President George W. Bush is now a man alone.

Only 14 per cent of Americans in a Harris poll now say Iraq is not in a civil war. His conservative base, many of whom have sons or daughters serving in Iraq, is deserting him.

Pundits like reliably conservative Joe Scarborough on MSNBC say he’s alone on the war in Iraq. You don’t hear a peep from Congressional Republicans in support of the President.

Ex-Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as well as former confidantes like former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell now take open shots at the President and no one utters a word in protest at their lack of decorum. More virulent still are a majority of TV pundits who are now questioning the President’s sanity in ways that would have ensured their sacking just a year ago.

Even the President’s puppet Prime Minister in Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, feels embarrassed and humiliated by the United States and stands up the President at an official dinner.

But George W. Bush is the man with the say-so and he says we stay in Iraq.

He’s the Commander-in-Chief and that’s the American system, like it or not.

Now that the United States has spent more time in Iraq than it took to defeat the Axis powers in World War II, some things have become irretrievably clear.

It was about the oil and, primarily, because of the oil we will most likely stay.

But the grand plan, hatched by Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al was messianic in its scope and breathtaking in its ignorance.

I must conclude after all was said and done that these men, these neoconservatives, these denizens of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) really, really believed in their heart of hearts:

  • We could invade Iraq and be greeted as liberators and,
  • Set up a puppet government, call it a democracy and,
  • Democracy would then take root and spread throughout the Middle East.

This would have the effect of ensuring the peaceful free flow of oil at market prices to the United States and its allies (in an era of declining oil supplies) and provide back door protection for the state of Israel.

And a thousand flowers of peace, prosperity and good feeling would bloom.

There was only one problem with this grand plan: it was based on assumptions that a first year intern at the State Department’s Middle Eastern desk could (and would) have shot down in flames.

And that’s precisely what various U.S. intelligence and diplomatic experts on the Middle East tried to do in the six months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They tried to tell The White House that the cultural, historical and political realities of Iraq and the greater Middle East made the PNAC’s core assumptions as realistic as fairy dust.

And for their troubles, these learned bureaucrats were first ignored and then silenced, disgraced or fired. Also disgraced, silenced and fired were countless people in the media who stood up and asked the hard questions of this invasion and also paid for it with their jobs.

And now having sown the wind the men who make their own reality have reaped the whirlwind. All their hubris has cost is over 600,000 total Iraqi casualties, 2,886 U.S. soldiers dead and 21,778 wounded as of this writing, a country wrecked and in civil war with the very real possibility of a regional war spiralling out of control beckoning.

And does anyone still blame the U.S. media (other than the increasingly unhinged Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel) for not airing “the good news” from Iraq? Any junior j-school graduate with a video camera could land almost anywhere in Iraq, turn on her camera and instantly be confronted with death, destruction and general mayhem.

And Iraq produces more dead children than tankers filled with oil.

More than anyone though, this will be forever known as George W. Bush’s war. And he will spend the rest of his term in office trying desperately to find a way out of it. Call it “Peace with Honour,” call it “preserving one’s legacy,” call it what you will but Bush will not, Churchill-like, preside over the dissolution of the New American Century.

Not if he can help it.

And forget any help from Iran and Syria — they have a vested interest in seeing America bleed itself white in Iraq, a view expressed by Hooshang Amirahmadi, the Director of Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the founder and president of the American Iranian Council on Lou Dobbs’ CNN show recently.

Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, recently said, “We’re not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups.” He concluded grimly, “The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body.”

And as far as training the Iraqi puppet government’s own police and “army” to stand up so the U.S. can stand down: after three years does anyone believe this day will ever arrive? And does anyone who has studied the situation believe that the Iraqi army and police, riddled with members of Jaysh al-Mahdi’s militia, will begin firing on each other as soon as the Americans are out of earshot?

And Bush has nixed talking to Syria and Iran as well as taking any advice from Jim Baker or the Iraq Study Group. A chasm of megalomania yawns.

To paraphrase General Jack D. Ripper of Dr. Strangelove fame, the President has now forced himself into a choice between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments:

    1. The Americans pull out, a massive regional civil war gets underway in earnest resulting in mass slaughter and a profound loss of American prestige in the Middle East and the world also resulting in an almost certain severe loss of oil production from Iraq and surrounding states probably causing a recession or worse (but without additional American bloodshed) and more terrorism directed against American interests,

or

    2. The Americans pump more soldiers into Iraq, fight to eliminate all the warring militias and create a permanent armed partition of Iraq, resulting in mass slaughter and a profound loss of American prestige in the Middle East and the world and also resulting in an almost certain severe loss of oil production from Iraq and surrounding states probably causing a recession or worse and more terrorism directed against American interests and the resulting U.S. casualties causing the very real possibility of unprecedented political and social unrest in the U.S.

How are those for choices? What would you do? Bush is right on one thing: there will be no “graceful exit.” The possibility of that has long passed thanks largely to his singular insistence on staying the course.

To be sure there’s many a slip twixt the cup and lip and miracles can occur but are unlikely. There may be other scenarios and saving throws beyond the two admittedly bleak scenarios I’ve outlined but so far I fail to see evidence for what they might be.

And if the geniuses at the PNAC had a clue right now I think we might have heard from them. The silence of the masters of the universe is probably the scariest thing of all.

There is one more thing about Bush than unnerves me. He could possibly rally the American people to the cause of this war but this President seems to have lost the gift of oration he possessed in the days following September 11, 2001.

Instead when the President talks about the war in Iraq as he has recently next to Prime Minister al-Maliki, he does so sometimes haltingly, as if he’s trying to sound believable, even to himself. Sometimes he seems to smile or show that infamous smirk as if he’s telling some kind of cute joke. Is anyone else as unnerved by this as I am?

Bush also seems to be mimicking another literary figure — Captain Ahab from Moby Dick — relentlessly stalking his own great white whale: a “victory” in Iraq and salvation for his legacy.

But unlike Ahab, there’s more than the crew of the Pequod at stake.

And this more than anything, makes me extremely uneasy about the solitary hand that stays the helm of the American ship of state for the next two years.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...