I haven't written much about the US in Iraq, probably because it has all unfolded so predictably. Iraq is caught between two pincers: one is the inevitability of Iraqi resistance, the other the arrogance and ineptness of the American occupation. The former was presaged by the 1991 war, and by the long, cruel regime of sanctions that followed, punctuated by further bombing attacks, which only had the effect of punishing the Iraqi people for leaders who in turn were able to use the siege to oppressively tighten their control. Those policies, pursued by three US presidents for more than a decade, implemented with indifference, indeed total contempt, for the Iraq people, have specifically destroyed any possible credibility that the US might have claimed to be seen as a liberator or benefactor of the Iraqi people. But even beyond the history of specific US policies dealing with Iraq, US policies elsewhere in the Arab world and throughout the third world have made it seem highly implausible that the US can be trusted to do anything of long-term benefit to the Iraqi people.

What's happened since Iraqi resistance emerged has only served to make it appear stronger and more viable -- not, of course, in the sense that they can hope to drive the US out but in anticipation that they can make it painful enough that the US will eventually choose to quit the struggle. The US has managed over the last 20+ years to fight wars with so few casualties that now none are expected, which gives them a very low pain threshold. The response is both to button up and to lash out, both of which make US forces appear to be more alien and more hostile, while at the same time making them less effective as security forces and less responsible as administrative forces. Recent sabotage of oil and water pipelines are something we can expect to see regularly, especially as long as the Iraqi people hold the US responsible for infrastructure failures.

On the other hand, the US appears to be nearly clueless in its occupation. There are many reasons for this: most obviously that the US military's core competency doesn't extend far beyond the art of blowing things up. Even logistical support of US troops seems to be a strain -- the death of a US soldier due to heatstroke is a particularly poignant sign of failure and incompetence. Language (the need to mediate virtually every communication through translators) is obviously a huge problem, which burdens every effort to work with and through the population. And the lack of security makes it all but impossible to bring in civilian help to repair critical infrastructure. But these are the sort of problems that any occupier would face, even one that could reasonably be viewed as benign.

The US faces far deeper problems, which are rooted in the delusions that the Bush administration entertained in selling the war and in conceiving of its solution. As an MBA, Bush should be aware that the single most effective prerequisite for selling anything is the ability to project conviction. The rationales for the Iraq war never had much merit, and the risks associated with the war have always loomed large, but Bush et al. somehow managed to convince first themselves and then key parts of the power structure that their rationales were sound and that the risks were manageable. In doing so they have become trapped in their own lies and delusions. Most obviously, this is why they didn't plan for contingencies that they had to discount in order to sell their case. And now, given the actual level of Iraqi resistance, and given the collapse of their delusions about popular and international support for their war and occupation, about all that Iraqi oil that was supposed to pay for the venture, they find themselves swamped in a mess that offers no way out.

But this gets worse for Bush, because Iraq isn't the only thing he and his possee are deluded about: Bush's handling of crises in America has faired little better. After all, the stories about blackouts and water shortages and snipers aren't all postmarked Baghdad. Bush's ideological straightjacket not only doesn't work in Iraq -- it doesn't even work here. The examples are numerous -- far too numerous to go into here. But some idea of the enormity of the problem, and how clueless Bush is regarding it, can be gleaned from a fairly simple and self-evident rule of thumb: that the only viable direction for change is toward greater equality and freedom. Freedom alone he might be able to handle, since freedom suggests the right to do what one wants, and Bush definitiely likes the idea of doing what one wants -- so long as "one" is Bush or at least a big campaign donor. But that sort of freedom inevitably tramples on the freedom of everyone else; it's only in moving toward greater equality that more people benefit from the system and thereby become part of the system. The core fact is that without the earnest participation of workers nothing really works in complex technological economies, and that everyone who inhabits those societies depends on their ability to trust those workers. What we're seeing in Iraq is a society where trust has been completely undermined by the presence of a foreign, hostile military culture. In the US we rarely see such active hostility, but the indifference and contempt of those who hold power toward those who merely work (in contrast to those who move capital) is spreading rot more slowly, but just as surely.

The bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad today, and last week's bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, are especially troubling acts. Both are attacks on groups that might have worked to mediate and ameliorate the US occupation. Consequently, they serve to make it all the harder for the US to withdraw at all gracefully. It's hard to tell what the intent might be in selecting such targets, and it's far from clear that there is any real coordination between these bombings and other more clearly targeted forms of resistance. But the suggestion is certainly raised that if/when the US withdraws there will be a bloody civil war in Iraq. (That shouldn't come as a surprise; indeed, that's always been in my potential risks file on this conflict, which to my mind was one of those worst case scenario risks where the sheer magnitude of the downside swamps out its improbability. Not that it ever was all that improbable: in effect there pre-existed a civil war truce between the Kurds and the Baathist regime, which could be destabilized at any time; it's also worth noting that Afghanistan is already in a state of civil war, only marginally realigned with the US intervention.)

I haven't written much about Iraq recently, because most of what I have to say boils down to a bunch of told-you-so's. What you seen now are the consequences of the decision to go to war. That decision was not necessary in any sense that can be reasonably articulated. The people who sold and implemented that war did so by denying the facts and what could logically be inferred from them, and by deluding themselves as to their motives and intentions. This is what they've gotten from those decisions and acts, and this is what those who believed them have gotten in return. And the prospects for the future range from more of the same to a whole lot worse. I don't have any bright ideas for fixing what has been broken, other than to remove from power the criminals who set this war in order. But even that won't solve the problem; it is merely the prerequisite to starting to redress the damage.

I picked up a couple of slim books from the library two weeks ago, and managed to get them read by their due date. The books were Shibley Telhami's The Stakes: America and the Middle East: The Consequences of Power and the Choice for Peace, and Walter Mosley's What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace. They both represent personal takes on an increasingly impersonal subject, but then it seems like reasonable people are fated nowadays to respond personally, as if reason is so rare it can be considered a personal quirk.

The main thing that Telhami brings to the table is some experience in polling Arabs in the Middle East. He marshalls sufficient evidence to make the case that Arab opposition to Americans is policy-driven and has little (if anything) to do with cultural factors -- envy of American freedom, etc. This isn't much of a revelation -- Jedediah Purdy figured out the same thing just chatting with young professionals in Cairo. Telhami also has polls from elsewhere in the world which pretty much reveal the same thing, and point out that Arabs are not even all that exceptional in their low opinion of US policy. One weak spot in the book is his discussion of the Barak phase of the Oslo negotiations, which he sees as floundering on the issue of Jerusalem. Tanya Reinhardt and others have argued that Jerusalem was a relatively minor issue, but that the resolution of the refugee problem was much more significant. That's always been my impression as well. But in general Telhami's analyses and proposals are relatively sensible.

Mosley's book interweaves a memoir of his father with his own modest efforts to plot out an activist program for promoting world peace. Mosley addresses his book to black Americans, and it's interesting to think of the post-9/11 antiterrorism regime refracted through the prism of the negro experience in America. For one thing, Mosley points out that his father didn't realize that he was an American until he found himself being shot at by Germans in WWII; but given that he had in fact been shot at just like white Americans were shot at, he came to realize that he ought to have rights just like all other Americans, and that realization changed his life.