Gen. Petraeus is clearly convinced that Iraq needs US troops to shore up the government and security. He has done the most responsible job yet seen by an American official in Iraq in trying to end the carnage. He has made bazaars no drive zones to stop the car bombings. He has surrounded city districts with blast walls to keep out insurgents. He has reached out to the Sunnis (though alas the Shiite government has not). He has done what he could, but it hasn't been enough. There really is little sign of political reconciliation.

Al-Maliki started out with a national unity government. He had Sunnis in his cabinet. He had Sadrists in his cabinet. Islamic Virtue Party. Iraqi National List. All gone. His government is more fractured and less representative than before the surge began!

What if the US military presence is juvenilizing the Iraqis and prolonging the civil war? Over 900 Iraqis were killed in political violence in March, the highest number since September.

Some of the March death toll was from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's abrupt attack on the Sadr neighborhoods of Basra, which was repulsed. But surely al-Maliki rejected negotiations and attacked frontally because he knew that if he got into trouble he could call down US close air support. If the US were not in Iraq, might al-Maliki not have dickered instead?

Might it not be the same between al-Maliki and the Sunnis? Al-Maliki objected vehemently to the US arming the Sunni Awakening Councils. He declines to incorporate them into the Iraqi security forces in any numbers. But his standoffishness comes from knowledge that if the Sunnis give him too much trouble, he can have his American friends bomb them.

If we make an analogy to Lebanon, we can see that a foreign military occupation never resolved Lebanon's problems. Kissinger greenlighted a Syrian/ Arab League force for Lebanon in 1976. Although the Syrians invaded and kept tens of thousands of troops in Lebanon, they either did not want to or could not end the Lebanese civil war, which sputtered on.

The Israeli attempt in 1982 to install a Phalangist strongman failed. The US Marines tried to come in to do peace-keeping after the Israeli invasion, and they faced a still-sullen population, and got hit by Islamic Amal.

The Syrians could not help but play one Lebanese faction off against another.

Only in 1989, after 14 years of fruitless fighting, did the Lebanese agree to end the war. The big clan and sect leaders negotiated an end to the war. Some had been in or associated with the militias that had fought the civil war.

What if Iraq has been lebanonized, but not in the sense that Ambassador Crocker alleged, of heavy Iranian influence? (And by the way, I was in south Lebanon in December, and the influence of Iran strikes me as over-stated in the US. The UN, the EU and other funding sources are also important).

What if the US is playing the Syrians here, and the Iraqis the Lebanese?

In this analogy, the war is not ended by foreign occupation troops. If anything, the Syrian policies just keep the pot boiling.

It is ended by a conference at the resort town of Taef in Saudi Arabia among the big Lebanese politicians, who make key compromises with one another and begin practically disbanding militias.

Maybe the Iraqis need to be left on their own militarily, and maybe what they need is a big conference at Taef.

Maybe the US in Iraq is not the little boy with his finger in the dike. Maybe we are workers with jackhammers instructed to make the hole in the dyke much more huge.

Just something to think about.

In a piece in the current New Republic, historian (and Nixon scholar) David Greenberg takes exception to the notion that Hillary Clinton is "Nixonian":

the charge that Clinton is Nixonian is as scurrilous as the smears that Obama is a closet Muslim or that John McCain sired a bastard child ... Unlike Tricky Dick, Hillary Clinton hasn't tapped her rival's phones or broken into his psychiatrist's office. She hasn't stolen his debate briefing book or convened a mob of rioters to shut down a vote count. She hasn't used the machinery of impeachment for partisan gain. It's been just words.

He's right, of course -- Hillary's run a rough, sometimes nasty campaign, but anyone who smears her as "Nixonian" needs to go back to the history books. Richard Nixon, of course, broke the law, violated the Constitution, and subverted the democratic process. Hillary has never done anything anywhere near as corrupt.

That said, I actually think that Hillary does resemble  Richard Nixon in some important respects -- only not in the ways you might think. Hillary actually shares many of Ole Tricky Dick's positive qualities (yes, he did have a few).

