But hippies don't fight wars. The Pentagon does. It did, and it lost. One reason—not even the most important—is the military's endemic inability to win hearts and minds. Early in the war, the Guardian sounded the alarm:

'You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know. The hell where youth and laughter go.' — Siegfried Sassoon

“Senior British military officers on the ground are making it clear they are dismayed by the failure of US troops to try to fight the battle for hearts and minds. They also made plain they are appalled by reports over the weekend that US marines killed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, as they seized bridges outside Nassiriya in southern Iraq.” (17) The emphasis on force protection is a far cry from past imperial practices. The Romans, Spaniards, British, French, and conquerors of yore seldom agonized over their own casualties. To their credit, Americans do. But this comes at a moral cost: US soldiers are brave but the casualty-averse military doctrine of their commanders is cowardly. That, in essence, is what Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, and Bill Maher said—right before the lynching began. (18—20) In a similar show of disgust diplomatically stripped of the C-word, this British officer echoed the sentiment:

“US troops have the attitude of shoot first and ask questions later. They simply won't take any risk... Unfortunately, when we explained our rules of engagement which are based around the principle of minimum force, the US troops just laughed.” (21) Lebanon and Somalia notwithstanding, the United States rarely cuts and runs. It did not in Vietnam. It fought to the death—of the other guy—and then cut and walked when victory proved elusive. Iraq is too central to US hegemonic fantasies to allow a speedy retreat: it'll be done cut-and-crawl style, with enough pit stops to admire the fireworks over Iran. Bush's playbook: (1) run out the clock; (2) anoint successor as “the dope who snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory and handed Iran the victor's crown”; (3) let the etching in the history books begin.

Could the invasion have succeeded? Not a chance. All the grousing about incompetent planning is the age-old excuse-making prattle of losers. Leave aside the not-so-trifling fact that the United States never had the proper DNA for empire (lite or otherwise). It is the incontrovertible reality of the 21st century that the time for the White Man's Burden has passed. Not only is the era of empire gone, but the days of the so-called liberal hegemonic order are numbered. Even before 9/11, the cumulative impact of European integration, the rise of Asian powers, and the resurgence of Muslim identity sounded the death knell for American hegemony. To hasten the burial will be one of Bush's legacies. Alas, incalculable misery in the Middle East, enduring anti-American hatred, and future terrorist attacks in London, Paris, and Seattle will be another one.

The same Madeleine Albright who called the United States “the indispensable nation”—presumably to avoid confusion with the dispensable ones—taunted Colin Powell with the wickedest double-entendre since Mae West: “What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it? ” (22)  To paraphrase an old line, it is better for a big country to keep its superb army idle and let the world think it's not much of a superpower than to use it and remove all doubt.

Bush's neoconservative doctrine seeks to apply Straussian philosophy to the unfettered pursuit of US energy interests. Its unspoken motto: “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” The rough idea—and the idea is, indeed, rough—is to play this century's Great Game (first prize: control of Mideast oil supply) under the banner of national security. Until we whacked them on the head, Iraqis had never expressed much desire to attack us. To the lesser minds, therefore, the idea of fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here always teetered on the edge of insanity. To the neocons' delight, 9/11 came to cleanse the public discourse of the yelpings of lesser minds.

And so, today, we gather to honor the superior minds, all of these men (they are mostly men) who so decisively turned out the lights on the American empire. Heading the roll call is none other than the Decider himself. If you're among the wise who chose to sit out the Bush years at the bottom of a well, you need to know only two things about the man: the first is that he is President of the United States; the second is that he said:

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” (23) To connect it to the war for terror would indeed be easier. A self-declared uniter, Bush is beginning to unite the country around the belief that he is the worst president in US history. (24)  Whether his reelection, ipso facto, makes the electorate the dumbest ever is a logical inference that a political culture drunk with self-admiration will have trouble getting its woozy head around.

To call Team Bush a thundering herd of galloping loons is to be unnecessarily kind. For rarely has daftness been elevated to such a lofty plane of power and influence. The early days of the Iraq adventure set the tone. A year after Defense strategist Ken Adelman infamously called the coming liberation of Iraq a “cakewalk,” Paul Wolfowitz, then Rumsfeld's deputy, used the occasion of an interview with NPR's Melissa Block to stamp the prediction with the Pentagon's gold seal.

“We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq. There's not going to be the hostility that you described Saturday. There simply won't be.” (25) Hostility? What an idea! On the eve of the war, in a vice presidential reprise of Tom Cruise's couch-hopping antics, Cheney stepped on the set of NBC's “Meet The Press” to share the love: “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” (26)  For a mere $44 billion a year,(27)  all we got from US intelligence was a silly update of an old movie script:

Renault:    And what in Heaven's name brought you to Baghdad?
Bush:         The sweets and the flowers. I came to Baghdad for love.
Renault:    Love! What love? We're in the Middle East.
Bush:         I was misinformed.

Christmas 2003 came early in Iraq and WMD-stuffed stockings were spotted everywhere by late March. Or so Rumsfeld told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos: “We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” (28)  East, west, south and nowhere somewhat. In September of that year, the part-time AEI scholar, full-time slimeball Richard Perle got all his neurons firing at once to produce this marvel of crystal gazing: