The Ghosts of Iraq

I The Making of a Skunk Policy

    a) Wrestling with Ourselves

    Every conclusion ever reached is permanently colored by the faults of its inception and method of its achievement.  At this point the nebulous benefits yet to be realized from the war in Iraq can never be worth the certain costs already amassed even as the negative differential between these two continues to expand.
     On this basis alone the war in Iraq will surely go down as the worst foreign policy misadventure in American history.  Necessary war is bad enough and may harm a nation’s position in the world, but optional, unnecessary warfare is the most costly and pointlessly self-destructive thing a nation can do to diminish itself.  Never has any war in our past been fought at such high cost to achieve so little.  It’s a ghost war.  
    After attacking an enemy which did not exist where we attacked them (no weapons of mass destruction, no al Qaeda etc.) we have spent five long years occupying a nation and fighting enemies that have only arisen or been created solely as a result of our mistaken invasion and occupation.  This war is not only mindless futility of itself but creates within it the essence of its own perpetuation.  
     The current operational theory behind the war resembles a skunk arriving at a garden party and declaring it not will leave until it has gotten to the bottom of and eliminated the frightful smell that seems to be following it wherever it goes.  This is skunk policy, a policy that makes worse precisely that which it has been enacted to improve.  This has been the sum of all our efforts to date in Iraq.  The effect we, the war’s perpetrators and elongators, have on its exercise will always be toxic to the aims the present policy is meant to effect.
    So among the multiple analyses of the problems with the achievement of stability on the ground in Iraq - the militias, the inertia of the Maliki government, the tensions of the Kurds with the Turks, the Iranians with us, etc. - the one element always eluding myopic American understanding of the war is the polarizing and destabilizing effect the presence of 150,000 American troops in the middle of Iraq has had and continues to have on the entire region. 
    So in a war that we had no reason to begin and have nothing to win or protect ourselves from by pursuing, we say we can’t afford to lose even though no one can tell us what it is we have to win by staying.  Iraq has become more a matter of us wrestling ourselves than fighting real enemies, more shadow boxing against our own mistakes, the limitations of our leaders’ imagination or protecting the reputations of these politicians, than in making the world a better place or securing our homeland from future attack.

    b)  Maya – Progressing Backward Ahead

    Let’s recap.  From the very start we have been unable to seize and capitalize on our own success.  After inventing an imaginary host of ghost enemies in Iraq, our leaders told us we had to preemptively attack them before they attacked us.  After relatively little effort but great cost, predictably - since no formidable enemy actually existed there - we routed them.  Yet even as those original ghosts which existed only in our brave leaders imaginations evaporated, coincidentally in the very same place, new straw dogs seemed to uncannily arise in these same confused and fretful minds for us to chase. 
     Therefore after the first failure in Iraq to locate a legitimate enemy we immediately created others by refusing to reconstitute the Iraqi force that we had just overwhelmed.  This meant that the very population we had come to liberate immediately became largely indistinguishable from the same population we had to oppress to continue our liberation of them. 
    Next we exaggerated the al Qaeda threat in Iraq, a force that had no prior basis in being in Iraq except to come to Iraq expressly to fight against us as long as we were there.  We immediately turned our independent position of strength in Iraq to weakness by turning this around to say we had to stay in Iraq in order to fight al Qaeda in Iraq which only existed there in order to fight us. This is shadow boxing.  For al Qaeda in Iraq is a shadow to the body of our occupation and would dissipate like a shadow as soon as the body of our occupation was removed.  
    This policy has become a self fulfilling pattern of creating enemies as we go which we then have to stay to fight even though they would have never existed if we hadn’t created the power vacuum which positively encouraged them to arise where they had in the first place.  Moreover, at the same al Qaeda is fighting this war cheaply by proxy, we are fighting them at direct and massive costs to ourselves.
     The theory behind any successful policy should be to face fewer enemies as you progress rather than make more and more as you go.  Yet to justify its continuance, our doomed policy, like a perpetual motion machine, seems almost uniquely designed to actually nimbly multiply, unite and draw more and more enemies against it as we progress backwards ahead.  This is the predictable byproduct of an unjust occupation of a foreign nation which we had no real reason to attack in the first place.  Our occupation of Iraq has been designed to be an end in itself while of itself it can never reach an end. 
    Followers of eastern thought might recognize this entire misadventure as Maya, illusion, projecting our fears outward and then erecting imaginary enemies to personify them which we must then attack, fight and overcome, while in the process generating more enemies which must be fought and overcome.

