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ace: much of what you are saying relies on a TON of assumptions, most of which square with standard-issue neoconservative arguments about the war in iraq. the premise is, as you have stated, that the united states is "top dog"--by which i assume you mean that the us is the dominant military power in the world on paper at least. in technological terms, maybe, insofar as what counts is expensive shiny deadly toys. from this premise follows thatthe americans need to figure out a way to act on the world, only being to a certain extent in the world as a function of having more shiny expensive deadly toys than anyone else. from this problem follows a rationale for the invasion of iraq: it is about the first gulf war and the neocon interpretation of that war (lunatic though it is) which assumes that the otherwise totally victorious americans were hamstrung by the evil un and so could not invade iraq in 1991 and "finish the job"---so the invasion this time has nothing to do with any of the absurd justifications floated by the bush people: it was supposed to be a huge fuck you to the international community and the moment across which the united states would assume its predestined role in the world as military hegemon.
except that the bush people screwed it up.
the gambled and they lost.
all i see in your arguments about the war up to this point is an inability to get your head around this basic reality.
then i see a refusal to even consider that a central problem with iraq may follow from this hyper-nationalist go-it-more-or-less alone attitude particular to the neocons. you treat that logic as a straightjacket and seem to think that there is no way to alter it: which means that you, like your more prominent neocon bretheren, have turned a massive defeat into a parameter for thinking, and you positions, like those of the "bush plan" follow in a straight line from that.
it seems to me that this entire line of argument is at best circular, and at worst simply nuts.
the problem--well there are a lot of them, but i have to go so i'll outline one--is that the americans are a faction within the iraqi civil war and, as others have said above, are the CAUSE of the institutional breakdown that has (arguably) generated that civil war (this from the un assessment of the situation in yesterday's ny times--not sure if i agree with it, but it is convenient)....if anything about that is true, then the only rational way out of this mess is for the americans to begin constructing frameworks internationally that would enable them to begin rolling themselves out of iraq. because there is no way--no bloody way--that the americans can do anything constructive in iraq within the present logic of the conflict. these frameworks--maybe something on the order of another congress of vienna--will not happen overnight, and so would have to operate as a strategic element. there is no such strategy in the bush plan. so the troop "surge" seems absurd: a walk down the primrose path that the americans walked down in vietnam, escalation as a device to engender de-escalation blah blah blah: all because the neocon worldview is constructed to the exclusion of any such internationalization of this debacle, and that (i think at least) because to entertain such an option would be to concede defeat on their own terms. and that it seems they cannot do. and it seems that you cannot do it either.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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