The Rag Blog

09/19/07 “Truthdig” — — Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some other, fresher way to explain why “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the “democratically elected government” of “liberated” Iraq does not explicitly have the legal power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to Iraq accountable for their deadly actions.

Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi independence rising from the ashes of this failed American imperialist venture, Blackwater would have to fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior Ministry claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a U.S. State Department convoy through the streets of Baghdad fired “randomly at citizens” in a crowded square on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13 others. So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater to leave the country after what a government spokesman called a “flagrant assault … on Iraqi citizens.”

But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the power to control anything regarding the 182,000 privately contracted personnel working for the U.S. in Iraq? Don’t they know about Order 17, which former American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards, immunity from Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed since the supposed transfer of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bremer once headed, to the Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and guarded by Blackwater and other “private” soldiers.

They are “private” in the same fictional sense that our uniformed military is a “volunteer” force, since both are lured by the dollars offered by the same paymaster, the U.S. government. Contractors earn substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the uniformed military. All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by now in protest.

Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The U.S. government purchases whatever army it needs, which has led to the dependence upon private contract firms like Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus contract to protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq. That is why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki branded a “crime,” is so difficult to deal with. Iraqis are clearly demanding to rid their country of Blackwater and other contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said it would be scrutinizing the status of all private security firms working in the country.

But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As the Associated Press reported on Monday: “The U.S. clearly hoped the Iraqis would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of responsibility and compensation to the victim’s families — and not insist on expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate here without.” Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the U.S. Senate last week: “There is simply no way at all that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts.”

Consider the irony of that last statement — that the U.S. experiment in building democracy in Iraq is dependent upon the same garrisons of foreign mercenaries that drove the founders of our own country to launch the American Revolution. As George Washington warned in his farewell address, once the American government enters into these “foreign entanglements,” we lose the Republic, because public accountability is sacrificed to the necessities of war for empire.

Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of its revenue from the U.S. government — much of it in no-bid contracts aided, no doubt, by the lavish contributions to the Republican Party made by company founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents — its operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny. Blackwater and others in this international security racket operate as independent states of their own, subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the ones that the U.S. government applies to its own uniformed forces. “We are not simply a ‘private security company,’ ” Blackwater boasts on its corporate website. “We are a professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm … We have become the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?

09/19/07 “ICH ” — — I am consistently amazed at things that right-wing nut jobs throw at me to justify their support of an unjustifiable war. Seriously, when you watch Generals, Ambassadors, Senators and Congress Reps and pundits who still cheerlead for a miserable, failed and murderous policy you can almost see the skepticism in their eyes, too. They know they are lying for their masters now, if they, like George and Dick didn’t always know they were lying.

However, a measly segment of our population are still so willingly ill-informed and ignorant of the facts are grasping for straws.

At the recent “Support for our Troops” rally that was held by the Republican backed and funded Move America Forward and Gathering of Eagles (who I like to call the “Smattering of Pigeons”) groups last Saturday where they had 1/100th of the numbers of the true “Support the Troops” (and the people of Iraq) rally and march that was sponsored by the ANSWER Coalition, we pro-peace people were even called “Communists” several times. I have asked people what they mean when they call me that so-last century epithet and they say: “Yeah, you hate America.” Well, for all of those who have eyes but refuse to see, and ears but refuse to hear, this is what Communist means:

Someone who supports communism which is a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

I don’t see how wanting peace and wanting our government to finally quit lying to us and stop killing people to further their hegemonic goals of bringing corporate America to every corner of the globe makes us Communists; maybe Humanists, patriots or great Americans, but Communists, no. Some people in America do belong to the Communist party, which is not against the law, and it is also not against the law to be a Muslim, yet.

One of the more morally reprehensible notes from the supporters of death I receive is the one that goes something like this: “I am for peace, too, but not at the expense of my family.” These people are saying that it is okay to ruin my family and thousands of other families in the US who have been torn apart like the bodies of our loved ones to keep other families “safe.” I have news for these people, as bad as the sacrifices have been for some families in America, the people of Iraq have suffered far more for the deceptions and greed of BushCo. Think about this: America killed over a million Iraqis between Gulf I and this current occupation, and that did not keep my family safe, or the families of the people killed in 9-11. How can one sleep at night thinking that her family is safe when so many people are devastated by the policies that she thinks is keeping her family safe? Never mind the National Intelligence Estimates that have rightly showed that our transgressions in Iraq and such inhumane prison camps as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are increasing Islamic extremism.

