The last three paragraphs of this story revealed that "senior administration officials . . . are considering alternatives other than democracy," according to a military expert who was just briefed at the White House.

Hmmm, "alternatives other than democracy."

My, what can those be?

Monarchy? Dictatorship?

In that same edition, The New York Times ran a headline about the death of the brutal Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner, proclaiming him to be a "colorful dictator."

That's an obscenity. According to Amnesty International, "During Stroessner's military dictatorship, gross and systematic violations of human rights occurred. Amnesty International repeatedly expressed concern to the Paraguayan Government about long-term prisoners of conscience and allegations of torture, 'disappearance' and death in custody of political prisoners, as well as reports of prolonged detentions of political opponents."

(For a glimpse at the horrors he committed, go to http://www.amnestyusa.org.)

The Bush Administration may be looking for an Iraqi Stroessner, or another, more reliable Saddam.

That may have been what Cheney and Rumsfeld had in mind all along. From the very beginning, they wanted to install in power Ahmad Chalabi and his groups of exiles roosting in the Iraqi National Congress, writes George Packer in his book The Assassin's Gate. When the situation in Iraq began to deteriorate, Cheney blamed those in the Administration who refused to go along with this plan.

"In the fall of 2003, Dick Cheney approached his colleague Colin Powell, stuck a finger in his chest, and said, 'If you hadn't opposed the INC and Chalabi, we wouldn't be in this mess,' " Packer reports.

Maybe Chalabi is waiting in the wings still-or some other Saddam wannabe.

Bush appears to be taking applications.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we speak with that former intern of the Lincoln Group -- his name, Willem Marx. He joins us on the line from Uzbekistan. He's a freelance writer and a graduate student in journalism at New York University. His piece -- his latest piece appears in Harper's magazine, detailing his experience. It's called "Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq." Willem Marx, thank you for joining us.

WILLEM MARX: Hi, Amy. Good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, why don't you start out just explaining, how did you get this job?

WILLEM MARX: Well, it started when I was approaching my final exams at Oxford just over a year ago, and a cousin of mine who lived in New York told me about a company that was offering internships in Baghdad. I had a place to study at NYU the following September, and I thought that a summer working in Iraq would be a very good experience for me as a burgeoning young reporter. And I sent off my resume. I saw a sort of position offered as a media intern. It didn't give a huge amount of detail. And it seemed like an opportunity that very few people my age would get. And having sent off my resume, I was contacted by the company, went through a few telephone interviews, and soon found myself flying over to D.C. to pick up a military identification card and then, a few days later, landing in Baghdad.

AMY GOODMAN: When you came to this country, you met the founders of the Lincoln Group?

WILLEM MARX: Yes, I did. Two men -- one called Christian Bailey, who is a Brit like me, and another former Marine called Paige Craig, who -- they have their headquarters in Washington, D.C.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you tell us any more about them and about that part of --

WILLEM MARX: Absolutely. Absolutely. I arrived in D.C., having not been there for a few years, since I visited a cousin at a university there. I didn't know the city very well. They put me up in a hotel near their office, and the morning after I had arrived, I walked up there. It was on K Street, the heart of the lobbying industry. And I was introduced to both of them. Paige Craig was very military, not particularly friendly, and just, you know, muttered a few words to me, whereas Christian Bailey had also gone to Oxford, and so we chatted about that for a while.

Neither of them were very forthcoming really about what I would be doing out in Iraq. Pretty sort of sketchy on details. But both, you know, were telling me there were great opportunities for young people like me. They were a company that was growing rapidly. And they welcomed me on board and wished me good luck.

AMY GOODMAN: Willem Marx, we're going to break, and then we're going to come back to hear about your time in Iraq, your time in the Green Zone and out. Willem Marx, former intern with the Lincoln Group. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Willem Marx. We're speaking to him now in Uzbekistan, a freelance writer and graduate student, spent the summer, last summer, in Iraq as an intern with the Lincoln Group and has written a piece about it in the latest edition of Harper's magazine called "Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq." Willem Marx, had either man who founded the Lincoln Group been to Iraq?

