Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the "surge" is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media's focus on the president's speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those thirty thousand new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what's actually under way.

In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it's scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together. What follows, then, is my attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the Unites States has been surging as part of Obama's widening war.

1. The troop surge: Let's start with those "30,000" new troops the president announced. First of all, they represent phase two of Obama's surge. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were "just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan" when he took office in January 2009. In March 2009, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. By December 2009, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. However, if you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 dispatched after the March announcement, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, 11,000 of those were "authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year," bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan "surge" was already under way when Obama arrived. It also seems that at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door without notice or comment. Similarly, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to "increase the [30,000] number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement." That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed "senior military official" told DeYoung that "the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs."

Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you've surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.

2. The contractor surge: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many formerly military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases.

There's no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. They certainly went unmentioned in Obama's West Point speech. Yet a modest-sized article by August Cole in the Wall Street Journal the day after gave us the basics, if you went looking for them. Headlined "U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace," Cole's article reported: "The Defense Department's latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40 percent between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5 percent in the same period.... Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total." In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.

Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corporation, the website TPM Muckraker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 "third country nationals" among the contractors, and among those 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that DynCorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan, "which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years."

3. The militia surge: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a minisurge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to create a movement along the lines of Iraq's Sunni Awakening movement that, many believe, ensured the "success" of George W. Bush's 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we'll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of cash.

This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense Initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of USA Today, will "funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize 'neighborhood watch'-like programs to help with security." Think of this as a "bribe" surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy "friendship."

4. The civilian surge: The State Department now claims to be "on track" to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by early 2010. Of course, that means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government, including "diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country." A similar civilian surge is evidently under way in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for that humongous new, nearly billion-dollar emba.s.sy compound to be built in Islamabad.

5. The CIA and special forces surge: Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room blog had it right when he wrote: "The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn't mention at West Point," referring to the CIA's "covert" (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. In fact, the CIA's drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af-Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report that the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House "for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the CIA's budget for operations inside the country." In addition, Scott Shane of the Times reports, "The White House has authorized an expansion of the CIA's drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said...to parallel the president's decision... to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time-a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas-because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide."

The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a complex tinderbox of a region with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.

In addition, thanks to the Nation magazine's Jeremy Scahill, we know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army's Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates "a secret program in which they plan targeted a.s.sa.s.sinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, 's.n.a.t.c.h and grabs' of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan." Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the "surge" there means.

6. The base-building surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama's latest troop-surge announcement, but he has continued it. A December 5, 2009, NBC Nightly News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a "boom town," shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which-especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades under way-are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.

As Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported, forward operating bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. "Forget for a moment the 'debates' in Washington over Afghan War policy," he wrote, "and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn't going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military's building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon."

7. The training surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan National Army and police. Despite years of U.S. and NATO "mentoring," both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions, running at a rate of at least 25 percent of those trained annually, and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by fall 2010 and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.

8. The cost surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama's $30 billion figure won't faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We've already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan army, and another $7 billion has gone into police training, staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a ma.s.sive bulking up of the country's security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works, which seems unlikely, try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-person force. Afghan president Hamid Karzai has suggested that it will take at least fifteen to twenty years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule ("You break it, you own it"). In this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. And this is even without adding in those local militias we're planning to invest "millions" in.

9. The endlessly receding horizon surge: By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting "an open-ended commitment." With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post headline said it all: "McChrystal's Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact." On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of drawdown promises. Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right wing began to blaze away about the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date "to the enemy," there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful. In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a "flurry of coordinated television interviews," the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows "in lockstep" to rea.s.sure the Right (and they were rea.s.sured) by playing "down the significance of the July 2011 target date." The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. ("July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [national security adviser] General [James] Jones said, is a 'ramp' rather than a 'cliff.'") When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: "We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government." This seemed a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we're talking about a relatively lightly armed minority Pashtun insurgency. Against them and a minuscule number of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched an unbelievably costly buildup of forces over vast distances, along fragile, overextended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan. This is the reality the president and his top officials didn't bother to explain to the American people.

And yet, confoundingly, as the United States bulks up, the war only grows fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, has written, "Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism." Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, give it some credit: the ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can't even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.

Pentagon Time: Tick...Tick...Tick...

