There's been an eruption of internet chatter about Iraq this week, which reminded me that I was meaning to post on this story from last Saturday's edition of The Australian.

The subbies did their best with a we-told-you-so tag line that read "There's no longer any doubt that Iraq is the key theatre of war against Al-Qa'ida." But we all know how it got that way.

Interesting points include a deepening of collaboration between foreign and Sunni fighters, concern about "blowback" or the export of trained fighters from Iraq to other countries in the Middle East and into the West, and the war having stimulated the radicalisation and recruitment of potential terrorists.

"The consensus is that we can no longer win in Iraq. We have to redefine winning as getting out ofthere without dramatically increasing the jihadist threat," observes one counter-terrorism expert who has worked with the Bush administration on the way ahead.

The neo-conservative fantasy of Iraq as a beacon of liberal democracy has been abandoned. The best hope is that a strong stable governing regime can emerge to hold Iraq together against the looming secessionist pressures in the Kurdish north and the Shia-dominated south.

Ehud Yaari, one of Israel's leading Middle East analysts, tells Inquirer that while the jury is still out on the American experiment in Iraq, "the verdict is going to be that the experiment fails".

Meanwhile, No Right Turn reminds us of what we can expect when the next tranche of Abu Ghraib pictures are released as ordered by a US court. And has this comment on the response the court decision drew:

But I think the award for the most shameful response goes to CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid, who claimed that releasing the pictures would present "a false image" and distort reality. Which turns reality on its head - now the cover up is the truth, and the truth is the distortion. Orwell's "Ministry of Truth" would have been proud...