    c) Ghost Enemies, Enemies Everywhere

    To cover up the malfeasance of the war’s instigation and justify its open ended continuance its authors also soon started to exaggerate consequences of failure - though to define failure there must be some corollary sense of success which they can’t define.  These include the outbreak of an imaginary regional civil war, the erection of a new Islamic caliphate (as if these two things, one requiring astonishing pan-Islamic agreement, organization and unity of purpose and the other complete division, were not mutually exclusive) chaos, death, embarrassment (read electoral defeat at home and shamefully lucrative contracts for their friends lost), shame and ignominy and endless destruction even unto Armageddon.  Needless to say this fear mongering by precisely the same fear mongering people that got us into this mess is as wildly disingenuous and unhinged as was the original erroneous rational for war against Iraq.
     In any case we are told that we must continue the occupation that has been the rallying source of the violence in order to tamp down and limit the effects of the violence our occupation continues to cause.  We continue to decry the very power vacuum that our presence has created while our presence ensures that the power vacuum we have created continues.  So we persist in trying to suppress with one hand what we are creating with the other by means of the same policies that have already repeatedly succeeded only in accomplishing the exact opposite of what they were intended to accomplish in the first place. 
     By now, after tremendous effort and expense to the American taxpayer we have become essentially the subsidiary national police department of Iraq with no particular subsidy or benefit to the American people for our efforts.  We have sunk a trillion dollars and thousands of lives into Iraq until it has slowly settled to a point of unstable, often violent calm, perhaps less than its peak violence but still intolerable and unsustainable over the long haul. 
    Yet even with small successes, despite all our valiant efforts, loss of life, expenditure of wealth and countless examples of cynical political posturing and moving around of goal posts by our government, there is no proof whatsoever that we have been the cause of this new uncomfortably volatile modus vivendi to the same degree we were completely responsible for the complete chaos that immediately proceeded it.  The logic of our alleged success would suggest otherwise.  
    In fact, this violent, costly, still unstable political stasis has returned to Iraq not because of our occupation but in spite of it.  Self evidently, one would have to assume that those troubles that hadn’t existed before we arrived in Iraq would disappear with us upon our departure.  After all, the tribal leaders who are portrayed as having been calmed by strenuous American efforts have been making precisely these sorts of deals without us for the last thousand years or so.  And still it must be always kept in mind that all the problems we now claim we are solving with our occupation are the same ones our invasion spawned and our occupation continues to encourage the creation of.

