Stirling Newberry has done a very good job explaining why and how we are losing the war in Iraq. I have no deep analysis to add to his account, I just want to raise the question: What happens politically as our impending loss becomes more obvious?
One thing is clearly NOT going to happen: W is not going to call a press conference and say, "I made a long series of mistakes and got a lot of good and innocent people killed for nothing. Because of my incompetence, America and the World are much worse off."
He's going to need an exit scenario that lets him blame someone else. Who?
Denial Requires Scapegoats
The three major scapegoat candidates are (1) us -- that traitorous liberal left that stabbed America's courageous troops in the back; (2) the Iraqi people, who couldn't accept W's generous gift of Democracy; and (3) the troops, or at least a few bad apples among the troops.
It won't just be Bush looking for scapegoats. The supporters of the war -- especially the kind of people who go on believing in WMD and an al Qaida connection -- aren't going to be able to grok watching our soldiers get their butts kicked. It will be painful (for us as well as them) and it will make them (and us) angry. Unlike us, they won't be able to focus their anger on the real culprit -- Bush. That inability will create a major problem for them.
Psychology tells us that denial is a fearsome thing. As the situation in Iraq continues to get worse, we can expect both the administration and the supporters of the war to thrash around madly in order to avoid recognizing the truth. Some of this will be unconscious, and some of it will be intentional propaganda, but the effect will be the same. So what kind of thrashing should we be prepared for?
William Pfaff refers to "the Dresden option" -- by which I presume he means genocidal fire-bombing -- and suggests that the Falluja attack was a step in this direction. "Dresden" would clearly go hand-in-hand with a blame-the-Iraqis scenario: We tried to be good to them, we tried to give them Democracy, and they turned on us. They had it coming.
Dresden, of course, raises the psychological stakes. In order to avoid facing up to his guilt, Bush (and his supporters) would take on more guilt. Dresden is a short-term way of coping, not an exit strategy.
How the Bush Administration Operates
Having watched the Bush propaganda machine for a full term now, we can identify its characteristic tools:
Multiple weak rationales. Remember the build-up to the Iraq War? War promoters shifted among a number of justifications for the invasion: WMD, defending the honor of the UN, making Iraq a model of Arab democracy, the al Qaida connection, saving the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyranny, etc. Rarely did I hear anyone defend one of these rationales when it was questioned. Instead, the war promoters would just jump to another justification. Tax cuts have been promoted in a similar fashion.
Misdirection. The Afghan War was packaged as a quick and dramatic success: The Taliban was destroyed and democracy was being installed in Kabul with hardly any US casualties. This story has stayed in the minds of most of the public because the administration shifted their attention to Iraq before the Afghan story started falling apart. In fact, we're still taking casualties in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is alive and well, but nobody notices.
Raising the color-coded terror level has been another misdirection tactic. Terror warnings have been well timed to divert attention whenever the news cycle was going against Bush.
Scare tactics. In order to cover the lack of evidence for Saddam's WMDs, Condi Rice started talking about mushroom clouds. The basic tactic is: There's no time to look at the evidence. We need to DO SOMETHING, and we need to do it RIGHT NOW.
String them along. Herbert Hoover used to say that prosperity was just around the corner. The Bush people have had us looking around multiple corners in Iraq. There is always something a month or two off that will make all the difference: We'll capture Saddam, or we'll turn over sovereignty, or we'll retake Falluja. Now the January elections are supposed to fix everything. Come February, there will be some other salvation-point for us to anticipate.
Vietnam II
As the situation deteriorates, there will be multiple scapegoats. Whenever the guilt of one is questioned, the administration will start blaming another.
We will unleash increasing amounts of Hell in the Sunni triangle (because they have it coming). When over-the-top atrocities can't be covered up, blame will be pushed as far down the chain-of-command as possible, as at Abu Ghraib.
The Dresden option will provoke protests in the US, of course, but Bush can use that to his advantage. His surrogates will blame the protesters for encouraging our enemies -- they're the reason we haven't already won. Expect demonstrations to be broken up violently, as in the late Vietnam era.
Particularly intense, and at times violent, will be the clashes between pro-war and anti-war veterans. The Vietnam-era pattern will repeat: Some veterans will come home horrified by what they did and what they saw, and will be determined to put a stop to it. Others will be equally determined to believe that they did what they had to do and are heroes. (It will be interesting to see whether Kerry and other anti-Vietnam-War veterans will have the courage to support their Iraq counterparts openly.)
But these are all short-term answers to the long-term blame problem. Sooner or later, Bush will need a more permanent solution.
The Escape Scenario
Eventually, even the Bush people will realize that the war is lost. At that point, this scenario will seem irresistable to them:
- Give Allawi or some other Shiite strongman a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy. Encourage the Shia to believe that we will support them to the end.
- Unleash such Hell in the Sunni triangle that it will take a few months for the resistance to pick up the pieces. Mass arrests of dissidents in the Shia south and Kurdish north should keep the lid on for a similar length of time.
- Create a diversion -- either a nuclear scare with North Korea or some real or imagined terrorist threat in the US. Have everyone checking their mail for white powder. If liberal groups can be implicated, so much the better.
- During the panic, pull the US troops out of Iraq -- because the war is over and we won. Have a parade. Put W in one of his Mussolini-style military outfits and let him hand out a lot of medals.
- Pay no attention when the Shia government falls a few months later. We gave them a democracy, but they couldn't hold on to it. It's their fault; Arabs don't have what it takes.