Breaking News: Suicide Bomb in Western Baghdad

In Iraq, 33 people have been killed and 46 wounded in a suicide bomb attack in in the Abu Ghraib section of Baghdad.

There are conflicting reports over the target: Al Jazeera is reporting that a group of dignitaries, including army officers, were visiting the market at the time; CNN reports that the bomber was trying to strike a municipal building where tribal leaders were meeting. Journalists, police personnel, and soldiers are amongst the dead; the BBC is reporting that an army chief has been slain.

New US, New Middle East? The Syria Initiative

The major follow-up to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Middle Eastern trip has come not in Israel and Palestine, where there is too much uncertainty for any American move, but in Damascus. On Saturday two US envoys, Jeffrey Feltman of the State Department and Daniel Shapiro of the National Security Council, sat down with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem. They were accompanied by the senior American official in Damascus and two other Syrian advisors for 3 1/2 hours before Feltman and al-Moallem had a private discussion.

The meeting on its own is significant, as the US has no Ambassador in Syria. Expectations are even higher, however, because Damascus could be the lynchpin for an Obama strategy. The core success of Israeli-Syrian talks would be complemented by Syria's distancing from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, giving the US greater room for manoeuvre on the Israel-Palestine negotiations and an advantage over Tehran in Washington's conception of the new battle for the Middle East.

After the meeting, Feltman was kind in tone toward Syria, “The Syrians have concerns with us as well. I’m sure the Syrians will be looking at choices we will be making in the future just as we will be looking at choices Syria is making,”. However, he was non-committal on specifics beyond the platitude, “We found a lot of common ground today."

The Syrians also gave nothing away. In particular, there is no sign that Damascus, in return for economic aid and an American "balance" on direct discussions with Tel Aviv over issues such as the Golan Heights, offered up the concessions that Washington wants on the bad guys in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Tehran. So the most that can be said is that yesterday's event, while of symbolic importance, is only the opener in a long process.

There has been surprisingly low-key coverage of the meeting in the US press. CNN has a report, but The New York Times recycles a downbeat Associated Press story, "Amid Low Expectations, American Officials Hold Talks in Syria", and The Washington Post overlooks the event altogether.

Syrian specialist Josh Landis offers excellent coverage on his blog, featuring Rami Khouri's upbeat (overly upbeat, in my opinion) assessment of a fundamental shift in US policy:

What we have going on, I suspect, is that the two leading proponents of Western arrogance in the form of colonialism and neocolonialism - the United States and the United Kingdom - have recognized that their approach has failed, and that they are better off having normal diplomatic talks and negotiations with the three leading centers of resistance to them, namely Iran, Syria and Hizbullah.

UPDATED Obama and Iran: Engagement, Muddle, and Hysteria

Update: Iran's Foreign Ministry has replied to Mullen's comment, ""All these statements regarding the production of a nuclear bomb are very baseless. It is baseless from a technical point of view and has propaganda connotations."

On Friday, after President Obama's speech on Iraq and its recommendation for talks with Iran and Syria, we wrote, "Watch the manoeuvres of those who are hostile to any engagement not only because they don’t like 'rogue states'."

And so it goes.

In a travesty of an interview on Sunday, CNN's John King led Admiral Mike Mullen (pictured), the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, down the sensational road to Mullen's statement that Iran "has enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb": "And Iran having a nuclear weapon I’ve believed for a long time is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world."

Unsurprisingly, those sentences have become bold-letter headlines this morning. Here, though, is the essential context for what was either 1) an Admiral being manoeuvred into a very silly mistake or 2) another example of the US military trying to bump others in the Obama Administration into a harder line.

Near the end of an interview which was devoted mainly to Iraq and Afghanistan, King and Mullen stood in front of one of those multi-coloured plasma maps that CNN uses as eye-candy as the CNN anchorman said, "If we come down to the right here, Iran, obviously, the International Atomic Energy Agency said last week they think that they were wrong in the past, that Iran might now have enough fissile material to make a bomb. Does Iran have enough to make a bomb?"

King, who has risen through the CNN ranks because of chiseled looks and broad shoulders rather than any detail of knowledge, had asked an question based on a falsehood. The IAEA did not say "they were wrong in the past". Their report explained that quantities of Iran's enriched uranium were one-third higher than previously stated because the amounts were verified by observation rather than estimates. And the IAEA, while saying that Iran might soon have a quantity of uranium sufficienct for one bomb, also said that the uranium was not of sufficient quality (it is enriched to 4% and 90% is the magic number needed).

Mullen could have said, "The Administration is currently conducting a review of policy towards Iran" (or, in a dream world, "John, you're a mannequin posing as a reporter"). He could have left it at that, as there was little time left in the interview. Instead, he nodded at King and the multi-coloured map and said:

We think they do, quite frankly. And Iran having a nuclear weapon I’ve believed for a long time is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world.

And that was it for Tehran. CNN spun the lights and the geography to North Korea so King could ask about their bomb, to which Mullen gave a more sensible response, one guaranteed not to make headlines:

Secretary Gates and I have made no recommendations. But it’s -- it’s an area that we watch with great concern. And I would hope that North Korea would not be provocative.

It is notable that Mullen did not say a word about Iran in his other Sunday interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News. And it's even more notable that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates slapped down Mullen's claim when he talked with David Gregory on NBC's Meet the Press:

[The Iranians are] not close to a uranium stockpile. They’re not close to a weapon, at this point, and so there is some time.

Indeed, Gates' much-longer answer on Iran is the one that deserves to be dissected this morning. He effectively laid out the "engagement" strategy. Negotiate with Tehran --- if the talks aren't satisfactory, then Washington has the cause for tougher economic sanctions:

GATES: I don’t think that either the last administration or the current one have been distracted from the growing problem with Iran and its nuclear program in the least over the last number of years. We worried about it well before even the Bush administration.
So I -- I think that there has been a continuing focus on how do you get the Iranians to walk away from a nuclear weapons program?
They’re not close to a stockpile. They’re not close to a weapon, at this point, and so there is some time.
And the question is whether you can increase the level of the sanctions and the cost to the Iranians of pursuing that program at the same time you show them an open door if they want to engage with the Europeans, with us, and so on, if they walk away from that program.
Our chances of being successful, it seems to me, are a lot better at $35 or $40 oil than they were at $140 oil because there are economic costs to this program, they do have economic challenges at home.
GREGORY: You do see the need, though, for a -- some kind of strategic relationship between the U.S. and Iran?
GATES: Well, I think that -- that’s really up to the Iranians. I’ve been -- as I like to say, I’ve been in this search for the elusive Iranian moderate for 30 years. I’m still looking.

Unfortunately, it's Mullen who has played into the more-established, if inaccurate, media line that Iran is about to get The Bomb. And with newspapers like The Times of London running hysterical campaigns on the Tehran threat --- see analyst Bronwen Maddox's Friday scenario of an Iranian invasion of Bahrain and Sunday's article claiming Tehran is funneling missiles to the Taliban --- it is that wave that could sink the Obama strategy of engagement.