What makes Mrs. Safety think that the Iraqi babies are less precious than her babies? Does the geographic accident of her baby’s births give them more right to be safe than the Iraqi babies? Maybe Mrs. Safety thinks that her babies deserve more protection because they are white and Christian? Or just maybe because they are hers?

I spent 24 years of my children’s lives thinking that I was doing everything I could to protect them. I guarded the boundaries of my family like a Doberman. I didn’t let anything bad in those boundaries to hurt my children until 2000 when an Army recruiter broke through my defenses to lie like a son of a bitch to my son who would ultimately be killed so Mrs. Safety’s babies could have the illusion and delusion of safety. Casey and my family paid a dear price for my thinking that my babies and my boundaries are the only ones that were precious and worth protecting. It will only be when we realize that all human life if precious and worthy of protection and know that all of the world’s children belong to all of us that war will stop being used as a tool in Satan’s tool-box of greed and destruction.

Many Muslims and American soldiers have told me that I may have lost a son, but I have gained millions of sons and daughters in my work for global peace and understanding.

They are all our sons and daughters as Casey was your son.

[Translator’s Introduction: The article below by Fawwaz Traboulsi first appeared in Arabic in the Beirut daily as-Safir on July 5, 2007.

Was the Iraq war inevitable? The anti-war movement in the West did what it could to prevent it. On February 15, 2003, in hundreds of American, European, and other cities across the globe an estimated ten million people demonstrated against the impending war. Massive demonstrations continued during the weeks preceding the invasion on March 20, 2003. World public opinion notwithstanding, the Bush administration plunged headlong into the war, and eventual catastrophe, with delusional fantasies: they would quickly win in a “shock-and-awe” campaign and the Iraqi people would welcome the invading troops with “rice and flowers” — so they proclaimed.

What about the anti-war movement in Arab countries? There were demonstrations in Arab cities in the weeks preceding the invasion, to be sure, some turning violent in confrontations with the police (chiefly in Cairo); but these were few and sparse, sometimes organized by the state, and far smaller than anything witnessed in the West. Anecdotal evidence from expatriate Arab groups indicated a far larger turnout of Arabs abroad than in their home countries. No doubt the repressive police states that are the norm in most of the Arab world made it difficult to organize anti-war rallies without government authorization. Perhaps also the masses in Arab countries were weary of marching in demonstrations that would be perceived in support of Saddam Hussein’s reviled government. But what about a wider oppositional movement in years preceding the war, if not in Iraq then in neighboring countries, that should have held Saddam Hussein and his government (and other despotic Arab regimes) accountable for their policies and deeds? What about intellectuals and journalists who should have written, and could still write critically, in a press whose freedom in many places (at least in Lebanon and the Gulf states) had not been curtailed? In the article below, Traboulsi addresses an Arab audience that has not always shown a disposition to take to task Saddam Hussein’s regime and others like it. A particular target of Traboulsi’s criticism are the political commentators that are prone to attribute the Arabs’ woes to dark conspiracies or to external forces beyond their control, thus deflecting much of the blame from failed and discredited rulers. In doing so, these political commentators contribute, if not to public apathy and demobilization, then to a feeling of impotence and despair against current conditions. — Assaf Kfoury]

For anyone reviewing the record, it is now plain that the president of the United States was lying to the American people, his allies and the world when he was brandishing the specter of “weapons of mass destruction” as justification for the decision to invade Iraq. Not only was George W. Bush lying when he maintained WMD threatened the security of Iraq’s neighbors, he managed to push the charade to the point of convincing a large segment of American and world public opinion that these weapons posed a direct threat to the security of the United States itself. His dutiful acolyte Tony Blair elevated the lie to an extra level of demagogy when he declared that Iraq’s chemical weapons could be set and launched within 45 minutes!

The lie about WMD was coupled with another lie, this one about a presumed connection between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda, which has since been totally exposed as a fabrication. Osama Bin Laden can now send reams of thanks to the American president for having turned Iraq into a haven for al-Qaeda and other Jihadi organizations. The Mesopotamian lands became a producer and exporter of terrorists within a brief period of importing them during the first few months of the occupation. And Bin Laden can double and redouble his thanks to the American president who has acted, wittingly or not, so as to help make al-Qaeda a truly international terrorist network which now reaches large portions of the planet.

