Events in Iraq are beginning to snowball as observers and participants are more and more reacting to them, rather than controlling them.

Within the last few weeks two provincial governors have been assassinated.

Diwaniya Governor Khaleel Jaleel Hamza, Governor of Qadisiyah Province was killed in a roadside bomb attack on August 10, along with Khalid Hassan, the chief of police for that province.

Muthanna Governor Mohammed Al-Hassani and two of his guards were killed in a roadside bomb explosion that hit his convoy on Monday morning near the town of Rumaitha north of Samara (280 km south of Baghdad).

Both governors belonged to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the renamed SCIRI political party, backed by Iran and the Shiite cleric Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the Badr Corps militia. Hakim is generally considered a political and military rival of Moqtada al-Sadr, who surprisingly, is also backed by Iran.

These targeted assassinations were in addition to the usual round of daily killings and bombings, including a particularly horrific series of bombings in several northern villages in Kurdistan, which apparently have killed more than 250, and left another 250 wounded in the largest non-American bombing of the occupation.

A Kurdistan government spokesman said yesterday that there might be more survivors in the rubble of these bombings but that further search was being called off.

As it becomes more and more painfully obvious to the Bu$h malAdministration that the Maliki government will be unable (or unwilling) to deliver Iraq’s oil wealth to Western oil interests, there has been a growing background chatter about Prime Minister Maliki being replaced by a more pliant effective Premier.

Word of the assassination [of Muthanna Province Governor Mohammed al-Hassani] came as two prominent members of the Senate Armed Services Committee completed a two-day visit to Iraq and offered a bleak assessment of prospects here.

In a joint statement, Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the committee's chairman, and John Warner, R-Va., the committee's senior Republican, said that while a surge of U.S. troops had tamped down violence in some parts of Baghdad, there was no sign of political reconciliation between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite rivals and "we are not optimistic about the prospects." They said U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker shared their views.

Levin later told reporters during a conference call from Tel Aviv that he believed the Iraqi parliament should replace Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. "The Maliki government is nonfunctional and cannot produce a political settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders," Levin said.

It should be noted that all the political parties in Iraq were established upon the foundations of either sectarian or religious membership, and it would be almost impossible to form a government on any other basis.

As events spin out of control in Iraq the qualified foreign policy community has lost all confidence in the enterprise in Iraq, and indeed in the Middle East.

The world is becoming a more dangerous place for Americans and the United States, with the war in Iraq playing a key role in worsening prospects for US national security, according to a majority of the experts surveyed for Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress's Terrorism Index.

For the third installment of the Index, Foreign Policy and CAP selected 100 experts from all political persuasions, with 80 percent of the participants hailing from former government service—including more than half in the Executive Branch, 32 percent in the military, and 21 percent in the intelligence community. A selection of results from the Index appear below.

This panel includes experts with actual experience in the matter at hand, rather than agenda-driven think tank academics, and ideologically-driven operatives representing other countries’ interests. Among their observations:

--Fully 91 percent say the world is becoming more dangerous for Americans and the United States, up 10 percentage points since February.

--Eighty-four percent do not believe the United States is winning the war on terror, an increase of 9 percentage points from six months ago.

--More than 80 percent expect a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade, a result that is more or less unchanged from one year ago.

--Ninety-one percent of the index’s experts said the war in Iraq negatively affects U.S. national security, an increase of 5 percentage points from a year ago. Negative perceptions of the war in Iraq are shared across the political spectrum, with 84 percent of those who describe themselves as conservative taking a dim view of the war’s impact.

--More than half say the surge is having a negative impact on U.S. national security, up 22 percentage points from just six months ago. This sentiment was shared across party lines, with 64 percent of conservative experts saying the surge is having either a negative impact or no impact at all.

--Sixty-eight percent favor redeploying U.S. forces from Iraq during the next 18 months. One in 5, including 25 percent of conservatives, now favor an immediate withdrawal.

--Only 12 percent believe that terrorist attacks would occur in the United States as a direct result of a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. Eighty-eight percent of the experts said that either such a scenario was unlikely or that they see no connection between a troop withdrawal from Iraq and terrorist attacks inside the United States.

--Though a majority—83 percent—do not believe Tehran when it says its nuclear program is intended for peaceful, civilian purposes, just 8 percent favor military strikes in response. Eight in 10, on the other hand, say the United States should use either sanctions or diplomatic talks to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

A grateful tip of the too-small Kevlar helmet to IraqSlogger, a very useful Iraq news resource, which will slip behind a prohibitively expensive paywall on September 1st. We regret their service will no longer be available to the average reader who is interested in this area which is vitally important to the nation’s survival.