President George W. Bush has surprised me again.

Instead of the two choices for his Iraq policy I delineated in a previous article — withdraw and leave a bloodbath of a civil war or throw everything America has into Iraq for a different kind of bloodbath — Bush, amazingly, has come up with another option.

For lack of a better term, let’s call it the “half-assed option.”

By now we know the details. Euphemistically called a “surge,” although more like a piddle, Bush ramps up the U.S. combat presence in Iraq by 20,000 troops, give or take.

This of course, will not be accomplished with anything like “fresh” troops from any of the American empire’s far-flung commitments. This human speed bump will be garnered by funneling in the next rotation of cannon fodder whilst preventing other ground-up troops scheduled to leave, from departing.

Not that even this will have any noticeable effect on the ground if you care to listen to America’s generals. One might ask what an additional 20,000 troops would have done for the Germans at the battle of Berlin in April 1945. Such will be the maximum effective range of this desperate move.

Unless of course, the administration is adding additional manpower on the side of Shi’ite militias to accomplish further sectarian conflict as suggested in some quarters.

But perhaps there is something even more at work here. Unless Bush is truly mad one must, in a Nasserian way, expect his neocon handlers to have an ulterior motive in continuing to destabilize Iraq.

At some point one must ask if chaos isn’t the objective?

And, at that point, one would reasonably ask: who would benefit from such chaos?

Here are some competing rationales:

  • Follow the money: of course the military-industrial complex continues to rake in the no-bid contracts although don’t ask Halliburton’s stockholders why they aren’t sharing in the largesse. But there’s more — private security goon squads like Blackwater are also making out in the debacle. But at some point you find yourself facing the law of diminishing returns — profits tend to run dry with a lack of things to blow up. There has to be a second act.
  • Divide and rule: no one in their right minds believes that a partition of Iraq based on sending the Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurd to their respective corners will work. No one except the neocons that is, and remember they “create their own reality.” After all, wasn’t Iraq itself a cobbled together creation of the British Empire?

At some point will an exhausted, battered and bleeding Iraq acquiesce to a partition? How many more dead (theirs and ours) it would take to get to that point may be on the discussion boards at the Project for a New American Century or the American Enterprise Institute. And who would benefit from it? Enclaves should be easier to control, especially if you happen to be a foreign oil concern or agribusiness giant. Israel certainly would love a weak, divided and subjugated Iraq and certainly not least, the Iraqis would have a more difficult time riling up their Shi’ite brothers across the border.

Which brings us to:

  • Jumping off point for the Big Show: the invasion of the Iranian oil fields. One might expect the exact same game plan for Iran — just enough force to conquer the country and depose its government, and then try to stay alive while the various factions inside the country tear the nation to bits. When the dust settles, pick up the pieces and rule and profit.

It’s all in the Wald-Vollmer report that Bush is paying far more attention to than the Iraq Study Group “surrender.”

According to conservative columnist Arnaud De Borchgrave, the report says:

“Rather than planning withdrawal from Iraq,” says the Wald-Vollmer paper, “we may be better served to plan for repositioning in this strategically important region. While withdrawal may be necessary in Iraq, withdrawal from the region would precipitate a global balance-of-power shift toward the Iran-Russia-China axis, which would be very detrimental for the energy dependent West.”

Is it not perhaps reasonable at this time to consider that Bush has meant exactly what he said about a decades long, worldwide war on Islamic radicalism? And isn’t it even barely possible although it seems mad that everything that has happened in Iraq, this “progressive destructive chaos” has been the plan from the get-go and that civil war was not only expected but hoped for?

If you must rule a people or a nation for the benefit of their natural resources and geopolitical value, would it not be a possible tactic to allow them to destroy themselves first without committing too many of your own people to the effort? After all, you hear from some supporters of this war that while 3,000 dead in three years may seem like a lot to the average American who knows nothing of war, it pales in comparison to American dead at the single battle of Iwo Jima (6,825).

And in the end, the neocons would ask, who should control the world’s precious oil supply in the days of waning energy supplies — unstable Arab governments attempting to acquire nuclear weapons or the cool-headed albeit bloodstained boardroom technocrats of the so-called civilized West?

As General Jack D. Ripper of Dr. Stranglove fame would say, we certainly might get our hair mussed in the effort. But the casualties will be in the operationally acceptable range — acceptable, of course, to those running and profiting from the slaughter.

It seems that whatever the American people think (whenever they do) their betters have already made the choice to be in this for the long haul. Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann, Dennis Kucinich, etc., can whine all they want but the Rumsfeldian types who take the long view of dollars vs. bloodshed divided by potential profits have already committed this nation to a very long and very costly struggle, Democratic bleating notwithstanding.

Truth be told, the American people are taking heavier casualties at home than the military. Our national treasury is practically bankrupt and our infrastructure is starting to totter. The middle class and its prosperity are being sacrificed to pay for this last grab at empire although most Americans have yet to put two and two together on this fact.

In fact, Bush continues to tell Americans they can help the national effort by going shopping. After all, if the consumer treadmill of borrowing and spending beyond our means ever stops so too does the tax revenue to pay for this carnage.

To use the hoary cliché so beloved by both the left and right, at the end of the day, the ruling class of America and the Corporate West will have secured the blessings of oil and profit in exchange for the blood of America’s working class sons and daughters and the previously envied living standards of the once great United States of America.

Not to mention the blood of perhaps millions of Arab peoples — the ones whose blasted homes and dead relatives we rarely see on our TV screens.

Nevertheless, in shantytowns all over some future America, the former autoworkers or middle management types desperately trying to feed their families may still put a flag in the window. Such is the power of our national mythology.

If it all seems crazy, in the cloud cuckoo land we seem to be living in today, don’t discount madness as a plan.

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...