31 December 2006: Baghdad, Iraq

To enter Iraq with US forces, journalists normally travel through Kuwait. This time I flew from Singapore to Kuwait, where I toured military facilities critical to maintaining war-fighting equipment, then to Qatar to continue exploration of the same, and finally back to Kuwait to enter Iraq.

I plan to spend the entirety of 2007 with our troops at war, until sickness, wounds or worse send me home, or the military tires of my presence and catapults me over the wire. Having spent most of 2005 in Iraq, I know what this means. “Drive-by reporting,” as some commanders call it, is worse than no reporting at all. The only way to approach describing what our troops experience, and what is really happening in Iraq, is to go the distance.

Somewhere, Iraq
Going to war with the United States military is dangerous, and strange. In Kuwait, I was alone but with a group of unfamiliar soldiers who were heading into Iraq. We boarded a military bus in Kuwait at an airfield that is not secret, but whose name cannot be mentioned. A large cargo jet called a C-17 squatted on the tarmac, and the bus driver pulled near the jet, stopped, opened the door. A young Air Force loadmaster stepped up asking, “Does anyone have ammunition in their weapon?”

The soldiers all had automatic weapons.

“If you’ve got ammunition in your weapon, clear your weapon before boarding the aircraft,” he said. “The flight is mostly empty, so you can sit anywhere you like. Have a nice flight.” He stepped down, turned around and walked back into the jet. No x-ray machine, no magnetometer, no tickets, no boarding passes. No nothing. Soldiers waddled off with heavy packs, ammo cans and weapons that presumably had been cleared of bullets that might accidentally shoot us down from the inside. Soon we were airborne. A jet full of armed US soldiers is probably one of the safest flights in the world, except that this C-17 happened to be heading into Iraq.

C-17 to Iraq
There was a circular window up front near the cockpit, and I was curious about what was happening behind it. Down the aisle one civilian-looking man sat reading, and an Air Force crewmember was watching me practice with the camera. I unbuckled, walked up and asked him if I could go upstairs to the cockpit. He mumbled into the headset and came back with, “Sure.”

And so I looked back through the circular window into the belly of the C-17.

There were four seats in the cockpit. Two pilots had the sticks, and the two seats behind the pilots were empty. The left-seat pilot told me I could have a seat, then showed me how to flip on the emergency oxygen switch and how to wear the mask. I buckled up and gazed out the windows at Iraq miles below.

Military people who get out and actually touch the edge of the world tend to be the easiest-going on journalists, and these two pilots seemed like the infantry soldiers I had gotten to know: if a person is willing to ride with them, that person is usually welcome aboard. The pilots explained some of the gadgets like the HUD (Heads-Up Display) and one of them leaned over to allow me to make a photo for the folks back home.

If I had gotten to take this ride as a kid, I’d have become a pilot for sure. All those buttons, switches and gauges. Something inside a boy just wants to start pushing a few buttons to see what will happen. Especially those two red ones, and what are those four orange knobs about?
What kid could ever resist?
The left-seat pilot was proud of his jet.
As we began the descent, I asked the pilot if it would be okay to stay in the cockpit during landing. He said it would be fine, but also said the crew was going to wear body armor although I could make my own choice. I stepped down from the cockpit and returned with body armor and helmet. Behind the wide-open cockpit were passengers armed with assault weapons, pistols and knives. The pilots were letting me sit in the cockpit during landing but they were wearing body armor. The rules are very different here.

26 December 2006: Baghdad International Airport, or BIAP, situated in the middle of a “Holy” battlefield. Saddam Hussein was somewhere below with only days to live.
The pilot slipped down to the right and lined up on the runway. From a distance it seemed almost ordinary.
Touchdown.
Want to see the good, the bad and the ugly of Iraq?
Almost there.
While getting this far is progress, journalists still must obtain final press credentials, and to do this, they must find their way from BIAP to the IZ (International Zone: AKA the “Green Zone.”) Already there at BIAP when we landed was a clutch of what appeared to be journalists waiting for ground transportation. But I knew something they didn’t. I had seen journalists waiting here before, and had helped them catch helicopters only to find them trying to muscle in on my flight. Not today. Just thirty seconds’ walk from where they would wait most of the night for ground transport in a “Rhino” (armored bus) was the booking desk for “Catfish Air.” I walked in, got on a helicopter flight and flew away, leaving them behind.

