Failed $tate

If you haven't gotten into the habit of reading TomDispatch, you should:

...The truth is that Iraq, which was to be only the first stop on a Bush administration (and neocon) military tour of the Middle East, and then assumedly the world, has so far proven the last stop on the global domination line. It has revealed to a startled world the remarkable weakness of the Earth's last superpower, the land which was, Roman-style, supposed to imprint a Pax Americana on the planet. It has ripped up the all-volunteer military and confounded the dreams of the ever angrier neocons.

In the period before 9/11, neocon writers often focused on the spread of a failed-state world, a supposed jungle of unrulable instability out there on the peripheries, one on which only the sole global hyperpower would assumedly have the capability to impose some level of order. Some of those neocons, in their eagerness to whack various regimes in the Middle East -- Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon -- probably didn't care greatly if, as a result, they created failed states throughout the region. Chaos didn't perhaps seem the worst fate for many of those lands (as long as Ariel Sharon's Israel was strengthened in the process).

Little did they know. Now, they have indeed succeeded in creating a failed-state right in the oil-rich heart of the Middle East and the chaos of Iraq has proceeded to suck the American military as well as Bush administration policies and dreams of every sort down with it, creating maneuvering space for countries as disparate as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

In fact, it's unlikely that the Bush administration -- possibly any American government -- will be able to live comfortably with Iraq as a failed state, its ripples of chaos spreading regionally, even globally. And yet the administration has already demonstrated with definitive thoroughness that it is capable of doing little about the situation -- except continually making it worse.

Someday, withdrawal will come, "permanent" bases or no. Staying is not conceivable and the longer we remain, the worse the situation is likely to be when we depart. But on such subjects and on the matter of taking any responsibility for its actions, this administration is not only shameless, but quite hopeless. It can only create more chaos, foster yet more mad plans for future operations like -- if the latest rumors leaked to ex-CIA official Philip Giraldi of American Conservative magazine are to be believed -- taking out the Iranian nuclear program using... doh!... nuclear weapons. Even Homer Simpson, six beers to the wind, couldn't have come up with that one, but evidently our Vice President has...

Ouch, that's gotta hurt.

Pity Bu$hie can't read without his earpiece, and Big Time Dick is too busy counting the WarBuck$ to feel the pain. Besides, these same plans are coming out as big fluff pieces, distractions planted with the main worry about American troops being used on U.S. soil.

The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.

Like it's never happened yet.

Protecting the Homeland was what the National Guard was for. But while they're sweating the heat in Iraq, you might as well bring those DynCorp/ CACI/ Blackwater private contractors home, Big Time. After the next Big Strike run by your Saudi buddies they'll smoke out those terra'ists fighting your plans to drill in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

But Englehardt's got it. The Bu$hCo strategeries are all like the demented plans of some stoned Yale fratboys. The harder Big Time hits, the messier it gets.

Fifty years from now they'll seem hilarious to our great-grandchildren.

Assuming, of course, we stop them in time, and there's anyone left in the world to do the laughing.