It is impossible to know what is really going on in Iraq, at least in terms of assessing the "progress" and prospects for the U.S. occupation. Most news reports depict a level of resistance that is sufficient to seriously disrupt American plans. Moreover, it seems likely that this level of resistance can be sustained indefinitely -- at least as long as the U.S. is a convenient target. On the other hand, U.S. officialdom is strenuously trying to paint a rosier picture. But, then, the credibility of U.S. officialdom has been strained so severely that even mainstream media, which usually devours whatever is fed them, is looking askance. Or maybe they just smell blood; they are, after all, good at that.

To some extent this is one of those half-empty/half-full divisions. What is generally agreed on is that the current state -- the "half" if you will -- is unstable and transitional. The disagreement is on where it is going. Your half-fulls here figure that when the occupation is able to get Iraq into some sort of functional state -- once the infrastructure works and the oil flows and the economy starts moving and ordinary Iraqis start to see some tangible improvement in their lives -- the resistance will fade away. On the other hand, your half-empties will argue that the resistance will keep most or all of those things from happening, and that by doing so it will harvest enough resentment against the occupation that it will sustain itself, until eventually the U.S. gives up and leaves.

This division has less to do with the available facts than with a pair of perceptions. The half-fulls believe that the resistance is the work of a small and finite number of intractable evil-doers, who merely need to be drawn out and dispatched; the half-empties believe that the resistance is the inevitable fruit of occupation, and that any efforts to suppress the resistance will only deepen it. The half-fulls also believe that the U.S. has the skills and good will and generosity to make the occupation work for the betterment of the Iraqi people; the half-empties have grave doubts about those very skills, not to mention what all that American good will and generosity did for ordinary Iraqi people even before the invasion. The half-fulls, of course, believe that even if their optimism has been a bit excessive, there is no choice but for America to "stay the course" until a better Iraq emerges, and see withdrawal as not only callous but ultimately as tragic for the Iraqi people. The half-empties, on the other hand, figure that even as bad as the occupation has already proved itself to be, continuing it is only going to make it worse, and that even though immediate U.S. withdrawal would probably lead to short-term chaos and possibly to long-term tyranny, those risks are preferable to the certain failure of occupation.

Needless to say, I've been with the half-empties as long as Iraq has been on Bush's todo list, and for that matter I was a half-empty on Afghanistan as well. Thus far, all my efforts have gotten me is an awfully long list of I-told-you-sos, which doesn't show me to be prescient so much as it shows you that I have a steady sense of who not to trust. But for the purposes of this thought-experiment, let me switch sides. What I want to do below is to show you how easily Bush et al. might be able to get some sort of positive results from their Iraq debacle: something that conforms to and at least partly justifies at least some of their rhetoric.

The first thing that must be done is for the U.S. to scale its goals back to something that can realistically be achieved. Such goals have to fit two requirements: 1) they have to be things that the U.S. and whatever allies the U.S. can muster are capable of and willing to do; and 2) they have to be things that will be favorably received and embraced by the majority of the Iraqi people. Some facets of the Bush agenda clearly fail to meet these criteria. For example, the favoritism in awarding lucrative reconstruction contracts to Bush's corporate sponsors works to the detriment of virtually all Iraqis. The fantasy of privatizing Iraq's economy is only likely to benefit a tiny elite. The prospect of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq promises to cast a long shadow over whatever form of democracy Bush has in mind or Iraq, especially given how easily Americans tend to demonize all Arabs. On the other hand, reforms which offer freedom, security, and opportunity to all Iraqis are likely to gain broad-based support among a people who have historically been denied everything.

A small subset of Bush's goals -- at least as expressed in the rhetoric of the administration -- would seem to be achievable. The easiest of these goals is to assure that Iraq does not have and is not engaged in developing Weapons of Mass Destruction. (After all, there are no such things.) The task of rounding up a short list of Saddam Hussein and his top henchmen to bring them to justice for their numerous crimes, mostly against fellow Iraqis, is also a matter that few Iraqis will dispute. Another worthwhile goal would be to prevent post-Saddam Iraq from falling into civil war, with its bloodshed and turmoil, leading to the likely prospect of another tyranny. The U.S. has made a clear verbal commitment to establishing and protecting democratic self-government in Iraq, which would certainly fail if any faction in Iraq were to resort to force to secure power -- but what faction would bother raising a militia knowing that it would have to defeat the U.S. military before it could finish subduing Iraq?