Back in 2007, when General David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a penchant for clock imagery. In an interview in April of that year, he typically said: "I'm conscious of a couple of things. One is that the Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock, so we're obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can perhaps give hope to those in the coalition countries, in Washington, and perhaps put a little more time on the Washington clock." And he wasn't alone. Military spokespeople and others in the Bush administration right up to the president regularly seemed to hear one, two, or sometimes as many as three clocks ticking away ominously and out of sync.

Hearing some discordant ticking myself of late, I decided to retrieve Petraeus's image from the dustbin of history. So imagine three ticking clocks, all right here in the United States, one set to Washington time, a second to American time, and the third to Pentagon time.

In Washington-with even the New York Times agreeing that a "majority" of one hundred is sixty (not fifty-one) and that the Senate's forty-first vote settles everything-the clock seems to be ticking erratically, if at all. On the other hand, that American clock, if we're to believe the good citizens of Ma.s.sachusetts, is ticking away like a bomb. Americans are impatient, angry, and "in revolt" against Washington time. That's what the media continue to tell us in the wake of the Senate upset in which Republicans won the long-safe Democratic seat opened up by the death of Edward Kennedy. Depending on which account you read, they were outraged by a nearly trillion-dollar health-care reform that was also a giveaway to insurance companies, and annoyed by Democratic candidate Martha Coakley calling Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling a "Yankees fan." They were anxious about an official Ma.s.sachusetts unemployment rate of 9.4 percent (and a higher real one), an economy that has rebounded for bankers but not for regular people, soaring deficits, staggering foreclosure rates, mega-banking bonuses, the Obama administration's bailout of those same bankers, and its coziness with Wall Street. They were angry and impatient about a lot of things, blind angry you might say, since they were ready to vote back into office the party not in office, even if behind that party's "new face" were ideas that would take us back to the origins of the present disaster.

It's worth noting, however, that they weren't angry about everything-and that the Washington clock, barely moving on a wide range of issues, is still ticking away when it comes to one inst.i.tution. The good citizens of Ma.s.sachusetts may be against free rides and bailouts for many types, but not for everybody. I'm speaking, of course, about the Pentagon, for which Congress in 2010 pa.s.sed a record budget of $626 billion. This happened without real debate, much public notice, or even a touch of anger in Washington or Ma.s.sachusetts. And keep in mind that the Pentagon's real budget is undoubtedly closer to a trillion dollars, without even including the full panoply of support for our national security state.

The Tea Party crews don't rail against Pentagon giveaways, nor do American voters. Unfettered Pentagon budgets pa.s.s in the tick-tock of a Washington clock and no one seems fazed when the Wall Street Journal reveals that military aides accompanying globe-hopping parties of congressional representatives regularly spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on snacks, drinks, and other "amenities" for them, even while, like some K Street lobbying outfit, promoting their newest weaponry. Think of it, in financial terms, as Pentagon peanuts sh.e.l.led out for actual peanuts, and no one gives a d.a.m.n.

It was hardly news-and certainly nothing to get angry about-when the secretary of defense met privately with the nation's top military-industrial contractors, called for an even "closer partnership," and pledged to further their mutual interests by working "with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time." Nor did it cause a stir among the denizens of inside-the-Beltway Washington or Americans generally when the top ten defense contractors spent more than $27 million lobbying the federal government, as in the last quarter of 2009, just as plans for the president's Afghan surge were being prepared.

However, it's not just the angry citizens of Ma.s.sachusetts, or those Tea Party organizers, or Republican stalwarts who see no link between our military-industrial outlays, our perpetual wars, and our economic woes. When, for instance, was the last time you saw a bona fide liberal economist and columnist like Paul Krugman include the Pentagon and our wars in the litany of things potentially bringing this country down?

Striking percentages of Americans attend the church (temple, mosque) of their choice, but when it comes to American politics and the economy, the U.S. military is our church, "national security" our bible, and nothing done in the name of either can be wrong. It's as if the military, already the most revered inst.i.tution in the country, existed on the other side of a Star-Trekkian financial wormhole.

Which brings us to Pentagon time. Yes, that third clock is ticking, but at a very different tempo from those in Washington or Ma.s.sachusetts.

Americans are evidently increasingly impatient for "change" of whatever sort, whether you can believe in it or not. The Pentagon, on the other hand, is patient. It's opted for making counterinsurgency the central strategy of its war in Central and South Asia, the sort of strategy that, even if successful, experts claim could easily take a decade or two to pull off. But no problem-not when the Pentagon's clock is ticking on something like eternal time.