While we recount lies that were used to justify the war, let’s not forget that American neo-conservatives had been clamoring for regime change in Iraq since 1995. We now know preparations for regime change by force had been underway before the terrorist operation of September 11, 2001, and the latter provided the perfect excuse to put the plan to invade Iraq into action.

We know all of that, and a lot more, about the background that led to the war from the American side. But what about the background from the Iraqi side? We know very little about the latter and there does not seem to be much interest in finding out more. Nonetheless, during the WMD crisis in the months right before the invasion, there was one person in Iraq who knew with absolute certainty the non-existence of WMD — this person was of course Saddam Hussein.

So, a question is in order: Why did Saddam Hussein procrastinate for months on end before permitting UN inspectors to proceed with the search for WMD? And why did he put up all sorts of obstacles before finally agreeing to let the inspectors freely pursue their assignment? By the time he agreed it was too late to stop or impede the inexorable drive to war. Many will rush to preempt the question with a flat answer: They were going to attack Iraq regardless!

The same answer came in response to another question several years before: Why didn’t Saddam Hussein order his troops to withdraw from Kuwait in 1991 before the UN deadline? Had he done so, he would have invalidated the main and official reason the US and its allies used to attack Iraq in 1991.

In both situations, Saddam Hussein did not undertake to do any of the necessary steps to undercut the plans of the powers arrayed against Iraq. An attempt to do so may or may not have worked, but why refrain from it? There is no need to speculate why Saddam Hussein acted the way he did. He is no longer alive so that we could still hope he would be asked these questions in front of a truly independent Iraqi court — a court that would judge him for the totality of his crimes and policies, not for only one relatively minor crime which, in the event, led to his execution in an act of tribal vengeance.

Was there a way to prevent the United States from invading Iraq?

Those who maintain the inevitability of the invasion, regardless of the Iraqi regime’s conduct, repeat a logic heard before in justification of every war and every Arab defeat. That sort of logic of fated events complements another justificatory logic, this one preoccupied with conspiracies where the idea of a “trap” is central to the plot: After every war and every defeat, it must be that the unsuspecting leader fell into a “trap” set by his enemies. Some have said that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the Second Gulf War in 1991 resulted from his falling into a “trap” set by US Ambassador April Glaspie, who let him understand that her government would not intervene in inter-Arab conflicts, which led him to believe he would have a free hand in acting against Kuwait!

What is truly amazing in the conduct of our Arab rulers is that, while they literally follow the principles of Machiavelli’s book “The Prince” when it comes to devising forms of internal repression and tyranny, they invariably fail to pay attention to the Prince’s advice in being expert like the fox in uncovering “traps” and avoiding them. If they keep falling into “traps”, it then stands to reason our rulers should be made accountable rather than absolved for their failure.

These questions may now seem from a different bygone time, but they haven’t lost any of their relevance as we watch the unrelenting horrors in today’s Iraq. There may be a lesson in pondering them. May they contribute to put an end to that pernicious habit of elevating defeated leaders to heroes — these leaders who were often rewarded by promoting them to absolute ruler or by renewing their mandate by acclamation after … a war they did not know how to avoid or a defeat that brought destruction to their country and their people!

Editor’s Note: At least the capitalists behind the death squads have been found guilty of murdering banana workers, something they have been doing for more than a century. It remains to convict other major multi-national corporate murders such as Coca-Cola, Nestle… Ron Ridenour, columnist.

A US federal court let Chiquita bosses off the hook on Monday, imposing a mere $25 million (£12.5m) fine on the multinational for payments that it made to Colombian death squads between 1997 and 2004.

Colombian Justice and Interior Minister Carlos Holguin said that the plea agreement in the Chiquita case “is not worthy of US justice, because it gives the idea that impunity can be bought for a few million dollars.

Mr Holguin told Bogota’s Radio Caracol that he found it surprising that “with a payment of $25 million, an amount so insignificant for a multinational the size of Chiquita, people are granted impunity who, in one way or another, were factors and accomplices in the horrendous crimes committed by the self-defence groups.”

