Are Israel's critics correct? Does the"occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza cause the Palestinian Arabs' anti-Semitism, their suicide factories, and their terrorism? And is it true these horrors will end only when Israeli civilians and troops leave the territories?

The answer is coming soon. Starting August 15, the Israeli government will evict about 8,000 Israelis from Gaza and turn their land over to the Palestinian Authority. In addition to being a unique event in modern history (no other democracy has forcibly uprooted thousands of its own citizens of one religion from their lawful homes), it also offers a rare, live, social-science experiment.

We stand at an interpretive divide. If Israel's critics are right, the Gaza withdrawal will improve Palestinian attitudes toward Israel, leading to an end of incitement and a steep drop in attempted violence, followed by a renewal of negotiations and a full settlement. Logic requires, after all, that if"occupation" is the problem, ending it, even partially, will lead to a solution.

But I forecast a very different outcome. Given that about 80% of Palestinian Arabs continue to reject Israel's very existence, signs of Israeli weakness, such as the forthcoming Gaza withdrawal, will instead inspire heightened Palestinian irredentism. Absorbing their new gift without gratitude, Palestinian Arabs will focus on those territories Israelis have not evacuated. (This is what happened after Israeli forces fled Lebanon.) The retreat will inspire not comity but a new rejectionist exhilaration, a greater frenzy of anti-Zionist anger, and a surge in anti-Israel violence.

Palestinian Arabs themselves are openly saying as much. A top Hamas figure in Gaza, Ahmed al-Bahar says"Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifada. Hamas's heroic attacks exposed the weakness and volatility of the impotent Zionist security establishment. The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state. We believe that the resistance is the only way to pressure the Jews."

A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri says likewise that the withdrawal is"due to the Palestinian resistance operations. … and we will continue our resistance."

Others are more specific. At a mass rally in Gaza City last Thursday, about 10,000 Palestinian Arabs danced, sang, and chanted,"Today Gaza, tomorrow Jerusalem." The commander of Gaza's Popular Resistance Committees, Jamal Abu Samhadaneh announced Sunday,"We will move our cells to the West Bank" and warned"The withdrawal will not be complete without the West Bank and Jerusalem." The Palestinian Authority's Ahmed Qurei also asserts,"Our march will stop only in Jerusalem."

Palestinian Arab intentions worry even Israeli leftists. An Arab affairs specialist for Ha'aretz, Danny Rubinstein notes that Prime Minister Sharon decided to leave Gaza only after anti-Israel carnage there had escalated."Even if these attacks were not the reason why Sharon came up with the idea of disengagement, the Palestinians are certain that that is the case, and this has reinforced their belief that Israel only understands the language of terror attacks and violence."

Israel National News has collected other leftist comments.

• A former justice minister and chairman of the Yahad/Meretz Party, Yossi Beilin:"There is a concrete danger that following the disengagement, the violence will greatly increase in the West Bank in order to achieve the same thing as was achieved in Gaza."
• A former Labor Party foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami:"A unilateral retreat perpetuates Israel's image as a country that runs away under pressure ... In Fatah and Hamas, they will assume that they must prepare for their third intifada - this time in [the West Bank]."
• A former General Security Service chief, Ami Ayalon:"Retreat without getting anything in return is liable to be interpreted by some of the Palestinians as surrender. ... There is a high chance that shortly after the disengagement, the violence will be renewed."
• A former air force commander, Eitan Ben-Eliyahu:"There is no chance that the disengagement will guarantee long-term stability. The plan as it stands can only lead to a renewal of terrorism."

Events, I predict, will prove Israel's critics totally wrong but they will learn no lessons. Untroubled by facts, they will demand further Israeli withdrawals. Israel's one-car crash is dismally preparing the way for more disasters.

This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.

Samuel Huntington, in the WSJ (June 16, 2004):

The battle over the Pledge of Allegiance has stimulated vigorous controversy on an issue central to America's identity. Opponents of "under God" (which was added to the pledge in 1954) argue that the United States is a secular country, that the First Amendment prohibits rhetorical or material state support for religion, and that people should be able to pledge allegiance to their country without implicitly also affirming a belief in God. Supporters point out that the phrase is perfectly consonant with the views of the framers of the Constitution, that Lincoln had used these words in the Gettysburg Address, and that the Supreme Court--which on Monday sidestepped a challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance--has long held that no one could be compelled to say the pledge.

The atheist who brought the court challenge, Michael Newdow, asked this question: "Why should I be made to feel like an outsider?" Earlier, the Court of Appeals in San Francisco had agreed that the words "under God" sent "a message to unbelievers that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community."

Although the Supreme Court did not address the question directly, Mr. Newdow got it right: Atheists are "outsiders" in the American community....

Statistics say America is not only a religious nation but also a Christian one. Up to 85% of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Brian Cronin, who litigated against a cross on public land in Boise, Idaho, complained, "For Buddhists, Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians in Boise, the cross only drives home the point that they are strangers in a strange land." Like Mr. Newdow and the Ninth Circuit judges, Mr. Cronin was on target. America is a predominantly Christian nation with a secular government. Non-Christians may legitimately see themselves as strangers because they or their ancestors moved to this "strange land" founded and peopled by Christians--even as Christians become strangers by moving to Israel, India, Thailand or Morocco.
Americans have always been extremely religious and overwhelmingly Christian. The 17th-century settlers founded their communities in America in large part for religious reasons. Eighteenth-century Americans saw their Revolution in religious and largely biblical terms. The Revolution reflected their "covenant with God" and was a war between "God's elect" and the British "Antichrist." Jefferson, Paine and other deists and nonbelievers felt it necessary to invoke religion to justify the Revolution. The Declaration of Independence appealed to "Nature's God," the "Creator," "the Supreme Judge of the World," and "divine Providence" for approval, legitimacy and protection.

The Constitution includes no such references. Yet its framers firmly believed that the republican government they were creating could last only if it was rooted in morality and religion. "A Republic can only be supported by pure religion or austere morals," John Adams said. Washington agreed: "Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles." Fifty years after the Constitution was adopted, Tocqueville reported that all Americans held religion "to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions."

The words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the Constitution, and some people cite the absence of religious language in the Constitution and the provisions of the First Amendment as evidence that America is fundamentally secular. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the end of the 18th century, religious establishments existed throughout Europe and in several American states. Control of the church was a key element of state power, and the established church, in turn, provided legitimacy to the state. The framers of the Constitution prohibited an established national church in order to limit the power of government and to protect and strengthen religion. The purpose of "separation of church and state," as William McLoughlin has said, was not to establish freedom from religion but to establish freedom for religion. As a result, Americans have been unique among peoples in the diversity of sects, denominations and religious movements to which they have given birth, almost all embodying some form of Protestantism. When substantial numbers of Catholic immigrants arrived, it was eventually possible to accept Catholicism as one more denomination within the broad framework of Christianity. The proportion of the population who were "religious adherents," that is church members, increased fairly steadily through most of American history.