WILLEM MARX: Yes. Paige Craig, the former Marine, had certainly spent a lot of time there, I think after the initial invasion in March 2003, and from what I understood, he went out there to try and facilitate business opportunities for foreign investors and in a very roundabout way ended up with a contract for, I think, what they call "strategic communications" with the U.S. military.

The other, the Brit, Christian Bailey, had never, when I first met him, been out to Iraq, and he explained to me that every time he meant to go out there, something would come up in D.C., and he was needed to stay behind. Just after I left, at the end of August, I think he made a trip out there for a few days, but as far as I'm aware, that's the only time he's been there.

AMY GOODMAN: So you got on a plane and went to Baghdad. Describe your experience there.

WILLEM MARX: Well, I arrived in Baghdad airport and was taken to a villa in the Green Zone via Camp Victory. After about a week of twiddling my thumbs and not really doing a lot, I became rather impatient and emailed people back in D.C., saying, you know, "What am I doing here? I thought I was going to be doing some work." And within a day or two, I was taken to lunch by another employee, and he explained to me in detail what exactly it was the Lincoln Group was doing. And I was going to take over his position, because he was going on holiday, so -- on vacation, I should say.

And what he was doing was receiving English-written articles by soldiers in a certain unit inside Camp Victory, the major U.S. base just south of Baghdad. He was choosing which of those articles would be published in Iraqi newspapers. He was sending them to Iraqi employees, getting them translated into Arabic, getting them okayed by the command back at Camp Victory and then having other Iraqi employees run them down to Iraqi newspapers, where they would pay editors, sub-editors, commissioning editors to run them as news stories in the Iraqi newspapers. And that was the role, you know, after about a week or ten days of me being there, that I took over.

And for the first two or three weeks of that, things seemed to go according to plan. I obviously wasn't hugely happy about the work I was doing, but I saw it as a very, very interesting insight into how both the U.S. military operate in Iraq and also how contractors operate there. And things started to get slightly more exciting, in that the company was offered a much larger contract to do all sorts of other types of media placement, both on television and radio, and the internet and through posters around Baghdad. And I was involved in setting up some of the budgeting and the execution of this larger contract, which was worth $10 million a month for the company.

AMY GOODMAN: $10 million. According to MSNBC, "In December 2005, Pentagon documents indicate the Lincoln Group [...] received a $100 million contract to help produce these favorable articles, translate [them] into Arabic, get them placed in Iraqi newspapers and not reveal the Pentagon's role."

WILLEM MARX: I think MSNBC has got it slightly confused. The Lincoln Group was one of three companies also offered -- also contracted for up to $100 million for a contract with the Psychological Operations Joint Task Force, I think it's called, down in Florida. And that $100 million was dependent on pictures they made, ideas they came up with and could then sell to the military. That contract, with Lincoln Group at least, has been canceled, I think as recently as this month. I think I saw a piece in the Washington Post reporting that. So that $100 million, very little of it was ever given to the company, I think, and it was certainly touted by them as one of their major crowning achievements. But these are $20 million over two months, the $10 million a month for media placement in Iraq, was a separate contract with the military in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Willem, talk about how you chose these articles. Talk about the generals you communicated with, what the content of the articles were.

WILLEM MARX: Sure. Well, I'd get about five a day from this unit inside Camp Victory. And they'd vary from profiles of an Iraqi policewoman, maybe, to stories about factories opening, hospitals opening, terrorists being eliminated. And I tried as much as possible to stay away from those that dealt with terrorism and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I thought they were particularly inflammatory, often badly informed about local feelings towards insurgents in Iraq.

And I tried as much as possible to push pieces which talked about reconstruction. I'd pass those ones onto Iraqi employees, that talked about hospitals being rebuilt, and they were very clinical stories. There was not often a lot of art to the writing, but I felt that those were definitely stories that, you know, the mainstream media, both in Iraq and elsewhere, would not be writing about, purely because they would have no access to them. And it was the kind of positive spin on the situation that I felt more comfortable with using.

AMY GOODMAN: And then --

WILLEM MARX: And I'd -- sorry, yes?

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about then what you would do once you chose these articles? Who would you transmit them to?

