A recent NYTimes article detailed the growing violence in Iraq and what it called the "slide to civil war" (I believe we can already call it a civil war, but that's our media for you: it ain't civil war until BushCo says it's a civil war). As a regular reader of Juan Cole, I didn't learn much from the article, but a bit at the very end did catch my eye:
Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House
said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the
possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not
survive.
“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me
that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one
military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White
House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.
“Everybody
in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said,
“but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from
democracy.”
Gee, ya think??
Now, whether Junior can be persuaded to give up his dreams of glory is another question. Nothing makes our president madder than being told he can't do something, like invade a country without provocation or wiretap ordinary people's conversations without warrants. Being thwarted tends to make him dig in his heels and insist on his own way.
Still, another item recently in the news makes you wonder if perhaps something is penetrating the bubble that keeps Dear Leader in fantasy land:
President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq
and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people —
had not shown greater public support for the American mission,
participants in the meeting said Tuesday.
Okay, I'll grant you that the fact that he's mystified by the lack of support among Iraqis does seem a bit thick-headed, but at least he's no longer buying the "we'll be greeted with flowers and candy!" hogwash. He seems to realize that the Iraqis feel less than warmly toward us. That's progress ... sorta.
On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians; hundreds of bombings; a crippled infrastructure; severe fuel shortages; orphaned children and displaced families; kidnappings; execution-style murders, often with the added horror of torture; widespread unemployment; destruction of mosques; the ransacking of Iraq's national historical and art treasures; rampant corruption; leveling of buildings, city blocks, and entire cities; lack of clean water, power, and medical supplies; Abu Ghraib; rape and murder by American GIs; the lovely legacy of DU and unexploded ordnance ... taken all together, these sorts of things tend to make people cranky, for some reason.
This he can't seem to get.
More generally, the participants said, the president expressed
frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the
United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent
anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah
in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated
about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate
against the United States,” said another person who attended.
They don't appreciate our sacrifices, the ungrateful peons. (Like those tax cuts for the rich? The billions to Halliburton and KBR? Those sacrifices?)
And how dare the Shiites demonstrate against the US! Sure, the US is Israel's biggest ally, and Israel recently bombed Lebanon into smithereens, not incidentally killing a lot of innocent people and committing various and sundry war crimes against other Shiites, but hey! Didn't we paint some schools or something?
Bush's determined ignorance about the Middle East may yet kill us all. Somebody, or a few somebodies, in his administration must have had the thankless task of clueing W in on the fact that Iraq is not a democratic paradise and that it doesn't seem destined to be one any time soon, but that doesn't mean Bush actually understands what he and his neocon masters have wrought.
Bush has also stated that US troops will stay in Iraq for as long as he is president. Will the sham of Iraq democracy be maintained for that long? It's possible that, as Matthew Rothschild writes in The Progressive, the US will install a dictator:
The Bush Administration may be looking for an Iraqi Stroessner, or another, more reliable Saddam.
That may have been what Cheney and Rumsfeld had in mind all along.
From the very beginning, they wanted to install in power Ahmad Chalabi
and his groups of exiles roosting in the Iraqi National Congress,
writes George Packer in his book The Assassin’s Gate. When the
situation in Iraq began to deteriorate, Cheney blamed those in the
Administration who refused to go along with this plan.
“In the fall of 2003, Dick Cheney approached his colleague Colin
Powell, stuck a finger in his chest, and said, ‘If you hadn’t opposed
the INC and Chalabi, we wouldn’t be in this mess,’ ” Packer reports.
But if they do, they may have to take care to maintain the illusion that Iraq is "free," just as the administration continues to insist even now as anarchy and chaos reign in the capital. Bush can't give up the image of himself as the brave fighter for a noble cause. We've seen the lengths he's already gone to in order to maintain that image.
That's why I'm afraid the depressing scenario put forth by Rick Gell may be closer to the truth:
And while many are convinced the Green Zone Disneywarland in Baghdad
is proof positive the Bush brain trust is in Iraq to stay, we should
not discount the recent events in Lebanon and the deteriorating
situation on the ground in Iraq, and their effects on the strategists
deep inside the Pentagon and White House.
With Reagan's Beirut
exit, Clinton's Somalia retreat and U.S. helicopter airlifts in Saigon
still vivid memories for many a neocon, a defeat in Iraq would be a
crushing blow. With a virtual lock on every branch of government --
who's to blame? So when they see 10,000 Iranian manufactured and
delivered rockets raining on Israel at will, they have to wonder.
How
easy would it be for the Iraq insurgents to import rockets from
neighboring Iran? How hard would it be to hide those rockets in a wild
and chaotic Baghdad? And what are the chances that insurgents could
launch 30 to 40 rockets directly into the Green Zone in one day? The
headlines around the world reading "500 U.S. Dead -- Last Safe Haven
Under Siege?" The result? Game over.
So one has to assume discussions are taking place on an exit strategy.
And since this is the Bush administration, where reality is irrelevant,
truth is secondary and public relations victories are all-important,
let's play exit strategy, Bush style.
Gell imagines a five-point strategy in which (1) civil war is described as "transitional"; (2) BushCo has the Iraqi government ask us to leave; (3) the "transitional civil war" is all but inevitable on the march toward democracy--look at our own messy "transition"!; (4) we accomplished our goals in Iraq (Saddam was removed; the capability to make WMD was ended; the US helped the Iraqis create a constitution and shape a democracy); and finally (5) "the assault on defeatist, unpatriotic liberals and democrats."
If you can stand it, go and read the whole thing. It all rings depressingly true, and with the American penchant for forgetfulness, depressingly likely.
The best thing about it, from the point of view of the people whose task it is to keep Bush happy by making sure he never comes into contact with messy reality, is that it can keep the fantasy going in what passes for Bush's mind. He, his puppet-masters, and his loyal followers can all maintain the fiction that Iraq was a noble enterprise and a shining example of America's beneficence and willingness to help the benighted.
Bush will never, willingly or unwillingly, abandon the parallel universe he lives in. The Bubble Boy swaggers on.