II   Illusions, Frauds and Sleights
      of Hand - Iraq, al Qaeda and Iran

    a) Snake Heads and Puppy Dog Tails 

     Al Qaeda, for instance, which has built its entire reputation as an opponent of western encroachment in the Muslim world, has always failed in its operations within the Muslim world extended.  That’s why bin Laden and Zawahiri were in the political backwater of Afghanistan to begin with, no legitimate Islamic government would have them.  Its credibility as a fighter of the American occupation of Iraq would have been obviated earlier by the withdrawal of our troops and the Iraqis themselves would have thrown them out.  
    After all, they are such inhuman and murderous guests that through their own indiscriminate brutality they eventually lost their hold on the Sunni Iraqis who had previously harbored them while they were ostensibly there to help them fight us.  How much sooner would that disenchantment have manifested itself if they hadn’t had our occupation first to lure them in and then to hide behind for as long as they have?
     At the outset we were led to believe we were going on the offensive to attack al Qaeda where they were, at our leisure, at a time and place and under conditions suitable to us.  In Iraq we have reversed this equation.  Because by inventing a position (a bad policy) which our political leaders convinced themselves we had to protect we have placed our military in a defensive position against our enemies where they may attack our troops when, where and by whatever means they choose, at their leisure.  
    In addition, because we never bothered concluding the first war in Afghanistan before we gratuitously started a second war in Iraq, we now have a two front war (really, since there are no internal lines that we control, two separate wars 1,000 miles apart) simultaneously, without being able to divert enough resources to either theater to win either one.  Any military person who considers this strategy sound needs to turn in their medals.  
    In fact, Al Qaeda could not possibly have gained any foothold in Iraq without the power vacuum created by our botched occupation.  If our occupation had not gone on so long, they would have arrived in fewer numbers to fight us and they would been driven out sooner and with far less bloodshed in accord with an earlier drawdown of American forces.  Since no one now suggests that we would have been as successful as we have been at rooting out al Qaeda without the cooperation of Sunni tribal chieftains who have grown predictably even more disenchanted with al Qaeda than they are with us, by simple deduction, the lessening influence of al Qaeda has not been a permanent triumph of our occupation but a tenuous triumph achieved despite it.  
    Nor is it feasible in the least, despite what is often claimed by the administration and was the fallacy recently just repeated by Ambassador Crocker, that al Qaeda will acquire a foothold in Iraq if and when we ever do leave.  
    How can foreign radical suicide bombers sworn to attack infidels exist in a land which the infidels have already left?  Again we are being told we must continue to fight enemies in Iraq which are in Iraq only because we are and whose influence would dissipate quickly upon our withdrawal.  As everyone really knows, to stay to fight al Qaeda in Iraq is simply another ghost rationale to keep us in Iraq, not to win a war against al Qaeda which, as an institution centered in tribal areas of Pakistan, is the chief beneficiary of the long diversion of our troops into Iraq.
     Our policy in Iraq has become a little like a puppy dog chasing its own tail around a tree because – it persuasively reasons to itself – if it slows down the tail will surely get away.  The best way to beat terrorists is to first isolate and divide them and then eliminate the grounds and situations under which they can arise.   Instead we’ve attacked a country where they didn’t exist, created a situation perfectly designed to foster and recruit them and have then allowed them to prosper by attacking us.  Meanwhile we remain at the vortex of our own failed policy in order to fight these surrogate enemies in a nation half way around the world over which we can exercise little effective control at ruinous costs to our own interests. 
    This would seem to be especially bizarre course to pursue when there is absolutely no dispute where the head of the snake of al Qaeda is - in safe havens a thousand miles away in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Quite simply, we can’t finally beat al Qaeda until we leave Iraq, not before.  Either our government must be stupid or they think we are.