WILLEM MARX: I would send them to an Iraqi in Lincoln Group's downtown Iraqi office, which was staffed entirely by local Iraqis, and he would choose one of the translators they had there, get it turned into Arabic, send back to me. I unfortunately don't read Arabic at all well. And I would then send it to the command. I think they had an Iraqi translator there themselves, who would check that it more or less followed the original English. They would rubber stamp it, and I would then send it back to the Iraqi office saying, "This is good to go. Put it in newspaper A, B, or C."

And from there, the process really was beyond my control, and they would do their best to place it in the newspaper I'd ask them to put it in, and often they didn't, and I began to grow suspicious about why exactly they weren't putting it in certain newspapers. And that led to what was, to me, the most shocking episode of my time in Iraq, when I was called upon to question some of the Iraqi employees at the downtown office as to why articles were being placed in newspapers we hadn't asked them to be put in and also why they were charging these newspapers far more than they had when I'd first arrived, the suspicion being that Iraqi employees were taking a cut of the money they then expensed the company.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don't you explain that whole journey, how you left the Green Zone and went to conduct this interrogation?

WILLEM MARX: It was extraordinary. I was asked by my boss at the company to look into -- you know, I'd noticed these discrepancies myself in the kind of flow charts we kept, which monitored how many articles were published and where, and I saw there were some very strange goings on in these records, and I was sent to go and investigate, myself. So I took a friend from the Green Zone, an Iraqi guy who lived nearby and worked more or less as a handyman for another American contractor. He agreed to come down as a mutual sort of friend of mine and translator, who the other Iraqi employees wouldn't know and would not be able to follow or suspect, in case there was any foul play to be experienced.

And he and I drove down to this downtown office through all the checkpoints, sort of mid-afternoon, I would say, arrived at this office, which, of course, is bolted and relatively heavily guarded inside this apartment building. And I went straight to the head of the Iraqi office and said, "I want to speak to such-and-such and such-and-such and ask them about these discrepancies." And I, at this stage, had no idea who was really involved, who was guilty and, because my Arabic was very rudimentary, I very rarely understood much of what was sort of said in front of me, so it was difficult to know who I should be trusting. And I sat down with one employee after another and really questioned them about their involvement in the publishing of these stories and whether they had been taking kickbacks in connivance with local editors.

And the really startling episode I write about is sitting down with one of these men, who I'd never really trusted, and he very angrily was protesting the accusations I was laying against him. And I carried a gun very often with me when I traveled outside of the Green Zone, a small sort of Glock revolver, and carried it in my belt, and as I sat down to talk to this man, after a few moments, I realized that the revolver was very uncomfortably placed inside my belt. And as I started asking these very accusatory questions, I pulled the gun out of my belt and put it on the table between the two of us and suddenly realized that was a horrifically threatening motion. And I was really quite disgusted with myself, and the man left. He ran away out of the office when I was questioning someone else.

The two men who had been sent to help me put pressure, along with my own translator friend, to help me put pressure on these employees were former Mukhabarat officers, part of Saddam's intelligence service, and they told me the best approach would be to sort of threaten this guy with a CIA investigation, telling me that those three letters were the most threatening three letters to any Iraqi. And once I had learned that the man I'd probably gone on, as it were, had left the building, I decided, you know, it was getting dark, and I needed to get the hell out of there, and this was not at all the sort of thing I should be spending my time doing if I wanted to be a journalist. And that really precipitated my departure from Baghdad. I decided, you know, that week, I was out of there.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the amounts of money that we're talking about on both ends? Here you were interrogating these Iraqis about whether they had possibly pocketed some of the money that was supposed to go to the newspapers. And yet, on the other hand, you had the Lincoln Group receiving millions of dollars.

WILLEM MARX: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain?

WILLEM MARX: Well, that was one of the really shocking things to me, is that, you know, I was sent down to talk to these guys, and at most we paid, I think, roughly $2,000 to place an article in the best Iraqi newspapers. And, you know, they were taking half of that. They were pocketing a grand an article, which in Iraq, as I'm sure you'd appreciate, is a huge amount of money and would have helped them and their families quite significantly.