But the U.S. faces a dilemma here: it cannot stay to protect Iraqi democracy unless it can extricate itself from being the target of Iraq's anti-imperialist resistance. To do that the U.S. desperately needs two things: 1) a viable Iraqi democracy in place, which receives increasing support from the Iraqi people; and 2) enough isolation to keep U.S. troops and civilians from being viewed as occupiers and imperialists. The current U.S. program in Iraq is failing because it does neither of these things: the U.S. promises Iraqi empowerment in the future, but right now it insists on its own complete control, which leaves Iraqis as disempowered as ever. This obsession with control taints everything, making any Iraqis who collaborate with the U.S. look like puppets, in the long term promising Iraq not empowerment but government by U.S. subterfuge. To break this cycle, the U.S. must put a viable independent Iraqi government in place, and the U.S. must for almost all intents and purposes get the hell out of the way.

The first part, putting a viable independent Iraqi government together, is the hard part, but it gets easier if you think first about making it independent, then work on viable. Start with a constitution: just pick a relatively simple, straightforward one, and clean it up a bit. The U.S. occupation of Japan wrote a constitution for Japan which has proved to be reasonably successful, so that may be a good start. The constitution has to establish extensive rights for individuals which limit what the government can do -- freedom of religion, speech, assembly, equal rights, due process, etc. You need a strong, independent court system to prevent government encroachment on these rights. You should have a broad-based legislative branch, and a relatively weak executive branch -- Iraq has had too many strong men already. Such a constitution should just be written and vetted to get as much consensus as is possible as quickly as possible -- there's no need for a constitutional convention since that would just delay implementation and add controversy. Of course, it should be possible for the Iraqis to amend the constitution at any time down the line.

Under that constitution hold a quick set of elections -- no more than 30 days of campaigning, no political parties, just try to encourage the Iraqi people to elect the best candidates possible. The quicker this can be done, the better. Then turn everything over to that government, including the power to negotiate with foreign governments, the United Nations, and NGOs for whatever assistance might be forthcoming. Most importantly, at least from the U.S.'s standpoint, the new government gets complete control over the security problem. This is a gamble -- in particular, we're gambling that the real cause of armed resistance in Iraq is the U.S. itself, as opposed to Iraq's own famous factionalism. But if the resistance has proven anything thus far it is that the U.S. is not competent to quell it. A makeshift Iraqi government might seem even less competent, but there is a real chance that resistance will simply fade when it no longer has the U.S. to rally against. The key to making this work, of course, is to convince the Iraqi people that the new government is their government, a reflection of their will and interest, completely independent from U.S. direction and domination.

This does not mean that the U.S. has to pack up and leave right away. It merely means that the U.S. has to let Iraq call the shots, and has to get out of the way. The latter is simple enough: move the U.S. forces to a handful of isolated, defensible military bases, and keep them out of sight and harm's way. The U.S. can still pursue its unfinished business -- cleaning up the WMD controversy, tracking down its short list of war criminals -- provided it can do so discreetly, with all due respect to the new Iraqi government. More importantly, keeping a U.S. military presence provides a check limit on potential escalation of civil conflict in Iraq. This is, in fact, what the U.S. actually is competent at: blowing to hell anything that looks like an enemy militia. It is almost axiomatic that terrorists cannot conquer anything -- all they can do is to disrupt, sow fear, wreak havoc, but it takes a significant militia to conquer and occupy any area. Continued U.S. presence cannot protect a democratic Iraq against acts of terrorism -- that has to be done through dilligent policework and through popular appeal, which is something that the Iraqis should be far better at than the U.S. can ever be -- but the U.S. can prevent a democratic Iraq from descending into factional civil war by presenting an overwhelming deterrent force against any faction who might think of civil war as an option. Iraqi democracy can survive as long as no independent militias are allowed to form and as long as no inside strongman can take control of the government.