    b) Like a Herd of Blind Elephants

     Now recently we are fighting some Shiite groups against other Shiite groups, Maliki vs. the militias (and occasionally Sunnis, former Baathists and al Qaeda too); pretending to know the difference between them on the basis of which of them is currently closer to Iran (or more temporarily complimentary to us).  This in spite of the fact that either of these factions is closer to Iran than we would like and closer to Iran than us and, due to a myriad of cultural and geographical reasons, always will be. Self-evidently these factions are using the presence of our troops far more successfully to leverage their wishes than we are able to use our own troops to leverage ours.
    These things are entirely predictable and a consequence of our being drawn seductively, like a herd of blind elephants in quicksand, into an ancient region of the world and religion of which we have very little innate understanding and nothing discernible to gain by our participation in the determination of their future.  Like the elephants, the more we thrash around the deeper we sink into the muck of matters which neither concern us nor will bear us any singular advantage.  The answer is not to get more deeply mired in these strictly local political and religious affairs but less.
    The latest in the endlessly mutating list of reasons why we must stay in Iraq is because of a new ghost enemy arising – Iran.  They have never attacked us outside their own borders prior to this, never evinced any desire to attack us and are only important to us today because they are meddling around the edges of our misguided meddling in a country we only invaded due to dishonest intelligence.  To suggest we can better gather international consensus and support to help neutralize Iran while stubbornly maintaining our tenuous foothold in neighboring Iraq, rather than after we have quit Iraq, is intellectually insupportable.  To suggest if we leave Iraq, Iran will somehow gain control over the country after centuries of trying and failing is similarly absurd.  These are sophistries within sophistries, new fears built atop old disproven ones.
    And again, though they couldn’t attack us if our forces weren’t exposed there, we are told that Iranians are helping support those who are attacking us in Iraq.  In unguarded moments our government suggests we may have to go to war against Iran too.  
    Their reasoning is that because Iran is keeping us from concluding this war with no conclusion and that should have never been started, we should actually expand it into Iran to limit it, conclude it sooner and limit its unsettling impact on the region.  Apparently such a reckless and intellectually dissolute policy recommends itself to them because it would have the virtue of making this third unwinnable war contiguous to our other two, aligning them across a single, vast 1,500 mile front on the other side of the world.  This will surely make everything much better.
    Regardless, whatever the consequences, we are again being told we must continue our pariah policy and stay the course in this war, which has done so much to directly strengthen the position of Iran in the region, in order to keep Iran from further strengthening their position in the region.  Again, with perfectly illogical logic, we are told we must remain doing those things which obviously haven’t worked in order to prevent things from getting even worse than they have already by the same means that have already failed so conspicuously before.
        What will be the result of all our efforts in Iraq even if with massive costs we manage to coax the evil genies back into the bottle our abrasive invasion has unleashed?  Iraq will be whatever Iraq was going to be anyway based on its own historical traditions, the preponderance of political and religious power within it and the real life of the nation which teems just beneath the surface of the brief overlay of the American occupation.  This better, hopeful future of Iraq will arrive sooner once we’ve gone and be indefinitely delayed for as long as we stay.  And when we do leave there will be very little to nothing of material benefit in Iraq to show for our great exertions and sacrifices that would not have occurred anyway.  
    There is an elastic quality to history, a national, religious and racial memory, which is always underestimated by fools and tyrants and simpletons who try to mold sovereign peoples to their own will.  Our invasion and occupation of Iraq, like all other occupations of this territory over the last 5,000 years will soon be covered over by the sands of time and forgotten.  We spent nine years in Viet Nam and lost many more thousands of lives and the American record of influence there for all those troubles is less than nil.  There is no Lyndon Johnson City or Richard Nixon Boulevard or even Henry Kissinger sewage treatment plant.  Don’t expect shrines to George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld in Iraq once we’re gone.   Instead, expect that all our reckless, feckless efforts here will afford no tangible long term benefit to the United States at all.

