As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues -- but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat. TARIQ ALI MID-POINT IN THE MIDDLE EAST? Editorial Looking down on the world from the imperial grandeur of the Oval Office in the fall of 2001, the Cheney -- Bush team was confident of its ability to utilize the September events to remodel the world. The Pentagon's Vice Admiral Cebrowski summed up the linkage of capitalism to war: 'the dangers against which us forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are "disconnected" from the prevailing trends of globalization'. Five years later, what is the balance sheet? On the credit side, Russia, China and India remain subdued, along with Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Here, despite the attempts of Western political science departments to cover the instrumentalist twists of us policy with fig-leaf conceptualizations -- 'limited democracies', 'tutelary democracies', 'illiberal democracies', 'inclusionary autocracies', 'illiberal autocracies' -- the reality is that acceptance of Washington Consensus norms is the principal criterion for gaining imperial approval. In Western Europe, after a few flutters on Iraq, the eu is firmly back on side. Chirac now sounds more belligerent than Bush on the Middle East, and the German elite is desperate to appease Washington. On the debit side, the Caracas effect is spreading. Cuba's long isolation has