Not looking so hot

If the goal was to completely destabilize the Middle East, the Bush administration has hit it out of the park, judging from these headlines:

• Going... - U.S. and European policies may be damaging to Turkey's secular traditions.
• Going... - militias local to Muqtada al Sadr have received training from Hezbollah militants in Lebanon (yet another deteriorating situation). I don't think this really surprises anyone too much: al Sadr has consciously modeled the Mahdi Army on Hezbollah. Early on in the Iraqi conflict we saw militias loyal to al Sadr filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam's regime with the provision of security and social services in Sadr City.
• Gone. - The U.S. has lost the fight in western Iraq, according to a Marine Corps report.