BIAP to IZ. Landing for fuel: passengers must dismount during refueling. After topping-off, the pilots switched off the lights and zoomed low over Baghdad. Despite the talk of electricity shortages, the city was well-lit, presumably by generators, though they do receive electricity from the grid part of each day.
IZ to Camp Victory
I spent one night in the International Zone and there I met a German professor and writer named Dietmar Herz. Professor Herz had been stuck in an open-bay room alone in a bunk bed for five days while trying to cover the war for a short embed. He said he’d been educated at Harvard, and we talked into the night about subjects ranging from communism to Karl Mai, and he seemed surprised that an American would know about Karl Mai; I didn’t offer that I learned about Karl by accident rather than scholarship. The short version is that Mai was a wacky German author who became famous and rich writing romantic adventures about the American southwest. Coincidentally, he even wrote about the Kurds. Hilter is said to have strongly encouraged his soldiers to read Mai’s mythic stories of heroism. Ironically, Mai had never been to the places he wrote about.

Professor Herz did not have adequate gloves for combat. I gave him my back-up pair, not wanting to read about his death only to wonder if flame retardant gloves would have made the difference between escape and conscious cremation. Later that night, a raucous but friendly NBC crew swarmed in.

Next morning, gaggle of five Iraqi journalists arrived for a press conference. One worked for the BBC and when I asked if he were Sunni or Shia (assuming), his hesitation was so pregnant that the room nearly burst, then he answered “Sunni” with an embarrassed and fleeting micro-grin, mindful perhaps that many Shia call the BBC “Sunni TV.” I wondered what they call CNN?

One Iraqi reporter asked about ways to get to America and I explained the Fullbright scholarship. He said he didn’t actually want to study, but would just go to the United States and disappear. Between the brief time from when the Iraqi reporter and the publication of this dispatch, another AP stringer was reported killed in Baghdad.

Professor Herz was into his sixth day stuck in the IZ when a friendly Public Affairs Captain took me to the helipad to grab a flight back to Camp Victory to begin my embed. The flights were getting socked-in by weather so she put me on a Rhino that convoyed down Route Irish, whose dangerous reputation is true, but vastly overstated these days. Command Sergeant Major Jeffrey Mellinger, the senior enlisted soldier in Iraq, with whom I was about to tour parts of the country, suffers the converse fate of having an excellent reputation that is not well-known outside of military circles.

There is no better way to get a clear read of events in Iraq than to shadow CSM Mellinger as he walks the line.
Military leaders tend to be strongly averse to seeing their name or photo too often in the press, but it’s important to explain why I have tried so hard to ride shotgun with Jeff Mellinger throughout the war, and doing that entails mentioning his name a number of times.

Many people have asked if my military experience was helpful during previous embeds. I downplayed it because the experience did not seem overly helpful. In retrospect that was wrong. When I first came to Iraq, in fact while the sun was rising on the very first morning I was in Iraq, I met Command Sergeant Major Jeffrey Mellinger and asked to ride with his people.

I did not want to talk with any generals, not at that time. Where the military experience truly did pay off was in knowing that the key to Iraq would not be with a general, because no general was likely to know the ground situation as well as his command sergeant major (CSM) would. A general looks at a more regional and global level. A CSM’s responsibility is to walk the line and report back directly, in this instance to General Casey, who runs this war.

CSM Mellinger has more access to Iraq and the entire theatre than most leaders have. Access that includes every guard tower, secret chamber and ditch, and anywhere else US or Coalition forces might be in Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, or even out on ships in the Gulf. For this reason, I spent about six months back in 2005 trying to get a ride with CSM Mellinger.

This is now my third trip with CSM Mellinger, and he has gained a kind of iconic status among young soldiers, because he pops up in every remote and dangerous corner, from mailrooms to maintenance bays, hospitals to police stations, to combat missions and memorials.