Needless to say, the U.S. will need far fewer troops in Iraq once there is a functioning Iraqi democracy, and once the U.S. is out of the security hot seat. That in turn starts to significantly reduce the cost of being there, both politically and financially. The down side -- if you're so inclined -- is that the U.S. has to give up its delusions, its pork barrel favoritism to U.S. corporations, and whatever designs it has on Iraq's vast oil reserves. Most importantly, it has to give up Bush's cherished War on Terrorism -- the idea that the world (or at least the U.S., which is the same thing in some minds) can be made safe from the acts of terrorists by waging war. As we can clearly see in Iraq, war is much too crude and much too unjust a tool to grapple with terrorists who dwell in the interstices of civil society. (Or we can look at Palestine, which differs from Iraq in that Israel has no illusions of itself as a benefactor to the Palestinian people, yet despite using every method of repression short of genocide has only managed to make its resistance more tenacious and treacherous.)

The third step in this plan is to write off all of Iraq's debts and reparations. If this isn't done, Iraqis will spend decades stewing in penury, adding to their resentment and sense of injustice. If this isn't done, the new government will be subservient not to its people but to Saddam's creditors, and the U.S. forces stationed nearby will be seen not as protecting Iraq's democracy but as protecting Saddam's creditors. Do this, and the Iraqi people and their fledgling democracy get a fresh start and a fair shake. And make new credit available, on reasonable terms. Iraq's oil reserves do not in and of themselves guarantee the Iraqi people a prosperous future, but they are assets, making much easier for Iraq to finance its own reconstruction -- one which the Iraqi people can control for themselves. A quick glance at the history of Germany should convince anyone of this point: compare what happened after the two World Wars, the first ending with a Germany saddled with huge reparations, the second ending with no reparations and reconstruction financing available through the Marshall Plan. (As for the U.S. actually paying reparations to Iraq for what we broke, dream on. The U.S. is such a debtor state now that it can't really afford the bombs that it used to wreck Iraq, much less the tab to put it all back together again.)

In some ways what I've proposed thus far resembles what the U.S. says it plans on doing: the big difference is the timetable, and the degree of independence permitted to Iraq's future democracy. The up side here is that this approach lets the U.S. disengage while saving face. Bush can tout this as a success: an Iraq free of WMD, free of Saddam and his thugs, well on its path to a modern, peaceable, maybe even prosperous democracy, one that could conceivably be seen as a model and hope for the Arab world and beyond. It's also worth noting that I've said nothing about the United Nations here -- this is really just about the U.S. and Iraq. If Iraq wants the U.N. to get involved, that's their business, but the fact is that the U.N.'s long history in Iraq exposes it as a transparent tool for the U.S., which is precisely what makes it an ineffective alternative to the U.S. But this also cuts Bush a little rhetorical slack: he can argue that the U.N. has long failed to resolve the Iraq problem, and that this failure has had tragic consequences for the people of Iraq. (But don't expect him to point out that the U.N.'s greatest failure here has been its inability to stand up to the U.S.) If the U.S. does what I propose, and if it works anywhere near reasonable expectations, Bush can shamelessly claim to have defused a longstanding threat to the peace and security of the world, and to have delivered freedom from tyranny to the Iraqi people. Given the mess that he's blundered into that's about as rosy an outcome as anyone could hope for.

Of course, I don't expect Bush to do anything of the sort. I don't have a real explanation why, in large part because I've never understood just what the real reason was why Bush led the U.S. into Iraq in the first place. It's hard, for instance, to give much creedance to WMD, the evil Saddam, or the thrill of establishing democracy in Iraq, becuase those reasons have been plied so cynically, but if/when Bush fails to do what I've proposed above, you can definitively cross those reasons off the list. It's also unlikely that he's so hard up for terrorists to war against that he had to invade and occupy a country which already had plenty of reasons to hate us. If the idea is to project American power, to remind the world not to mess with the World's Only Superpower, it runs a real risk of exposing that Superpower as deeply flawed, foolish, and ultimately self-defeating. And if it really does have something to do with all that oil underfoot, well, that's just too silly to dignify. For all I know, maybe Bush's been boning up on his "end of times" theology, and he decided that invading Iraq would help advance God's Plan. If doing this for oil is silly, I'd have to say that promoting the "end of times" is downright bonkers, but then look at the rest of what his administration is up to and try to calculate how much future Bush expects us to have.

