From the watch:

The American Dilemma

As many people warned before Bush took us into war, the problem was not the war itself. The really ugly problem would be dealing with the aftermath. Well, now we are well and truly stuck in a quagmire, with no end in sight. Today when the costs of empire are being exposed and both our soldiers and the Iraqis are dying, it looks increasingly like there are no good answers to our dilemma: how can we extract ourselves from this mess without creating greater carnage and leaving even more disaster in our wake?

One of the principle objectives of the Bush Cabal was to create the American empire. They believed that the reason America was endangered by terrorism was because it was not sufficiently assertive. Right after 9/11, the Weekly Standard published an article called The Case for American Empire stating that after dealing with Afghanistan, America should then take care of Iraq.

Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq. It will probably not be possible to remove Saddam quickly without a U.S. invasion and occupation–though it will hardly require half a million men, since Saddam’s army is much diminished since the Gulf War, and we will probably have plenty of help from Iraqis, once they trust that we intend to finish the job this time. Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region’s many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us.

So, now we have our empire, but it is messy (or as Donald Rumsfeld put it “untidy”). And it looks like the opportunists that they were counting on to help run the country are not quite the partners we were hoping to find to help us with our war on terrorism.

Steve Gilliard has a couple of excellent posts up at Kos’s place that summarize the problems.

The situation for our troops is becoming more untenable as Steve Soto reports. Now that it is increasingly evident that our troops are there for the long haul and starting to get pretty unhappy about this, what is the response from their leadership? Why, provide them a patriotic magazine that tells them what a wonderful thing they’ve done and why things are just peachy. (Courtesy of LesterNYC in a dKos comment thread.)

This seems so apropos of the Bushies. Remember how providing better media coverage of the US to the Arabic world was supposed to let them know that we are the good guys and we’re on their side? The funny thing is, they see their propaganda working here, so they think that they just need to “massage” the message right and everyone will be happy and dumb. Why can’t they understand that sometimes people want to have real substance and not just a fluffy ad that promises one thing, but never delivers. If the Bushies had really wanted to make an empire work in Iraq, they would have at least figured out how to get the hospitals, electricity and water back up and running before turning their attention to selling the oil.

There’s some good stuff about Iraq at Edo Charrette Blog and The Soap Source under their Iraq section..

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