Chiquita bosses, who enjoy annual revenues of about $4.5 billion (£2.2bn), had proposed the $25 million fine in March.

US district judge Royce Lamberth approved the deal, which also places the company on probation for five years.

The banana company has admitted to paying about $1.7 million (£850,000) to the notorious United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, known as AUC for its Spanish initials.

The payments were approved by senior executives of the firm, according to court documents, and continued even after the disclosures to the Justice Department, despite insistent warnings to the boardroom from Chiquita’s lawyers.

But the Justice Department said in a sentencing memo last week that it had decided against charging 10 Chiquita bosses involved in the payoffs.

Among those who had been under investigation were former Chiquita chief executive Cyrus Freidheim, who is now boss of the Sun-Times Media Group and former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Roderick Hills, who served on Chiquita’s board and is married to Carla Hills, who served as the US trade representative under former US president George H.W. Bush.

Chiquita senior vice president and general counsel James Thompson crowed that the Justice Department had made “the correct decision, which reflected the good-faith efforts” that the company had made to deal with a “difficult” situation.

Federal prosecutor Jonathan Malis emphasised the companies’ “co-operation,” while noting that “Chiquita was funding the bullets which killed innocent Colombians.”

The AUC has been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia’s civil conflict and for a sizable percentage of the country’s cocaine exports.

SAN FRANCISCO – We are being walled in. Every second that we stay here, they are adding another inch to the wall they are building along the southern border of this country and the northern one of the next country down. The border wall will eventually extend 1964 miles between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, roughly six times the length of the wall the Israelis are throwing up inside Palestine and 20 times that of the Berlin Wall, which once separated the totalitarians from the so-called free world.

The Wall is a project of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Guard, and a gaggle of corporate predators. It is only congruent that Israeli security planners were brought in for consultations and a sort of perverse poetic justice that a San Diego subcontractor has been indicted for exploiting the labor of the very undocumented workers the Wall is being built to keep out.

Those who build this Wall tell us that it will keep illegal people out of the United States of North America but no person is illegal. It is not yet against the law to be alive except maybe in Bush’s Iraq. Although the Border Wall is designed to keep workers on the other side, the goods they produce and the services they provide are perfectly free to pass through the barrier from one corporate predator to another.

Homeland Security, a wholly owned subsidiary of the globalizers of greed, argues that they are building this Wall for our own protection. That the illegal people on the other side are all potential terrorists. This is the same reason that Israel builds the notorious “security barrier” which prevents Palestinian farmers from tending their fields and the olive trees they have nurtured since biblical times. This is the same reason that the Army Corps of Engineers throws up blast walls between neighborhoods in Baghdad and between those neighborhoods and the increasingly vulnerable Green Zone. Indeed, we all live in the Green Zone now.

The Army Corps of Engineers is in the wall business. Perhaps the only wall the corps does not build is between the lower ninth ward of New Orleans and the sea which engulfed that vibrant black neighborhood two years ago this past August 29. The Army Corps of Engineers has its priorities.

We watch them as they wall us in, as if it is not happening to us. We watch them as they pour the concrete, string up the razor wire, install the searchlights and the electronic sensors, the surveillance cameras, the armed patrols and snarling dogs and unmanned drones. We do not understand yet that they are trying to keep us from breaking out of the compound.

They need to keep us walled in here so that we will know no other reality. So that we will always keep buying their useless junk and pledging allegiance to corporate vampires. There is a reason why they call it Wall Street.

We are allowing them to wall us in into their war. Bush lays it on trowel by trowel. It’s just like building fences down on the ranch. That’s what he calls the Border Wall. A fence. You thought there was a way out of here? That the Democrats would throw up ladders to get across this Wall of War? The fix has been in since last November’s elections.

Now Bush flies at night to a photo op in Anbar, evading the press corps in the underground passages beneath the White House. Now General BetrayUs, a ventriloquist’s dummy of Goebbelian dimensions, oozes to a willingly bamboozled Congress that Iraq is all better now. Now Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Lee roll over at their Master’s Voice and vote to tag a few hundred more miles on to this Wall of lies. We will never be able to leave now. We have walled ourselves into Iraq.

I am a writer. I build my walls out of words but the only word for our times is arrrggghhh!