Today, overwhelming majorities of Americans affirm religious beliefs. When asked in 2003 simply whether they believed in God or not, 92% said yes. In a series of 2002-03 polls, 57% to 65% of Americans said religion was very important in their lives, 23% to 27% said fairly important, and 12% to 18% said not very important. Large proportions of Americans also appear to be active in the practice of their religion. In 2002 and 2003, an average of 65% claimed membership in a church or synagogue. About 40% said they had attended church or synagogue in the previous seven days, and roughly 33% said they went to church at least once a week. In the same period, about 60% of Americans said they prayed one or more times a day, more than 20% once or more a week, about 10% less than once a week, and 10% never. Given human nature, these claims of religious practice may be overstated, but the extent to which Americans believe the right response is to affirm their religiosity is itself evidence for the centrality of religious norms in American society.
Only about 10% of Americans, however, espouse atheism, and most Americans do not approve of it. Although the willingness of Americans to vote for a presidential candidate from a minority group has increased dramatically--over 90% of those polled in 1999 said they would vote for a black, Jewish or female presidential candidate, while 59% were willing to vote for a homosexual--only 49% were willing to vote for an atheist. Americans seem to agree with the Founding Fathers that their republican government requires a religious base, and hence find it difficult to accept the explicit rejection of God....

Mike Steketee, in the Australian (May 7, 2004):

THERE are increasing signs the US has overreached and faces decline despite its unrivalled military and economic power, according to Paul Kennedy, a leading historian.

In Sydney to address the Future Summit, a major conference on the nation's future, Professor Kennedy, of Yale University, said the US was top-heavy in expensive Cold War weapons systems such as nuclear submarines and suffered from a desperate shortage of "grunt" in army and navy personnel. This would get worse with large-scale resignations after soldiers return from Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the same time, the US was running massive economic and trade deficits that required the goodwill of overseas bond-holders for their continued funding.

"Even though in military terms it's much stronger in comparison to its rivals than either the Roman Empire or the British Empire at their height, I don't think there's any chance this empire is going to last as long," he said.

Professor Kennedy is best known for his controversial 1988 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which suggested the US might face the same problem of "imperial overstretch" that had seen the fall of other empires.

It is a thesis that tended to be dismissed as US dominance continued to increase. He said yesterday he was "pretty gloomy" about Iraq, with the US facing the emerging prospect that "if you stay you lose and if you go you haven't won".

The Bush administration had failed to think through its latest initiative to obtain greater UN involvement.

"That may well cause Ba'athists and al-Qa'ida to say we have already won," Professor Kennedy said.

"There's bitter resentment against (US Defence Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld and (deputy) Paul Wolfowitz for dismissing military assessments of how hard it would be and I think people are starting to crumble. "I think things are significantly worse than the US press presents them."

Professor Kennedy said Mr Rumsfeld was "my best card" in support of his argument about imperial overstretch because of his eagerness to make US troop commitments all over the world.

"Sixteen years ago the real issue was how to develop clever polices to manage global change that might be moving against you and to manage relative decline. They have been very clumsy in the military sphere.

"The area where they thought they were very strong -- soft power, which is the power to influence people through culture and ideas and ideology -- you just have to look at the latest research."

About 80 per cent of people surveyed worldwide disapproved of US actions.

"That's before we got these latest photographs (of American soldiers mistreating Iraqis)," Professor Kennedy said.

From the Associated Press (May 3, 2004):

As President Clinton rushes to finish his memoirs, he faces the more pressing task of writing a book deemed worthy of all the attention, an accomplishment no president has pulled off since Ulysses S. Grant.

Some leading historians have ideas on how Clinton could do it.

``He's an intelligent fellow and if he writes as well as he talks, he could make an interesting contribution to history,'' says Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., author of Pulitzer Prize winning books on the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Andrew Jackson.

``I'd like to see him do two things,'' says David Herbert Donald, author of several acclaimed books on Abraham Lincoln. ``First of all, I'd like to see him write a personal story on how he grew up and how he became who he was. Second, I'd like to see him write about how he shaped the politics of the White House, how a man of such great accomplishments also hurt himself by his foolishness.''

Booksellers expect huge sales for Clinton's book, ``My Life,'' for which he received a reported $10 million to $12 million and which has a first printing of 1.5 million copies. But historians hope he will offer more than platitudes about his public life or a token reference to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The book is due out in late June.

Countless memoirs have been dulled by the impersonal touch of a ghostwriter and by a president's unwillingness to tell all he knows. Ronald Reagan, for example, had little to say about the Iran-Contra scandal and devoted a single paragraph to his first marriage, to actress Jane Wyman. Even Grant, whose memoirs were edited by Mark Twain, did not mention his famous drinking problem and wrote virtually nothing about his marriage or his presidency.

Historians have hopes for the literary quality of ``My Life.'' Clinton is among the most well-read of presidents and his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, says he's writing the book himself. His editor at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, has worked with such leading authors as Toni Morrison and Robert Caro.

``There are only three presidents in the 20th century who really had a deep sense of American history: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton,'' says Joseph Ellis, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning ``Founding Brothers'' and an upcoming biography of George Washington.

``So I'm interested in how he brings a truly sophisticated sense of history to his book. I'd like to see him bring that to how he think his judgments affected the direction of both domestic and foreign policy.''

But while Knopf president Sonny Mehta has promised a ``revealing and remarkable'' memoir from Clinton, historians wonder how much Clinton will, or can, reveal. Beyond any embarrassing details about his private life, they note that he still has good reason to keep a lot to himself. His wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is considered a likely presidential candidate in 2008 or later and the former president will almost surely avoid any undue controversy.

``Presidents in their memoirs try to be above the fray, but what makes a book interesting is the fray,'' says Douglas Brinkley, author of an upcoming biography of Gerald Ford and of a current best seller, ``Tour of Duty,'' about Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

``I don't think he's going to handle the Lewinsky affair much at all,'' says Lincoln author Donald. ``I'm not sure he's that introspective.

``What I'd really like is to have a good psychoanalyst work with him and get him to say why a man of such enormous intelligence and charm and possibility would act the way he does with women. ... That would be enormously revealing and helpful in the long run, although not, perhaps, in the short run.''

Brinkley said the perfect book for Clinton to emulate isn't by a president, but by a secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who served under Harry Truman. Brinkley notes that Acheson waited nearly 20 years before publishing ``Present at the Creation,'' which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. By then, Acheson had historical perspective, the time to review documents and relief from concerns about damaging the careers of people with whom he worked.