And here's the thing: because the mainstream media are no less likely to give the Pentagon a blank check than Americans generally, it's hard indeed to grasp the extent to which that inst.i.tution, and the military services it represents, are planning and living by their own clock. Though major papers have Pentagon "beats," they generally tell us remarkably little, except inadvertently and in pa.s.sing, about Pentagon time.

Take, for example, a January 6, 2010, story from the inside pages of the New York Times. Reporter Eric Schmitt began it this way: "The military's effort to build a seasoned corps of expert officers for the Afghan war, one of the highest priorities of top commanders, is off to a slow start, with too few volunteers and a high-level warning to the armed services to steer better candidates into the program, according to some senior officers and partic.i.p.ants." At stake was an initiative "championed" by Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal to create a "912-member corps of mostly officers and enlisted service members who will work on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues for up to five years."

As Schmitt saw it, a program in its infancy was already faltering because it didn't conform to one of the normal career paths followed in the U.S. military. But what caught my eye was that phrase "up to five years." Imagine what it means for the war commander, backed by key figures in the Pentagon, to plan to put more than nine hundred soldiers, including top officers, on a career path that would leave them totally wedded, for five years, to war in the Af-Pak theater of operations. (After all, if that war were to end, the State Department might well take charge.) In other words, McChrystal was creating a potentially powerful interest group within the military whose careers would be wedded to an ongoing war with a time line that extended into 2015, and who would have something to lose if it ended too quickly. What does it matter then that President Obama was proclaiming his desire to begin drawing down the war in July 2011?

Or consider the plan being proposed by special forces major Jim Gant, and now getting a most respectful hearing inside the military, according to Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post. Gant wants to establish small special forces teams that would "go native," move into Afghan villages and partner up with local tribal leaders, "One Tribe at a Time," as an influential paper he wrote on the subject was ent.i.tled. "The U.S. military," reported Tyson, "would have to grant the teams the leeway to grow beards and wear local garb, and enough autonomy in the chain of command to make rapid decisions. Most important, to build relationships, the military would have to commit one or two teams to working with the same tribe for three to five years, Gant said." She added that Gant has "won praise at the highest levels for his effort to radically deepen the U.S. military's involvement with Afghan tribes-and is being sent back to Afghanistan to do just that." Again, another "up to five year" commitment in Afghanistan and a career path to go with it on a clock that, in Gant's case, has yet to start ticking.

Or just to run through a few more examples: * In August 2009, the superb Walter Pincus of the Washington Post quoted air force brigadier general Walter Givhan, in charge of training the Afghan National Army Air Corps, as saying: "Our goal is by 2016 to have an air corps that will be capable of doing those operations and the things that it needs to do to meet the security requirements of this country." Of course, that six-year timeline includes the American advisers training that air force. (And note that Givhan's 2016 date may actually represent slippage. In January 2008, when air force brigadier general Jay H. Lindell, who was then commander of the Combined Air Power Transition Force, discussed the subject, he spoke of an "eight-year campaign plan" through 2015 to build up the Afghan Air Corps.) * In a January 13, 2010, piece on Pentagon budgeting plans, Anne Gearan and Anne Flaherty of the a.s.sociated Press reported: "The Pentagon projects that war funding would drop sharply in 2012, to $50 billion" from the present at least $159 billion (mainly thanks to a projected ma.s.sive drawdown of forces in Iraq), "and remain there through 2015." Whether the financial numbers are accurate or not, the date is striking: again a five-year window.

* Or take the "train and equip" program aimed at bulking up the Afghan military and police, which will be ma.s.sively staffed with U.S. military advisers (and private security contractors) and is expected to cost at least $65 billion. It's officially slated to run from 2010 to 2014, by which time the combined Afghan security forces are projected to reach four hundred thousand.

* Or consider a couple of the long-term contracts already being handed out for Afghan War work like the $158 million the air force has awarded to Evergreen Helicopters, Inc., for an "indefinite delivery/indefinite quant.i.ty (IDIQ) contract for rotary wing aircraft, personnel, equipment, tools, material, maintenance and supervision necessary to perform pa.s.senger and cargo air transportation services. Work will be performed in Afghanistan and is expected to start Apr. 3, 2009, to be completed by Nov. 30, 2013." Or the Pentagon contract awarded to the private contractor SOS International primarily for translators, which has an estimated completion date of September 2014.

