('Zugzwang': Situation in which a chess player whose turn it is to move cannot do so without losing a piece.)

Wayne Brown

***
'.future historians will wonder how it happened that the United States came halfway around the world, suffered more than 1,200 dead and spent $200 billion to help install an Iraqi government whose key leaders were trained in Iran.'
(David Ignatius, 'How Iran Is Winning Iraq', Washington Post, December 17)

***
'Objective reality' is a term disowned by scientific purists, who cite the various conundrums plaguing it. The weight of the world cannot be known, they point out, since it depends from one nano-second to the next on such immeasurable minutiae as whether that butterfly you just saw eddying up over the hedge is still airborne or has alighted.

Or: You can't know something without having observed it, and observing it changes it - as when we stare at someone and they turn. Well, maybe. But let's not be picky. Our subject today is the year ahead, specifically as it relates to the imperial designs of the superpower on our doorstep. And in considering it, one is reassured by the fact that, in a rough-and-ready sense, objective realities do exist.

BUSH. has no choice but to go ahead with the charade of elections in Iraq next month

Such realities have often in the past been the last, best hope of a world confronted, as it may be today, by overweening military might and a predisposition on the part of those commanding it to use it.

When in the summer of 1941, for example, Hitler turned from his military victories in the west and attacked Soviet Russia, those sufficiently in the know had to have breathed an epochal sigh of relief - for the objective reality was that Germany lacked the resources of manpower and material to fight a war conducted simultaneously on two fronts.

Thus, when on June 22nd, 1941 - 129 years to the day after Napoleon crossed the Niemen into Russia - the Fuhrer excitedly launched Operation Barbarossa ('When Barbarossa commences,' he'd told his generals, 'the world will hold its breath') he also doomed himself and his regime.

Allawi. is hated in the Sunni triangle from which his political support will have to come

The objective reality of Iraq is that what the western media call 'the security situation' continues to deteriorate, tying down an already overstretched US volunteer military and putting a crimp - at least for the time being - in Mr Bush's world-makeover plans.

A year after a rocket-propelled grenade landed in the Al Rasheed, once patronised by US officials and Western journalists, the hotel remains closed for security reasons; and the Al Rasheed is in the heavily fortified Green Zone, the closest thing the Occupation has to a safe house in Iraq.

A fortnight ago, Donald Rumsfeld set off for that incendiary country, but wound up settling for meeting the troops in Kuwait instead; Iraq these days, it turned out, was too dangerous for the personal tastes of a 'chickenhawk' defence secretary.

Even supplying US forces increasingly restricted to base 'for security reasons' has become a problem: the NYT reported last week that 'Responding to the threat of roadside bombings and ambushes of American ground convoys in Iraq, the Air Force is sharply expanding its airlift of equipment and supplies to bases inside the country to reduce the amount of military cargo hauled over land routes'. In a word, the occupiers of Iraq are now the besieged.

And working-class Americans, from whom the US military draws its recruits, are getting the message. A fortnight ago, the chief of the US Army Reserve declared that Reserve recruiting was in a 'precipitous decline'. He even used the 'D' word, raising the spectre of the draft which Bush in his recent presidential campaign repeatedly swore not to bring back.

Some commentators suggest Mr Bush may yet be forced to declare victory ('The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein removed from power') and get out of Iraq. It's possible, though personally I wouldn't bet on it. Objective realities may yet catch up with Mr Bush, but they will have to slap him in the face to get his attention: Mr Bush seems increasingly incapable of picking what's real out of the thickening fog of his hubris. As Maureen Dowd acidly observed ('Lost in a Masquerade', NYT, December 9):

'W likes officials who feed him swaggering fictions instead of uncomfortable facts. The president loves dressing up to play soldier. To rally Camp Pendleton marines facing extended deployments in Iraq, he got gussied up in an Ike D-Day-style jacket, with epaulets and a big presidential seal on one lapel and his name and 'Commander in Chief' on the other.

