Our Bloody Valentine

They also neglect to mention just what they were defining as success in order to make the surge leap as well. Think about it. If you were a leader of the insurgency and you were outgunned by a foe whom you knew would have to be leaving before too long, what would you do? Maybe hunker down a couple of years and wait for a better opportunity, knowing that the Americans were leaving and definitely not coming back? In this sense, I always thought it was as foolish and deceitful to claim victory in 2008 as it had been in 2003. And this is probably precisely what we're witnessing now, as political violence is once again ramping up in Iraq. According to the New York Times story reporting on the thirteen simultaneous strikes in as many Iraqi cities that occurred this week, a prominent insurgent Website posted this warning: "The countdown has begun to return Iraq to the embrace of Islam and its Sunnis, with God's permission". Oh joy. An Iraqi judge and former legislator is quoted in the same article as interpreting the attacks this way: "The message the insurgents want to deliver to the Iraqi people and the politicians is that we exist and we choose the time and place. They are carrying out such attacks when the Americans are still here, so just imagine what they can do after the Americans leave."

Evidently, all those regressives in America who claimed that the surge won the war didn't quite have those powers of imagination.

Moreover, that question of the degree of violence reduced points to another aspect of the great lie regarding the surge. Even if it was the extra troops that did the trick in 2007, rather than all the other factors, just what trick did they do? Reducing the level of sheer cataclysmic chaos and unmitigated violence from that of the all-but-full-blown-civil-war era of 2006 is something, indeed. But it ain't necessarily winning a war. Suppose someone in your family has been getting plastered and wrecking the family car on a weekly basis, but lately dried up enough to bring that rate down to 'merely' once a month instead. Just how good would you be likely to feel about that achievement? Twenty-five percent of Hell is still Hell.

It gets worse from there. America was supposed to be bringing democracy to Iraq, which, in turn, would launch a virtuous domino effect in the Middle East. Leave aside what a disingenuous claim that always was. (What happened to Turkey, long an Islamic democracy in the heart of the region? And if democratization really was the true goal, why not - instead of starting wars - lean hard on our major clients there, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which remain to this day as autocratic as ever?) But forget all that nettlesome logic stuff and just take a look at Iraq in 2010 to see the product of America's handiwork. Three clear and prominent facts about Iraqi national politics fundamentally undermine any neocon con about democratization. First, the country is deeply divided, and it is divided principally on ethnic grounds. When it comes to the nation of Iraq, there is no there there. How, then, can there be a democracy? Second, one of these three ethno-geographic polities has already all but left the building. The Kurds have become independent of Baghdad in everything but name, and they may indeed finish the job and formalize the process once the Americans are out of the picture. And finally, look at the government that exists, such as it is. Months after the last election, there is nothing in Iraq resembling a national government - just an endless series of bickering fights between creepy power junkies like Ahmad Chalabi and folks of that ilk.

Meanwhile, violence escalates, the military and the police are impotent to deal with it when they aren't actually in full-on corrupt collusion with the combatants, and nothing remotely works in the country - not power, not water, not sewage, not security, not infrastructure, not education, not government, not nothing. What a shock it is - no? - that the neighboring people of the Middle East haven't been clamoring for all the joys of freedom and democracy America has brought to Iraq with its invasion. Astonishingly, you don't see people marching in the streets of Cairo, Damascus or even Tehran (where they have in fact been marching for democracy), demanding that their countries become more like Iraq. Golly, could Paul Wolfowitz actually have been - gulp - wrong about his crap shoot with a million (of other people's) lives based on his elaborate but bogus ivory tower theory? Well, at least he had the decency to admit his error, apologize and decline Bush's subsequent offer for a nice plum job, saying, "Look, after Iraq I'm not fit to run anything from here on out, let alone the World Bank". Oh, wait a sec. I must be thinking of a different Paul Wolfowitz. This one actually did follow Robert McNamara into the ignominy of the World Bank presidency, where he stayed until they caught the great exponent of moral virtue with his hands in the cookie jar and finally threw his skanky ass out.

Bush's big adventure was also supposed to enhance American security. Uh, let's do the math here and see... Over 4,000 American soldiers are dead. Tens of thousands of them are gravely wounded. Perhaps hundreds of thousands are suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome effects, after the multiple tours in Hell that the cowards Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and the rest deployed them into. We now have a military that even the sell-out king of all time, Colin Powell, described as "broken" from all the stress and depletion. The war cost America a trillion bucks so far. When we get done - literally generations from now - providing expensive care to the wounded, replenishing the war materiel supplies expended, and paying off the debt for all the money borrowed to run this little party, that figure is likely to get closer to two trillion, or more. Iran - infinitely more the real adversary than Saddam ever was - is now vastly more powerful. Who knows how many anti-American Iraqis, crafted in the crucible of the disastrous occupation, seeking violent revenge. America's global reputation in the toilet.

Dang. When you add it all up, that's a pretty expensive little fling, all for the purposes of ameliorating George "Caligula" Bush's personal insecurity and Dick "Satan" Cheney's sociopathic lust for oil and blood. What did we get for our efforts? What's behind Door Number One, Carol Merrill, for which we traded all that money and lives and security and honor and reputation and morale and morality? One dead dictator who had fallen out of favor with us, after previously being our client (back when he actually was using WMD, requiring Republicans to cover for him in Congress and at the UN). That's it, pal. It sure ain't no democracy. It sure ain't no delivery from the peril of weapons that never existed. It sure ain't no improved national security. It sure ain't no peace in the region.

And, of course, the greatest irony is that what Iraq sadly really needs right now, what it will probably get one way or another, and what the US government will no doubt slap some lipstick on and call a democratic beauty, is simply another Saddam. Assuming, that is, that it is even possible to talk meaningfully about Iraq as a country anymore, given the breakaway tendencies of the Kurds and the unwillingness of either the Sunni or Shia to live under the authority of the other. If you can get past that, however - and likely the only way you can get past that - you're probably gonna need a brutal dictator to hold together this multi-ethnic state of bitter rivals, the creation of European imperialists and no more the better for it than is Belgium, which may suffer the same fate very soon now, though probably less violently.

The other thing to remember, of course, is that Obama's 'ending' of the war may prove to be every bit as legitimate and lasting as the last two were. I have often wondered what any president - let alone one so timid and so intimidated by the right as Obama - could get away with politically in presiding over the withdrawal of troops if Iraq was blowing up simultaneously, something I'd judge to be either quite likely to happen, or perhaps already happening as we speak. The right - these children of Joe McCarthy who make the old tail-gunner look tame by comparison - would undoubtedly wrap themselves in military garb and start in with the chorus of "Obama lost Iraq", hammering him for dishonoring and wasting all the lives already sacrificed.

What would happen next could go either way. On the one hand, it feels a lot like 1975, with the public now showing little stomach to remain in an endless overseas war for nothing. On the other hand, from what I can see, there is virtually no perceptible bottom to the pit of Barack Obama's political cowardice. If he caves to the sick right (once again), we may have to 'win' the war yet a fourth time before we actually get out of there.

And get out we most certainly must. There is, after all, a real limit to what any nation can expend on exporting its virtues to the rest of the world. Altruism of the magnitude we've shown in the Middle East cannot be unlimited.

Much as we might like to generously continue donating so many more kindnesses to the (remaining, un-dead) people of Iraq, those resources are now needed more than ever here at home.

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