III  The Phantoms of Fear

    a) The Politics of Paranoia

     But then from the very start every reason given for this fiasco has not been positive but paranoid, schizophrenic, fantastical and couched in negative terms.  So we were told initially that if we, the most powerful country in the world by far, didn’t launch an unprovoked, preemptive attack on one of the weakest countries in the world – which only incidentally happened to be totally unarmed and incapable of defending itself against us – it would surely attack us first with weapons it didn’t possess!
     This is not exactly the stuff of dreams, legend, glory and bravery on the part of our leadership, but just crude, everyday cowardice.  Jumping at shadows, seeing enemies where none exist, exaggerating threats into bogeymen are common cowards’ ploys.  And then long after it has been determined that these ghost enemies never even existed where we attacked them and never represented the magnitude of the threat that was represented, to continue the war mindlessly for four long years even though no positive results from continuing the conflict can be identified - is surely more a sign of incompetence and/or insanity than farsighted intelligence and courage.  
    In Iraq no serious enemy that previously existed nor any that have arisen to fight us since we arrived has been beaten and by this point we haven’t a ghost of a chance of winning anything of substance in Iraq to in any way defray the vast extent of our losses.  This will not rank as a noble and necessary protection of American interests but a betrayal of many of our finest historical instincts and precedents.  Its continuation now into its fifth year will be seen by history more properly as sheer national masochism than national necessity.
     Even after proving that they were not brave enough to resist attacking an unarmed country, now our leaders say they are too afraid of what will happen next if we ever stop attacking it.  Completely without proof, much like their original case for war, they say that the indirect chaos and destruction that will ensue if we leave off the occupation of Iraq which has directly led to all the chaos and destruction in Iraq, will be unbearable.  It is our duty to this country we have destroyed to continue to occupy them.  Or, in other words - in their wonderfully inimitable doublespeak - in order to reverse the destruction our occupation has already caused, we must open-endedly continue our occupation of Iraq that has caused all the destruction.
     Naturally we want Iraq to be peaceful, productive and self-governing.  And of course, Iraq in some version or other has somehow muddled through for 5,000 years or so before our belated attempts to save it but obviously now it can exist no longer without us.  Israel recently attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon and seriously destabilized its government but the Lebanese still seem to have managed an accommodation between its factions to exist without an ongoing occupation by a foreign power.  It and Israel both have gotten along much better apart than they ever did together since Israel withdrew its forces, not only now but when Israel previously occupied it for many years.  
    In fact, history has shown that foreign occupation seldom leads to increased stability in a nation which resents the occupation.  Even less can it be shown to result in great benefit to the occupier.  Even Viet Nam (and ourselves) prospered better after that similarly misguided war was ended than either did while it was under way. There is no reason to believe that Iraq would not exist more peaceably without the American occupation than it has with it.  To suggest that either the United States or Iraq is profiting from our current occupation is an unreasonable stretch of the facts.
    The longer the foreign occupation endures the longer the reconciliation which can lead to real sustainable security and growth in Iraq will be delayed.  To believe otherwise is to understand nothing of this sort of pathology in history, particularly modern history where, with modern armaments, communications and transportation, even a small guerilla force can hamstring a much larger force and inflict a much greater degree of harm on an occupier than ever before in history.

