No quick fix for Bush

It is déjà vu all over again (as the baseball coach Yogi Berra put it) for the Americans in Iraq. They are avoiding the words cut and run, but that is what the policy of "glide down" certainly smells like.

President Bush wants to be rid of the Iraq nightmare by the time he goes on the campaign trail for re-election next autumn. He has told his forces chief General Richard Meyers and his representative in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, to fix it.

Ten years ago America was reeling from the Black Hawk Down incident after two helicopters were shot up and 18 Rangers killed as the US went to war with the warlord Farrah Aideed in the urban jungle of Mogadishu. A year or so later the Americans were gone from Somalia.

Ten years before that, 241 marines were blown up by a Hezbollah suicide truck bomber at their base in the south of Beirut. Inside six months the US and the multi-national peace force had quit Lebanon, condemning it to a dozen years more of bloody civil war.

This time the suicide bombers have been at work again, probably with quite a lot of help from Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The Americans have been losing soldiers in Iraq at the rate of dozens each month.

What was initially a triumph for President Bush has become an increasingly unpopular scrap for all but his staunchest supporters back home. And the scrap is a real war of the modern sort - open-ended and unpredictable.

One feature makes it different from the American entanglements in Lebanon and Somalia. This time quitting is not really an option for the US and its principal allies - however much the focus groups in Washington and Whitehall might desire it.

Unlike Somalia in 1993 or Lebanon in 1983, or even Vietnam and Laos in the Sixties and Seventies for that matter, Iraq is now strategic ground. Upon what happens there the equilibrium of the region depends, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Turkey and the Kurdish lands included.

Today Iraq is a honey pot for dissident extremists, the venal and criminal as well as the madly ideological. Hezbollah from Syria and Iran is now there as are allies of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda such as the remnants of the Ansar al Islam group and Wahhabite sympathisers and warriors from the Arabian Peninsula, Chechnya and the central Asian republics.

For the guerrillas and terrorists Iraq has become strategic ground too. There they have the space to train and plot and have munitions and material in super-abundance.

For the Americans and their European allies quitting is no option. If they do, then they and their cities and homes will be threatened the more.

But there can be no quick fix tactical solution. The policy of targeted assassination seems simplistic and self-defeating. Given the recent record in Iraq, it is unlikely to work, and could do terrible damage.

It was after the moderate cleric Ayatollah al Hakim was murdered in the summer that the Shi'ite clergy began co-operating with the British and the Italians, bringing some sense of calm to Basra and Nasiriyah. The real sense of progress now being felt across the south of the country could be lost in an instant.

The old mantras about the US force "not doing empire" and the US marines motto "peace-keeping is for pussies," have to be forgotten. The Americans are in a nasty guerrilla war again and the outcome is truly of global significance. They will have to hang in, and learn new methods of peace-making from the ground up - all over again.