Of course, this just scratches the surface of long-term Afghan War planning in the Pentagon and the military, which rolls right along, seemingly barely related to whatever war debates may be taking place in Washington. Few in or out of that city find these timelines strange, and indeed they are just symptomatic of an organization already planning for "the next war" and the ones after that, not to speak of the next generation bomber of 2018, the integrated U.S. Army battlefield surveillance system of 2025, and the drones of 2047.

This, in short, is Pentagon time, and it's we who fund that clock that ticks toward eternity. If the Pentagon gets in trouble, fighting a war or otherwise, we bail it out without serious debate or any of the anger we saw in the Ma.s.sachusetts election. No one marches in the streets, or demands that Pentagon bailouts end, or votes 'em (or at least their supporters) out of office.

In this way, no inst.i.tution is more deeply embedded in American life or less accountable for its acts. Pentagon time exists enswathed in an almost religious glow of praise and veneration, what might once have been known as "idolatry." Until the Pentagon is forced into our financial universe, the angry, impatient one where most Americans now live, we're in trouble. Until candidates begin losing because angry Americans reject our perpetual wars, and the perpetual war planning that goes with them, this sort of thinking will simply continue, no matter who the "commander in chief" is or what he thinks he's commanding. Americans need to stop saluting and end the Pentagon's free ride before our wars kill us.

EPILOGUE.

Premature Withdrawal.

We've now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost twenty years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for thirty years. Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad. And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded? In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better. In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us. After all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they've done best in recent years: cut one another's throats?

Modesty in Washington? Humility? The ability to draw new lessons from long-term experience? None of the above is evidently appropriate for "the indispensable nation," as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called the United States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to "see further into the future." None of the above is part of the American a.r.s.enal, not when Washington's weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the sc.r.a.p heap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us.

An expanding crew of Washington-based opiners is now calling for the Obama administration to alter its plans, negotiated in the last months of the Bush administration, for the departure of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. They seem to have taken Albright's belief in American foresight-even prophesy-to heart and so are basing their arguments on their ability to divine the future.

The problem, it seems, is that, whatever may be happening in the present, Iraq's future prospects are terrifying, which makes leaving, if not inconceivable, then as ma.s.sively irresponsible (as former Washington Post correspondent and bestselling author Tom Ricks wrote in a New York Times op-ed) as invading in the first place. Without the U.S. military on hand, we're told, the Iraqis will almost certainly deep-six democracy, while devolving into major civil violence and ethnic bloodletting, possibly of the sort that convulsed their country in 2005-06 when, by the way, the U.S. military was present in force.

The various partial winners of Iraq's much delayed March 7, 2010, election would, we were a.s.sured beforehand, jockey for power for months trying to cobble together a functioning national government. During that period, violence, it was said, would surely escalate, potentially endangering the marginal gains made thanks to the U.S. military "surge" of 2007. The possibilities remain endless and, according to these doomsayers, none of them are encouraging: Shiite militias could use our withdrawal to stage a violence-filled comeback. Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs is likely to increase and violently so, while al-Qaeda-in-Iraq could move into any post-election power void with its own destructive agenda.

The Warrior-Pundits Occupy the Future.

Such predictions are now dribbling out of the world of punditry and into the world of news reporting, where the future threatens to become fact long before it makes it onto the scene. Already it's reported that the anxious U.S. commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, "citing the prospects for political instability and increased violence," is talking about "plan B's" to delay the agreed upon withdrawal of all "combat troops" from the country this August. He has, Ricks reported on Foreign Policy's website, officially requested that a combat brigade remain in or near the troubled northern city of Kirkuk after the deadline.

As 2009 ended, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was suggesting that new negotiations might extend the U.S. position into the post-2011 years. ("I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a train, equip, and advise role beyond the end of 2011.") Centcom commander General David Petraeus agreed. More recently, Gates added that a "pretty considerable deterioration" in the country's security situation might lead to a delay in withdrawal plans (and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has agreed that this is a possibility). Vice President Joe Biden is already talking about relabeling "combat troops" not sent home in August because, as he put it in an interview with Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times, "we're not leaving behind cooks and quartermasters." The bulk of the troops remaining, he insisted, "will still be guys who can shoot straight and go get bad guys."

