“A civil war in Iraq could lead to a broader conflict in the Middle East, pitting the region’s rival Islamic sects against each other, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an unusually frank assessment Tuesday,” the Associated Press reports this morning. “The consequences for the people of Iraq would be catastrophic,” Negroponte told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Clearly, it would seriously jeopardize the democratic political process on which they are presently embarked. And one can only begin to imagine what the political outcomes would be.”

Of course, the Straussian neocons who run U.S. foreign policy imagined long ago what the “political outcomes” would be—an easily manipulated Middle East, broken down into ethnically and religiously divided and antagonist components, led by dictators and monarchs answering to the United States and Israel, and acquiescing to harsh diktat and economic “medicine” passed down from international bankers and venal neolibs determined to suck up all natural resources and impoverish millions of people in the process.