That's what former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had to say about the situation in Iraq last week. He pointed to the potentially disastrous consequences of waging a never-ending war in the region which supplies most of the world's oil and suggested bluntly that it could lead to destabilization of the world's economy. I read five papers a day, and I missed that little item. Holbrooke is one of the few looking past the immediate quagmire to see the larger picture: what's the occupation of Iraq doing to the global balance of power? We are treating the deteriorating situation there as at best a temporary chaos created by outside agitators and remnants of the old Ba'athist regime and at worst a local insurrection, but Holbrooke is seeing it as a developing regional conflict that could easily force other Arab nations to choose up sides, enlarging the 'insurrection' into a region-wide nationalist struggle. Kaveh L Afrasiabi of the Asia Times agrees. In an essay entitled 'Refocus on the the big picture', Afrasiabi lays out the way the war has already changed.

The stage is now set for another chapter in a showdown between the forces of occupation and their local props on the one hand, and the diverse forces of (religious) nationalism seeking to regain Iraq's independence on the other. This means that contrary to some recent analyses focusing on a Shi'ite-Sunni divide, the most important determining factor in the war-torn country is, and for the foreseeable future will be, nationalism versus imperialism.

Whether we think of ourselves as an imperial power or not, the point is that they do.