To paraphrase Talleyrand, the invention and recognition of a “state” called Kosovo by the United States and Brussels in February was worse than gross ignorance, it was a mistake. Every Western political delusion since the end of the Cold War was at the root of the disaster, and, to make matters worse, those delusions have been shared by otherwise unlikely partners: the Clinton administration and George Bush, the usually anti-American Europeans, the “human rights” establishment and “progressive” media here and in Europe. A brief analysis makes it clear that there is and should not be a state named “Kosovo.”

• The initial motivation for NATO’s (read America’s) 1999 intervention in Kosovo, stopping “genocide,” was based on false premises and images, largely created by CNN and similar media outlets, and vocally supported by the “human rights” chorus led by Amnesty International and the like. There was no genocide in any serious definition. There was a massive, disproportionate Serbian military response to the sporadic and often indiscriminate attacks against authorities and civilians by a ragtag combination of Leninists, Maoists, thugs, drug runners and misguided members of the Albanian diaspora, going under the grand name of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). It took a combination of overexcited CNN sympathizers of the Albanian secessionist cause, a mass exodus of scared Albanians, and a skilled Albanian lobby in Washington to convince a human rights obsessed Clinton administration that a new Auschwitz was in the making.
• Most Europeans at the time, even more influenced by their human rights lobbies and put off by the Serbs’ old-fashioned use of religious and historic arguments for their claim on Kosovo, supported the military intervention—mostly by holding our coat.

Kosovo, a bit larger than Delaware but, with 2.4 million people (in 2001), three times the population, has proclaimed its statehood, the newest and so far the latest “country” created on the ruins of the former Yugoslavia. Other than the stubborn support of the majority Albanians, it has none of the basic necessary qualifications of statehood—functioning institutions, human or natural resources, ethnic and historic arguments.

Nonetheless, Washington and most European countries are prepared to take the bet that somehow Kosovo will be something else—say, a Luxembourg or Monaco. Is this serious? And if not, as common sense and experience suggest, why the pressure to take the bet, indeed why the decade-long encouragement of such development?

To begin with, as far as Washington is concerned, the blame is clearly bipartisan, with Democrats like Richard Holbrooke being and remaining staunchly and indiscriminately pro-Albanian for more than a decade, and the Bush administration mysteriously following the same misguided path. True enough, some Republican veterans of foreign affairs, such as former Secretary of State and former ambassador to Belgrade Lawrence Eagleburger, do know better and have made their opposition clear, but they remain a minority.

It is very hard, if not impossible, to have much sympathy for the Serbs, now claiming the role of victims in Kosovo after years of overreacting to excessive Albanian demands there; it is even harder to do so now, after an opportunistic Russia decided to support Belgrade’s position and to suddenly become a stalwart defender of “national integrity.” That, after more than a decade of supporting illegal, indeed Mafioso-type secessionist regions of Transnistria in Moldova, South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. It is clear that Russia supports Serbia’s hopeless claim to Kosovo out of sheer hypocrisy—and a more general policy of showing the West that Moscow is to be taken seriously again, after its internationally weak presence since the end of the Soviet Union. Simply put, Moscow is right on Kosovo for all the wrong and dishonest reasons—but correct nonetheless. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Washington is politically, ideologically and strategically mistaken on Kosovo for all the “right” reasons. The Albanian lobby in the U.S. managed to convince enough members of Congress of their “right” cause ever since the late 1990s, to earn uncritical sympathy for Albanian “victimhood” at Serb hands, to convince them of their alleged “right,” historically unheard of, to independence; so that Washington is now the main engine behind the international bandwagon to recognize Kosovo’s statehood. The Europeans—Spain, Slovakia, Romania, all knowledgeable of or threatened by separatism and reluctant subscribers to a “common” policy of recognition for Kosovo’s independence aside - are ready to be bullied by larger Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The Serbs’ lack of an organized (or large) diaspora in the West and their steady preference for unsavory politicians, like Milosevic, did not help their cause either.