We are the builders of our own walls. We have walled ourselves into our own fears, bolted the doors and windows and hunkered down deep in the compartmentalized bunkers they force us to rent each month with our blood and our sweat. We do not even know who lives on the other side of the six inches of sheet rock that separates us from our next-door neighbors. All we can think is that they want our stuff. Bush said that. They want what we have. According to the newest numbers, there are nine guns for every 10 red-blooded citizens of the United Snakes (note – undocumented workers are not included in this sampling.)

Fear is a big item in the wall business. You can’t build one without it. The bigger the fear the taller the Wall and the taller the Wall, the greater the profits. The Blackwaters and the Dynecorps have made their fortunes keeping the looters at bay. How many folks on your block or in your building are employed to guard someone else’s property or person?

Why do they hate us so much, Bush wailed as the towers were tumbling six 9/11s ago now? No one ever quite answered that extremely crucial question. Ignorance requires active participation and we are walling ourselves into the mind-numbing ignorance of the eternally lobotomized.

We choose to avoid what is on the other side of the Wall. We do not know what it looks like over there or how it smells. The garbage pits of Tijuana where our own offal is dumped every day to the delight of emaciated Indian scavengers. The bloated bellies of the starvation army stretching from TJ to Tierra del Fuego. The stench of shit and blood hanging heavily over Baghdad this morning.

We don’t care. We are so scared by it all that we can’t allow ourselves to care. We punch up the remote and the screen hides us from the rest of the world. We bust up a joint and forget that we live in the shadow of the Wall and we cannot get out of here.

We are stuck inside the intestinal Walls of the beast’s belly. There isn’t much light in here and we cannot see out. We cannot see how we look to others. We cannot see what is in their eyes. We will never learn the answer to Bush’s question after 9/11 took his mind away. Why do they hate us so much?

I have a dream. It is their nightmare. I dream that we are locked up in some maximum security prison, maybe old Folsom or Abu Ghraib or the T. Don Hutto detention center, and the word on the grapevine is “jailbreak!” We listen up for the signal and when it comes, we let each other out of our cages, overwhelm the guards, and scale the Wall on ropes fashioned from our bed sheets. At the top we stop to catch our collective breath and take a look at what the world really looks like on the other side. For once, we cannot see the Wall.

The insurgents who were shooting at U.S. troops six months ago are now on the payroll [includes video].

Title: Director’s Cut: New Video shows the truth in Anbar that Petraeus does not want us to see.

When Bush was in Iraq two weeks ago he posed for photographs with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the Anbar Awakening, an alliance of Sunni tribes who vow to back the United States and fight against al Qaeda.

Last Monday, General Petraeus testified to Congress that “a year ago” Anbar province “was assessed ‘lost’ politically … Today, it is a model of what happens when local leaders and citizens decide to oppose al Qaeda and reject its Taliban-like ideology.”

Three days later, the assassination of Abu Risha in Ramadi dramatically undercut Bush and Petraeus’ claims of Anbar victory and peacekeeping. But what else is the administration keeping from us about Anbar?

Rick Rowley, a journalist and independent filmmaker of Big Noise Films, was one of the last people to videotape and interview the Sunni sheikh, and his video report Uncovering the Truth Behind the Anbar Success Story, presents a very different picture of the Anbar Awakening.

Embedded with the U.S. Army and Iraqi militias, Rowley shows us that the Sunni “freedom fighters” with whom the United States is now allied are not just insurgents who had been killing Americans but war criminals responsible for sectarian cleansing.

Rowley, and his co-producers David Enders and Hiba Dawood, are the only Western journalists to bring a camera into the refugee camp where the displaced Shiites recount being attacked, bombed and driven out by the very tribes Petraeus and Bush are hailing as heroes.

Rowley’s report, which includes interviews with candid U.S. soldiers and footage of a military commander handing a Sunni leader a wad of cash, suggests the role of bribery and coercion in building alliances that serve short-term goals in Anbar province, but in the long run deepen a multisided civil war. I talked to Rick Rowley about his report and what he thinks it indicates about Iraq’s future.

Katie Halper: What brought you to Iraq, and what were you hoping to capture?

Rick Rowley: We knew that one of the major stories the Army was going to use to justify keeping troops there was the supposed success in Anbar. The first investigation we did was into the Anbar reconciliation program. We spent six weeks crisscrossing Iraq, embedding with different militias to try to get a picture of the state of Iraq during the surge.

