This isn’t shaping up to be just a civil war – it’s worse than that. It’s a war of all against all. What we have is a security vacuum that has given rise to various...

You have an assassination attempt on the president of Iraq, a president who’s invaded Iran, the war isn’t going well: this is a clear blow against his power,

The response has to be swift and it has to be bloody to prove to the population of the town, and the whole of Iraq, that any attack on the president will be punished in...

It’s pretty messy and I think ultimately it won’t do anything positive but just aggravate the violence.

[The attempt to ensure passage] was a mixture of arrogance and stupidity, … It would have made a Sunni boycott (of Saturday’s vote) inevitable.

They’re negotiating about an institution that doesn’t exist and shows no signs of coming to life, … The state collapsed in June, 2003, and definitely needs to be rebuilt.

Does the process dump the Sunnis by the wayside or do they stay and hammer out a compromise?

It’s increasingly becoming a war of all against all, with no rules. . . . The Iraqi security forces themselves are becoming just another of the players, and if they owe allegiance to anything, it’s...