Now that things seem to be decided—in the West as much as in the capital of Pristina, and in a Moscow determined to oppose independence, including at the United Nations—what next? The answers are disturbingly negative.

• Even today, after the sad examples of artificially created and failed postcolonial countries (mostly in Africa), it remains unfashionable to admit that there are unviable states. Nevertheless, if there is a case study of such an unpromising future “state,” Kosovo is the one. Perhaps, with Kosovo being in Europe, the usual obstacle to a serious assessment of political dysfunctionality and economic backwardness elsewhere—the Pavlovian accusation of “racism”—may finally be purged from serious public debate. That would be good news.
• Ethnically, after the massive expulsion of most non-Albanians following the 1999 NATO intervention (which, ironically, was conducted to prevent “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians by Serbs), the population is now 95 percent or more ethnic Albanian. Worse still, the large Macedonian ethnic Albanian areas and the smaller Albanian majority regions of Montenegro and Serbia’s Presevo, Bujanovac and Medveda are all already infiltrated by irredentists from or supported by Kosovo Albanians. It does not require much imagination to see a collapsing Kosovo “state’ seek a diversion in demanding “human rights” for ethnic kin—i.e. encouraging secessionism in those areas.
• Ethnic homogeneity may be helpful, but only when complete, and that is not the case, not with Serbian enclaves around Pristina, the second-largest town, Prizren and, especially in the northern border region of Mitrovica—on the Serbian border and functioning as a de facto province of Serbia, complete with common currency, communication and economic ties. All of this, notwithstanding NATO’s dubious promise of protection for the Serbs outside Mitrovica, amounts to certain trouble, and it came on March 17.
• By itself, Kosovo, always the poorest area, despite massive subsidies from the rest of the former Yugoslavia, is an economic basket case. Its few and now mostly closed mines remain the only possible source of income, other than European and American economic aid. The Trepka mining complex of lignite, lead, zinc, and nickel happens to be of dubious economic value now and, on top of that, is located in the Serbian majority area of Northern Kosovo.
• In theory, of course, the extraordinary Serbian 14th-century monasteries of Peć, Decani and Gracani, with their valuable interior and exterior late-Byzantine frescoes, could be major tourist attractions—for Serbs and the Orthodox, all unlikely visitors to an Albanian Muslim-majority site—not to mention their possible destruction by local Albanians.
• The rest of the would-be state’s revenues come from the diaspora’s remittances and, even more, from the only flourishing “industry”—organized crime. That is mostly centered on international prostitution rings, narcotics (heroin), and smuggling of arms, cigarettes and other items, bring the Kosovars into competition, often deadly, with their Albanian kin and explain the latter’s reluctance to accept Kosovo as a normal part of their country. All these realities should also be seen on the background of Europe’s largest population growth rate by far!
• Kosovo Albanians have consistently demonstrated their allegiance to the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), even though that organization never amounted to anything but a glorified armed mafia, inept and ineffective against the Serbian military prior to 1999, but very good at public relations (at home, in Europe, and in Washington) and nationalist propaganda. The latest elections, in November 2007, in fact brought the KLA and its leader Hashim Thaçi to power in Pristina. Thaçi was a founder of the 1993 People’s Movement of Kosovo (LPK), a Switzerland-based “political party” seeking a greater Albania. A very probably dysfunctional Kosovo state would naturally seek a greater cause—by supporting irredentist causes in neighboring countries, or unification with the mother country, Albania. We have seen that movie before—dysfunctional Somalia still seeking annexation of regions of Ethiopia or, worse still, Chechnya during its de facto independence in 1996–99 seeking an Islamist Northern Caucasus and thus provoking another war.
• In a nutshell, this is the likely future of Kosovo—a resentful, poor and well armed area with a population 90 percent Muslim. And that is the trouble, as we have seen, in part, in neighboring Bosnia and Chechnya—poverty, an international criminal established link, a sense of victimhood (real or imagined) and transnational connections inevitably attract, like moths to a lamp, international jihadis. Of course, we are told, Albanians are pro-American, a rare case in today’s Europe. But that could change. Indeed, Albanians were pro-Ottoman when it fit their interests, pro-Nazis during the Second World War, without being Nazis, Maoists during the Tito years of old Yugoslavia, and so on. Now they are pro-American because the GIs and Secretary Condoleezza Rice seem to offer them more than anybody else—but all that could, indeed will, change once circumstances change. Albanians are no different from anyone else, especially in the Balkans.
• Finally, there is the cost. Many Americans complain about the cost of the Iraq war, but few even mention the cost of the U.S. presence in and aid to Kosovo, an area of no strategic interest, running in the hundreds of millions of dollars since 1999. As for the Europeans, they paid much more and promise more still. NATO, i.e. Europe with some U.S. military presence, pretends to offer protection for the isolated Serb enclaves, for the vocal Albanians against a possible Serb threat, and promises to prevent a likely secession by the Mitrovica Serbs—none with much credibility.