KH: You were the last Western journalists to videotape an interview with Abu Risha. What was he like? What was his significance?

RR: He seemed stiff and scripted. He told us some incredible lies during the interview. Three times he said he was the leader of all the Arab tribes of Iraq — both Shia and Sunni. And like a bad poker player’s tell, every time he told a lie he sniffed loudly.

He was a figurehead for a movement, the face they put on this story. Operationally, militarily, he wasn’t particularly important. In his interview with us he said there was 100 percent security in Ramadi, that he was head of all of the tribes in Iraq. That has proven, in a horrifying way, to not be true. His assassination has blown a hole in the American story about security in Anbar. It’s going to have a chilling effect on other tribes in other parts of the country who were thinking it might be safe to work with the Americans.

KH: Bush and Petraeus are hailing our alliance with Sunni tribes in Anbar. Can you tell us about these “freedom fighters” the U.S. is now allied with?

Once a mighty war god, Bush has run out of tricks, troops and time. Will Americans finally rise up to stop his endless war?

Sept. 18, 2007 | The Iraq war has moved into a weird purgatorial endgame. Almost no one believes in it anymore, but it keeps going. Americans keep dying, Iraq continues to fall apart, there is no end in sight, but nothing changes. Much of the country wants the war to end, but the political system is deadlocked. As George W. Bush’s presidency winds down, there will be a crucial struggle between two opposed forces: inertia vs. outrage, resignation vs. engagement. At stake is not just what we do in Iraq but a deeper question: Do we care?

If history holds, the war will just keep rolling along as an anesthetized nation watches dumbly from the sidelines. Bush has succeeded in making an endless, pointless war seem normal. He just won another tactical victory, convincing wavering GOP politicians to sign off on his stay-the-course policy. A great lassitude seems to have descended over the country. The debate has gone on for too long, and the outcome is always the same. No one even wants to think about it anymore. The war is invisible.

But beneath the surface, something may have changed. Most Americans have been skeptical of Bush’s war and everything he has said about it for a year or more. Still, they have entertained hope that the situation in Iraq would improve. Bush’s “surge” was his last gambit: Everyone knew that there were no more troops to throw in. It had to work. Now that it is clear that it didn’t, there is nothing else Bush can do.

This is an unprecedented situation. Bush always had another trick up his sleeve, another milestone to point to, another winning tactic to propose. But he has run out of tricks. The thing he dreaded most has come to pass: He is now completely at the mercy of events in Iraq.

Of course, Bush was always hostage to the harsh reality of Iraq. But he was able to counter that reality by invoking his master narrative about how Iraq was the front line of the war on terror, a battle of good vs. evil, a crucial battle on which the fate of the West depended. Even though Americans increasingly rejected that narrative, it had enough resonance to perform its function. At least Bush came across as consistent.

Now Bush’s grand war story has not only been discredited by reality, he himself has been forced to adjust it in ways that make him look both hypocritical and powerless. His aura as an aggressive winner has been destroyed. This fact has not sunk in yet, but it could lead to the final erosion of American support for the war.

Bush has justified the war by arguing that it’s necessary to fight terrorism, and that we’re winning. Gen. Petraeus bought more time for Bush by arguing that the surge had resulted in some minor tactical victories. But by declining to say whether the war in Iraq was making us safer, Petraeus did more damage to Bush’s justifications for the war than all of the experts who have concluded that the war has made America less safe. Both Petraeus and Iraq ambassador Ryan Crocker admitted that we are not winning the real war in Iraq, the political one, and there are no realistic expectations of doing so.

Only dead-enders still believe that Bush’s Iraq war is either winnable or constitutes “the front line of the war on terror.” Most Americans see it as a terrible blunder that has thrown Americans into the middle of a civil war, and that is breeding far more terrorists than it is eliminating. Petraeus and Crocker’s reports only confirmed these beliefs. Bush has no recourse. These are his people. And he doesn’t have any more to trot out.