With nearly 35 years of continuous military service, Mellinger is the senior most active duty draftee; yet he cruises Iraq like an infantryman. More than 3,000 of our people have been killed in combat here, but if it weren’t for this type of leadership, found in commands throughout Iraq, that number might be 10,000.

Grandparents should know that a grandparent is watching out for the young men and women who are fighting in Iraq. CSM Mellinger has spent three consecutive Christmases in Iraq and is going on his third straight year walking the line. One young sergeant, a team member on CSM Mellinger’s crew, told me the CSM’s team has been hit 26 times so far, and when I asked the CSM, he shrugged and said, “Sounds about right.” Five of his Humvees have been destroyed by IEDs, two that he was riding in at the time. Astonishingly, nobody in his crew has even been seriously wounded. He goes into combat, but you’d have to see how he rolls to understand why nobody has been killed so far. Experience multiplied by luck.

I didn’t write all this to build up the CSM, there’s not a lot I can add there: quite the opposite and this can cost me. But it also explains why I gravitate to senior sergeants and field grade officers, and why I will sit with young soldiers on a cold guard tower or on a dangerous rooftop, or range down the roads with platoons under the command of young lieutenants, yet rarely print a word from a general, though I communicate with some regularly, and they can be very helpful in clarifying the big picture.

I’ve had to agree with the CSM not to write about him, and to use his patrols and access only as a vector to the troops. That said, we can begin Walking the Line.

(End of Part One)

Future of Iraq: The spoils of war
How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches
By Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson and Tim Webb
Published: 07 January 2007
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.

Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.

Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."

Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals.

Greg Muttitt, a researcher for Platform, a human rights and environmental group which monitors the oil industry, said Iraq was being asked to pay an enormous price over the next 30 years for its present instability. "They would lose out massively," he said, "because they don't have the capacity at the moment to strike a good deal."

Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Salih, who chairs the country's oil committee, is expected to unveil the legislation as early as today. "It is a redrawing of the whole Iraqi oil industry [to] a modern standard," said Khaled Salih, spokesman for the Kurdish Regional Government, a party to the negotiations. The Iraqi government hopes to have the law on the books by March.

Several major oil companies are said to have sent teams into the country in recent months to lobby for deals ahead of the law, though the big names are considered unlikely to invest until the violence in Iraq abates.

James Paul, executive director at the Global Policy Forum, the international government watchdog, said: "It is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of the population would be opposed to this. To do it anyway, with minimal discussion within the [Iraqi] parliament is really just pouring more oil on the fire."

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman and a former chief economist at Shell, said it was crucial that any deal would guarantee funds for rebuilding Iraq. "It is absolutely vital that the revenue from the oil industry goes into Iraqi development and is seen to do so," he said. "Although it does make sense to collaborate with foreign investors, it is very important the terms are seen to be fair."

Iraq Will Be Petraeus's Knot to Untie
General Known to See Peace as Still Possible
By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 7, 2007; A01

Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is President Bush's choice to become the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, posed a riddle during the initial march to Baghdad four years ago that now becomes his own conundrum to solve: "Tell me how this ends."

That query, uttered repeatedly to a reporter then embedded in Petraeus's 101st Airborne Division, revealed a flinty skepticism about prospects in Iraq -- and the man now asked to forestall a military debacle.

Long recognized as one of the Army's premier intellectuals, with a PhD from Princeton to complement his West Point education, Petraeus, 54, will inherit one of the toughest assignments handed any senior officer since the Vietnam War. He takes command of 132,000 U.S. troops in a country shattered by insurgency and sectarian bloodletting, with a home front that is divided and disheartened after 3,000 American combat deaths. If his riddle of 2003 remains apt, so does the headline on a Newsweek cover story about Petraeus in July 2004: "Can This Man Save Iraq?"

Skepticism is rife, inside and outside the Army. "Petraeus is being given a losing hand. I say that reluctantly. The war is unmistakably going in the wrong direction," retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey said in an interview yesterday. "The only good news in all this is that Petraeus is so incredibly intelligent and creative. . . . I'm sure he'll say to himself, 'I'm not going to be the last soldier off the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone.' "

Petraeus, if controversial among some peers who deem him arrogant or excessively ambitious, is seen by many others as perhaps the last, best hope for success in Iraq. "If anyone can pick up the baton and run with it, it is David Petraeus," said retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff.