But how about the other side—Serbia, most of its neighbors, and Russia? As mentioned, Moscow is only accidentally, rather than morally or legally, on the realistic side of the Kosovo issue. That is not, as many in the West believe, because of some Orthodox solidarity (Socialist, anti-Catholic Spain and mostly Catholic Slovakia are also opposed to independence for Kosovo), but for practical reasons.

1. For the same reason Moscow sells weapons to anti-American Hugo Chávez, protects Iran’s mullahs against Western economic threats, keeps in power Europe’s only open dictator in Belarus, etc.—because it shows muscle. If that has to be done at the UN, so much publicity.
2. Because a Moscow-dependent and thus weak Serbia is a useful bridgehead in Europe—just as the Transnistria enclave between Moldova and Ukraine keeps both countries on their toes;
3. Third, because legal ambiguity serves Russia’s interests. If Kosovo’s situation remains unclear, manipulation opportunities are rife—just as they are in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, all areas Moscow controls and/or manipulated for years in order to dominate neighboring former Soviet colonies.

All of this suggests that Kosovo independence is a mistake, that support for it (indeed its creation) by the Europeans and the United States is a greater mistake, and that it should not have been done. But what is the alternative, considering the present reality? Clearly, the Marti Ahtisaari plan of a “supervised sovereignty” is neither horse nor donkey, nor acceptable to anyone. More honest and wiser would be direct support for the unification of Kosovo to Albania—minus the Serb enclave of Mitrovica, and permanent autonomy for historic Serb/Orthodox enclaves around historic monuments. That would give responsibility for Kosovo to an admittedly reluctant Albania—a country interested in becoming a NATO and European member—rather than create a black hole in the central Balkans; it would also create a precedent, to be sure, but a less damaging one. Instead of mini-mafia states, responsibility would be transferred to established ones.

True enough, neither Georgia nor Azerbaijan would be happy with the loss of a South Ossetia or Nagorno-Karabakh, but history and reality should force them to live with it.

On the other hand, Transnistria is “legally” part of an artificial Stalinist creation—“Moldova,” a depressed area of sad, confused people of Romanian ethnicity, with only one major export—people, mostly with Romanian passports. Transnistria never was a legitimate part of the Romanian ethnic or historic area, and Moldova’s claims to it are as self-damaging as they are artificial. As for Abkhazia, it is a Georgian territory occupied by Russia, period, where the issue is foreign occupation, rather than self-determination. Prior to the Russian-supported forced separation and associated ethnic cleansing of Georgians, the local Abkhaz were only 17 percent of the population.

So much for the precedents an independent Kosovo would create, and so much for the worries in Madrid, Bratislava, or Bucharest, if the issue is treated as a general problem rather than as it is now—a balm for the allegedly victimized Albanians.

In addition, and certainly in the long term, one has to consider the “feelings” of relevant peoples (message to Foggy Bottom!) in the Balkans rather than of the Washington lobbyists. The Serbs are, perhaps unique among Europeans, born with a chip on their collective shoulder (just as Albanians are born with a victimhood obsession), but for those who believe centuries of historical experience are worth nothing, it should be recalled that Albanians are unpopular with all their neighbors (Greeks, Macedonians, Serbs, Montenegrins) and some further away—Romanians and Bulgarians. It may not be politically correct but the general opinion of all those is that Albanians are (even more) nationalist and violent—and that in a historically violent and nationalist area.

