That had a ring not heard since Americans called for total victory and unconditional surrender in World War II, but then the President remains in a World War II dream world, that thrilling place he experienced in the movies of his childhood where the Marines always advance; our grinning native sidekicks are friendly and remarkably willing to die in our place; the enemy is destined to fall by their hundreds before our fire; and total victory is an American birthright. In fact, the President, who mentioned no post-1945 war (except the Cold one) -- and there were so many to chose from -- spoke of World War II twice. You know, that war so like the present one in which "free nations came together to fight the ideology of fascism, and freedom prevailed." (Just in case you've forgotten, that was the war in which the other side had the Guantánamos…)

Perhaps there's poetic justice in seeing a President trapped in his fantasy world being driven from pillar to post by a fantasy public, while his generals and top officials do their best to ignore him as they search desperately for ways out, and his advisers (and political supporters) hire lawyers.

How to Tell Withdrawal from Its Doppelgangers

If you pay attention not to the war of words or the storm of confusing withdrawal proposals, but to four bedrock matters, you'll have a far better sense of where we're really heading. These are air power, permanent bases, an "American" Kurdistan, and oil; and, not surprisingly, they coincide with the great uncovered, or barely covered, stories of the war. In the present flurry of withdrawal discussions, only air power, thanks to Hersh, is getting any attention. The others have so far gone largely or totally unmentioned -- and yet, without them, none of this makes any sense at all.

Air Power: It remains amazing to me that Hersh's report is the first serious mainstream piece since the invasion of Iraq to take up the uses of air power in that country. It's a subject I've written about for the last two years. After all, we've loosed our Air Force on heavily populated urban Iraq, regularly bombing (and sometimes destroying significant sections of) Sunni cities and towns (and in 2004 Shiite ones as well). There have been hundreds and hundreds of reporters in Iraq, many embedded with the military -- and yet it's as if they simply never look up. Figures on the use of air power are almost impossible to come by, though Hersh tells us in his Democracy Now interview that the bombing has "gone up exponentially, certainly in the last four or five months in the Sunni Triangle." He adds, however, that "we don't have reporters at the air bases. We don't know what's going on with the air war." Here's just one passage that gives a modest sense of some of what the Bush administration has been doing from the air: "Naval efforts in Iraq include not only the Marine Corps but also virtually every type of deployable Naval asset in our inventory. Navy and Marine carrier-based aircraft flew over 21,000 hours, dropped over 54,000 pounds of ordnance and played a vital role in the fight for Fallujah."

Add in another reality of America's Iraq: L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, in a burst of blind pride in 2003, disbanded the Iraqi military. For well over a year or more, Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a future Iraqi military force (lite) of only 40,000 men with minimal armaments and essentially no air force at all! This is the Middle East, mind you. What that meant, simply enough, was that the Bush administration intended the American Army and Air Force to be the Iraqi military for eons to come. Under the pressure of the insurgency, the army part of that plan was thrown out the window. But "standing up" the Iraqi military has meant just that. Standing on the ground. There is still no real Iraqi air force. Iraq was never to "fly," but to stay on that "bike" and under the tutelage of Washington.

The actual use of American air power will undoubtedly prove tricky indeed (without many American ground troops around) and probably no more successful in the long run than it was in Iraq -- except, of course, in terms of devastating the country. But watch the Iraqi skies as best you can. They will tell you something.

Permanent Bases: We were to control military-less Iraq and perhaps the region from a small series of permanent bases, already imagined and on the drawing boards as the invasion began. At the height of our base-building mania, we had about 106 bases there, ranging from multibillion-dollar Vietnam-era-sized mega-structures like Camp Victory North (renamed Camp Liberty) just outside of Baghdad to tiny base camps in outlying parts of the country. We now claim to be turning these over to the Iraqis. Part of our draw-down plan, according to Hersh, includes "heavily scripted change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones" -- one of these occurred, conveniently enough, near the Syrian border the day the President spoke.

We have so many of these bases that we can hand them back one by one with appropriate special ceremonies almost in perpetuity without ever getting to the small core of 4-5 bases that the Pentagon planned on permanently garrisoning as American troops first crossed the Iraqi border. So here's what to watch for: If any of these key bases are handed back, with flags lowered and troops removed, then you can begin to believe that an actual withdrawal may be in the offing.

Kurdistan: You would largely not know that the Kurdish parts of Iraq existed from most daily news reports on the war. But one major change from the Vietnam era is that we have potential "sanctuaries" in the area to withdraw to. Murtha suggested one of them, Kuwait, and it is the focus of attention at the moment. But Kurdistan, at present the quietest part of Iraq (despite fierce tensions between the two main Kurdish political parties and non-Kurdish residents of the as-yet somewhat undefined area), is also likely to be the most welcoming to American forces "withdrawing" from "Iraq." Present-day Kurdistan was created under the American and British no-fly zones in the 1990s and its future autonomy, no less independence, would be at least temporarily guaranteed by the presence of American troops there. Even the Turks might prefer American forces in Kurdistan, if they restrained local forces from any kind of cross-border shenanigans in Kurdish regions of Turkey. The sole reference I've seen to this possibility was in a recent piece by veteran reporter Martin Walker who wrote: "There are other ideas circulating in the Pentagon, including the establishment of a major and possibly permanent base in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where U.S. troops are less controversial, and would be welcomed by the neighboring Turks, always worried at the prospect of an independent Kurdistan becoming a magnet for their own disaffected Kurdish minority."

Were the rest of Iraq to fall completely out of our hands, it's easy to imagine an "American" Kurdistan (conveniently near the Iranian border), possibly expanded to include the oil lands around the tinderbox city of Kirkuk, with its own set of bases. Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times has just revealed that one of the Kurdish political parties signed a private oil exploration deal with a Norwegian company. Of course, the Kurdish areas would have their own set of explosive problems, but over the next year watch for Kurdistan to surface as part of any American draw-down which isn't actually a withdrawal.

Oil: So here we are at another of the great, hardly covered stories of the Iraq war. As Mark LeVine has recently made so clear, the Bush administration, with its former energy industry execs and consultants, was thinking oil -- and Iraqi oil in particular -- from literally the first moments of its existence. "[T]he few documents that have been made public from [Vice President Cheney's] Energy Task Force… reveal not only that industry executives met with Cheney's staff [in February 2001] but that a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of ‘Iraq oil foreign suitors' were the center of discussion." Hmmm… These were people who already had "peak oil" on their minds. They entered Iraq, a nation sitting on untold amounts of oil, thinking about the global control of future energy resources. They sent soldiers to guard the Oil Ministry and the oil fields, while allowing pretty much everything else to be looted as the country fell to them. They have no desire to abandon either their permanent bases or that reservoir of "black gold" to others. But beyond pious statements about preserving the Iraqi "patrimony" (i.e. oil) in the early days of the war, they never broached the subject publicly and the media followed their lead. It's rare today -- though a perfectly obvious point to make -- for someone to say, as Ambassador Khalilzad did recently, "You could have a regional war that could go on for a very long time, and affect the security of oil supplies." Keep your eyes on this issue. It's what separates Vietnam, which itself contained nothing special for a foreign power, from Iraq.

In the end, ignore (if you can) the whirlwind of withdrawal language that will turn all sorts of non- or semi-withdrawal schemes into something other than what they are, and try to keep your eyes on those shoals of reality. This is not Vietnam, which happened in slow-time. This war, as the historian Marilyn Young claimed in its first weeks so few years ago, is "Vietnam on crack cocaine" and, whatever anyone is saying now, it's a fair bet that events will outpace all administration plans and fantasies in the explosive year to come.

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