Iraq is breaking up into rebels and collaborators, with a vast heap of innocent bodies turning up each day at the morgues
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad

Ever since Daniel Pipes - he of the failed American neo-cons - piped up last summer with his plan to install a “democratic-minded autocrat” (sic) in Iraq, I have been eyeing the Washington crystal ball for further signs of what the designers of this wretched war have in store for the Iraqis whom they “liberated” for “democracy” last year. And bingo, not long before Christmas, another of those chilling proposals for “New Iraq” popped up from the same right-wing cabal. Any predictions for Iraq this year may thus have to be based on the thoughts of Leslie Gelb, a former chairman of the United States Council on Foreign Relations, whose wretched plans for “liberated” Iraq call for something close to ethnic cleansing.

I return from Mass to a Muslim home
on a bloodied street in the south of Iraq.
The family has gathered in the living room.
All the chairs are gone, sold years ago
for something essential. Food, perhaps.