It's beginning to look as if the "New American Century" could be
over as early as June 2004. That's when the Bush administration plans to
turn Iraq's sovereignty back to as many of its hand-picked Governing
Council as manage to survive until that heralded day. See, for those
inclined to follow President Bush's practice of averting his eyes from
the bad news out of Baghdad, it's crucial to understand that it's not
just American soldiers who are targets of the brutal Iraqi insurgency.
It's anybody and everybody who looks like an accomplice of the U.S.
occupation.

So does the impending turnover mean that Bush has decided to heed
the kind of advice given to our last Texas president by Vermont Sen.
George Aiken back in 1966? "President Johnson," Aiken said famously
"should declare victory in Vietnam and get out." Probably not.
Nevertheless, it's apt to happen anyway. There's a growing likelihood
that Bush's intentions--particularly given White House political advisor
Karl Rove's wish to see him returned to office in 2004--will end up
having little to do with the ultimate outcome in Iraq. Events appear to
be spiralling out of control.

According to a top secret CIA report leaked to the Philadelphia
Inquirer last week, "growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding the
U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the insurgents."
The report's bleak tone, the newspaper emphasized, was shared by L. Paul
Bremer, the U.S. official in charge of the occupation, who
"unexpectedly" returned to Washington in a seeming effort to get Bush's
attention. The CIA findings were leaked, wrote the Inquirer's John S.
Landay, because "senior policymakers" have become frustrated by their
inability "to provide Bush with more somber analyses of the situation in
Iraq than the optimistic views presented by Vice President Cheney,
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and other hard-liners."

For "senior policymakers," it's probably fair to read Bremer
himself and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Given Bush's stated
disinclination to read newspapers or watch TV news, preferring instead
to rely upon the honeyed words of his trusted advisors, the leakers real
hope may have been to get the Machiavellian Mr. Rove's attention.

Even as the U.S. command's Hollywood-sounding "Operation Iron
Hammer" began bombing empty warehouses and shooting up villages deemed
loyal to Saddam Hussein, Bush felt compelled to deny that the U.S.
planned to "cut and run." Doubters came from almost every point on the
political compass: "My greatest fear is that this administration, having
made all the wrong choices, is going to conclude they have to bring
Johnny and Jane home by the next election in order to survive,"
Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware told the New York Times.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona was customarily blunt: "To
announce withdrawals when the number of attacks and deaths of American
military are going up is not reasonable or logical," he said. "If the
American military can't do it, then certainly half-trained Iraqis
cannot."

McCain's fellow Vietnam vet and Republican colleage from Nebraska,
Sen. Chuck Hagel, sounded equally dubious in the Washington Post: "We so
underestimated and underplanned and underthought about a post-Saddam
Iraq that we've been woefully unprepared...Now we have a security
problem. We have a reality problem. And we have a governance
problem....And time is not on our side."

Even William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and
cheerleader for the clique of neoconservative chickenhawks who conceived
this visionary scheme and sold it to a feckless, easily bamboozled
president, sounded uncertain for once: "Too many people for my comfort
are looking for an exit strategy," he admitted, "and this administration
is making too many noises that sound like an exit strategy. But I
believe that, at the end of the day, Bush is not pursuing and will not
pursue an exit strategy."

Dream on, pal. "The Project for a New American Century," Kristol
and his fellow visionaries called their plan. (The late Gov. George
Wallace might have called them "pointy-headed intellectuals.") Turning
Iraq into a kind of Arab Switzerland was supposed to be only the first
step in creating a benign American empire encompassing most of the
Middle East and Southern Asia.

But the problem isn't simply that they oversold Iraq's
non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" and underestimated its
resentment of foreign invaders. They also misunderstood their own
country. Americans, see, will fight fiercely in what they see as
self-defense. But they have no real appetite for empire.