How does it feel to have a shotgun blasted in your face by two guys with almost as many DUIs as draft deferments?

Just ask Iraqis. For that matter, just ask Americans.

Both countries are unraveling now, if at different velocities, and the cause is the same for each. The sheer incompetence of George Bush and Dick Cheney is eclipsed only by their pathological compulsion to externalize their own self-loathing, both of which maladies have now been fully visited upon an unprepared and now – literally and figuratively – much tortured world.

On the day after September 11, 2001 (as distinct from another September 11, in 1973 – the day that America launched a surprise attack on democracy and human rights in Chile and installed the murderous twenty-year Pinochet regime in a bloody coup), the lefty paper Le Monde gave voice to France’s empathy for America by headlining its edition with gracious words of solidarity. We, of course, repaid in kind just a year later by trashing them viciously (remember “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and “freedom fries”?) for having the audacity to think invading Iraq might be a bad idea.

“We are all Americans”, Le Monde said. Hmm. Maybe then. Certainly not now. Today, we are all Harry Whittingtons.

Iraq is coming apart at lightening speed now, and taking America down with it. In yet another breathtaking example of bungled American diplomacy, our proconsul there – er, sorry, I mean ambassador – blithely informed the Iraqis that if they wanted more American money they had to put away their silly sectarian squabbles and form a unity government. Of course, just the sheer arrogance of this statement was alone astonishing. To invade this country on the basis of lies, dismantle it using bombs, bullets and white phosphorus, and then insist that money for its restoration is contingent upon our political terms is an act of staggering self-centeredness. As the saying goes, “Only in America."

But that arrogance was actually outdone by the ineptitude of Mr. Khalilzad’s warning, which was taken in Iraq as a signal to open the floodgates of civil strife in order to drive out the hated invaders. And so, over the last week, the simmering pot of American incompetence in ‘governing’ Iraq has boiled over into near full civil war, as Shiites and Sunnis rip each other apart, both hating Americans as much as each other for the voracious security vacuum we’ve bequeathed to their country.

Meanwhile, the ‘Iraqification’ project which was meant to be the key to American withdrawal (read: Bush’s political survival) is showing all the success we’ve come to expect from this administration after its other achievements in protecting us from attack, capturing the perpetrators of that attack, protecting us from natural disaster, rescuing us when it hits, and serving our seniors with an efficient prescription drug plan. The project for the training of Iraqi forces, in other words, is in the toilet. The number of Iraqi battalions capable of fighting independently was reported down from three to one last September. Now the LA Times indicates that it has gone from one to zero. All of which begs the question, when Cheney said certain forces in Iraq were in their “last throes”, just whom did he mean?

This misbegotten adventure in American imperialism is tattered beyond all recognition, and everybody now understands that it is a failure of epic proportions.

And I mean everybody.

Well, I suppose there is one exception. As civil violence explodes all over Iraq, George Bush, now crashing below 35 percent job approval, was asked what the administration would do if civil war broke out in Iraq. His remarkable response was: “I don't buy your premise that there's going to be a civil war.” Arguably, like Hurricane Katrina, he’ll only figure it out well beyond when it happens (if it hasn’t already begun). In any case, since the premise of the question was “if”, not “when” – a perfectly reasonable contingency for anyone to worry about – the president’s answer shows just how deeply in denial is the commander-in-chief, the same guy who ignited this global tinderbox.

Meanwhile, everybody else has it figured out, including – not surprisingly – the troops there, who in a poll express the belief, by a two-to-one ratio, that the war is unwinnable without doubling American forces there, an obvious and complete non-starter. Seventy-two percent told pollsters that the whole bloody mess of American involvement should be ended within a year.

But that’s just the beginning. I suppose it’s not the biggest news in the world that Ted Koppel has a problem with the war, but when he comes right out and says that it was all about oil, and when that op-ed is published by the New York Times (former instruments in bringing us the war itself), that is pretty remarkable. You can say that the war is bad (though of course that means you’re a traitor), but you must never say in the mainstream media that the war was for oil. Well, apparently that taboo has now been breached, as well, and by one of the mainstreamiest of the bunch, no less. Ted Koppel ain’t exactly Noam Chomsky. Heck, he isn’t even Phil Donahue, or Garrison Keillor, who is now calling for the impeachment of George Woebegone. But that’s exactly what makes Koppel’s indictment even more powerful.