And a chorus of the usual suspects, Washington's warrior-pundits and "warrior journalists" (as Tom Hayden calls them), have been singing ever-louder versions of a song warning of that greatest of all dangers: premature withdrawal. Ricks, for instance, recommended in the Times that, having scuttled the "grandiose original vision" of the Bush invasion, the Obama administration should still "find a way" to keep a "relatively small, tailored force" of thirty thousand to fifty thousand troops in Iraq "for many years to come." (Those numbers, oddly enough, bring to mind the thirty-four thousand U.S. troops that, according to Ricks in his 2006 best-seller Fiasco, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz projected as the future U.S. garrison in Iraq in the weeks before the invasion of 2003.) Kenneth Pollack, a drumbeater for that invasion, is now wary of removing "the cast"-his metaphor for the U.S. military presence-on the "broken arm" of Iraq too soon, since states that have "undergone a major inter-communal civil war have a terrifying rate of recidivism." For Kimberly and Frederick Kagan, drumbeaters extraordinaire, writing for the Wall Street Journal, the United States must start discussing "a long-term military partnership with Iraq beyond 2011," especially since that country will not be able to defend itself by then.

Why, you might well ask, must we stay in Iraq, given our abysmal record there? Well, say these experts, we are the only force all Iraqis now accept, however grudgingly. We are, according to Pollack, the "peacekeepers...the lev[ee] holding back violence...Iraq's security blanket, and the broker of political deals...we enforce the rules." According to Ricks, we are the only "honest brokers" around. According to the Kagans, we were the "guarantor" of the recent elections, and have a kind of "continuing leverage" not available to any other group in that country, "should we choose to use it."

Today, Iraq is admittedly a mess. On our watch, the country crashed and burned. No one claims that we've put it back together. Multibillions of dollars in reconstruction funds later, the United States has been incapable of delivering the simplest things like reliable electricity or potable water to significant parts of the country. Now, the future sits empty and threatening before us. So much time in which so many things could happen, and all of them horrifying, all calling out for us to remain because they just can't be trusted, they just don't deliver.

The Sally Fields of American Foreign Policy.

Talk about blaming the victim. An uninvited guest breaks into a lousy dinner party, sweeps the already meager meal off the table, smashes the patched-together silverware, busts up the rickety furniture, and then insists on staying ad infinitum because the place is such a mess that someone responsible has to oversee the cleanup process.

What's remained in all this, remarkably enough, is our confidence in ourselves, our admiration for us, our-well, why not say it?-narcissism. Nothing we've done so far stops us from staring into that pool and being struck by what a kindly, helpful face stares back at us. Think of those gathering officials, pundits, journalists, and military figures seemingly eager to imagine the worst and so put the brakes on a full-scale American withdrawal as the Sally Fields of foreign policy. ("I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!") When you have an administration that has made backpedaling its modus operandi, this rising chorus in Washington and perhaps among the military in Iraq could prove formidable in an election year (here, not there). What, of course, makes their arguments particularly potent is the fact that they base them almost entirely on things that have yet to happen, that may, in fact, never happen. After all, humans have such a lousy track record as predictors of the future. History regularly surprises us, and yet their dismal tune about that future turns out to be an effective cudgel with which to beat those in favor of getting all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011.

Few remember anymore, but we went through a version of this forty years ago in Vietnam. There, too, Americans were repeatedly told that the United States couldn't withdraw because, if we left, the enemy would launch a "bloodbath" in South Vietnam. This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared in innumerable official speeches and accounts. It became so real that sometimes it seemed to put the actual, ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam in the shade, and for years it provided a winning explanation for why any departure would have to be interminably and indefinitely delayed. The only problem was, when the last American took that last helicopter out, the bloodbath didn't happen.

In Iraq, only one thing is really known: After our invasion and with U.S. and allied troops occupying the country in significant numbers, the Iraqis did descend into the charnel house of history, into a monumental bloodbath. It happened in our presence, on our watch, and in significant part thanks to us.

But why should the historical record-the only thing we can, in part, rely on-be taken into account when our pundits and strategists have such privileged access to an otherwise unknown future? Based on what we're seeing now, such arguments may intensify. Terrible prophesies about Iraq's future without us may multiply. And make no mistake, terrible things could indeed happen in Iraq. They could happen while we are there. They could happen with us gone. But history delivers its surprises more regularly than we imagine-even in Iraq.

In the meantime, it's worth keeping in mind that not even Americans can occupy the future. It belongs to no one.

Also from Haymarket Books.

Hopes and Prospects.

Noam Chomsky.

Breaking the Sound Barrier.

Amy Goodman, edited by Denis Moynihan

Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Gra.s.shoppers

Arundhati Roy

War Without End: The Iraq War in Context

Michael Schwartz

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan