As the United States-led occupation forces in Iraq continue their new anti-insurgent offensive, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government appears shaky. Its possible collapse will signify the US’s greatest political failure in Iraq since its invasion in 2003. It will greatly compound the disaster that Washington’s Iraq strategy has become. Yet, such collapse could come about if Mr al-Maliki yields to US pressure to reshuffle his Cabinet and end his dependence on the anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s supporters.

The recent raid by coalition troops on the interior Ministry’s intelligence headquarters has further embarrassed the embattled Prime Minister, who wants the attacking troops punished. Their “security sweep” in Baghdad and the Sunni-dominated Anbar province has had extremely limited success. Pressure on them to “show results” in “pacifying” Iraq is reaching critical point. An elite team of former anti-insurgency experts advising US commander General David Petraeus has reportedly concluded that they have six months to win the Iraq war—“or face a Vietnam-style collapse.”

Meanwhile, it’s clear that Washington’s policy-makers have no Plan B in case the “new way forward” strategy announced by President George W. Bush in January doesn’t work. According to reports, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Peter Pace was asked at a high-level meeting what his back-up strategy might be. He answered: “I am a Marine and Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.” If there is at all a Plan B, it’s to make Plan A work!

Absence of military planning is part of a larger crisis of strategy. Earlier US plans all ran into rough weather. These included “stabilising” Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority; return of “sovereignty” in 2004 through a handpicked government and US-dictated constitution; installation of an elected regime in 2005; and the launching that summer of the anti-insurgency “Plan Baghdad”. Mr Bush has shifted from plan to plan without thinking things enough. The latest “new way forward” is an awkward, half-hearted attempt at a final “big push”, based on inducting 21,500 more US troops into Iraq.

Faced with a galloping crisis, US policy-makers and opinion-shapers have taken to blaming one another. Thus, the Republicans accuse former CPA chief Paul Bremer for messing things up. The Democrats blame the Republicans. And Mr Bush blames Iranian President Mahmood Ahmedinejad!

Worse, many US policy-makers and commentators blame the victims, the Iraqi people themselves, while claiming that the US had the best of “intentions”. Thus leading Neoconservative and former Defence Planning Board chairman Richard Perle (known as the “Prince of Darkness”), who led the clamour for war against Iraq even before 9/11, now says he had “underestimated the depravity” in Iraq.

Right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer says the Iraqis alone are responsible for the violence and strife: “Iraq is their country. We mid-wifed their freedom. They chose civil war.” Even Fareed Zakaria, considered a liberal critic of the Bush administration, blames Iraqi society for the fiasco, and says the Sunnis “have mostly behaved like self-defeating thugs.” Not one of these critics calls a spade a spade and attributes the Iraq disaster to its root-cause: namely, the US’s project of Empire and world domination.

The US want to war with Iraq not out of compulsion but out of choice. It knew Iraq didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction, nor was its government working in league with al-Qaeda. The US invaded Iraq to bring about “regime change” through pre-emptive war and “instill some democracy in the heart of the Middle East”—as part of its plan for transforming the entire region in line with Mr Bush’s Greater Middle East Initiative. It decided this would be the right response to a situation in which al-Qaeda flourishes, and “rogue states” back them. Mr Bush thought that “by a combination of creative strategies and advanced technologies”, the US could redefine “war on our terms”.

The US’s core-objectives were to secure access to West Asia’s energy resources, begin the “modernisation of the Middle East”, promote Israel’s security, establish (and make acceptable) its own world hegemony, and reduce the global spread of terrorism.

All of these stand defeated or badly compromised. Within 10 months of Iraq’s invasion, the US achieved what an Egyptian commentator described as “a miracle”: “It has made people regret the downfall of Saddam’s regime.” According to pre-invasion polls, 43 percent of Iraqis considered the US presence as liberation and 46 percent as occupation; six months later, the figures were 15 and 67 percent. In a December 2006 poll, 95 percent felt that the security situation was better prior to the US-led invasion; 89 percent felt that way about the political situation; and 79 percent about the economic situation.

Iraq’s wealth has been systematically looted. It has been reduced from a middle-level human development society to a low-level, impoverished one, with high unemployment, rising inflation, massive corruption and a burgeoning black market. Baghdad gets electricity for barely 6 to 8 hours a day. Water and education services have collapsed. The psychological impact of the occupation and violence on Iraqi society has proved devastating.

The Association of Iraqi Psychologists has just published a study which says the violence has affected millions of children. “Children in Iraq are seriously suffering psychologically with all the insecurity, especially with the fear of kidnapping and explosions,” an API official said: “In some cases, they are found to be suffering extreme stress”—inevitable when “an innocent child is orphaned or sees terrible things that children should never see”.

The US has spent $350 billion on the war and occupation and sustained over 3,000 deaths among its troops, besides killing 650,000 Iraqis according to Johns Hopkins University-Lancet estimates. But it has failed to contain the insurgency. The number of insurgents rose four-fold to 20,000 between November 2003 and October 2004, and has since risen to 30,000—despite anti-insurgency operations. The militias include 2,000 overseas fighters, many from North Africa, but also from West and Central Asia.

Even worse is the external impact of Iraq’s occupation—in particular, through the political radicalisation of many Muslims and the spread of jehadi terrorism. Iraq’s invasion and occupation have made the world considerably more unsafe and dangerous. It took no great historical insight or prophetic vision to see that the occupation would further foment anti-Western sentiment and violence the world over.

Like the continuing injustice heaped upon the Palestinian people by Israel, Iraq’s occupation is seen by many Muslims—many others too—as proof of the West’s Islamophobia and its racist and arrogant attitude towards the Middle East. This has led to a backlash—through a rising incidence of terrorism.

Some hard numbers have now emerged proving this in a study by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for “Mother Jones” magazine in the US. This shows that the al-Qaeda ideology has spread “from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.” The study looked at two periods, between September 2001 to March 2003, and from March 2003 to September 2006, and compared the figures for violence from a RAND Corporation terrorism database.

Globally, there was a 607 percent rise in the yearly incidence of attacks and a 237 percent rise in the fatality rate. The first period witnessed 729 deaths from terrorist attacks. This rose to 5,420 in the second. A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for half the global total. Even excluding Iraq, the average number of terrorist attacks and fatalities rose sharply, by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively.

Iraq and Afghanistan together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths. But even if they’re excluded, there is still a 35 percent increase in the number of terrorist attacks and a 12 percent rise in fatalities (to 554 per year).

The Iraq war has caused a precipitous drop in public support for the US in Muslim countries: from 25 percent to 1 percent in Jordan, a major US ally; and from 30 to 15 percent in Lebanon. Favourable views plummeted in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, from 61 percent to 15.

All this has grave implications for the entire world—and not least India and Pakistan, where the fatalities have risen from 182 to 489. No part of the world is immune from jehadi terrorism. It’s in humanity’s interest that jehadi forces don’t gain. That will only produce more strife, violence, paranoia and insecurity—and eventually, restrictions and assaults on human rights and democracy.

However, the manner in which the US is acting will ensure precisely that outcome—to our collective detriment. The US must be dissuaded from its present catastrophic course. This poses a historic challenge before the global peace movement, as well as progressive governments and political forces everywhere.