At the same time, items in the contract that the Lincoln Group had with the U.S. military -- one such item, a line item, as they would call it, would be placing a TV commercial on Iraqi television, and that would require them to film, edit and then air these 30-second-long or minute-long on-air sort of commercials. And each commercial, they were paid $1 million, just over $1 million. And when I went to try and, you know, get some idea of prices for these things, I was told that you could effectively get one of these on air for about $12,000, and as I'm sure you appreciate, that's a pretty significant profit margin. And yet, there was I, interrogating people with guns for a mere $1,000.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the U.S. generals involved and also the Iraqi newspapers you had these articles placed in?

WILLEM MARX: Yes. The process by which I passed on these articles often involved a bit of back-and-forth between myself and captains and majors in the U.S. military unit that I dealt with, and my relationship with them was very important to the company. I had to at times be diplomatic, at times be critical. And occasionally I would have to give up my editorial control over which articles were pushed through to the Iraqi media, because they had, themselves, received orders from above, from men like General Casey, who was the top commander in Iraq at the time and, I believe, still is. And General Casey said, "No, sorry. It's very important we publish this article. You guys make sure the Lincoln Group publishes it." And lo and behold, we'd publish it, even though it would be something that I felt was, you know, not really suitable and would grate with many Iraqis reading it, who would think this is obviously American propaganda.

And, you know, the newspapers we dealt with, I think on occasions like that, were very, very suspicious, I would imagine, of who was planting these articles, where they were coming from, why freelance Iraqi writers would turn up to their offices and offer them $1,000, $2,000 to publish an article. And there must have been a huge suspicion from some of these editors that the Americans were involved.

And one particular article about the Badr Brigade, which is a Shiite militia, I'm sure you know, which General Casey was very keen to push, basically applauded the Badr Brigade for not retaliating against attacks on the Shia in Baghdad. And he was very keen to get it pushed out, and two newspapers in a row refused to publish it, because it was too inflammatory in a political sense. So that was a very interesting experience, having this senior, senior general getting involved in the nitty-gritty and wanting one particular story to go out, only to discover that no Iraqi newspapers in their right mind were willing to publish it for however much money we offered.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Willem Marx, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Have a safe trip back to the United States. I look forward to meeting you when you come back to New York to get your journalism education. Willem Marx has written a piece in the latest edition of Harper's magazine called "Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq."

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.

Officially, the Bush administration's strategy is: Clear, hold and build. But with limited American forces to do any clearing, the war in western Iraq looks much more like hang on and hand over. Hang on against an insurgency that seems to be laying roadside bombs as quickly as they are discovered, and hand over to an Iraqi military that is still a work in progress.

The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, American generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control a country the size of California. They counted heavily on the cooperation of anti-Hussein Iraqi troops to carry out the task. The plan to enlist the support of Iraqi troops to control the country was approved in March 2003 by President Bush himself.

But the Iraqi Army went AWOL when faced with the rapid American push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior American military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the top American general in Iraq at the time, and the C.I.A. station chief in Baghdad began to work toward this end by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals. Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer III, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Secretary of State Colin Powell was informed in advance.

Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a new and very methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a nation that was in chaos. (The new force was to be called the New Iraqi Corps, until American officials learned that N.I.C. sounded like a vulgar profanity in Arabic.) Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought that Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and police was pursued with a new urgency. Today, an American-run organization - the Multinational Security Transition Command - is led by Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card.

Many Democrats want to leave Iraq "before the job is done," the president said. "I can't tell you exactly when it's going to be done," he said, but "if we ever give up the desire to help people who live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation, as far as I'm concerned."

Now in its fourth year, the war has taken a toll - more than 2,600 Americans have died and many more Iraqis have been killed. Last month alone, about 3,500 Iraqis died violently, the highest monthly civilian toll so far. Bush's approval rating has slumped to the lowest point of his presidency, and Republicans are concerned that they could lose control of Congress because of voters' unhappiness.

Bush said he was frustrated by the war at times.

"War is not a time of joy," he said. "These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country. I understand that. You know, nobody likes to see innocent people die. Nobody wants to turn on their TV on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists."

But Bush said he agreed with Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, that if "we leave before the mission is done, the terrorists will follow us here." A failed Iraq would provide a safe haven for terrorists and extremists and give them revenue from oil sales, Bush said.

