If you set aside, for a moment, what is believed in, it obviously helps to believe in something if you plan to "stand up" and fight. At the most basic level in our age, it helps if you feel your country has been violated and occupied by foreigners. In the last two centuries, no emotion has mobilized more people in arms than the one we call "nationalism" when other people take up arms and "patriotism" when we do so. Call it love of country. Add religion to that -- or the belief that your country or region has been taken over by unbelievers -- and you have a powerful combination. The issue here is not years of training, it's motivation. And our Iraqis have next to none -- with the exception of Kurdish and Shiite militiamen who want to take out those Sunnis they think of as their enemies and a potential peril to their existence.

Experiencing Withdrawal Symptoms

So let's return for a moment to the President's "plan." "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." But what about some contingency planning? This administration has been notoriously weak on planning for lesser alternative futures. Despite having Colin Powell for Secretary of State, for instance, Bush officials never had an exit strategy for Iraq, not just because they had no urge to leave, but because they didn't believe they would ever have to. So if you reverse the President's little jingle, there's no there there. "As Iraqis stand down, we will…" Well, what?

The options are increasingly limited, and yet, even for this administration, the need is increasingly obvious and pressing. The President could not be more isolated internationally when it comes to his war. Most of the Europeans are now simply doing their best to look the other way. The Chinese leadership undoubtedly dances in the streets of the Forbidden City every morning, because the Iraqi quagmire ensures that, for another day, China will not be the next enemy of enemies. The newly elected Norwegian government has announced that it will withdraw its few trainers from Iraq. The Poles and Italians are on their way out along with the Ukrainians. A Dane was just killed by a roadside bomb in the Basra area and the keeping of a Danish contingent in the country, never popular, has grown less so. The Japanese troops are locked into their "base" in the south, doing nothing; and, while Tony Blair swears fealty to Bush Iraq policy for another 1,000 Arabian nights, the British have, in fact, been hemming and hawing about withdrawal as their situation grows ever hotter in the Basra area (where Shiite militias have taken over and, as Robert Dreyfuss of Tompaine.com points out, former Baathists are being assassinated in startling numbers). Meanwhile, the Bush administration was just rebuffed by NATO on a Rumsfeld proposal that NATO troops take over parts of the American counter-guerrilla war in southern Afghanistan, freeing up our hard-pressed troops for duty elsewhere.

So what's left in Iraq -- other than the stood-down Iraqi Army and the embattled Iraqi police (both forces evidently well-infiltrated by insurgents)? Well, there are always those 25,000 or so private mercenaries with the run of the country; there's a nearly non-functional Iraqi government in disarray over the constitution the Bush administration has been shoving down its throat on an unpalatable schedule; and, of course, there's the U.S. military, which is losing not quite two soldiers a day in the country (and many more wounded). Fifty-one American troops died in September along with several American "contractors" and a diplomatic official. As has been true for the last two years, the insurgents remain capable mainly of picking off Americans as they travel from one place to another on Iraq's embattled roads and highways. But a suicide car bomber was caught recently inside the well-guarded Green Zone in Baghdad before his vehicle could explode. That is, perhaps, an omen of what's likely to come. Sooner or later, catastrophic events are a near certainly if the war goes on.

In the meantime, our military in Iraq is fraying in all sorts of ways; while, back home, the publicity attendant on the war has been terrible and recruitment continues to prove a problem, despite heightened resources going into the effort. Publicity. Ah, there's an issue. Karen Hughes, presidential confident and America's newest public diplomat, was hoofing it around the Middle East last week on a disastrous public diplomacy tour for the administration, highlighting her ya-gotta-love-me qualifications as a "mom" and Americans' qualifications as a people "of faith." (As Fred Kaplan of Slate writes, "Put the shoe on the other foot. Let's say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans' image of Islam. It's doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented ‘Good morning.'")