``The problem now is you get these big advances and are expected to have the book out in two years,'' Brinkley says. ``Clinton hasn't had time to look at all the papers and documents or to think about how his administration fits into history. I fear his book will be aimed more for Vanity Fair than for the historical community.''

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (April 6, 2004):

The global war on terror cannot be won through counterterrorism alone; it also requires convincing the terrorists and their sympathizers that their goals and methods are faulty and failing. But how is this to be done?

By focusing on the ideological and religious sources of the violence, say I:"The immediate war goal must be to destroy militant Islam and the ultimate war goal the modernization of Islam." I have not worked out the detailed implications of this policy, however.

Which explains my delight on finding that the RAND Corporation's Cheryl Benard has done just this, publishing her results in a small book titled Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies (available in full at RAND 's Web site, www.rand.org ).

Ms. Benard recognizes the awesome ambition of the effort to modernize Islam : If nation-building is a daunting task, she notes, religion-building"is immeasurably more perilous and complex." This is something never tried before ; we enter uncharted territory here.

Civil Democratic Islam covers three topics: rival Muslim approaches to Islam; which approach contributes most to a moderate version of Islam; and policy recommendations for Western governments.

Like other analysts, Ms. Benard finds that in relation to their religion, Muslims divide into four groups:

· Fundamentalists , who, in turn, split into two. Radicals (like the Taliban) are ready to resort to violence in an attempt to create a totalitarian order. Scripturalists (like the Saudi monarchy ) are more rooted in a religious establishment and less prone to rely on violence.

· Traditionalists , who also split into two. Conservatives (like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq ) seek to preserve orthodox norms and old fashioned behavior as best they can. Reformists (like the Kuwaiti rulers) have the same traditional goals but are more flexible in details and more innovative in achieving them.

· Modernists (like Muammar Gadhafi of Libya ) assume that Islam is compatible with modernity and then work backwards to prove this point.

· Secularists again split into two. The mainstream (like Atatürkists in Turkey ) respects religion as a private affair but permits it no role in the public arena. Radicals (like communists ) see religion as bogus and reject it entirely.

The author brings these viewpoints to life in a smart, convincing presentation, showing their differences on everything from establishing the pure Islamic state to husbands having rights to beat their wives. She rightly dwells on values and lifestyles, finding dissimulation about polygamy far less commonplace than about the use of violence.

Which of these groups is most suitable to ally with? Modernists, says Ms. Benard , are"most congenial to the values and the spirit of modern democratic society." Fundamentalists are the enemy, for they"oppose us and we oppose them." Traditionalists have potentially useful democratic elements but generally share too much with the fundamentalists to be relied upon. Secularists are too often anti-Western to fix Islam.

Ms. Benard then proposes a strategy for religion-building with several prongs:

· Delegitimize the immorality and hypocrisy of fundamentalists. Encourage investigative reporting into the corruption of their leaders. Criticize the flaws of traditionalism, especially its promoting backwardness.

· Support the modernists first. Support secularists on a case-by-case basis. Back the traditionalists tactically against the fundamentalists. Consistently oppose the fundamentalists.

· Assertively promote the values of Western democratic modernity. Encourage secular civic and cultural institutions. Focus on the next generation. Provide aid to states, groups, and individuals with the right attitudes.

I agree with Ms. Benard 's general approach, doubting only her enthusiasm for Muslim modernists, a group that through two centuries of effort has failed to help reconcile Islam with current realities. H.A.R. Gibb , the great orientalist, condemned modernist thinking in 1947 as mired in"intellectual confusions and paralyzing romanticism." Writing in 1983 , I dismissed modernism as"a tired movement, locked in place by the unsoundness of its premises and arguments." Nothing has changed for the better since then.

Instead of modernists, I propose mainstream secularists as the forward looking Muslims who uniquely can wrench their co-religionists out of their current slough of despair and radicalism. Secularists start with the proven premise of disentangling religion from politics; not only has this served the Western world well, but it has also worked in Turkey , the Muslim success story of our time.

Only when Muslims turn to secularism will this terrible era of their history come to an end.

Excepts from the blog of historian Juan Cole, April 6-12, 2004:

Hamza Hendawi of AP points out that the US offensives in Fallujah and the Shiite south have been extremely costly politically. Interim Governing Council members grew openly critical, and one suspended his membership on the council. The minister of human rights resigned in protest. The appointment of a minister of human rights in Iraq was treated as a great propaganda victory by the Bush administration when it happened. But there has been virtually no reporting about the resignation, which is a dramatic critique of US policy. Hendawi quotes me, ' "No Iraqi likes to see an imperial power like the United States beating up on people who are essentially their cousins,'' said Juan R. Cole, a University of Michigan lecturer and a prominent expert on Iraqi affairs. ``There is a danger that the vindictive attitude of the Americans ... will push the whole country to hate them. A hated occupier is powerless even with all the firepower in the world,'' he said. ' ...

****

The rumors going around Washington that Bush is going to meet Sharon and give away everything to him, allow him to annex 45% of the West Bank, build the wall, and put Palestinians in small Bantustans (all this negotiated by the criminal Likudnik Elliot Abrams, whom the Neocons got appointed to the National Security Council to deal with Israel-Palestine issues), bode ill for the future of the American occupation of Iraq. The two occupations are profoundly intertwined in the eyes of Iraqis, and the recent fighting in Iraq was in part sparked by the Israeli murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas cleric. Bush will never have credibility in Iraq if he rips up the road map and gives away the West Bank to Sharon. Sharon's iron fist in the Occupied Territories is likely to ignite new anti-American violence in Iraq in the coming year if Bush goes supine this way....

****

I think it is highly unlikely that Muqtada will agree to go into exile [in Iran, as some guess]. The problem is that Bush has gotten himself in a bind by going after him in the first place, virtually unprovoked. It is difficult for the US now to let Muqtada off the hook, since he did launch an insurgency. But if they go into Najaf to arrest him, it would be rather like invading the Vatican to get at an Irish priest who supported the IRA. It is not as if dislike of terrorism would convince most Catholics that the action had been justified. Most Shiites will be furious at the US if it invades Najaf and arrests or kills Muqtada....

****

Although former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani did praise Muqtada as "heroic" and made no secret of his hope that the US would leave Iraq, Rafsanjani no longer has any executive power and is known for shooting his mouth off and saying wild things he never follows through on. The MEMRI/ Likud crowd in Washington tried to use Rafsanjani's statements as proof that Iran was backing Muqtada's insurgency, but even Rumsfeld admitted he had no proof for that.