After spending 2 1/2 of the past four years in Iraq, as a division commander and then as the officer overseeing the initial reconstruction of Iraqi security forces, Petraeus is known to believe that a stable, pacified Iraq is still possible -- if not probable -- but not without dramatically improved security. Having also served in Bosnia after the catastrophic civil war there, he has told friends that he sees troubling parallels between that country and Iraq. Two months ago, he said, "I actually stay awake occasionally at night trying to figure out the path ahead."

Upon Senate confirmation and the receipt of his fourth star, making him a full general, he is expected to spend some weeks assessing conditions in Iraq and drafting a strategic plan that goes beyond the current debate over whether to increase U.S. troop levels by up to five brigades, roughly 20,000 troops. That "surge" is consistent with the military's new counterinsurgency manual, much of which Petraeus wrote, which stresses protecting the indigenous population and imposing security as a condition for stability.

One of Petraeus's longtime Army patrons, now-retired Gen. Jack Keane, has advocated an even larger deployment this spring. But many strategists say such an increase is pointless without a sweeping economic reconstruction program and a robust rearmament of the Iraqi army with artillery, attack helicopters and other heavy weapons.

Many also say the additional forces to be used in any troop increase are already badly worn down by the military's intense operational tempo since the first deployments to Afghanistan in 2001. The new Democratic leadership in Congress on Friday pointedly rejected even a short-term escalation in U.S. forces in Iraq.

These problems and more confront Petraeus, who has told friends that he has no illusions about the complexity of the job at hand. Unaccustomed to failure, he is, in the words of one former aide, "the most competitive man on the planet." The son of a Dutch sea captain who took refuge in New York during World War II, Petraeus grew up in Cornwall on Hudson, a few miles outside the gates of the U.S. Military Academy, which he entered as a new cadet in July 1970.

"A striver to the max, Dave was always 'going for it' in sports, academics, leadership, and even his social life," the West Point yearbook noted in 1974. A month after graduation, he married Holly Knowlton, the daughter of the academy superintendent. They have two grown children.

As a young lieutenant, Petraeus entered an Army battered by defeat in Vietnam and badly frayed by drugs, lack of discipline and the American public's diminished esteem for the military. Accolades and achievements followed as he moved from post to post. Petraeus received all three prizes awarded in his class at Ranger School, perhaps the Army's toughest physical and psychological challenge, and he later won the George C. Marshall award as the top graduate in the Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983.

As he rose through the ranks, Petraeus alternated command and staff assignments with duty as an aide to several of the Army's most prominent four-star generals, a pattern that caused one envious peer to call him a "professional son." At Princeton University, Petraeus's dissertation, "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam," examined the caution that seized the high command after the war.

His intensity, cutting intellect and competitiveness have rubbed some officers the wrong way. Muttered jibes about "King David" have been heard around his command post. He remains obsessive about what he calls "the P.T. culture" -- physical training -- and has been known to challenge soldiers half his age to various athletic competitions. "If anyone beats him in the shorter runs, four miles or so, he takes them out for 10 miles and smokes them," a staff officer observed several years ago. At 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds, Petraeus evokes George Bernard Shaw's description of the British general Bernard L. Montgomery: "an intensely compacted hank of wire."

Twice, accidents almost ended his career, or even his life. In 1991, as a battalion commander at Fort Campbell, Ky., he was shot in the chest with an M-16 rifle when a soldier tripped during a training exercise. Rushed into surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he underwent five hours of surgery by Bill Frist, who a decade later became Senate majority leader. While skydiving in 2000, Petraeus survived the abrupt collapse of his parachute 60 feet up. His shattered pelvis was reassembled with a plate and long screws.