Seen in this context, the recent violence in Mitrovica should be no surprise. Whether manipulated from Serbia (as is likely) and/or rooted in local sentiments, the fact remains that unless major force is repeatedly applied by the foreign troops—i.e. the Europeans, since the UN, especially without Russian and Chinese support, is unlikely to even remain there for long—the area will secede. Whether the Europeans have the will, or even the means, to use such force is doubtful, especially as that would only offer more opportunities for Russian involvement. At best, an ambiguous situation will develop, with Pristina complaining, Brussels pretending that nothing serious is happening and Serbia treating the area as its own.

Another possible scenario, equally hopeless, is that the Serbian area of Bosnia will use the Kosovo precedent and organize a referendum to join Serbia—especially if, as is probable, the coming parliamentary elections of May 11 in the latter country bring nationalists to power in Belgrade. Then, once again, despite Washington’s claims that Kosovo is a unique case, the options will again be heavy use of force or de facto secession, making Bosnia even less viable than is now. Ultimately, it appears that the Serbs have learned from the Albanian methods: provoke reprisals, claim victimhood and raise the cost of any solution unacceptable to them. What started a decade ago as a policy of emotions based on CNN’s lachrymose images has boomeranged into a smoldering fire in Southeastern Europe.

Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They struck a village in Somalia, tribal areas in Pakistan, rural areas in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods in Iraq. Their troops are training and advising the Iraqi army and police as well as the new Afghan army, while their Special Operations forces are planning to train Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps in that country's wild, mountainous borderlands.

Their Vice President arrived in Baghdad not long before the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched its recent (failed) offensive against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in the southern oil city of Basra. To"discuss" their needs in their President's eternal War on Terror, two of their top diplomats, a deputy secretary of state and an assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, arrived in Pakistan -- to the helpless outrage of the local press -- on the very day newly elected Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was being given the oath of office. ("I don't think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day… right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms..." was the way Zaffar Abbas, editor of the newspaper Dawn, put it.)

At home, their politicians have nationally televised debates in which they fervently discuss just how quickly they would launch air assaults against Pakistan's tribal areas, without permission from the Pakistani government but based on"actionable intelligence" on terrorists. Their drones cruise the skies of the world looking for terrorist suspects to -- in the phrase of the hour -- "take out." Agents from their intelligence services have, these last years, roamed the planet, kidnapping terrorist suspects directly off the streets of major cities and transporting them to their own secret prisons, or those of other countries willing to employ torture methods. Their spy satellites circle the globe listening in on conversations wherever they please, while their military has divided the whole planet into" commands," the last of which, Africom, was just formed.

As far as they are concerned, nowhere do their interests not come into play; nowhere, in fact, are they not paramount. As their President put it recently,"If [our] strategic interests are not in Iraq -- the convergence point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin Laden's deputy has called 'the place for the greatest battle,' the country at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth -- then where are they?" (And you could easily substitute the names of other countries for Iraq.)

Their President makes a habit of regularly telling other countries what they"must" do."At the same time," he said recently,"the regimes in Iran and Syria must stop supporting violence and terror in Iraq." It's especially important to him and his officials that other nations not"interfere" in situations where, as in Iraq, they are so obviously"foreigners" and have no business; no fingers, that is, are to be caught in other people's cookie jars. Their Vice President made this point strikingly in an exchange with a TV interviewer:

"Q: So what message are you sending to Iran, and how tough are you prepared to get?

"Vice President: I think the message that the president sent clearly is that we do not want them doing what they can to try to destabilize the situation inside Iraq. We think it's very important that they keep their folks at home."

A range of other countries, all with a natural bent for"interference" or"meddling," must regularly be warned or threatened. After all, what needs to be prevented, according to a typical formulation of their President, is"foreign interference in the internal affairs of Iraq."