Trapped by reality, Bush can no longer use his time-tested rhetoric to rally America. Instead, he is forced to contradict his own grand ideological claims. His pathetic speech last week was a preview of what we are likely to see in the diminished last phase of his presidency. The grand rhetoric about “victory” was replaced by the weird CEO-like phrase “return on success,” an expression so plastic it radiated “corporate bullshit spin” from every syllable. Worse, Bush had to acknowledge the destructive facts on the ground. He had to deal with the painful reality that unless he extends tours of duty, which would be political suicide, he has to start bringing troops home, no matter what the situation in Iraq is. This forced him to make the absurd claim that the surge’s “success” in Iraq has made it possible to bring home 5,700 troops by Christmas. Disregarding the fact that these troops were slated to come home anyway, not even Bush’s most ardent supporters could believe that there is any actual connection between the allegedly “improving” situation in Iraq and the redeployment of 5,700 troops.

By insisting that the stakes in the war are nothing less than the fate of Western civilization, yet refusing to impose a draft or ask Americans to make real sacrifices, Bush has painted himself into a corner. If the war in Iraq was really the vital front line of the war against terror that Bush claims it is, he should not be pulling troops out, but pouring more in — even if it meant reinstating the draft. For the first time, Bush’s actions explicitly belie his words. Bush, once the great and powerful war god, now comes across as a desperate politician hiding behind a curtain, trying to score popularity points by bringing troops home while simultaneously warning of apocalypse if we lose the war. Bush’s obvious hypocrisy and powerlessness, exacerbated by his lame-duck status, have caused him to lose his image of invincibility — the only thing he ever had going for him.

In short, we’re now in the endgame, and everyone knows it. Even the entropic force of war eventually runs out. The fact that even staunchly conservative GOP senators like Elizabeth Dole are edging away from Bush shows how much the ground has shifted.

Unless a miracle happens to stabilize Iraq in the next six months, the end of Bush’s presidency will be slow-motion political death for him. Each bombing, each sectarian murder, each failure of the Iraqi factions to reach agreement will be another nail in his coffin. If the situation in Iraq worsens, which is, sadly, the most likely scenario, Bush cannot send more troops in, because there are none to send. But if he pulls them out, as he will be under enormous pressure to do, he will look like a weakling and a hypocrite. There is no way for him to get out of this self-created box — except by ratcheting up tensions with Iran and Syria in the hopes of provoking an accidentally-on-purpose regional war that would serve as a do-over for his entire misguided Middle East adventure. Insane as that idea would be, he might grab at it to save himself.

Assuming that this nightmare doesn’t materialize, the best-case scenario would be a political breakthrough, in which moderate GOP politicians, terrified of losing their seats in 2008, join with Democrats to force Bush to begin ending the war. The time has never been more propitious.

But America is being pulled in opposite directions. The failure of the war, and Bush’s meltdown, could lead Americans to turn decisively against it. But it could also heighten the exhausted passivity, the resignation, and the sheer apathy that have marked America’s response to the war.

The deepest, darkest fear of those opposed to the war is that Americans simply don’t care enough to end it. The dead and the maimed are hidden from view. The war’s economic impact goes unnoticed. The lack of a draft means that the rich and powerful have no personal stake in the war. Its effect on most Americans, in short, is zero. It is almost as if it is being fought by a mercenary army on behalf of some unknown entity. It may go down in history as the first war that never ended because people forgot its existence.

So America needs to wake up. Those opposed to the war, of whatever political persuasion, need to appropriate that old World War II chestnut, “Don’t you know there’s a war going on?” We need to think about what we could do with the $550 billion the war has cost so far. We need to remember that every day that this war goes on, jihadis rejoice, the chances of a devastating regional confrontation increase and our national security is jeopardized. Above all, we need to remember that real people are dying every day in this war — Americans and Iraqis.

One of the many tragedies of Bush’s response to 9/11 was that he squandered the sense of national unity that sprang up after the terror attacks. The country today is more bitterly divided than at any time since Vietnam. But we can regain that unity — not through partisanship, not through Bush-hating, but through a renewed acknowledgment of our responsibility to each other. We need to remember that every American who falls in Iraq is someone’s son or daughter. We need to commit ourselves to working with the Iraqis, whom we have so terribly wronged, and with the rest of the world to ensure that our departure will not cause Iraq’s people to suffer even more. We need to remember that war is not normal, that it is the worst thing in the world, to be undertaken only in extreme need. And we need to remember that a nation that does not rise up when arrogant and foolish leaders sacrifice its less privileged members is in danger of becoming a nation in name only.