    b) Glasses Half Full, Eyes Full Shut

     But even though there is no positive outcome or course which can be identified of
lasting benefit to the US by our staying in Iraq, fear of political consequences, fear of the unknown in general and fear of the future especially, still drive our weak and craven policy.  The costs are known, definite, demonstrable, exorbitant and growing daily.  They are dead certain.  
    Against these the proponents weigh dire ghost consequences which may or may not arise upon our withdrawal, improbable, inexpressible and vague beyond belief.  Therefore the awful present must be endured, we’re told, not because anything good may ever come of it, but because they’re frightened that the unknown, the bogey man under the bed, may be worse.  Since we invaded Iraq out of irrational fear they suggest it would be inconsistent if we didn’t stay in Iraq for the same reason.
     And still into our fifth year we have yet to hear what positive end for the US engagement in Iraq is foreseen.  This may be because our leadership can’t operate optimistically and because fear and uncertainty play better politically for the fiasco’s authors.  Apparently all our rose colored glasses must by law be considered blood red, half empty and the eyes behind them kept tightly shut for their own electoral uses and purposes.  So we must humor them their unjustified fears which they call patriotism, endure their dark, private fantasies and tolerate their public dishonesty while they can not even define a single positive benefit that has come or can possibly accrue to the American people from this harsh sacrifice of our troops and massive costs to the taxpayer beyond the assuagement of their own unregulated fears.  
     The proponents of this war even seem to take a weird and disquieting satisfaction in the depths of the disaster they have created.  They deride the division among the opponents of the war and ridicule them for lack of an exit strategy as simplistic, naive and moronic as their original erroneous theory for the war and the unworkable stay the course approach they (still) ironically advocate.  To their feeble minds the very complexity of the mess they have created is itself justification that it should be continued.  The futility of the hole they have already dug us into, because it is getting deeper and harder to get out of, suggests to them the odd solution of continuing to dig. 
    Roosevelt spoke of the “phantom of fear.”  That is the ghost enemy we are fighting in Iraq.  So that Dick Cheney and George Bush may sleep more soundly and pretend to protect you and me, Americans must actually die far away in Iraq.  There’s a tradeoff for the ages.
     And of course their fears and the way they are going about neutralizing them are bogus in their construction.  To a child it should be evident that when fighting an enemy you don’t pursue a course, no matter how satisfying it is to your ego and temporarily expedient in its political effects, that doesn’t strengthen your enemies more than your exertions weaken you.  Clearly this has not been the case.  As our enemies have consolidated their prior weak position because of the war in Iraq; because of the war in Iraq we are continuing to weaken our previously strong one.
     There is not a person on the planet who would not judge that al Qaeda (and all like minded enemies), the same ones George Bush promised us “can run but cannot hide” before he allowed them to do just that, have grown far stronger and multifaceted and resilient now because of the war in Iraq, not in spite of it.  Worse, rather than admit his mistakes so that others may begin to correct them our president has continued to let others pay the ultimate sacrifice for his errors while sending the American people the ever mounting bill for his arrogant and ongoing derelictions.

IV Limbo Land Government

    a) Puppet Masters of Baghdad

     For despite the bombast and pseudo patriotic bellicosity of the lapel pin patriots who engineered this policy it represents the weakest and most cowardly and morally bankrupt we have ever experienced in America.  Even in Viet Nam, total loss that it was, we were fighting against avowed communists, our nominal enemy.  The neo-colonialist// neo-imperialist//neo-conservative Iraq policy was based on or at least sold with entirely untrue intelligence and an irrational fear of fear itself at its core and has been continued ever since on the same phantasmagorical basis.  Nowhere is it possible to find a positive strategic good or coherent gain for the US in it, before, during or after (if that day ever comes).  Like Viet Nam, the war in Iraq is all cost and no return.
     After all, once the initial easy phase of the invasion was ended, our “strategy” in Iraq has been only a series of shifting retreats and fall back positions designed to keep things from worsening rather than any realistic expectation of things getting anything but marginally better.  This path has been repeatedly mis-styled “victory” by dishonestly striving political operatives.  Along the way the strongest and most proudly independent country in the world has been maneuvered by our weak willed leadership into being held hostage to one of the weakest, most shiftless, corrupt and self-serving governments on the globe.  At the outset many feared that the Iraq government would merely be a puppet of the US.  Instead our leadership has let us become a puppet to the government of Iraq.  Everything we may do and every hope we may have there, is completely contingent on a combination of the actions of others and events which lay totally beyond our control.