When he really had a chance to put on a uniform and go someplace where the enemy was invisible and there was no exit strategy and our government was not levelling with us about how bad it was, W wasn't so high on the idea. But now that it's just a masquerade - giving a morale boost to troops heading off someplace where the enemy's invisible and there's no exit strategy and the government's not levelling with us about how bad it is - hey, man, it's cool.'

Commentators trying to find sense rather than dissociation in Mr Bush's Iraq-related behaviour were hard-pressed to deal with his recent bestowal of Presidential Medals of Freedom on three of his Administration's most abject failures. One recipient was George Tenet, who resigned last summer one step ahead of a Congressional inquiry and censure.

Tenet was the CIA director who ignored the signs that the 9-11 attacks were approaching, and who later obligingly told Bush it was a 'slam-dunk' that Saddam had WMD. Another was Paul Bremer, the former US proconsul, who in that mood of heady contempt curtly disbanded the Iraqi army and kicked the Baathists out of government jobs - thus precipitating the insurgency. And the third was retired General Tommy Franks, the Rumsfeld lackey who acquiesced in the latter's dream of a 'leaner, meaner' US military and dispatched woefully too few troops to Iraq.

As Richard Cohen pointed out (Washington Post, December 16), Bremer was the man who, on returning home, complained there were never enough troops in Iraq, and Franks was the man directly responsible for that. They couldn't possibly both deserve Medals of Freedom.

Concluded Cohen: '.what seems to matter most to this president is not performance - certainly not excellence - but a matey kind of loyalty and obsequiousness. The White House medal ceremony was really about George W Bush.

It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter. To make these awards in the face of failure - the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason - has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied.'

Yet Cohen's own paper has often been part of the whitewash. Two Sundays ago, eg, when eight marines were killed and seven wounded in a single day in Iraq, the Washington Post reported that news on page A17 - leading even some American readers to ask why such a story wasn't deemed front-page material. ('So if there are four dead,' one reader inquired sarcastically, 'will that be on A34? Will it take 32 dead to at least make the front page?')

So here is the zugzwang in which Mr Bush has landed himself.
He has no choice but to go ahead with the charade of elections in Iraq next month; not to do so would be to exceed the patience of al Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric, and risk a Shiite insurgency in the south. Yet Bush cannot let Sistani's candidates come to power:

that would further motivate the Sunni insurgency, and would also lead to a result which even Mr Bush would recognise as ridiculous: an Iraqi government dominated by Shiite clerics closely allied to the ayatollahs of Iran, the country which Mr Bush has moved on to threatening.

Mr Bush has therefore to engineer a victory for Allawi, the purely titular Shiite, ex-Baathist and CIA thug whom the White House appointed to head Iraq's interim government last June. But that fraud will be so transparent as to be tantamount to not holding elections at all. Allawi is hated in the Sunni triangle from which his political support will have to come; and it's extremely unlikely that his 'victory' would be accepted by Sistani.

So the Bush Administration, having just finished terrorising the American electorate to their own advantage, is now desperately trying to orchestrate an Allawi campaign based on the same instilling of fear in secular Iraqis. As Jim Hoagland summed it up in the Washington Post last Sunday ('Scare Tactics in Baghdad'):

'The new threat is 'the Black Horde'. The ayatollahs of Iran 'are out to liquidate you', [interim Defence Minister Hazim] Shalan told Iraqis.

A few hours later, at the White House, President Bush echoed that dire concern. [and] public warnings - delivered in remarkably similar terms - about an Iranian plot to impose an Islamic theocracy on Iraq have come from another CIA favourite and partner, King Abdullah of Jordan, and even from Ghazi Yawar, the moderate interim president of Iraq, both of whom visited Washington earlier this month.'

Indeed. But Sunni Muslims are not Republicans from Jesusland. And Allawi is the man who acquiesced in the destruction of Falluja, their city (which, incidentally, US jets were still carpet-bombing a fortnight ago - three weeks after it was supposed to have been 'taken' by a massive US bombardment and ground attack).
Zugzwang.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World