None of this advice do they apply to themselves for reasons far too obvious to explain. Wherever they go -- sometimes in huge numbers, usually well-armed, and, after a while, deeply entrenched in bases the size of small towns that they love to build -- they feel comfortable. They are, after all, defending their liberties by defending those of others elsewhere. Though there are natives of one brand or another everywhere, they consider themselves the planet's only true natives. Their motto might be: Wherever we hang our hats (or helmets) is home.

Others, who choose to fight them, automatically become aliens, intent as they are on destroying the stability of that planetary"home." So, for years, their military spokespeople referred to the Sunni insurgents they were battling in Iraq as "anti-Iraqi forces." It mattered little that almost all of them were, in fact, Iraqis; for the enemy is, by nature, so beyond the pale as to be a stranger to his or her own country or, just as likely, a cat's-paw of foreign forces and powers. Only when the very same"anti-Iraqi forces" suddenly decided to become allies were they suddenly granted the title, " concerned citizens," or even, more gloriously, "Sons of Iraq."

When off duty, their luckier soldiers have the option of taking"rest and recreation" in"the homeland" at places like the Hale Koa ("House of the Warrior") Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, or in the extended homeland at, say, the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in the Bavarian Alps or the Dragon Hill Lodge near thrilling downtown Seoul, South Korea -- all part of their global system of Armed Forces Recreation Centers.

This is their world -- and welcome to it.

It's not exactly a mystery what country I'm talking about. You knew from the beginning. Since the Soviet Union vanished in 1991, only one nation has made itself at home everywhere on Earth; only one nation has felt that the planet's interests and its own interests were essentially one; only one nation's military garrisons and patrols our world from Greenland to the tropics, from the sea bed to the edge of space; only one nation's military talks about its vast array of bases as its"footprint" on the planet; only one nation judges its essential and exceptional goodness, in motivation if nothing else, as justification for any act it may take.

Putting an Iraqi Face on Iraq

Soon, U.S. surge commander General David Petraeus will return to Washington to report to Congress on our"progress" in Iraq -- and he'll do so with the worst crisis in that country in almost a year still unresolved. He'll do so, in fact, shrouded in yet another strategic disaster for the Bush administration. With that in mind, let's take a moment to look back at just how, militarily at least, the Bush administration first made itself at home in Iraq.

In the U.S., the administration's lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq -- starting with the wholesale looting of Baghdad after American troops had taken the capital -- has been the subject of much debate and discussion in Congress and the media. While it's usually noted in passing that, amid the chaos, orders had in fact been issued to American troops to guard the Oil Ministry, little is made of that. In fact, orders for U.S. troops to guard that ministry and the Interior Ministry, and nothing else, were indeed given, which simply indicates that administration planning was extremely focused -- on oil and the secret police (and perhaps Saddam Hussein's secret archives).

In addition, we know that the administration ignored the 13-volume"Future of Iraq" project put together by the State Department to guide an occupation -- largely because its neocon officials were so intent on sidelining the State Department more generally. On the other hand, the Pentagon did plan for what it thought would matter. Specifically, from a front-page April 19, 2003 New York Times article, we know that, by the time the invasion began, the Pentagon already had on the drawing boards plans for building four permanent mega-bases in Iraq. (They were meant to replace our bases in Saudi Arabia.) And these were indeed built (along with others and the largest embassy on the planet) in more or less the locations originally described. From the beginning, whatever planning it didn't do, the Bush administration was certainly planning to make itself at home in Iraq in a big way for a long, long time.

Much has also been made of the disastrous, seat-of-the-pants decision by the administration, in the person of L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) then ruling Baghdad, to disband the Iraqi army. But few now recall what the administration, the CPA, and the Pentagon had in mind (and leaked to the press soon after the invasion) for a future Iraqi military of their dreams.

They had, in fact, reconceived the Iraqi army as a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed, largely border-guarding troops. Keep in mind that Saddam Hussein had a military of 400,000 heavily armed troops and -- until the First Gulf War in 1990 -- a powerful air force (as well as copious supplies of chemical weapons). In the Middle East, for a country to have only a 40,000 man military without tanks, artillery, or an air force to call on meant but one thing: that the U.S. military and the U.S. Air Force, from bases in Iraq and in the region, were to be Iraq's real fighting force in any crisis. This was the true planning message of the Bush administration and it indicated just how"at home" its officials thought they would be in occupied Iraq.

By the time it became obvious that such thinking was fantastical and George Bush was starting to repeat the mantra,"As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down," the idea of a 40,000-man force had been long forgotten. By then, the U.S. military was at work creating a large Iraqi army and national police force. But the effects of such planning remain debilitatingly present, even today.

After all, the" crack" Iraqi units sent into Basra by Prime Minister Maliki were still relatively lightly armed. (Hence, their complaints that the Sadrist militia they came up against were often better armed than they were.) They still had no significant Iraqi air force to call on, because as yet it hardly exists. When they got desperate, they had to call on U.S. and British air support as well as U.S. Special Forces units. And, of course, in the fighting in Basra, as in Baghdad where American units quickly entered the fray, they showed no particular flair for"standing up." In fact, according to the Associated Press's fine reporter Charles J. Hanley, the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now estimates that Iraq's military will not be able to guard the country's borders effectively until, at the earliest, 2018.

There was a period, back in 2004-05, when the Bush administration regularly wielded a telling image. They talked often about the importance of putting"an Iraqi face" on various aspects of the situation in that country. Here's a typical passage from the New York Times from that period:"By insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to put 'an Iraqi face' on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the ones talking to reporters, not Americans." This caught something of the strangeness of that moment, a strangeness that has yet to disappear. After all, as an image, to put a"face" on anything actually means to put a mask over an already present face, which was (and, even today, in military terms largely remains) American power in Iraq.

The presentation of the recent Maliki government offensive, launched on the eve of Petraeus's return, also represented, in part, an attempt to put an Iraqi face on American at-homeness in that country. The fictional story put out as the"Iraqi" offensive was launched -- printed up quite seriously in our media -- was that Maliki had only informed the American high command (and the British in Basra) of his prospective move in the hours just before it was launched. This was, on the face of it, ludicrous. The"Iraqi" army has been stood up -- trained, that is -- by U.S. advisors; some of its units have U.S. advisors embedded in them; it is almost totally reliant on the logistical support of the U.S. military. It could not move far offensively without the significant prior knowledge of U.S. commanders (and this was later admitted by the President's National Security Council Advisor Stephen J. Hadley).

While Maliki had his own reasons for launching his forces (and allied militias) against Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra, the Americans certainly imagined a triumphant moment for Petraeus in his upcoming hearings, thanks to new evidence that the Iraqi government was finally, in George Bush's words,"in the lead" and its military shaping up well. As Leila Fadel of the McClatchy Newspapers reported,"Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the Iraqi operation was a 'byproduct of the success' of the year-old U.S. troop surge." This was a fantasy, of course. And the result was the success of Sadr's forces from Basra to Baghdad -- and ongoing American attempts to disavow any real involvement in the planning of the offensive.

Grand Delusions

The United States is hardly the first empire whose representatives have felt at home anywhere in its world (if not, in past times, in the world). When you are at the peak of your imperial powers, you can ignore the problems and contradictions that such a feeling, such an attitude, naturally calls up. This is no longer the situation for the United States and so the contradictions ripen, the problems only grow, and the plunge into delusional thinking deepens.

Take just the seeming conundrum of the recent battle in Basra. On one side, you have an Iraqi army, trained for years by the Americans, to the tune of approximately $22 billion in U.S. funds. On the other side, you have an (at best) partially trained"militia" -- an"army" in name only. It may be that the Iranians have put some effort or money into equipping the Mahdi Army -- though the evidence for this is slim indeed -- but, if so, this would be minor by comparison.