In the meantime, the real "public diplomacy" work is being done elsewhere by an administration that, from the first moments of its global war on terror, was intent on mayhem, destruction, and torture; that wanted, in Donald Rumsfeld's words, to "take the gloves off." All evidence continues to indicate that, in behavioral terms, this spirit spread like a pandemic throughout the imperium and into the deepest reaches of the U.S. military, the CIA, and even American embassies abroad. Just in the last couple of weeks, such "public diplomacy" has consisted of an actual porn website that has been posting military "war porn" for all to see -- photos of American troops exulting in blistered and mutilated Iraqi and Afghani corpses; and the news that an Army captain who reported ongoing military abuses against Iraqi prisoners, both before and after Abu Ghraib (including the use of those tell-tale human pyramids), found himself and two sergeants from his unit, who supported his testimony, the only ones under investigation by our military. ("Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration, you show up at the PUC [prisoner] tent. In a way it was sport.") Or try this one on for publicity size: This week, the global managing editor of Reuters sent a letter off to Senator John Warner claiming that "American forces' conduct towards journalists in Iraq is ‘spiraling out of control' and preventing full coverage of the war reaching the public… The Reuters news service chief referred to ‘a long parade of disturbing incidents whereby professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully detained, and/or illegally abused by US forces in Iraq.'" (I can't think of another example of such a letter being written from a mainstream news outlet to the U.S. government.)

Believe me, you can't buy negative publicity like this on the street. And then, just for good measure, consider the anti-publicity value of the latest ad from the joint team of Boeing and Bell Helicopter for their vertical-lift Osprey aircraft -- a shot of U.S. Special Forces rappelling onto a smoking mosque with the tag line: "It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell... Consider it a gift from above." The ad caused another little storm, and there's an awesome shock!

Put it all together and it adds up to a tsunami of unsustainable reality. So somebody answer me this question: Based on the evidence, what favor exactly have we been doing the Iraqis these last two disastrous years by occupying their country? I suspect a lot of military people have been asking similar questions as they worry (as their predecessors did in the later Vietnam years) about the future viability of the Army.

Withdrawal from Iraq, one way or another, is now probably unstoppable, no matter how many times generals, administration officials, and politicians may step back or create "withdrawal plans" that are intent on keeping us in Iraq. President Bush continues to speak of how the terrorists will not "break the will" of the American people. But all evidence indicates that support for his war has all but collapsed here in the United States, even increasingly among his own base of support. And it's almost as clear that the military leadership knows the score. The Army high command, after all, never wanted to be in Iraq in the first place and can see not only that the "war" is unwinnable, or even salvageable, but that it threatens the cohesion and future of the Army itself.

Gen. Casey, for instance, has been floating supposedly unauthorized withdrawal balloons for a couple of months now, despite being officially chastised for doing so by Washington (or so the story goes, anyway). Recently, in Washington, he began more publicly counseling for, if not a full-scale withdrawal, at least a "gradual" draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq. As Mark Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times wrote, he based his thinking on the novel thesis (for this administration) that "the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across the Middle East." Sound familiar, any of you war critics out there?

Unfortunately, this is likely to prove too little too late, Iraqi dependence having long been fostered because it was exactly what was wanted. It's now late in the game to -- as administration officials used to love to say -- put "an Iraqi face" on "our" Iraq.

Oh, by the way, when someone actually starts developing those withdrawal plans for real, the mercenaries shouldn't be forgotten. The Iraqis don't deserve them, although evidence seems to indicate that some of them are already coming home. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out recently, "In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is awash in soldiers and police. Nonetheless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Blackwater USA, a private security firm with strong political connections, to provide armed guards." The North Carolina-based Blackwater Consulting, with its strong private security presence in Iraq, has just hired former Director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and former ambassador Cofer Black as its vice-chairman and Joseph E. Schmitz, former Inspector General of the Department of Defense, as its Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel; while, it's website listings for "overseas opportunities," assumedly in Iraq, is still looking include open positions for explosive- detection dog handlers, designated defensive marksmen, and protective-security specialists. So batten down the hatches, there's surely more killing and chaos to come. Lots more.

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