Imagine if, on May 1, 2003 as George Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in color-coded triumph, someone had leaned over and, behind a cupped palm, whispered that he would not attend the crowning triumph of his first presidential term, the official recreation of an Iraqi government in our image. Imagine if someone had then told him that an insurgency, evidently without a central command, armed with nothing more powerful than Kalashnikovs and RPGs, and made up to a significant degree of ordinary, angry Iraqis (as Edward Wong of the New York Times vividly reported today,) would stop his plans in their tracks; or that our sheriff in Baghdad would, hardly a year later, flee town tossing his badge in the dirt. What would George Bush have said then? Who among his followers wouldn't have had the laugh of their lives?

And yet, here we are. You won't read this in your daily paper or see it on the nightly prime-time news, but I assure you that what we're witnessing in slow motion is likely to be one of the great imperial defeats in history.


http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1520