In response, Democrats said it was time for a new direction and Bush should begin redeploying troops this year.

"Our soldiers in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, force protection of U.S. personnel and training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said, "Far from spreading freedom and democracy in the Middle East, the Bush administration has watched while extremists grow stronger,
Iran goes nuclear, Iraq falls into civil war and oil and gas prices skyrocket. Simply staying the course is unacceptable."

Bush said differences over Iraq provide "an interesting debate." "There's a lot of people - good, decent people - saying 'withdraw now.' They're absolutely wrong. ... We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president. That would be a huge mistake."

"Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster."

Bush said he would not question the patriotism of someone who disagreed with him - although Vice President
Dick Cheney said recently the Democratic primary election victory of anti-war candidate Ned Lamont over incumbent Sen.
Joe Lieberman, a defender of the war, might encourage "the al-Qaida types."

Bush opened his nearly hour-long news conference by calling for quick deployment of an international force to help uphold the fragile cease-fire in southern Lebanon. "The need is urgent," Bush said. He said the United States was increasing humanitarian and reconstruction aid to more than $230 million.

European countries expected to provide the bulk of peacekeepers have delayed committing troops. France disappointed allies by merely doubling its contingent of 200.

The president also said the United States would seek a new U.N. resolution on disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon but he sounded doubtful about achieving results soon on the ground. "Hopefully, over time, Hezbollah will disarm," the president said.

Bush also urged patience about the rebuilding of New Orleans and other gulf communities ravaged by Hurricane Katrina a year ago. The federal government has committed $110 billion to help. "I also want the people down there to understand that it's going to take awhile to recover," the president said. "This was a huge storm." He suggested the federal government had done its part and state and local officials should move faster.

On other points, Bush said:

- He talked Monday with Chinese President
Hu Jintao about trying to revive six-party negotiations aimed getting
North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. The White House said the two leaders, in a 21-minute call, also discussed economic issues that have caused friction.

- There is no quick fix for soaring gasoline prices. He said the answer was to diversify away from crude oil.

- A morning-after contraceptive pill, known as Plan B, should require a prescription for minors. Anti-abortion groups want Bush to withdraw Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, his nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, because they think he will approve over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill. Democrats, meanwhile, are upset that the FDA has long delayed settling the debate over whether at least some women could buy the contraceptive without a doctor's note.

Now in its fourth year, the war has taken a toll - more than 2,600 Americans have died and many more Iraqis have been killed. Last month alone, about 3,500 Iraqis died violently, the highest monthly civilian toll so far. Bush's approval rating has slumped to the lowest point of his presidency, and Republicans are concerned that they could lose control of Congress because of voters' unhappiness.

Bush said he was frustrated by the war at times.

"War is not a time of joy," he said. "These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country. I understand that. You know, nobody likes to see innocent people die. Nobody wants to turn on their TV on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists."

But Bush said he agreed with Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, that if "we leave before the mission is done, the terrorists will follow us here." A failed Iraq would provide a safe haven for terrorists and extremists and give them revenue from oil sales, Bush said.

In response, Democrats said it was time for a new direction and Bush should begin redeploying troops this year.

"Our soldiers in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, force protection of U.S. personnel and training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said, "Far from spreading freedom and democracy in the Middle East, the Bush administration has watched while extremists grow stronger,
Iran goes nuclear, Iraq falls into civil war and oil and gas prices skyrocket. Simply staying the course is unacceptable."

Bush said differences over Iraq provide "an interesting debate." "There's a lot of people - good, decent people - saying 'withdraw now.' They're absolutely wrong. ... We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president. That would be a huge mistake."

"Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster."

Bush said he would not question the patriotism of someone who disagreed with him - although Vice President
Dick Cheney said recently the Democratic primary election victory of anti-war candidate Ned Lamont over incumbent Sen.
Joe Lieberman, a defender of the war, might encourage "the al-Qaida types."

Bush opened his nearly hour-long news conference by calling for quick deployment of an international force to help uphold the fragile cease-fire in southern Lebanon. "The need is urgent," Bush said. He said the United States was increasing humanitarian and reconstruction aid to more than $230 million.

European countries expected to provide the bulk of peacekeepers have delayed committing troops. France disappointed allies by merely doubling its contingent of 200.

