Local Perspective

[Iran] will, come hell or high water, build an atomic bomb. I doubt the US can do much to stop it … Iranians have some 15,000, perhaps, 20,000 so-called Badr troops and entrenched intelligence-apparatus inside Iraq formed of Iraqi Shiites, Arab-speakers and sitting quiet cells … the 150,000 American troops in Iraq are “hostages”. They move out of protected garrisons, to which they return. Administrator Paul Bremer is hiding inside Saddam Hussain’s palaces, seeing few Iraqis, engaged in a tense relationship with his own American commanders and visiting Washington more often than the streets of Baghdad … US diplomacy meanwhile is paralysed. In the whole Gulf region and Middle East, and as far as Indonesia and Pakistan, US diplomats, are sequestered in their heavily protected embassies.