THE CRUSADER STATE DOESN'T DO STABILIZATION:

Iraq report's core premise flawed - UN envoy (David Clarke, 12/08/06, Reuters)

The report by an elite U.S. panel on Iraq is flawed because it assumes that there is a common interest among states in the Middle East to stop a slide into chaos in Iraq, a senior U.N. envoy said on Friday.

Terje Roed-Larsen, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy on Syria-Lebanon issues, said some regional states had an interest in maintaining a "calibrated or designed disequilibrium" in Iraq to inflict pain on Washington.

"They want to keep it in disequilibrium, which does not lead to collapse, because that will bog down the Americans, their forces, so they cannot focus on other issues in the region and it will weaken the administration in Washington," he said.

"So I do not believe necessarily that the basic assumptions in the report are correct, that there is a common interest -- on the contrary," Roed-Larsen told the Chatham House think-tank.

Which is why our interest lies in the collapse of "Iraq", to the extent of creating a flood of Sunni refugees.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2006 4:16 PM