COMMENTARY:

The Next Few Months and the Next Four Years

The second is "Vietnamization" -- creating a puppet government with a local army to support it as intermediaries. This the US is attempting to do in Iraq, but not with much success. The unelected government is hated and weak and the idea that a local militia can do what a highly equipped army has failed at is, as always, "a fantasy," says Polk, an option that at best can be described as a "fig leaf to hide defeat." At worst there will be a rapid collapse and "humiliating evacuation, as in Vietnam." Anyway, at the moment, as the Marines begin a massive assault on Fallujah that they themselves are comparing to the assault on Hue in the Vietnam War, it's clear that prolongued direct confrontation is in full swing.

These are pleasing prospects. It's good that Saddam is gone, and if the US forces would turn the country over to an international peacekeeping force, maybe Iraq could quickly be rebuilt. But it doesn't look like that's possible. Even if it happened one would have to look closely at Vietnam and Ireland and Algeria to see how well things have gone after occupiers' withdrawals, with the seven-and-a-half year Vietnam War perhaps the best analogy, since the damage and the method of its infliction in Iraq are becoming comparable. Polk is overoptimistic in predicting that a million Iraqi exiles abroad might return to rebuild the country under this third option. He also does not go into the neocons' plans for Iran or consider how Israel and the other Arab nations would affect this process. In fact he doesn't seem to be paying attention to who's still in charge in the US.

If Naomi Klein is correct in her analysis of what the real neocon plan has always been for Iraq as she lays it out in "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia" (Harper's, November 2004), then it doesn't matter to the Bush administration that Iraq is falling apart so long as the US "Coalition" can keep investment open to big US corporations. They want a land stripped bare, ready for capitalist exploitation. As Klein says, "International law prohibits occupiers from selling state assets but doesn't say anything about puppet governments."

Keeping the puppet government is fine for the pursuit of the devastating neocon utopia. The neocons aren't interested in reconstruction -- not if it's done by the locals without outsiders profiting. Bush's success in grabbing a second term will encourage him and his team to maintain what Klein calls their "ideological blindness," hiding behind the Green Zone and fake statistics. This blindness is greater than usual because the ideological stance is more extreme than other US administrations'. But the impulse of an occupier to ignore reality and pursue a fantasy never visible on the ground is an old habit among nations. The US desire to "stay the course" and save face during the Vietnam War led to similar behavior, even with less mercantile motives.

Polk is wildly optimistic to suggest elective withdrawal as a possibility under a continuing Bush administration. Bush has never spoken of withdrawal, and since he claims both a "mandate" and "political capital" that he is determined to "spend" (based on the last four years a better word is "squander"), the logical prediction is that in dealing with Iraq, the administration will continue to follow a combination of options one and two. Even tentative steps toward option three will not be possible for another five years--which is most unfortunate because, as Polk says, the longer you wait, the harder it is to withdraw.

As the Marines carry out the most massive assault ever on Fallujah the immediate future looks very ugly. The irony is that the Vietnam War was conducted on the pretext of the "domino theory," which held that if one country in Southeast Asia went communist, others would follow in succession. The theory was fallacious. But this time there is already proof that the US occupation and war in Iraq is increasing the ranks of Muslim insurgency. American belligerency is really having a "domino" effect.