When the two forces clashed, what was the result? Some Iraqi soldiers and policemen simply put down their weapons and, in certain cases, surrendered or went over to the other side, or deserted, or fought half-heartedly; while the Mahdis fought fiercely, cleverly, and, in the end, successfully, until called off in triumph by their leader. They"stood up" (just as they had against the full might of the American military in the southern holy city of Najaf back in 2004). Could there, then, be two different races of Iraqis, one set willing to fight with or without training or outside help, the other unwilling, no matter the support?

The American military faced a similar situation four decades ago in Vietnam, where American advisors training the South Vietnamese military regularly swore that they would turn in their brigades of Vietnamese troops for just a few platoons of Vietcong, who would stand and fight as if their lives depended on it.

Of course, the answer here is anything but mysterious. On the one hand, you have a foreign-trained, foreign-advised, foreign-supplied force with confused and divided loyalties that is only partially an"Iraqi" army; on the other, you have a local force, fighting in a community, for the safety and wellbeing of its own sons and wives, friends and relatives. The Mahdi Army members know why they fight and who they fight for. They have"faith," and not just in the religious sense. They are, in a word, at home.

The history of the last 200 years has regularly piled up evidence that this matters far more than firepower. Human beings, that is, regularly"stand up" for something other than shiny weapons or the interests of a foreign power, no matter how at home its leaders may think they are in your country. The inability to see this obvious point -- repeatedly and over decades -- represents delusional thinking stemming, at least in part, from an inability of Americans to imagine their own foreignness in the world.

In such cases, you misperceive who is on your side, why they are there, and what, exactly, they are capable of. You misunderstand what the actual natives of a place think of you. You don't grasp that, whatever the brute force and finances at your command, you, as a foreigner, may never understand the situation you believe you should control. Even the Maliki government itself, after all, is only"on our side" thanks to its abysmal weakness. (Otherwise, it would be far more closely allied with that other foreign power, Iran.) Sooner or later -- usually sooner -- you simply delude yourself. You mistake your trained army for an"Iraqi" or a"Vietnamese" one and so come to believe that, if only you adjust your counterinsurgency tactics correctly, it will fight like one. Then you act accordingly, which is, of course, disastrous.

Whatever General Petraeus says before Congress next week, however sane and pragmatic he sounds, however impressive looking his charts and graphs, it's worth keeping in mind that his testimony cannot help but be delusional, because it stems from delusional premises and it can lead only to further disaster for Americans and Iraqis.

Yes, of course, American planes and drones will continue to cruise the skies of the globe"taking out" enemies (or missing them and taking out citizens elsewhere whom we could care less about); American diplomats and high military officials will continue to travel the planet in packs, indicating, however politely, what politicians, military men, and diplomats elsewhere"must" do; and American military men will continue to train the Iraqi army in the hopes that, in 2018 if not sooner, it will stand up.

And yet, as long as we mistake ourselves for"the natives," as long as we are convinced that our interests are paramount everywhere, and feel that we must be part of the solution to every problem, our problems -- and the world's -- will only multiply.

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the"Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American"Empire."

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called"The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire -- or period of"imperialism."

I recall the classroom map (labeled"Western Expansion") which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called"The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes -- what we now call"ethnic cleansing" -- so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging" civilization" and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of"Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the"Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of"the five civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as"emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln's administration.

That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled"Mexican Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term"Manifest Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba:"We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."

The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn't the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word"imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war -- treated quickly and superficially in the history books -- gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.

The"Sole Superpower" Comes into View

Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later:"I was an errand boy for Wall Street."

At the very time I was learning this history -- the years after World War II -- the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.

In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home:"[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.

When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.

Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.

When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for"tin, rubber, oil."

Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I -- indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.

Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower -- even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union -- to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.

Justifying Empire

The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a"war on terrorism," many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew -- what we had in common was that we both read books -- that he considered this"an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of"The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States"to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this"influence" is benign, that the"purposes" -- whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones -- are noble, that this is an"imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address:"Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech"striking for its idealism."

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used"her navy and her army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates:"The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?