The president also said the United States would seek a new U.N. resolution on disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon but he sounded doubtful about achieving results soon on the ground. "Hopefully, over time, Hezbollah will disarm," the president said.

Bush also urged patience about the rebuilding of New Orleans and other gulf communities ravaged by Hurricane Katrina a year ago. The federal government has committed $110 billion to help. "I also want the people down there to understand that it's going to take awhile to recover," the president said. "This was a huge storm." He suggested the federal government had done its part and state and local officials should move faster.

On other points, Bush said:

- He talked Monday with Chinese President
Hu Jintao about trying to revive six-party negotiations aimed getting
North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. The White House said the two leaders, in a 21-minute call, also discussed economic issues that have caused friction.

- There is no quick fix for soaring gasoline prices. He said the answer was to diversify away from crude oil.

- A morning-after contraceptive pill, known as Plan B, should require a prescription for minors. Anti-abortion groups want Bush to withdraw Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, his nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, because they think he will approve over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill. Democrats, meanwhile, are upset that the FDA has long delayed settling the debate over whether at least some women could buy the contraceptive without a doctor's note.

I am not a psychiatrist and don't play one on t.v., so treat what follows as political satire please, and nothing more.

But what strikes me about Bush's Monday appearance is how consistent it is with what I understand of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Let's look at it this way:

'1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).'

Bush is not content to be the most powerful man in the world. He thinks he is on a mission from God, and has decided that he is going to "reform" the Middle East, and turn Middle Easterners into something else. He is the Great Transformer of these other peoples' lives. The reason he has to stay in Iraq until the end of his presidency (it is all about him) is that he cannot admit that he did not succeed in being the great Transformer of the Middle East, that in fact he screwed up the Middle East royally. Because such an admission of any slightest mistake, much less a major series of failures, would fatally threaten his sense of grandiosity. Thus, he can't pull troops out of Iraq not because of practical military considerations, but because it would send the wrong signal to regional "reformers," i.e. Bush's mini-me's, the people fulfilling his sense of grandiosity.

Nobody else is in the picture here, just Bush. He doesn't ask any sacrifice from the US public for the war, as Bill Maher and others have noted. The heroics are his alone. The rest of us should go shopping (so as not to interfere with his self-image as Atlas of the Middle East.)

' 2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

'Bush suffers from T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") syndrome. Lawrence, despite polite denials, clearly thought that he led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I and wrote:

' All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant.

Bush, like Lawrence before him, imagines that he is inspiring a people to accomplish things they couldn't do without him. (That is why he can't admit that the Lebanese have been having elections for decades, and has to pretend it all started with him.) And all he gets for his inspired Transformation of others' lives is carping about the expected oil contracts in Iraq not being there. There is even prickliness from the French. Lawrence might have sympathized.

3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

4. Requires excessive admiration

5. Has a sense of entitlement.

He is the Decider. He doesn't need Security Council resolutions to start wars. He doesn't need warrants for wire taps. He is entitled. He is the War President (never mind that he chose to go to war in Iraq and so made himself into the war president, and that the war presidency would be over with by now if he were any good at it.)

'

6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends.

7. Lacks empathy'

Bush only "worries" that eventually there may be a civil war in Iraq. He doesn't admit that he made a whole country of 25 million people into guinea pigs, and that as a result 3,000 are dying a month in civil war violence of the most brutal kind. '

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him

9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes. '

Saying that he can understand that having over 2600 of our troops come home in body bags and over 8,000 come home seriously wounded, with limbs gone or brain or spinal damage, is a cause of "anxiety" to the American "psyche" is patronizing. He knows better about why this has to be. The inferior people are a little upset, but that is because they don't understand that he is the Transformer. What they're upset about is just the side effect of the Transformation. They don't believe. They can't see the Transformation before their eyes. They are inferior.

Despite the growing casualty rate, however, the Ministry of Defence has no figures for combat injuries on its website - despite promises by John Reid, the former defence secretary, earlier this year that details would be made public.

The MoD's website, which is supposed to update casualty figures every month, reports fatalities but states that no figures for combat injuries are currently available. No reason is given.