As commander of the 101st Airborne, Petraeus saw combat for the first time during the division's drive up the Euphrates Valley, with sharp firefights in Najaf, Karbala and Hilla. But it was during the division's subsequent occupation of Mosul and northern Iraq that he won widespread acclaim by resurrecting the local economy, restoring services and preserving order with strategic force, which included killing Saddam Hussein's two sons. Posters in the division bivouacs read: "What have you done to win Iraqi hearts and minds today?"

More than 60 soldiers from the 101st died during the deployment, and upon bringing the division back to Kentucky in February 2004, Petraeus remarked, "It's been a long, tough year, and I am older in more ways than just age."

His subsequent service as commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command, responsible for training Iraqi security forces, was another long, tough year -- that stretched to 15 months. Tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police were trained, with concomitant efforts to supply infrastructure, equipment and procedures. But the project at best remains an imperiled work in progress, with alarming signs of sectarian fractures spreading through the Iraqi security institutions that Petraeus is known to consider as crucial to restoring stability there as any additional coalition forces could be.

Both long stints in Iraq have given Petraeus an intimate knowledge of the country's ethnic fractures and the limits of American influence. "A certain degree of intellectual humility is a good thing," he once told a reporter. "There aren't always a hell of a lot of absolutely right answers out there."

His cordial relations with the media, and the Newsweek cover story that depicted him as a potential savior for the Bush administration, rankled some of his superiors in the Pentagon, according to two now-retired senior generals. When Petraeus was sent to command the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 2005, some of his peers wondered whether his career was in eclipse.

In asking that nettlesome question four years ago -- "Tell me how this ends" -- Petraeus alluded to the advice supposedly given President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the mid-1950s when he asked what it would take for the U.S. military to save the beleaguered French colonial empire in war-torn Vietnam: "Eight years and eight divisions."

With only ten divisions now in the U.S. Army, and the American public's patience ebbing, Petraeus recently acknowledged that such a prescription is not likely to be any more acceptable today than it was in the 1950s.

Conrad C. Crane, a West Point classmate of Petraeus's who last year helped him write the new counterinsurgency manual, said: "There have been situations in our history where American generals were given tough problems to resolve, like Lincoln grabbing U.S. Grant in 1864. Those situations have all demanded steadfastness, fortitude, initiative and creativity. It will take all those traits in Baghdad.

"We've got a big problem," Crane added. "He's the right guy to fix it. If anybody can fix this, he can."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

Op-Ed Columnist
Making the Surge Work
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By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 7, 2007
Picture the person you love most in the world. Now imagine that person shredded by a bomb or dropped off one morning in the gutter with holes drilled through the back of the head. Imagine your lifelong rage, and the terror of not knowing who will die next. Now imagine this has happened to someone in nearly every family on your block, and on the next block, and in the whole town.

David Brooks.
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This is Iraqi society.

And yet Gen. George Casey and Gen. John Abizaid wanted to put the burden of nation-building on the victims and initiators of this maelstrom. U.S. war strategy for the past three years has been to lighten the American footprint in Iraq and compel Iraqis to undertake the policing tasks we ourselves couldn’t accomplish.

Over this time a chorus has arisen to oppose this strategy. The members of this chorus — John McCain, The Weekly Standard, whispering dissenters in the middling rankings of the military — argue that it’s simply unrealistic to expect human beings in these circumstances to become impartial nation-builders. These dissenters have argued, since the summer of 2003, that the U.S. must commit more troops to establish security before anything else becomes possible.

For over three years, President Bush sided with the light-footprint school. He did so for personal reasons, not military ones. Casey and Abizaid are impressive men, and Bush deferred to their judgment.

But sometimes good men make bad choices, and it is now clear that the light-footprint approach has been a disaster. If the U.S. had committed more troops and established security back in 2003, when, as Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek recently reminded us, the Coalition Provisional Authority had 70 percent approval ratings, history would be different.

It is now 2007, and President Bush has finally replaced Donald Rumsfeld, Casey and Abizaid. The question now is whether the policy that should have been implemented in 2003 can still be implemented four years on — after so many thousands have died.

Many in and out of the administration think so, hence all the talk about a surge — putting 20,000 more troops into Baghdad, finally occupying the dangerous neighborhoods, finally starting a jobs program, finally forcing national reconciliation.