If the American people are alarmed that Iraq is turning into another Vietnam (and a majority now are), they should think seriously about the disaster the Neocons want to drag them into in Iran....

Sean Rayment of the Telegraph reports a story today that should be on the front pages of every American newspaper. He reports extremely deep dissatisifaction in the British officer corps with American military counter-insurgency tactics.

The critique begins with attitudes. The officer quoted says that the US military looks at Iraqis as "Untermenschen," a Hitler-derived term for inferior human beings. ' "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are." '

This attitude tracks with what I know of racial attitudes that are all too common (not universal) in US military ranks. Press reports speak of US troops and some officers routinely denigrating Arabs. Even calling them "hajjis" and "Ali Babas" betrays the attitude. (Hajji is a strange thing to call Iraqis, who have lived under a militantly secular socialist regime for 35 years and most of whom couldn't have gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca even if they wanted to). [Readers wrote in to suggest that the term is Hadji, a reference to cartoon figure Johnny Quest's South Asian, beturbanned sidekick.] The contempt for Iraqis and Arabs and Muslims that is widespread in the ranks, the British maintain, spills over into operational plans, creating a contempt for human life and a willingness to endanger and kill civilians in a ruthless effort to get at insurgents. This approach produces, of course, further insurgents.

The officer said, "When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area. They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage, but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. The US will have to abandon the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach - it has failed. They need to stop viewing every Iraqi, every Arab as the enemy and attempt to win the hearts and minds of the people. "

I was sure that the British military in Basra were royally ticked off at the trouble Bremer made for them in going after Muqtada al-Sadr. The British military felt badly used in Bosnia by British politicians, and I was told that as a result, their officers have decided to speak out when they fear it is happening again. British military spokesmen in Basra have sometimes verged on insubordination. It is clear, for instance, that they felt Bremer should have acquiesced to Sistani's demand for direct elections this spring (which might well have forestalled the current blow-up), and they said so. When I mentioned the FT reports of these comments to reporters in London, they were surprised, since they had been attending briefings at Whitehall, where Blair and Jeremy Greenstock were opposing elections in accordance with US preferences....

****

[N]either Sistani nor Muqtada can be considered a cat's paw of Iran. It is not clearly in the interest of the Iranian hardliners to have either one emerge as a center of Shiite power that might rival Tehran. Sistani rejects the guardianship of the jurisprudent altogether, and Muqtada rejects Khamenei's claims to be a sort of Shiite pope, reducing him to the bishop of Iran, and insisting on an autonomous Iraqi Shiite leadership.

What is going on in Iraq has mainly to do with Iraq, not with foreign forces. The foreign forces might put in money or attempt to influence events, but the events themselves are driven by indigenous issues and movements....

****

Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times has two important articles today. Since he was almost killed getting them, I hope someone is paying attention. One forthrightly acknowledges the instigating role of the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin on the blow-up in Iraq. The other talks about the ugly mood brewing, of hatred for Americans and cross-sectarian sympathy born of Iraqi nationalism.

It should not be taken for granted that Iraqis can be divided and ruled. Remember that they united to fight off Iran for 8 years in the 1980s, and that relatively few Iraqi Shiites defected to Khomeini. It is also worrisome that the trained battalion of the new Iraqi army that was ordered to go fight in Fallujah refused to go, according to Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post. The battalion came under fire from the Mahdi Army on its way out of Baghdad and just went back to barracks. They said they hadn't signed up to fight Iraqis. This phenomenon had been seen many times before. The police in Fallujah refused to fight insurgents not so long ago when they had a firefight with US troops. Same reason. This is further evidence of the collapse of American authority in Iraq, such as it was.

Robin Wright of the Washington Post goes Bernard Lewis one better with an insightful piece on What Went Wrong with the American enterprise in Iraq....

****

Fallujah Bloodbath threatens US-Appointed Iraqi Government with Collapse

AP reported that the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) issued a demand early on Saturday that the US cease its military action against Fallujah and stop employing "collective punishment."

Not only has what many Iraqis call "the puppet council" taken a stand against Bush administration tactics in Iraq, but individual members are peeling off. Shiite Marsh Arab leader Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi suspended his membership in the council on Friday. A Sunni member, Ghazi al-Yawir, has threatened to resign if a negotiated settlement of the Fallujah conflict cannot be found. Old-time Sunni nationalist leader Adnan Pachachi thundered on al-Arabiya televsion, "It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal." For him to go on an Arab satellite station much hated by Donald Rumsfeld and denounce the very people who appointed him to the IGC is a clear act of defiance. There are rumors that many of the 25 Governing Council members have fled abroad, fearful of assassination because of their association with the Americans. The ones who are left appear on the verge of resigning.

This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast. The "handover of sovereignty" scheduled for June 30 was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush's election campaign, but it now seems likely to be even more empty. Since its main rationale was to provide more legitimacy to the US enterprise in Iraq, and since any legitimacy the US had is fading fast, and since a government appointed by Bremer will be hated by virtue of that very appointment, the Bush administration may as well just not bother....

****

Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Ha'iri, now resident in Qom in Iran but the major clerical successor to Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (Muqtada's father), warned the Americans against "these reckless actions" on Monday, referring to the crackdown on the Sadrists. He complained that seminary students had become the targets of the Occupation authorities. He said he knew from the beginning that the Americans had not come to Iraq to liberate it from darkness, and now his conviction had been proven correct. He complained that the Americans had begun "making war on this community [the Shiites], dishonoring them, imprisoning their clerics and believers, killing their children, and striking at their ancient intellectual positions. "This is all taking place in the name of freedom and democracy." ....

****

An opinion poll taken in late February showed that 10 % of Iraq's Shiites say attacks on US troops are "acceptable." But 30% of Sunni Arabs say such attacks are acceptable, and fully 70% of Anbar province approves of attacking Americans. (Anbar is where Ramadi, Fallujah, Hadithah and Habbaniyah are, with a population of 1.25 million or 5% of Iraq--those who approve of attacks are 875,000).

But simple statistics don't tell the story. If there are 25 million Iraqis and Shiites comprise 65%, that is about 16 million persons. Ten percent of them is 1.6 million, which is a lot of people who hate Americans enough to approve of attacks on them. If Sunni Arabs comprise about 16% of the population, there are 4 million of them. If 30% approve of attacks, that is 1.2 million. That is, the poll actually shows that in absolute numbers, there are more Shiites who approve of attacks on Americans than there are Sunni Arabs. The numbers bring into question the official line that there are no problems in the South, only in the Sunni Arab heartland.