More likely, though, Bush won't do it because he figures that if he could lie his way into the war, he can lie his way out of it. He's staked his political reputation on being tough and aggressive against "evil-doers" -- in effect he's all stick, no carrot, and he (or his advisors) think that plays best with the voters in the U.S. He's afraid that backing down in Iraq would make him seem weak. It might even be taken as signifying that he realizes that he made a huge, stupid blunder -- one that has thus far cost hundreds of American lives and billions of American dollars. And, let's face it, it's not like he can point to successes in anything else he's done as President. So he's hemmed in, by his own mendacity; by his corrupt, self-serving advisors and sponsors; by his narrow, self-important worldview. In other words, by things that would work against this proposal even if he were to belatedly move in this direction. In order for the U.S. to successfully extricate itself from Iraq, it is important not only that the U.S. let the Iraqi people take control of their own government, that the U.S. forces move to the sidelines and out of the way, it would also be a big help to admit that we screwed up. Bush, or whoever follows him as President, should simply say so, and should go further and clean house of his subordinates most responsible for this fiasco: the list starts with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell, and goes on and on. And he should also take a look in the mirror: if George W. Bush has an ounce of patriotism in him, the best thing he could do for the country right now is take the fall for screwing up, and resign. That won't make a believer out of me, but it might help cut America some slack in Iraq, and elsewhere.

For those of us who are not in a position to influence U.S. policy -- which includes virtually everyone in the U.S. -- there is an element of fantasy to plans like this one. But there is also little reason to worry about salvaging the good reputation of the U.S. leaders. So I'd just as soon see a simpler plan: just have the U.S. pack up and leave. While the simpler plan might lead to at bit more chaos, in the short term anyhow, I doubt that the long term would work out any different. WMD is clearly a false issue in Iraq. And even if the U.S. forces were to unceremoniously slip out of the country, I really doubt that Saddam Hussein will be making public appearances any time soon. The one good thing that the U.S. has accomplished in Iraq was to topple Sadam Hussein from his pedestal, and there's obviously very little sentiment for bringing him back. (Much as there's very little sentiment in Iraq for subjugating themselves to U.S. neocolonialism.) I also believe that in the absence of foreign interference Iraqis will plot their own path embracing democracy, otherwise they would consign themselves to the further tyranny of clique of one minority over all the others. Democracy is a simple system for compromising on power rather than risk tyranny, and has generally resulted in stable political systems where all parties benefit. Iraq has plenty of people who know and understand this concept. What Iraq has long lacked has been the chance for its people to assert democracy, and this has mostly been because foreign powers have perverted the political system. That so many Iraqis fear as much from the U.S. strikes me, at least, as quite percpetive. After all, even in America George W. Bush doesn't make much of a poster boy for liberal democracy, for freedom, for equality, for opportunity, for all those things that we used to think of as the American Way of Life.

Send the above to a writer/publisher with the following note:

Partly in response to your RFC on immediate US withdrawal from Iraq, I jotted down the piece below. This is one of those thought-experiments -- take a hypothesis (like what if Bush had any brains) and see how far you can run with it. It's not as sharp as I would like, but that's basically because it turns over several rocks without sorting out everything that crawls out underneath. In particular, I think one can argue from such an experiment that any reason for going to war that could be salvaged by the sort of withdrawal tactics that I suggest isn't one of the real reasons Bush went to war. (Of course, other conclusions are possible, including that Bush has grits for brains.) Of course, there is much more that could be written about. In particular, I don't think that what we're seeing in Iraq right now is anywhere near the worst case scenario that is possible and, given the way the administration plays this, probable. The most obvious point is that the Shias don't want an US occupation any more than the Sunnis, but for now they have the luxury of playing a waiting game -- let the Sunnis shoot and get shot at, wearing the US down. But they can't afford to let the Sunnis get too successful; at some point they have to weigh in to preserve their own credibility. Same thing is no doubt true with the Kurds, too. If we assume that the US cannot suppress the Sunni rebels, and I don't see how they can -- they simply don't have the competency, let alone the resources -- the Shias and Kurds have to join in and turn against the US. Another recent twist is your reports of how the US is seeking to remake Iraq in the image of Texas, which resonates powerfully with recent critiques of Bush policy in the US (e.g., Molly Ivins). All through the Taliban and Saddam Hussein adventures, Bush enjoyed the luxury of attacking people who his opponents here couldn't stand, but now that the operative power in Iraq is the same Bush as here, it is possible that a small faction here will start to find common cause with violent anti-US resistance in Iraq, and a smaller faction of them might opt to give Bush a present in the form of terrorist actions here. As in Iraq, it wouldn't take much to get real ugly.