By Kevin Potvin

After US President George W Bush (a set of words I still can’t say without my jaw dropping) made his January 10 State of the War address to the American nation from the White House library (as though he’d ever found that room before!), we can now conclude that the latest episode in that long-running sit-com called US Military Adventurism is not in fact unfolding according to anyone’s plan.

There were those, myself included, who have suspected at times over the last four years that complete chaos in Iraq was a desirable outcome for some diabolical neo-cons high up in the Bush administration. But there is no way Bush’s mea culpa and change of course, announced Wednesday night, could be part of anyone’s plan, and neither could the loss of both the Senate and Congress by the Republicans to Democratic control. Diabolical plans are hatched and executed, no doubt, and as Noam Chomsky forever reminds us, the two parties are really opposite sides of the same coin. But plans don’t always succeed, and sometimes, as we are now seeing in Iraq, they fail spectacularly. Events in Iraq do not serve Bush, his backers, the Republicans, the Democrats, or any agency of the vast and half-secret US government, nor any part of the more vast private arms industry. The US war in Iraq really is a catastrophe for Americans and for Iraqis, and the neo-cons too, just as World War I was a catastrophe for all sides, eventual winners and losers alike.

Good news, bad news

This is a good news/bad news scenario. The good news is no hijackers are flying the plane we are all passengers on. Phew! The bad news is, no pilots are flying the plane either. I’m not sure what’s worse: to learn there is a diabolical plan to take over the world, or to learn that the US military is over-committed to a massive trap with no plan at all, diabolical or otherwise.

It is overstating things, and perhaps even a straight-up lie, to say Bush has really changed course in Iraq and admitted to grievous errors. The errors his speech admits to are about the numbers of US troops committed initially to the invasion of Iraq, and over the last four years to the occupation of that country. There was no admission of error about launching the attack in the first place, or about failing to heed the legally binding will of the family of nations as expressed at the United Nations in its General Assembly vote against sanctioning the US’s proposal for war, or about failing to heed the warning of world leaders in Germany, Japan, France, and Russia.

And the so-called “course correction” sounds suspiciously like the plan announced before US casualties shot up six months ago: to re-deploy thousands more soldiers to patrols in Baghdad. This is no new course, it’s not even a new idea. After Bush’s speech, there is no reason to suppose anything will change throughout 2007 besides a higher harvest of souls of all nationalities, American and Iraqi most of all.

Democrats led by speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi are also due for an awakening, although it must be said in sympathy that there is nothing they can do, either, to ease the price America will pay for its crimes. Democrats appear on TV debating about the timetable for getting out, some saying sooner, others saying later, as though the choice is still for any American to make. But well-meaning and sensitive, even very smart, Democratic leaders are just as trapped in Iraq as the most bellicose victim of his own denial in the Republican leadership is.

A fact’s a fact

Francis Fukyama, neo-con author of The End of History, already issued his mea culpa earlier last year, putting us back in the midst of history, where we learn that it is facts on the ground, not rhetoric in the capitals, that determines the outcome of wars. And the facts on the ground, plain to see through inexhaustible eyewitness and journalist accounts, do not favour the Americans for anything that can be construed as victory, nor even do the facts on the ground favour anything other than a very ugly retreat.

How, for example, do you move 138,000 soldiers, plus 40,000 or so American mercenaries, plus 40,000 or so American administrators, from 100 or more different camps spread all over the country to the one airport that can take big passenger planes (near Baghdad) without losing too many to bombs and shootings on roads Americans cannot even patrol now without suffering endless attacks? Even the road from Baghdad to the airport cannot be secured from attacks.

Escalation begs escalation

It is in fact the Bush administration’s theory that the extra 21,500 soldiers to be deployed this winter to Baghdad are required to secure the city sufficiently to enable Americans to begin leaving. With that theory, Americans will soon have 500,000 soldiers in Iraq, all meant to begin the removal of the original 138,000. But of course, the larger the number, the more casualties Americans will suffer, calling for even bigger deployments again, causing more mayhem in Iraq, inspiring more attacks by Iraqis on them. This is what the Prime Minister of Iraq has tried to explain to the Americans as reported in the press before, during, and after Bush’s speech, but to no avail.

Already mainstream commen-tators are talking about helicopters on embassy roofs and frantic evacuees clinging to their feet ahead of the fall. That retreat from Saigon went orderly and without incident by comparison to the coming flee from Baghdad. What the retreat from Baghdad might look more like is the road from Kuwait City to Basra after the Iraqi army and administrators fled ahead of American forces landing in Kuwait in 1991, only this time, the army in full-scale retreat will be the Americans, and the road from Baghdad to Kuwait is about 20 times longer than the one from Kuwait to Basra.

The shock to the American public’s psyche when the bolt-for-the-door happens will be one for the ages, perhaps right up there with the Japanese after their emperor surrendered in 1945, or the French and the Germans after the armistice was finally declared in 1918. But not to worry, it could be worse. It could have been America that’s physically devastated by war instead of Iraq. So, steep as the price will be for its monumental mistakes, and ugly as its ignoble and dishonourable retreat will look, once again, this lucky country will escape any serious physical consequences for its long-running battle against the rest of the world, first begun at its very inception.

No sympathy for the devil

What will be required this time is no Gerald Ford-feel good presidency after Bush leaves, no presidential pardons, and no world community willing to forgive and forget, as happened after the American misadventure in Vietnam. (Who, for example, remains cognizant of, let alone opposes, the fact that Vietnam continues to pay war reparation payments to the US to this day?) What the world needs is America to go through something akin to what Germany and Japan went through 60 years ago: a new constitution imposed by the world community that includes a ban on re-militarization. And a massive, unrelenting, unforgiving, and eternal reparations payment scheme that ensures the country never again is able to rear up so ugly on its hind feet, no matter who is in charge.

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