    b) Torture and Other Crimes

     Moreover, at the same time our political leaders have preached the moral exceptionalism of America they have debased it in practice by showing less moral courage and ethical fortitude than we have ever experienced in the management of our nation before.  
     At the top of the long list of examples of their moral dereliction has been their attitude toward the Geneva Convention.  Much wiser, farsighted and honest Americans signed off on these accords and passed them into law and we have adhered to them proudly, rigorously and morally through numerous American presidencies - like Eisenhower and Roosevelt and Truman and Reagan – far more capable than the one we have at present; and through far more trying and dangerous times – like World War II, and the Korean, Viet Nam and Cold Wars – than face us today.  
    Yet the Geneva Convention was abrogated wholesale and without debate or second thought by the third rate amorality of a few right wing political lawyers at the behest of an immoral White House.  The argument they employed, believe it or not, was that this cornerstone international convention - designed to regulate ethical behavior and establish some basis of law and humanity in times of warfare – has no applicability in times of war.  That’s like saying our criminal justice system is only serviceable in situations where no crime has occurred.
    But then it has always been found necessary first to torture law and ethics before a nation can move on to torturing people.  Torture has long been discredited as unreliable and counterproductive as a tool of investigation and abhorrent, illegal and morally repugnant as a point of law.  Torture is the unalloyed essence of tyranny – a denial of another’s humanity.  Yet this government claims some specious benefit they can’t prove or define by utilizing torture which outweigh in their minds the universal opprobrium it invites and lack of moral compass it displays and moral high ground it abdicates on the other side of the argument.  Their theory is that we must be as evil as our enemies if we are to eventually replace their evil with our own former good.  This principle is obviously self-refuting.
    Truly it takes enormous strength of character and moral courage to hold to your finest abstract beliefs in times of extreme fears and pressures.  These are the testing times of nations and individuals on which their respect and reputation rises or falls.  Our current administration has failed the tests before them not only miserably but in their entirety.  
    They immediately abandoned our hard won ideals, our reputation for ethics and law and our entire stature in the world’s community of nations as a beacon of justice at first opportunity as soon as they got a little afraid.  They have spent nearly every day since unrepentantly trying to cover their tracks, clamoring for executive privilege to be applied where executive privilege has never applied before, on the theory that the public has no inherent right to know what its employees have been secretly doing to them.  
     Along the way they have displayed a strikingly un-American absence of character totally unburdened by any innate allegiance to the truth as an objective principle of good.  In foreign affairs they have exhibited no historical understanding, nuance or perspective.  Domestically, they are unable to see any objective public benefit to the nation in actions that are not of benefit to them personally.  In an astonishing lack of personal integrity they let the problems they cause proceed at the expense of others rather than shoulder the responsibility of acknowledging them and correcting their own mistakes themselves.  
     In one particularly egregious example, these phony patriots, many of whom never served in the military, have been suspiciously quick to burnish their martial pretensions by hiding behind our troops and professing their great love and devotion to military matters.  Yet after initially disastrously ignoring all professional military advice as to how to prosecute the war in Iraq they have spent years doing their best to break our armed forces and run them into the ground in pursuit of failed policies they haven’t the personal integrity or guts to reverse.
    In this and all their activities they have been willfully, belligerently, secretively and uniformly anti-democratic.  They have degraded our ideals in the eyes of the world.  They have consciously attempted to subvert the genius of our pluralistic society of many voices by ignoring, dissembling and punishing where possible, any voices dissenting from their own.  They have consistently claimed extraordinary unstatutory and extra-constitutional powers to do things far less well than far more effective leaders have ever needed to do these same things much better. They have sought to cheat the constitution, evade all intelligent restraints and permanently imbalance our cherished system of checks and balances in their favor. They have tried to neuter justice, the courts and the law itself by applying unjust political pressures, overt manipulations and odd and errant interpretations as its suited their purposes. While boasting about how they were going to impose democracy on the rest of the world they have been doing their unlevel best to suppress it here at home.
     Open debate, sound argument and consensus building are the essence of democracy.  It is not cowardice to question strategy, admit your mistakes or exercise proper mental discipline or hold to the most elemental principles of moral courage, it shows profound gutlessness and lack of character not to.  As we’ve seen, it is not even sound management. 
    On the contrary it subverts the genius of democracy to ignore or silence all alternative, expert, professional and knowledgeable opinion, merely because it simplifies and streamlines your decision making process and endorses your narrow prejudices.  Nor is it bravery to stay irrationally fighting a baseless war flown into on the wings of lies, imaginary fears and intelligence manipulation by our leaders, the sheepishness of congress and the total lack of enterprise of a docile press corps. A great nation does not cull and craft its foreign policy from an accumulation of its basest and most primitive fears and expect to succeed.
     Unfortunately, it is hard to hold anyone to a higher standard than they refuse to hold themselves.  In this respect there is no ethical or moral standard or legal bar our leaders have not proven themselves spineless enough to try to slip under.  There is no lie too low, no spin too transparent, no misrepresentation too far a reach, that they have not tried when it has served their interests.  This is limbo government.  
    And this is where psychology turns to psychosis.  Because having no principles has been their only guiding principle, their persistent limbo-like ethics, their evasions of all institutional limitations coupled with a complete lack of any sense of personal accountability; Iraq and all their other manifold errors have not been so much a surprise as an inevitability of these deep and cumulative failings of character.  This void of moral relativism they have constructed around themselves has left us with an ethical vacuum at the core of government which starts at the oval office and radiates outward.  Believing in nothing more substantial than their own profits, personal aggrandizement and political perpetuation, this administration has driven us into a limbo of their own devising. And so in limbo we remain.  
    The shared guilt of its illegitimate inception is the only thing that now sustains the policy in Iraq.  All those who through their own weakness colluded with this administration in their various betrayals, derelictions, frauds and power grabs, from congress, to a tame press to slavish political supporters, have us stymied.  The very ones culpable, gullible and weak enough to back us into this debacle will never suddenly become strong and condemn the very behavior they previously acquiesced in. Instead, as if guilt and errors can be magically lessened by their continuation, even though the war has been unmasked as a fraud and is well known to work directly counter to our national interests, they let its pitiable waste of lives and resources continue unabated. 
    Historically, in a Limbo government, change will only be instituted in a bad policy by those that were not party to its instigation. The end of this war must be left to those of finer stuff and better make up in next administration.