Then this last week Francis Fukuyama broke ranks with his fellow neoconservatives, saying that “By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.” He then proceeds in his New York Times Magazine article to get it wrong (Again! – Why don’t these guys ever have the decency to self-censor after so many profound mistakes? Why do they think the world needs more of their horrid advice?), arguing that Iraq was an unfortunate mistake of means, not of ends. As if Bush really went there to foster democracy. While dismantling it at home. And ignoring genocide in Darfur. Uh-huh.

It gets better yet. Along with Fukuyama, William F. Buckley, of all people, has also now come out and written: “One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed”, concluding that “different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.” In his article, entitled “It Didn’t Work” (no kidding, Bill), Buckley joins Fukuyama in desperately attempting to salvage as many of the mythological shards remaining from their shattered ideology as conservatives can Crazy Glue together into a fig leaf covering the exposure of their lies and grievous errors using other people’s money, and other people’s children. Once again, to the grief we must already endure based on the failures of these failures of the punditocracy is added the insultingly ridiculous premise that the war was fought for purposes of fostering democracy in the Middle East. Does anyone this side of the Ozarks still fall for that crap?

Buckley insists “Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.” So it was the ice men whodunnit, eh? In the Persian Gulf, of all places. You’d think they would have melted by now, especially since the occupation has made sure that there is no power to run their refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners.

As if Buckley’s apostasy weren’t remarkable enough, even the truly insufferable Bill O’Reilly has come to the same conclusion, though he of course expresses it with somewhat less eloquence than Buckley. On his radio show this week, O’Reilly – Anne Coulter’s only true rival for the crown of most unbelievably smug, arrogant and cowardly bully on the planet – finally admitted that the show was over in Iraq. Despite previously referring to opponents of the war as “pinheads” and “appeasers”, he has now acknowledged (sort of) the folly of Bush’s Folly in the Cradle of Civilization.

Of course, he can’t come clean as to the real reasons why the war has gone south, instead arguing that we simply underestimated the sheer number of lunatics in Iraq. Left unspecified is why that part of the world should possess a disproportionately larger tendency toward mental health problems than the rest of us, though perhaps it is something in the Euphrates, eh? For O’Reilly, this “crazy people underestimation” – yeah, he really said that – was the big mistake, not the fact that we illegally invaded a sovereign country on the basis of lies, without support of the international community, and killed tens of thousands of Iraqis destroying infrastructure, jobs, health and security. I gather from his premise that I could invade his house to topple the tyrant in control there (you know who that is), and he would have no problem with that, even if some of his children got killed in the process. If his wife then attacked me with her rolling pin while he cowered in the corner, I assume Bill would describe her as “crazy people”.

And finally there’s John Negroponte, a member of the Bush team even, who refused to dismiss the possibility of civil war in Iraq, even though he is an administration hack par excellence. “The consequences for the people of Iraq would be catastrophic,” he said. "Clearly, it would seriously jeopardize the democratic political process on which they are presently embarked. And one can only begin to imagine what the political outcomes would be.” Wow, with the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States government at his service, it only took him three years into the war to figure that out! Not bad for a figure in the Bush administration, though, which is not exactly known for its tendency to produce sharp, competent adminstrators. (In the same Senate hearing Negroponte went on to desribe his concern about Hugo Chavez’s arms purchases: “I would say that it's clear that he is spending hundreds of millions, if not more, for his very extravagant foreign policy” at the expense of the impoverished Venezuelan population. “Extravagant foreign policy”? I beg you pardon? Do these people have no sense of irony, after all? Does Negroponte, his hands dripping with Central American blood from the 1980s, have no limit to the hypocrisy he’s willing to exercise, pretending to care for Venezuelan peasants?)

So there they are, folks, and see how they run. Koppel, the New York Times, Fukuyama, Buckley, O’Reilly, Negroponte. Who’s next? Karl Rove? You know things are bad when the rattiest rats are jumping off your regressive, theocratic, kleptocratic, sinking ship of state at this rapid clip. I’m glad they’re finally figuring out the obvious, but I have to say that these guys remind me of nothing more than those posthumous recipients of the hysterical Darwin Awards (“We salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who remove themselves from it”), who arrange for their own demise by doing really bright things like putting lava lamps on a hot stove, or arc welding a hand grenade for the (intended) use in some weird chimney sweeping weighting contraption (um, didn’t work). Except that clowns like Buckley and O’Reilly – possessed with lethal levels of diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain – always manage to get other people killed instead of themselves.

Things are bad, but if only bad was all they were. Unfortunately, Iraq is now poised at the very brink of full-scale civil war. But not just any civil war, and not just anywhere. Chances are excellent that this civil war – generally already the most brutal kind of conflagration to start with – will quickly escalate into an internationalized civil war, sucking in Iran and Turkey and perhaps the Saudis and Israelis and more. If you think that nasty affair in the Congo has been fun, you’ll love this little world war. Especially because it will play out in what is already one of the most politically volatile and charged regions of the world, and one which sits atop the lifeblood supplying industrialized economies from Bangor (Maine) to Bangor (India). Thus, in addition to the mounting carnage and unspeakable human grief at stake (and on top of that already created), George Bush’s wee error in judgement might also take down the world economy as well. Of course, turning our country into an economic powerhouse rivaling Burkina Faso is one way to deal with the problem of excessive American foreign aid, which we’d obviously no longer be able to afford. If only we actually had such a problem.

Only Bush could make Saddam look so good, and only Bush could have brought the rest of us along with him to step shoulder deep in what his pop would refer to as “deep doo-doo”. Furious George, the very personification of human insecurity, surrounded himself with sycophants and idiot (clearly) savants (clear only to them), leaving himself an open field to make the stupidest of mistakes on the grandest of human stages. It says a lot about this administration that the massively over-rated and equally under-courageous Colin Powell was considered the grown-up voice of reason amongst them. As Cheney, Rummy and Wolfie played expertly on all the Boy King’s insecurities, pushing toward war while hapless Condi stood on the sidelines, reduced to reminding him of how buff he looked, there was Powell invoking his Pottery Barn rule in private (after the decision to invade had already been made anyhow), meanwhile flacking the war for the administration in public, an act of unparalleled shame, if not outright mass murder.

And so off to war we went. A fearful nation not riding behind our fearful non-leader. Was this meltdown predictable? Not only was it predictable, it was widely predicted. But Bush could not have seen it coming because he was so gravely ill-prepared for the job he stole. This is what happens when a judicial coup on the Supreme Court overturns the democratic process to install as leader of the free world a fool whose primary qualifications were actually graduating from Yale despite his “gentleman’s C” grades (those are called F’s when your name isn’t Bush) and surviving forty years of alcoholism.

Bush’s bold brashness as a decision-maker is a thin patina masking equal parts fear and laziness. Why study an issue when you can bluff your way through it with dogmatic assuredness? Why confront your fears of being outed as Alfred E. Neuman’s even dumber kid brother when you can resort instead to bring-it-on macho posturing (especially when you make damn sure to stay out of harm’s way yourself)? Why? Because – the answer to both questions is – when you don’t do the hard work of getting it right, the hard work gets it right by doing you. Which in this case, of course, mainly means us.

And that is precisely how we came to be immersed in the quagmire of Iraq, tens of thousands of deaths later. We were told Iraq was a smoldering fire (it wasn’t, and he knew it), upon which Bush was throwing buckets of liquid. If only he could tell the difference between water and gasoline, things might have turned out differently. But that was probably well too much to expect from a guy who took three members of the Iraqi opposition to the Super Bowl, just two months before launching an invasion of that country, whereupon it was revealed, according to former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith – you’ll think I’m joking here but I’m not – that our commander-in-chief learned for the first time that there is a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. “You mean...they're not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?”, he asked.

Is this not breathtakingly, fall-off-your-chair, jaw-droppingly astonishing to contemplate? What has happened to America in the forty years since Camelot that half of us have twice now willfully chosen our even more willfully worst and dimmest for president? Need you know more to understand our present predicament than that a man whom the gods of irony installed in the Oval Office, apparently just for a laugh, could risk so much of other people’s stakes with so little knowledge of the conditions on the ground – and a literal determination not to gain that knowledge – that he didn’t even know that there existed Sunni and Shiite Muslims, two months before committing us to war in Iraq (and well after he had already put that decision into motion)? Could you imagine FDR, on the eve of World War II, asking “You mean Germany is in Europe? Right next to France? But I thought Japan attacked us? Do the Chinamen all live in Japan, or are they mostly in Germany? There’s this difference? What is it about?”

