Tomgram: William Astore, If We Lose Iraq, You're to Blame

You know there's trouble ahead when Iraq, in its present state, is the good news story for Bush administration policy. While various civilian and military officials from the President on down have been talking up "success" in Iraq and beating the rhetorical war drums vis-à-vis Iran, much of the remainder of the administration's foreign policy in what the neocons used to call "the arc of instability" began to thoroughly unravel.

In the Horn of Africa, U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops are bogged down in a disastrous occupation of the Somalian capital, harried by a growing Islamist insurgency. Despite endless shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration's Middle East peace conference, to be held at Annapolis, is already being dismissed as a failure before the first official invitations are issued. Meanwhile, the Turks are driving the administration to distraction by threatening to invade and destabilize the only moderately successful part of the new Iraq, its Kurdish region (while the Iraqi government in Baghdad calls on Iran for help in the crisis).