Every Invader-Occupier in history who has tried to conquer new lands has invariably ended up changing his own people to mirror the wildness he tried to tame. Whether it be Genghiz Khan’s conquest of lands to his West, or Babar’s conquest of lands to his East, many conquerors have failed to convert the defeated and have instead created a conciliation between the cultures of the conqueror and the conquest.

While George W. Bush may not have the martial cunning of Genghiz Khan or the complex cultural theology of Babar, he has created a new American-Iraqi breed through his conquest and occupation of Iraq. Meet the Iraqi Republicans.

After the disastrous fighting in Falluja, the Bush administration decided, belatedly, to allow an Iraqi General to create a militia to take over the role of controlling the rebellious town. The decision to hand over power and weapons to a militia run by an Iraqi, a former Republican Guard, seemed disturbing to many commentators, given that these officers were responsible for carrying out brutalities under Saddam Hussein.

What these commentators forget is that the officers of the Iraqi Republican Guard are essentially Republican at heart. They believe in the core values that are dear to most Republicans, and their agenda for Iraq is very close to that of the Bush administration.

How are the Iraqi Republican Guard officers Republicans? Well, examine their inherent system of beliefs:

1. Might is always right.

2. The rich should be free to confer with the powerful in secret.

3. The powerful deserve to be rich.

4. The rich deserve to be powerful.

5. Politics should protect the interests of the rich and powerful.

6. Any enemy of the rich and powerful is an enemy of the state.

7. Enemies of the state should be locked up, interrogated, tortured and killed, without the fuss of a public trial.

These were the seven pillars of the Iraqi Republican Guard’s thinking under Saddam Hussein.uHusseinHussein They continue to be the pillars of convention under the U.S. occupation which are, in effect, easily enforced by former Republican Guard officers who are part of the core of the new Iraqi Republicans.

The danger is not that Iraq will, thanks to its new Republicans, be as violent a state under U.S. occupation as it was under Saddam. The level of violence in post-2003 liberated Iraq is already far exceeding the level of violence under the 2002 dictatorship. The real danger is that these seven pillars of Iraqi Republicans will become the essential doctrine of the Bush administration in America.

We have already seen many of these Iraqi Republican leanings in the Bush administration. The ‘might is right’ doctrine led the administration’s police of pre-emptive war against Iraq, and may very well lead the nation into wars in Lebanon and Syria in the post-2004 Bush regime.

The Bush administration is already engaged in a legal battle to protect its right to secretly confer with the rich when it comes to deciding matters of national policy. In question are the details of the meetings between Dick Cheney and representatives of America’s oil companies in a period during which Cheney was to make recommendations regarding drilling for oil in the Alaskan wildlife refuge areas.

Another reason for keeping the Cheney transcripts secret might well be that the topic of these meetings went well beyond oil in Alaska and might well have included oil in Iraq, planning for a war against Iraq, occupation of Iraq and control, reconstruction and operation of the Iraqi oil industry by American oil companies.

All these details, of course, remain secret and subject to speculation till the Supreme Court, including Cheney’s hunting buddy Antonin Scalia, decide that secret consultations between the rich and powerful are illegal.

Meanwhile, many Iraqi state-run industries have been sold off to American corporations.

Bush’s multi-billion dollar tax cuts are another clear sign of the Iraqi Republican thinking – the rich deserve to be richer. The Bush administration has also installed a number of rich businessmen into positions of power in government, thereby following the Iraqi Republican creed of passing power on to the rich, and riches onto the powerful.

Politics, as defined by the Bush administration, has always sought to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. From using the offices of the Florida Governor and Secretary of State to win the presidency, to using executive powers to pass laws that the legislature will not accept, the Bush regime has time and again shown great disdain and outright contempt for the democratic process.

The liberals and the left, long established critics of the rich and powerful, have been easily confused as enemies of the state by the Bush regime. Be it the FBI investigations into the alleged terror activities of the environmental groups, or the federal subpoenas issued against anti-war protestors, the Bush regime has seen it fit to pursue the Iraqi Republican thinking wherein all dissent is criminal. Bush is so averse to dissent that his Secret Service has routinely fenced off demonstrators hundreds of yards, if not miles, away from Bush’s propaganda appearances in towns and cities across America.

The Bush regime is also guilty of approving a “72-point matrix of stress” - tactics of interrogation, many of which are considered outright torture by the leading Human Rights watchdog groups across the globe. Every one of these 72 tactics was practiced by the Iraqi Republicans under Saddam Hussein. Their list, of course, did not stop at 72, and the question is whether a post-2004 Bush regime will also see it fit to expand the American interrogation tactics list to include more Iraqi and Israeli tactics.

The proponents of torture in America have already suggested new methods to add to the list, including inserting sterilized needles under fingernails of suspects to produce excruciating, but non-lethal, pain. This particular suggestion comes from Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Then there are the Iraqi Republican denials of wrongdoing, led by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, who claimed he was “more outraged over the outrage” in the Abu Ghraib prison torture hearings. Inhofe claimed that the victims of the alleged torture were “murderers” and “terrorists.”

Inhofe disregarded the previous reporting by both The New York Times and the Washington Post which had tracked down many of the torture victims of the Abu Ghraib facility and proven them to be free men who were never charged with any crime. Facts, of course, have no place in Iraqi Republican thinking. And the torture and terrorizing of innocent men and women has always been the Iraqi Republican way of life.

In fact, the beatings and rapes continue in many areas around Iraq at the hands of Iraqi Republicans, the hundreds of thousands of mercenaries hired to fight the real war in Iraq – the war against dissent.

The major difference between the Republican Iraq and the Republican America at this point is the presence of a press that, occasionally, bites the hand that feeds. The American conservative media are mirror images of the bastardized Iraqi press controlled by Uday Hussein. Just as the Iraqi press was loathe to question its lord and master, so are the conservative press, radio and TV stations lapdogs, suckling at the bosoms of their well-endowed masters and mistresses.

The reason why the opposition to the Bush regime is apparent and not driven underground is due to the few elements in the mainstream and independent press that refuse to buckle down under the moneyed fist of the pro-Bush media corporations. These last surviving bastions of dissent are also America’s last hope for reality, lest we all get sucked into the Iraqi Republican way of life.

The rich and powerful in Iraq never had any permanent friends, least of all their own people. They had permanent interests – to stay rich and powerful. In that quest, the Iraqi Republicans and the American Republicans have a common goal.

It is clear to see at this point that Iraq will not have the freedom to bloom into a democratic nation that embraces independence and dissent against the rich and powerful. The real threat is whether America will now embrace Iraqi Republican thought, and whether the post-2004 Bush regime will enforce an Iraqi Republican agenda.

Abhinav Aima is an Instructor of Journalism at the University of Minnesota.

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