Over a quarter century Timothy Garton Ash "cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man- made disaster." Look who we have to deal with it!

"Osama bin Laden's plan was to get the U.S. to overreact and overreach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. . . .

"In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer-term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But as far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic.

"Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster."

--Timothy Garton Ash, in an op-ed piece in today's Los Angeles Times, "Iraq hasn't even begun"


If you've read Timothy Garton Ash's absorbing reporting in the New York Review of Books over the decades on the remaking of Europe in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet empire (or considerable other writings, of course), his L.A. Times op-ed with the provocative head "Iraq hasn't even begun" is self-recommending. If you're not familiar with his work, this is a fine place to start.

In case you're wondering what Garton Ash means by "Iraq hasn't even begun," the subhead is: "Consequences from the disaster we could have avoided will plague the world long into the future."

"Iraq is over," Garton Ash writes, "insofar as the American public has decided that most U.S. troops should leave.

CNN's veteran political analyst, Bill Schneider [right], observes that in the latter years of the Vietnam War, the American public's basic attitude could be summarized as "either win or get out." He argues that it's the same with Iraq. Most Americans have now concluded that the U.S. is not winning. So: Get out.

Because this is a democracy, their elected representatives are following where the people lead. Although the Democrats did not get the result they wanted in an all-night marathon on the floor of the Senate, from Tuesday to Wednesday this week, no one in Washington doubts that this is the way the wind blows. Publicly, there's still a sharp split along party lines, but leading Republicans are already breaking ranks to float their own phased troop-reduction plans.

"So Iraq is over," he writes. "But Iraq has not yet begun."

Not yet begun in terms of the consequences for Iraq itself, the Middle East, the United States' own foreign policy and its reputation in the world. The most probable consequence of rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in its present condition is a further bloodbath, with even larger refugee flows and the effective dismemberment of the country. Already, about 2 million Iraqis have fled across the borders, and more than 2 million are internally displaced.

Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues that what its authors call "soft partition"--the peaceful, voluntary transfer of an estimated 2 million to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions, under close U.S. military supervision--would be the lesser evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and that Americans are prepared to allow their troops to stay in sufficient numbers to accomplish that thankless job--two implausible assumptions. A greater evil is more likely.

In an article for the Web magazine Open Democracy, Middle East specialist Fred Halliday [right] spells out some regional consequences. Besides the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand; the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shiite, "a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition"; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

For the United States, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged "Al Qaeda Central" in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed, and there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2007, there is an Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of the old Al Qaeda are creeping back into Afghanistan and there are Al Qaeda emulators spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe.

Garton Ash (described in the Times's biographical note as "a contributing editor to Opinion, is professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University") concludes with the reflection on unintended--and avoidable--consequences quoted above.

It has become a cliche, of course, to say that there are no good options now in Iraq. A cliche, perhaps, but I don't know of any competent and responsible authority who disagrees. And yet instead of helping the American people truly understand this grim reality, and searching for the "least worse" solution, the War Wackos--Cheney, Bush, Lieberman, McCain--continue their campaign of lies, hatred, and terror. Trust these megalomaniacal losers to find the "worst worse" option.

If it doesn't find them first.