The other problem is that attitudes change, and sometimes they change rapidly. The US cannot count on the percentage of Shiites who approve of attacks on its troops remaining at 10% if it is strafing Sadr City in Baghdad. Every 1% increase in the number of Shiites who approve of attacks equals 160,000 new enemies.

Lewis Gould, in the Wash Post (April 18, 2004):

There comes a moment in almost every presidency when an unpleasant bit of reality intrudes upon the happy routine of striking media poses, harvesting reelection money and rubbing the egos of political allies. It's a moment when the unique burdens of the Oval Office begin to weigh upon its occupant more heavily than before, when a sense of impending tragedy threatens to overwhelm any countervailing assumption of divine, or even just plain political, purpose.

President Bush appeared to be having one of those moments during his news conference last Tuesday night. With the situation in Iraq in seeming chaos and the roots of the nation's vulnerability to terrorism under a microscope on Capitol Hill before the 9/11 commission, the president's third televised prime-time news conference offered a rare chance for reporters to ask about the substantive policy choices that the nation faces. Bush provided exhortation and a reiteration of his goals rather than a roadmap for how he intends to deal with the present crisis. The holder of the bully pulpit delivered a familiar sermon when a diagnosis of a national malady and prescription for a cure was needed.

The fault for this outcome did not lie entirely with the president. Rather, the nature of the office itself and what it has become are partly the problem. Over the past 50 years, the institution of the presidency has evolved into a mixture of celebrity and continuous campaigning. Substantive policy has receded in significance; presidents are judged on how they perform before the media, whether they win a second term and what their approval ratings are. In this context, mastery of staged events and the capacity to please the public are what matter most.

During their first three years in the White House, Bush and his advisers proved to be superb practitioners of these arts and experts at staging moments that conveyed an aura of decisive leadership. Whether standing atop the World Trade Center wreckage with a bullhorn or landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, Bush fulfilled the symbolic expectations of the office with practiced skill. He has been equally adept at continuous campaigning, as his record fundraising totals and success in boosting Republicans in the 2002 congressional elections attest. As long as the presidency operated within this context, Bush enjoyed high ratings and widespread popularity.

But, of course, the presidency is not just about glitz and the trappings of show business. At bottom, it is about policy, substantive issues and demanding choices. Eventually the rigors of the White House expose a president's areas of vulnerability. Early on, Bush had proclaimed with pride that he did not do nuance. He and his aides cultivated his reputation as a big-picture man who left it to subordinates to handle details and the nitty-gritty of policies. Now he faces a public that wants to know not simply that he wants to stay the course, but the nitty-gritty as well: how he plans to do it, how long it will take, how he defines a less-than-perfect success....

Mark LeVine, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the co-editor, with Pilar Perez and Viggo Mortensen, of Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation (Perceval Press, 2003) and author of the forthcoming Why They Don't Hate Us: Islam and the World in the Age of Globalization (Oneworld Publications, 2004); in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 22, 2004):

The voice on the other end of the phone was as sweet and reassuring as I remembered from our brief time together in Baghdad. It belonged to an Italian peace activist who has spent much of the last year in Iraq working with a group of European and Iraqi comrades to monitor and resist the U.S. occupation of the country. Now she was being forced to leave. The intensifying violence in central and southern Iraq has turned even foreign peace activists into targets, despite the fact that some of them were risking their lives ferrying the wounded and medical supplies between Baghdad, Falluja, and other cities.

What struck me upon hearing Francesca's voice -- the names in this story have been changed -- were her first words upon recognizing me:"Ah, Mark, è un casinoi," she said, her voice filled with sadness tinged with desperation. In Italian, this phrase usually means something like"it's crazy" or"it's overwhelming." (Mothers of young children use it a lot when you ask them how they're doing.) But it has a darker meaning when said by an Italian in Baghdad these days. There, it means something closer to"total chaos and violence," while also evoking images of the prostitution and perversion that accompany the wholesale breakdown of a social order.

With the burst of intense violence of the last few weeks the world press has decided that Iraq is descending into chaos. In fact, the descent has been longer and steeper than most people imagine. The last night of my trip to Iraq, I had dinner with Francesca, along with other Italian, French, and Filipino activists who for a year have been resisting the occupation as best they could -- by building bridges with Iraqis on the grass-roots level, risking their lives to find out the myriad ugly truths about the occupation, and bringing that information to the international public. The increase in chaos was palpable during my almost two weeks there in the latter half of March, with suicide bombings (including the big one at the Jebal Lubnan Hotel that blew out the first three stories' worth of its windows), not to speak of the nightly missile/RPG strikes and battles with U.S. troops on the city's streets.

Even as the situation turned worse the activists I knew, along with Iraqi staff members of the organization Occupation Watch (www.occupationwatch.org), and a group of American journalists and activists with whom I traveled to Iraq's capital felt free to spend an evening out at Baghdad's best Chinese restaurant discussing the current situation and future prospects for Iraq from a far more hopeful perspective than, only a few weeks later, seems imaginable. In fact, the very act of having Iraqi and international activists talking, working, eating and sometimes living together was itself an example of an alternative to imperial occupation or indiscriminately violent resistance.

Most of us believed that the situation"would get worse before it gets better," as a French activist put it, and few of the internationals thought bringing in more foreigners made much sense for the near future, even though none of them had ever felt targeted for being foreigners. (A few weeks ago the insurgents still discriminated between people working for and against the occupation.) But they still felt there was a lot of important work to be done: Francesca discussed building ties to local communities by passing out flyers explaining the work of her organization, Bridge to Baghdad, on issues like Iraqis detained indefinitely without charge, civilian casualties, and the decrepit state of the country's hospitals. Several of the Iraqis present talked about the need to dig deep into the nuts and bolts of the occupation, into the problems of the Draft Constitution, and the everyday violence plaguing the country.

The strategies then being considered by grass-roots activists across the political spectrum in Iraq reminded me of the anarchistic tactics recently favored by the global peace and justice movement. And it seemed to raise a possibility: If violence-related chaos could slow down the"reconstruction" of the country, even forcing the Americans and British to consider abandoning their allies on the Interim Governing Council, could a very different kind of anarchy and grass-roots activism challenge the larger order being imposed by the United States in Iraq?

Today, the answer seems to be a resounding, no, and not just because of the chaos a growing insurgency encourages. When it comes to creating chaos, no one can compete with the boys at the Pentagon and in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. Which brings me back to Francesca's words on the phone. What struck me instantly was that"casino," when used negatively in Italian to describe life in Baghdad, had a similar meaning to the common Russian word for chaos,"bardok." Used throughout the former Soviet Union to describe the situation since the end of communism, it too conjured up images of extreme chaos, and of brothels and prostitution. Both uses distill into a single word what the violence of"globalization," or as it's called in Iraq"privatization," does to those on the receiving end of the enterprise.