But it actually gets worse from there. One of the newest bits of evidence to add to the mounting indictment of Bush and his crony incompetence comes from none other than Paul Bremer, Bush’s Bad Boy in Baghdad during the year it all went wrong. As if we didn’t already know what kind of dude Bremer is, just in time we now learn that he thought all along – as did General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military figure there at the time – that more troops were desperately needed to do the job, and not only didn’t he say so publicly, but he instead supported the inane Rumsfeld/Bush claim that there were enough, and that Bush was giving his military officers everything they asked for. (Yeah, just ask Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff who, along with at least one other general, had his career cashiered for having the courage to say that 160,000 troops was not going to be enough to occupy a country of 25 million people in post-war, post-dictatorship, post-sanctions chaos.) How could Bremer remain silent with so many lives at stake? One answer is the career carrot reputedly dangled in front of him (at least in his own imagination). You can just see him, comb in hand, checking himself out in the mirror like some political Fonz, saying to himself “Hey, I got the hair, I got the look. If I can just pacify this freaking desert toilet they’ll make me Secretary of State. After that, look out White House...”

What a guy, eh? But for our purposes, the most insightful vignette from Bremer’s new book is the story he tells about meeting Bush on his way over to Baghdad. Apparently, Bush showed little interest in the key substantive issues concerning the occupation forces (cue Gomer: “Surprise, surprise”), but was instead repeating vapid slogans, giving Bremer carte blanche to run the country, and keying in on one issue, over and over. Bush’s only demand was “It’s important to have someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people [read: “me, George Bush”] for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq”. So overridingly crucial was this public relations aspect of the project to Bush that he was pushing an obscure Iraqi as a candidate for president of the interim government, solely on the basis of the guy’s prior public expressions of gratitude to the invading forces.

And that’s how we got into this mess, ladies and gentlemen, this tragedy turned farce, now about to turn global disaster.

It would be ridiculous to assume that young Caligula has changed his stripes, even as his presidency itself is added to the bonfire of vanities. If you think that it would be too much to ask for him to roll up his sleeves and do a full day’s labor for once, you’d be right. What has Bush done this last week as Iraq burned? According to the White House he made phone calls to seven Iraqi leaders, asking them to stop fighting. (Gee, does that mean if Kofi calls and asks the same of him, he’d pull our troops out of Iraq?)

Supposedly the calls lasted “about an hour” altogether. Of course, with this White House (remember how this war would be “self-financing”, how tax cuts would not produce deficits, how the $800 billion prescription drug plan would cost $400 billion maximum?), that probably means that he spent thirty-one minutes on the phone, tops, and they just rounded up. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he lasted the full sixty. That’s an average of a whopping eight-and-a-half minutes per call, trying to unravel this mega-crisis.

And what probably really happened was that Bush made three two-minute calls, then, petulant and frustrated, rode his bike for a couple of hours, then he made two more calls, then took a nap, then forced himself to make the last one. Each was entirely scripted, and likely went something like this:

Bush, reading from his cue card: “We sure hope the violence stops there.”

Iraqi: “Mr. President, we need your help desperately.”

Bush: “It’s good to know that things are going so well, other than this minor setback.”

Incredulous Iraqi: “Mr. President, Iraq is blowing to pieces. Baghdad is burning, sir.”

Bush: “Now that you’ve got your democracy going [and I’ve won my election], I’ll be bringing the troops home soon [before their presence there really becomes a problem for me].”

Desperately Incredulous Iraqi: “Mr. President, are you hearing anything I’m saying???”

Bush: “Well, don’t mention it. You’re very welcome. As you know, America stands tall for democracy in the world, and we were proud to liberate you. One thing, though – would you mind thanking us for all we’ve given you?”

Meanwhile, while Rome burns (okay, that was Nero, not Caligula), The New York Times reports that last week “Mr. Bush was kicking off a year of fund raising for candidates in the 2006 elections and that the president's schedule would accelerate over the next months.” I think we can all agree that this is what the president of the United States should be doing while his policy in the Middle East is imploding, perhaps taking the global economy down with it, right? I mean, if you can hang in Crawford for a month after being warned of an imminent terrorist attack, and play guitar in San Diego while New Orleans drowns, why not raise money for your party during a severe foreign policy crisis entirely of your own making? After all, none of his family is at risk. (Except Jeb, of course, whose teeth have now probably been gnashed down to the gum line as he watches the Clan Idiot forever tarnish the family name and destroy the presidency that always rightly belonged to him. “Mine, do you hear me? It was mine!” That image almost makes it worth it all. Well, almost.)