    c) The Real Ghosts of Iraq

    And still, even now, no more than we have ever had, we have no coherent policy in Iraq. Because if you imagine the fantasy that the “surge” is somehow succeeding at anything but surface achievements you had only to listen to General Petreaus and Ambassador Crocker lately answer questions from congress.  In another calculated insult by this administration to the American people, they would answer few real questions about the true progress, direction or ultimate goal of the war. 
Instead they talked only nuts and bolts and basic tactical details and when asked deeper questions about whether we were safer because of this war or as to whether it would ever have an ending, they pled ignorance.  And these are the ones allegedly in charge.  And again you realize deep in your soul that after five years this war is still more scam than plan.  They won’t answer questions about strategic matters because there is still no strategic plan to either win or leave Iraq.  No nation can possibly derive its policies from the bottom up, hoping against hope that something better will occur before something worse does.  Yet that is the sum of our current policy in Iraq.
     George Bush claimed that the true measure of the “surge” of additional troops in ‘07 would be a “return on success.”  In other words the troops would return as success was achieved.  Yet General Petreaus indicated the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be delayed indefinitely and they will not be coming home any time soon.  So this phrase too has gone the way of all the other hollow platitudes – mission accomplished, stay the course, we can’t let others win, we don’t want to lose, we are afraid what will happen if we change course, we’ll stand down as they stand up, maybe the worse will turn out better than it looks, etc.  
     Therefore we continue to stay the course in this war of attrition of certain demonstrable loss in face of uncertain, unnamable, ghostly fears, terrified that something worse might happen to us if we quit.  How many wrongs do they suppose it will take to finally add up to a right?   What miracle must ensue for this misbegotten war to suddenly turn to victory and allow our troops to come home?  They have no answer.  Frankly the proponents of this war seem to not even much care.
     And so this war started for no good reason continues to rage to no good purpose.  A war begun chasing the twin ghosts of their illusions of grandeur and invisible phantoms of fear will only be remembered for the real ghosts of American lives carelessly lost and innocent Iraqi lives cruelly taken.  These are the ghosts that can’t be vanquished as this superb example of the futility of false war, the War of Ghosts in Iraq, desultorily continues without point, justification or potential resolution.  Its shadow will darken our memory and forever stain the perilous history of these times.