Chaos and the Fading Prospects of Peace and Democracy

Indeed, it's the continuous chaos of everyday life that makes it so hard for Iraqis to tell friend from foe, that leads to peace activists being kidnapped, that makes it impossible for progressive-minded Islamic religious figures to offer protection to my friends who've been risking their lives in Iraq the past year. Chaos even makes it harder to do the digging necessary to understand just what the"Coalition" is up to.

Chaos means the four to six hours without electricity in Baghdad out of each twenty-four, including during that dinner of ours. It means having to travel with a satellite phone, a regular Iraqi cell phone ("Iraqnafone"), and a special CPA phone with a 914 (Westchester, NY) area code just to stay in touch with people. Even then, most of the time you can't call one type of phone from the others. It also means desperately under-equipped hospitals, bullet-ridden ambulances, and millions of dollars earmarked for school rehabilitation siphoned into the pockets of U.S. contractors and their Iraqi middlemen.

It's hard to assess how much of the chaos now evident in Iraq is just the product of war and occupation generally; how much is the product of Bush administration ill-planning, arrogance, and pure stupidity; and how much has been planned, or at least welcomed, by elements in the administration. Most Iraqis opt, almost automatically, for option C. As one Iraqi military psychiatrist who worked closely with the CPA and the American military at the start of the occupation argued,"They can't be that incompetent. It has to be at least partly deliberate." What convinced him beyond all else was the CPA's refusal to allow the collection of data for a program he had developed to track levels of post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraqi children since the occupation -- this after they had already funded the study, sent in an American doctor to help implement it, and even put the computers in place to begin collecting the data. He still has no idea how many children suffer from such disorders, but in his words,"It could be millions, and how can we build a stable society with such trauma?"

If it's true that at least some of the chaos in Iraq has, to one degree or another, been consciously let loose on the land, the broadest reason is obvious. As Ali (an Iraqi friend who worked for the UN before a suicide bombing drove that organization out of the country) explained,"One thing is clear; it is impossible to build a peaceful alternative to the occupation when the chaos reaches its current levels." As late one night he and another friend, Hassan, both now working for an international NGO as translators and drivers, plied me with Arak, the national drink of Iraq, they recounted life under, and after, Saddam Hussein. Hassan explained how, having escaped a death sentence personally signed by Saddam, he'd become a Buddhist and lived for a time in Thailand and the Philippines. Yet, as we spoke of peace, Ali and Hassan drilled me on how to disassemble and reassemble one of the three AK-47s in their 200 square-foot apartment. (If I were Iraqi, they laughed, I'd have been court-martialed for being so inept.)

I'm far from a gun enthusiast, but as they pointed out,"In Iraq, you never know when you'll have to use your Kalashnikov." And these guys are committed peace activists. What's sad is that while months ago Hassan had forsworn traveling with a weapon, after the fighting in Falluja broke out he emailed me that he now had no choice but to keep one with him at all times and was preparing to"fight" if the American incursions didn't end soon. What chance does peace have when peace activists are armed and feel the urge, even the necessity, to use their weapons?

Clearly, as long as the violence continues at anything near present levels, the chance of building a truly democratic, progressive alternative to the status quo is nil. Indeed, perhaps the worst thing about the chaos ruling Iraq, along with the insecurity it brings, is that it denies civil society the possibility of promoting any alternatives to collaboration with or violent religious opposition to the occupation.

Watching a similar dynamic at work for over a decade in the Occupied Territories, I had grown ever more frustrated with Palestinian society for not being able to build a nonviolent means of resisting an occupation that only digs in deeper in response to the violent resistance it breeds. But seeing the dynamic evolve before my eyes in Iraq has given me a better understanding of why it's so difficult for Palestinians, or Iraqis, to build such a movement. What Colgate University Professor Nancy Ries calls the"planned chaos" of an occupation, coupled with the economic"structural adjustment" that is a euphemism for the harsh imposition of a market economy controlled by corporate giants on"socialist" systems, steamrolls over any attempts at resistance through the kinds of tactics favored by Gandhi or Martin Luther King.

Multiple Levels of Chaos and Incompetence

The question is: How much of the chaos is deliberate and how much due to arrogance, incompetence, and stupidity? There would seem to be at least three circles of chaos involved in the occupation of Iraq. I don't know official Washington well enough to determine exactly who fits into which category, but it's likely that President Bush and some of his senior military planners and top political advisors fall into the first circle of offenders – the arrogant, incompetent, and just plain stupid.

Whoever comprises this group, they are certainly responsible for the lack of coherent post-occupation planning and the innumerable political and cultural miscues of the American administration in Iraq, which are now much commented upon in the press. It is this group, both politically and militarily, that can be considered"that incompetent," as a leading scholar of Iraq described them to me.

However, there are two other groups within the American governmental system who are definitely not that incompetent: the radical right-wing ideologues in the White House and the Pentagon and their corporate sponsors. And they make up the final two circles of chaos-creators in Iraq. The two groups, not at all distinct, are embodied in the personage of former Defense Secretary and former Halliburton CEO Vice President Dick Cheney. On the more directly political level, neocon officials and their media allies such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Richard Armitrage, Michael Ledeen, George Will, Daniel Pipes and other stalwarts neither expected the occupation of Iraq to be a" cakewalk," nor cared if it spread chaos to other countries, as long as it furthered their aim to reconfigure the political map of the region.

In fact, for years key American governmental figures and the leaders of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have understood that U.S.-led globalization was going to necessitate -- and generate -- violence throughout the Third World and in the Middle East specifically. Already in the early 1990s, hawkish scholars were writing of"the new cold war" that was taking shape there as Islamic nationalism confronted the region's secular states. In 2000, a U.S. Strategic Space Command document,"Vision 2020," admitted that globalization was producing a zero-sum game of winners and losers and that on such a planet Americans needed to be prepared to do whatever it might take to"win." Several years before that, the World Bank had reported that the Middle East would likely require a"shakedown period" to adapt to the new global economic order coming out of Washington.

