World's arc of crisis at high pitch

When the White House said it wanted to transform the Middle East, surely it didn't mean into this.

Two years after the administration of George W. Bush launched its war on terrorism, the most volatile area of the world - an arc of crisis that runs from Israel to Afghanistan - remains torn by conflict and bloodshed. Polarization, not reconciliation, at the moment seems to be the sentiment on the march.

Iraq is still reverberating from the explosion that blew up the UN's Baghdad headquarters. In Afghanistan, Taliban remnants seem resurgent. Months of relative quiet in Israeli-Palestinian relations has given way to a new cycle of suicide bomb-and-response.

These events don't mean the region is sliding inevitably into an abyss. The vividness of transient tragedies can overshadow quieter progress. But taken together they remain troubling, say analysts. At the least, the administration might need to prepare the US public for an armed presence in the region that could last longer, and be more onerous, than seemed possible only a few weeks ago.

"The trend line is not good but I don't think it's out of control," says Michele Flournoy, an international security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The neoconservative thinkers within the administration who long pushed for the invasion of Iraq, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, talked about it as a transforming event for the whole region. Remove Saddam Hussein, and change Iraq into a prosperous democracy, so their thinking goes, and inevitably Iraq's neighbors will follow suit.

It's a justification for war that has become increasingly prominent in administration rhetoric in recent weeks, particularly as the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has so far proved fruitless.

Invading Iraq was "a tough decision to make the world more peaceful," said President Bush at an August 13 appearance before reporters.

But so far it isn't peace that seems to be descending on the Middle East.

The US-backed road map for Israeli-Palestinian peace plan is on the edge of irrelevance as both sides gird for more violence. Israeli rockets killed four members of Hamas on Sunday - although, in a positive sign, Palestinian forces said they were taking steps to stop arms smuggling by Hamas and other militant groups.

Meanwhile, three British soldiers were killed on Saturday by insurgents in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, in the latest example of continued strikes against US-led occupying forces. On Sunday a leading Shiite cleric was wounded, and three of his bodyguards killed, by a bomb in the holy city of Najaf.

In Afghanistan, a suspected Taliban ambush killed five government soldiers in the southeast of the country.

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