Meanwhile, out on the hustings, the president – never one to allow mere rules of syntax to get in the way of a good Freudian slip or two – offered up this gem on a recent swing through Ohio: “We will stay on the hunt. We will be on the offense, and we will protect the American people by defeating them overseas, so we do not have to face them here at home.” No wonder Republican candidates are finding they have “other commitments” when Bush comes to town to campaign for them. Hey, somebody’s gotta clean the kitty’s litter box and shovel snow off the driveway! It’s hard to get good help these days, y’know?

Meanwhile, though, we fools trapped in the real world are still stuck with Mr. Bush and his insane war. There are some potential silver linings, however. Chief among these is the possibility that the regressive right’s entire radical project for the eradication of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will finally be repudiated, once and for all, as increasing numbers of Americans have their eyes finally pried open by the leading edge of the disaster in Mesopotamia. Once you’ve made that leap, the deficit, Katrina, the prescription drug bill, real domestic security and even 9/11 can’t be that hard to figure out as well, especially with the president now selling out American port security to his pals in Dubai, who coincidently dropped a million for his library (like the guy reads, anyhow). Even the troglodyte crowd could figure that one out. Anyhow, there could be no more richly deserved irony than the right becoming a victim of their own success, with Americans finally awakening to the magnitude of the movement’s thievery, deceit, murder and arrogance, and saying no thanks for the next generation or six.

Another possible positive effect of this disaster might take the form of evil spirits visiting its perpetrators. Ones wishes that, somehow, George Bush could live a thousand lifetimes of pain, though it could still never begin to atone for the grief he has brought into this world. Perhaps his personal hell would be that awful feeling in his gut – like when he was flunking his college mid-terms, like when he was crashing businesses into the ground, like when he was in a drunken stupor blowing life itself – only a thousand times worse. And to think, here he had finally vanquished some of those demons. He was the most powerful man in the world. He had kicked the snot out of Saddam and won reelection. Hell, even his smart-ass dad, with his big resume and everybody always fawning on him and all, couldn’t do that! But now his whole presidency is going down in the self-immolation of Baghdad’s smoking ruins, and with it the entire pathetic edifice he had created to somehow miraculously convince himself that he isn’t a complete screw-up coasting through life on the most improbable twist of unimaginable luck in the genetic lottery, after all. As the mirage melts, Bush comes inescapably face to face with the demon which has haunted him for sixty years now. As more and more pundits, historians and voters begin mouthing the words “worst president ever”, there will be no place to hide, not even in Texas.

As for the corporate predator d.b.a. Dick Cheney, one wishes he could spend even one hour on patrol in the streets of Baghdad, just so we could watch the iron-man soil his Dockers and crumble in fear facing the very thing he’s forced upon countless 18 year-olds for three years now. One wishes Paul Wolfowitz – who nowadays is so disgustingly, arrogantly, breathtakingly disrespectful as to refuse since becoming head of the World Bank to even talk about the war he made – one wishes he could be condemned to spend eternity hearing the screams induced by white phosphorus burns delivered in pursuit of his unbelievably wrong-headed theories of international politics.

But, of course, all of this may be too much to ask, especially in Mr. Bush’s case. With or without the alcohol, this president manifests an uncanny ability to delude himself. This is the Bode Miller of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe taking lessons from the commander-in-chief was how Miller managed to win zero medals in five events and then conclude “Man, I rocked here”. Why? Because he had partied real good throughout the Turin nightlife.

I guess if you’re George Bush, self-delusion (not to mention substance abuse) is a basic survival mechanism. Either that, or face that old demon panic deep down in the belly again. Just the same, I’m definitely not up for hearing “Man, I rocked here – I got to party and socialize at an Olympic level” (and all we got was this lousy “Mission Accomplished” t-shirt, complete with blood stains) after his little experiment in imperialism blows up in our faces. But given that we’ve already been told that the war was over before it really started, and given that the president once blamed the disaster in Iraq on his “catastrophic success”, this possibility can hardly be discounted, no matter how bad things get.

Of course, there’s always one other tried and true possibility from the Karl Rove playbook, if the let’s-pretend-we-rocked one fails. Since it was, after all, Bill Clinton who actually launched this war, why not blame it on him?

Either way, for god’s sake, somebody get these clowns out of the control room.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He welcomes reaction to his articles at his website – www.davidmichaelgreen.net – where readers can also find information about his other articles and endeavors.

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