For the ideologues in the Bush Administration a shakedown wasn't enough, and so Iraq, a country already thoroughly weakened, militarily and economically, by years of war and sanctions, was targeted for a shock-down -- and in March of 2003, we got"shock and awe." If we take seriously the statements and writings of Ledeen, Perle, Frum, Feith and Wolfowitz, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was supposed to create a domino effect that would weaken local states (or in their polite phrasing,"democratize" them), open their economies to"international" -- as in Iraq, to the neocons, this largely meant American -- capital ("establish market economies"), and at the same time lead to a much needed"reformation" or"modernization" of Islam (which meant putting in power"Muslims" who would feel at home in the Republican Party in Washington or the Likud Party in Israel). Of course, to accomplish such a"revolution," force would be a necessity, lots of it, continuously applied. This -- itself obviously a chaos-creator -- was not seen by them as a bad thing. As Michael Ledeen has typically argued the U.S., as"the most revolutionary force on earth," naturally engages in the kind of" creative destruction" that has been the hallmark of imperialism, capitalism, and modernity for almost half a millennium -- and neither Ledeen, nor any of his fellow neocons, thought this would occur without causing much chagrin in the Muslim world as well as the Third World at large. And it mattered to them not a whit.

Such a policy-line had two things going for it: the fear of such a machinery of chaos and massive violence heading one's way can often compel local leaders to fall into line and pressure rebels to stop fighting (as has happened in Falluja and Najaf); but if it doesn't, the resulting chaos and violence can in turn be used to further the program. At home, as we've seen, such chaos and the acts that go with it only inflame Americans, convincing many that what's happening there is anything but our fault, and that the only option -- as even Senator John Kerry now argues -- is to"stay the course," whatever that is. As a potential side benefit, generating such chaos and misery also means that any fall off in the same, any move toward political or economic normalcy, however modest, can be touted as proof of the"success" for the U.S. sponsored"reconstruction" of the country.

Sponsored Chaos

Whatever the degree of chaos neocons in the Pentagon, the vice president's office, and elsewhere in this administration were ready to accept in their future Iraq and in the region generally, only on entering the third circle of chaos can one envision the full benefits of a world in which lawlessness and violence are the essence of the open market. In such a world of what might be called"sponsored chaos," giant corporate entities and their hangers-on, including the booming"security" firms they employ, stand to make tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars off Iraq and a globalized war on terrorism, no matter the levels of ongoing carnage.

It is perhaps hard for Americans to understand their occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization; but Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of such a trend, a place in which chaos is king and the revenues flow back to the corporate"homeland" like water from a tap. Here, as a start, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity, oil. While corporate prospectors allied with the U.S. scavenged the country in mammoth SUVs filled with downsized former soldiers turned high-priced security guards for any opportunity to profit from Iraq's misery, inside Baghdad's massively fortified Green Zone, where the CPA rules over a non-country, their counterparts drafted regulations for"privatizing" everything from health care to prisons and for delivering them into the same corporate hands.

You only have to spend a few hours in the no-less fortified Baghdad Airport checking out the new colonial bureaucrats and Bible Belt contractors passing through to get a sense of how such a world operates. Aside from gazing at a departure/arrivals boards with"delayed" notifications from who knows how many years ago, the most interesting way to pass the time is to chat with them. At least when I was there, most of the two dozen or so white men (and a few women) I spoke with or on whose conversations I eavesdropped were from the South or Midwest. All were clearly in Iraq for one thing -- money -- and happy to say so. Some were on quick trips to Basra or Kirkuk scouting out contracts; others had crisscrossed the country for the previous months or year intent on such tasks as training bomb-sniffing dogs for the Army. There were contract employees of USAID, workers for the privately run RTI International -- making $100,000 per year with hazard pay for jobs that would pay less than half that at home -- and assorted contractors looking to milk some of the billions of dollars in congressionally-mandated reconstruction aid. As a group, they were a reminder that the chaos of war and occupation provides wonderful opportunities for corporations and individuals to make levels of profits, unchecked by the laws and regulations that hamper profitability in peacetime and are usually unrealizable under normal circumstances. But -- and this is the other side of chaos, even for those who profit from it -- all of those departing were relieved or happy to be leaving, even though a number of them planned to return.

There is, needless to say, nothing new about war profiteering. But there is something new about the way it's being done in Iraq. In the post-Cold War era, global corporations and the government elites with whom they work have great incentives to sponsor global chaos and the violence it generates. This gives"opening markets" a new meaning in our age. We know from the experience, for instance, of post-Soviet Kazakhstan or even of Russia itself, how political and social chaos lead to the formation of competing networks of criminal gangs and exceedingly corruptible political parties, filled with potential dynastic families and their friends, all competing for resources and power in the decidedly one-sided contest that is the globalized market economy.

Algeria and its grisly civil war serves as a particularly stark example of how situations of violence and the profitability of widespread chaos can feed off each other to the advantage of all sides in a conflict. Indeed, Algeria's civil war had its roots in good measure in a series of desperately destructive, chaos-producing structural adjustment"reforms" imposed on the country in the late 1980s by the World Bank and the IMF. During the civil war both the state and private groups, including the armed terrorist organizations, made lots of money through the privatization process we call globalization. More important, a semi-secret"political-mafia power" (as Le Monde recently described it) evolved that now rivals the previous political and formerly dominant military establishments.

Once you have mafias coming into being, chaos only advances further, being, at least for a time, the cheapest, easiest, and for those not dying or being impoverished by it, most profitable way to go. If the present chaos and violence continues in Iraq, there is little doubt that a similar scenario will evolve there too. In fact, my friend Ali described the local situation in Shi'a towns like Najaf and Nasriyya in terms troublingly similar to the grim descriptions coming out of Algeria in the 1990s:"Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi's Army are little more than mercenaries who were lost with no jobs in streets of Iraq. I've watched them steal the government properties in order to make money to support their revolt. The Iraqi police are totally afraid of them; they stood looking on the without thinking to take any action. Some others took the advantage of this chaos to loot what ever they could, even the people's properties."

How to Tell the Difference Between Chaos and Incompetence

What's important to bear in mind here is that the U.S. can increase such chaos not just through genuine incompetence but through purposeful incompetence -- and it's normally impossible for an outsider to tell which is which. I could, for instance, feel the impact of purposeful incompetence in the conversation I had with an Iraqi architect who worked in Falluja. Having experienced the frustration of dealing with the bureaucrats inside the Green Zone and the corrupt Iraqis who increasingly surround them, he explained to me that"no honest Iraqi contractor will touch the CPA." In the early months of the occupation, he had tried to offer his help to the CPA, but despite a public pretense of accountability -- of giving all comers a chance to profit from the rebuilding of the country -- his bids, though lower than those of foreign bidders, were either ignored or someone would show up weeks later offering to help him" cement a deal" only after thousands of dollars passed under the table.

The officials of the CPA, however, were never intent on"rebuilding" Iraq in the normal sense -- not with Iraqis anyway. What they were intent on was cracking what was left of the Iraqi economy open and handing its spoils to crony capitalists and giant corporate entities allied to them. And this is why we can't simply assume, as one recent newspaper article put it, that the hemorrhaging of billions of dollars in Iraq is"yet more proof of the administration's inadequate preparation for the war, and its failure to fathom what awaited it in Iraq." Such a view misunderstands why, for example, Pentagon Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other senior administration officials dismissed pre-war warnings that the civil rebuilding of Iraq would cost between $60 billion and $150 billion. They certainly didn't do so because they thought it could be done cheaper.

