Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian

Shock and awe was more than the first phase of the invasion of Iraq. It was the premise of Bush’s foreign policy. Fear of unrivalled power would prompt the dominoes to fall — the dominoes being the traditional Western allies. Unilateralism (depicted as the coalition of the willing) would yield in submission. The spectacle of Iraqi democracy, a beacon to the Arab world, would refute argument and opposition.

On this gamble, the entire edifice of Bush’s policy rested. From the “cakewalk” would follow the collapse of Iranian influence, the rescue of Saudi Arabia from radical Islamist threat, Palestinian quiescence and instant solution of the Middle East crisis, the rapid spread of democracy across the former Ottoman Empire, the US blessed by the grateful Iraqi street as it withdrew its military forces, leaving the leader of “free Iraq,” former exile Ahmad Chalabi, in charge, and the French reduced to anxious waiters only seeking to please Bush with his order.

Now the FBI investigates neoconservatives in the Pentagon to discover who may have given secret US intelligence to Chalabi that he allegedly passed to the Iranians. The Iraqi Governing Council, a US creation, has transmogrified itself into the interim government, having shed Chalabi, hoping that its new identity will lend it a mask of legitimacy. Al-Qaeda has found fresh fields for its deadly work. The Middle East peace process is in ruins. The US casualty rate reached and then exceeded 800 dead soldiers on Memorial Day. The French case that there was not a WMD threat, and invading Iraq would lead to fragmentation of the country and trigger more terrorism, has been vindicated.

Bush’s emissaries cannot decide whether Iraq can be a democracy or at best a warlord state like Afghanistan. They plead before the UN, once spurned, for symbolic justification. Meanwhile, Bush launches a month of European travel, less diplomacy than a tableau vivant of international cooperation that, upon his departure from the stage, will instantly dissolve into grim realpolitik. As polls show him at his low ebb, he hopes that the American public will accept the illusion as reality and reject the reality as illusion.

At the UN, the US has proposed a resolution whose only substantive element is obviously empty. No nation that is not already there will contribute troops to comprise a multinational force in Iraq. The rest is window-dressing. Having disdained the UN at the start and failed to protect the UN mission, which was blown up last August with 17 killed, the Bush administration now desperately clings to the UN as a fig leaf of internationalism.

At home and abroad, Bush is investing his rhetoric about the “clash of ideologies” and “global war” with historical analogies. On his European visits, Bush will compare Iraq to rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II. He will raise the specter of the West against communism in the Cold War. He will contrast Nazi atrocities to Islamist terrorism.

Bush’s principal analogy conflates Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein into a common threat of “weapons of mass destruction” and a “totalitarian political ideology” that is “not an expression of religion”, as he explained in his speech before the Army War College on May 24. This is a world war of “two visions” that first “clashed in Afghanistan” and “have now met in Iraq.” It was in this speech that he proposed tearing down and replacing Abu Ghraib prison, despite having neglected to provide for it in his budget. Prophetically, on the eve of Bush’s appearance at the Army War College, its Strategic Studies Institute released a report, Vietnam and Iraq: Differences, Similarities and Insights, observing the similarities as failures of strategy, maintaining public support and nation building. It also noted: “Prospects for creating a stable, prosperous, and democratic Iraq are problematic, and observers and decision-makers should not be misled by false analogies to American state-building success in Germany and Japan after World War II.”

“They haven’t known what they’ve been doing since the statue of Saddam came down,” a military strategist at the Army War College told me. “Bush’s speech was a vision speech with no connection to facts on the ground. That seems to be the limit of his understanding and ability. Even Vietnam doesn’t look so bad in retrospect.” But Bush will not make reference to “Vietnam and Iraq” in Europe.