Unfortunately, if the goal is to create a stable, unified Iraq, the surge is a good policy three years too late. For that surge to succeed now, it would have to accomplish the following tasks: compel the Maliki government to deliver public services in a nonsectarian way; convert the Shiite theocrats who now dominate the Iraqi government into ecumenical multiculturalists; persuade the rabid Sunni leaders to accept a dependent role in the new Iraq; induce the traumatized Iraqi people to hang together as the blood flows; sustain, over 18 months, American political support for an arduous policy that begins with a 17 percent approval rating.

The odds that the surge can accomplish these tasks are vanishingly small. The tragic truth is that the social context for this military strategy has changed since 2003.

But another surge may be realistic. This surge would begin by giving up the dream of national reconciliation and acknowledging that Iraq is in the process of dividing itself.

As the best reporting from Baghdad makes clear, today’s Iraqi leaders have little interest in healing the Sunni-Shiite divide. People are retreating to their sectarian homelands by the tens of thousands. In an ever-radicalizing climate, the Sadrs are supplanting the Sistanis, and genocidal Sunni leaders are replacing the merely racist ones.

Perhaps, in other words, it’s time to merge the military Plan B — the surge — with a political Plan B — flexible decentralization. That would mean using adequate force levels (finally!) to help those who are returning to sectarian homelands. It would mean erecting buffers between populations where possible and establishing order in areas that remain mixed. It would mean finding decentralized governing structures that reflect the social and psychological facts on the ground.

The record shows that in sufficient numbers and with sufficient staying power, U.S. troops can suppress violence. Perhaps more U.S. troops can create a climate in which decentralized arrangements can evolve.

We can’t turn back time. But if the disintegration of Iraqi society would be a political and humanitarian disaster, perhaps we should finally commit military resources, and create a political strategy, commensurate with the task of salvaging something.

Next Article in Opinion (5 of 13) »

Ahmadinejad's post-presidency not that far on the heels of Bush's
PERISCOPE: "A Brewing Battle of Heavyweights in Tehran," by Maziar Bahari, Newsweek, 8 January 2007, p. 8.
I've made the case that Bush's post-presidency began with Katrina, but I think Bush-taunting Ahmadinejad's ain't much further behind, especially after the Iranian parliament voted to shorten his term! Ahmadinejad's real time at the plate looks like it will last less than two years, by this judgment.

The analysis here speaks for itself:

Iranians are deserting the president they elected by a landslide in June 2005. Not only did university students heckle Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with chants of "Death to the dictator!" during a speech last month in Tehran, state-run TV had the temerity to report it. Some of his own supporters criticized his recent international gathering of Holocaust revisionists as harmful to Iran's national interests. And thanks to his economic flubs, Iranians are grumbling about inflation instead of reveling in an oil-boom windfall. Iranian TV reported that news, too, and when Ahmadinejad complained about the story, the network's director (a former ally) replied: "We just tell the truth." The legislature has stopped rubber-stamping the 50-year-old president's decisions, and the latest local elections cost him all but two of his allies on Tehran's 15-seat city council. The big winner: his pothole-filling, street-cleaning successor as mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, 45.
Ghalibaf, the article goes on, is already casting a shadow over Ahmadinejad's presidency as the 2009 election looms in the distance. No, he's not some messiah reformer. Same basic package of conservative, just far more pragmatic and willing to deal to get things done. Got a PhD in geopolitics. Famous now for quelling a student protest by holding talks with the leaders and okaying a needle exchange program for Tehran's many drug addicts.

Ghalibaf could have been prez in 2005, but reached out too much to moderates while Ahmadinejad courted the hardliners. Interesting to see how well that's worked out now, isn't it?

Another good example of why calling Iran totalitarian is wrong. It's a rancid old authoritarianism that's got more skulldugging internal politics than we understand, much less take advantage of. We've got to get smarter on this country. We focus on one thing (WMD) and as a result we're getting played by Tehran across the dial.

Their fox v. our hedgehog, but fortunately for us, not the smartest fox in town.