In fact the $100 billion-plus the U.S. is slated to spend by the end of next year on infrastructure and civilian expenses -- we can only guess how much of that will go directly and indirectly to Halliburton and Bechtel and not to Iraqis -- along with the fraud, bribery, theft and waste that are literally written into budgets under the heading of"special clauses," when combined with the $250 billion in military-related costs (all those depleted uranium bullets and high-tech napalm aren't cheap) plunked down for the invasion and military occupation, together constitute a major reason why we went to war in the first place. Looked at from a certain perspective, all of this falls under the category of planned or sponsored chaos.

Just consider the profits of the major arms, energy, and heavy engineering companies today versus three years ago. Some have more than doubled their profits, as has their share of the total profits of the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones companies; and no one with a car today can remain oblivious to the relationship between Middle Eastern chaos and higher oil prices, which naturally mean higher profits for the major oil companies. Of course, officials like Wolfowitz weren't going to tell the American people what Iraq was really going to cost them, at least not beforehand. But it's hard to imagine Cheney and his friends in the military-petroindustrial complex didn't know better, especially when it's a given that reconstruction contracts handed out to companies like Halliburton have profits built into them regardless of cost over-runs.

I should admit that one of my travel companions who knows Washington doesn't agree with level of importance I've given to sponsored chaos. For her, more than profits and chaos, Cheney and Co. are about"about projecting US dominance. It's all geostrategy." But since when have imperial dominance and imperial profits been separable? And it's just too hard to stick with a simple explanation of"incompetence" when it comes to Iraq. As she admits,"Maybe incompetent is the wrong word. Ideological is more like it."

Even then, you haven't quite captured the strange combination of planned and actual incompetence that is now Iraq. As I flew out of Baghdad, I struck up a conversation with a woman who works for USAID"reforming" Iraqi hospitals. I was a bit emotional leaving the country in such a state of visible disintegration, so I leaned into her immediately with questions about why hospitals which I had visited still have almost no supplies of drugs or equipment, and aren't even allowed to send mortality reports or other negative statistics -- of which there are now reams -- to the"health" ministry. Taken aback, she replied that the doctors I had interviewed simply"don't know what they're talking about. We're trying to decentralize the system and make it more efficient." I felt a twinge of guilt for being so argumentative; perhaps we just weren't talking about the same hospitals. So I asked her if she'd ever visited an Iraqi hospital. Visibly surprised that I would even ask such a question, she answered with a simple,"No."

It was clear that she basically spent her days ensconced in an office in the Green Zone, totally cut off from the chaos she had a small hand in creating, pushing paper, transferring millions of dollars here and there, and undoubtedly writing reports about how"efficient" U.S. reforms are and how Iraqis are being readied to reassume control of one of the most underfunded ministries in the Government. Since most Americans of the civilian part of the occupation rarely mix with or spend significant amounts of time with Iraqis outside their security bubble, they, like her, have little idea of the realities on the ground. This is, in fact, almost a necessary qualification for the planning they're engaged in. Otherwise, they would have to quit their jobs or do them very differently. This is how chaos and privatization thrive on ignorance -- but an ignorance structurally and purposefully set up and embedded in the landscape. Maybe my companion on that plane thought she was doing a good job. Who knows? Who cares? Either way, ignorance, chaos, privatization, planning, and various kinds of sponsored chaos seem to be in perfect synergy in Iraq.

And this is why I suspect that the very categories within which most of us outside the world of this administration and its corporate allies think may not even provide us with the language necessary to describe accurately what's actually taking place. In some sense, the chaos-managers in the Pentagon and their corporate cousins know well enough what they're doing in Iraq and what impact their version of sponsored chaos is having. A society so brutalized by twenty years of Saddam Hussein and constant war, oppression, and corruption, one where even seventy year-old Ayatollahs want their picture taken with Kalashnikovs, all play into the hands of the occupation profiteers. Because of this situation, as my friend Ali explained,"The idea of building a coherent positive resistance cannot fit for the Iraqi mentality. They can easily be driven to any fight and will hand the mess over to the Americans by giving them an excuse to stay here. The Iraqi intellectuals are doing nothing: they are more worried about their chairs [that is, their possessions and social position] than the country or the people."

We can perhaps be a bit more charitable, as the very Iraqis who have the training, skills and desire to rebuild their country -- the engineers, doctors, lawyers and other professionals -- are, like the architect I talked with, either ignored by the CPA's contractors in favor of more corrupt colleagues, or themselves targets of assassination just by virtue of the fact they might be imagined as cooperating with the Americans. Either way, with local intellectuals in hiding or dead, and international activists now leaving, it's no surprise that Iraqis feel very much alone and have little in the way of a positive, forward-thinking leadership. What, after all, does it say about the prospects for Iraq when Ayatollah Sistani, the"most important figure in the country," hasn't left his house in a decade?

Break it, Buy it, Fix it?

By now many people have heard that before the U.S. invasion, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, Secretary of State Powell informed President Bush about his"Pottery Barn" theory of international politics --"you break it, you own it." Of course, breaking something is the easy part; and if the goal of at least part of the US establishment (at least in the short-term) is indeed chaos, then"owning" Iraq does not necessarily mean that our political and corporate elites feel compelled to fix it, however much they insist it's their heartfelt dream. They might, in the end, prefer that it be left broken -- possibly into three pieces -- an impotent and wrecked country.

From this perspective, the Iraqi situation is hardly unique. In the bardok of Kazakhstan and the rest of the former USSR, for instance, the Western-promoted"shock therapy" of the early 1990s impoverished whole populations but successfully brought their resources (oil, gold, forest products, labor, intellectual capital) onto the global market in a major way. And just as in Russia, sexual exploitation as both imagery and reality is not far from the surface of the growing chaos in Iraq. During the last year increasing numbers of Iranians have been bringing in women and setting up bordellos in parts of the country so that Shi'i Iraqi men could obtain"temporary marriages" in order to have sex with what are clearly prostitutes (a practice, while sanctioned in Shi'i Islam and widespread in Iran, that was frowned upon in Iraq before the occupation).

Whoever is responsible, in the casino of post-occupation Iraq, bardok, it seems, is thriving in every way possible. It will take a lot of money, blood, and good will to change this dynamic any time soon. In the meantime, chaos by its nature is never anybody's assured property. As the Bush administration is learning even now, the operative phrase is: Be careful what you wish for.