MPs and senior officers have accused the Government of trying to "cover-up" the sacrifices being made by the British troops in Afghanistan, and one senior officer claimed that the MoD's policy of not releasing full details of injured soldiers was for "purely presentational reasons" because of the negative messages it would send to the public.

The officer added that there was a great deal of "bad feeling" within the military over the treatment of casualties, many of whom believe they have become the forgotten victims of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the injured soldiers, a ranger in the Royal Irish Regiment, was shot through the head by a sniper 10 days ago and is fighting for his life in a Karachi hospital. Two weeks earlier, two members of the Parachute Regiment were seriously injured in an ambush during which one soldier was shot in the stomach and another received severe shrapnel injuries to his leg.

In June, three soldiers received gunshot and shrapnel wounds in an ambush that left one officer, Captain Jim Philippson, dead. This newspaper has been given details of several other soldiers injured in battles with the Taliban.

Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, told The Sunday Telegraph that the MoD's policy smacked of political motives.

He said: "Ministers have given us assurances in the past that they will make casualty figures and details of casualties available... any attempt to suppress information of this sort will only serve to undermine public confidence in what's happening in Afghanistan and that would be a tragedy."

A spokesman for the MoD said last night: "There is no attempt to cover up casualty figures. It is our intention to publish casualty figures for Afghanistan in the near future."

1. The Iraqi Government Is Little More Than a Group of "Talking Heads"

A minimally viable central government is built on at least three foundations: the coercive capacity to maintain order, an administrative apparatus that can deliver government services and directives to society, and the resources to manage these functions. The Iraqi government has none of these attributes -- and no prospect of developing them. It has no coercive capacity. The national army we hear so much about is actually trained and commanded by the Americans, while the police forces are largely controlled by local governments and have few, if any, viable links to the central government in Baghdad. (Only the Special Forces, whose death-squad activities in the capital have lately been in the news, have any formal relationship with the elected government; and they have more enduring ties to the U.S. military that created them and the Shia militias who staffed them.)

Administratively, the Iraqi government has no existence outside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone -- and little presence within it. Whatever local apparatus exists elsewhere in the country is led by local leaders, usually with little or no loyalty to the central government and not dependent on it for resources it doesn't, in any case, possess. In Baghdad itself, this is clearly illustrated in the vast Shiite slum of Sadr city, controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and his elaborate network of political clerics. (Even U.S. occupation forces enter that enormous swath of the capital only in large brigades, braced for significant firefights.) In the major city of the Shia south, Basra, local clerics lead a government that alternately ignores and defies the central government on all policy issues from oil to women's rights; in Sunni cities like Tal Afar and Ramadi, where major battles with the Americans alternate with insurgent control, the government simply has no presence whatsoever. In Kurdistan in the north, the Kurdish leadership maintains full control of all local governments.

As for resources, with 85% of the country's revenues deriving from oil, all you really need to know is that oil-rich Iraq is also suffering from an "acute fuel shortage" (including soaring prices, all-night lines at gas stations, and a deal to get help from neighboring Syria which itself has minimal refining capacity). The almost helpless Iraqi government has had little choice but to accept the dictates of American advisors and of the International Monetary Fund about exactly how what energy resources exist will be used. Paying off Saddam-era debt, reparations to Kuwait from the Gulf War of 1990, and the needs of the U.S.-controlled national army have had first claim. With what remains so meager that it cannot sustain a viable administrative apparatus in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, there is barely enough to spare for the government leadership to line their own pockets.

2. There Is No Iraqi Army

The "Iraqi Army" is a misnomer. The government's military consists of Iraqi units integrated into the U.S.-commanded occupation army. These units rely on the Americans for intelligence, logistics, and -- lacking almost all heavy weaponry themselves -- artillery, tanks, and any kind of airpower. (The Iraqi "Air Force" typically consists of fewer then 10 planes with no combat capability.) The government has no real control over either personnel or strategy.

We can see this clearly in a recent operation in Sadr City, conducted (as news reports tell us) by "Iraqi troops and US advisors" and backed up by U.S. artillery and air power. It was one of an ongoing series of attempts to undermine the Sadrists and their Mahdi army, who have governed the area since the fall of Saddam. The day after the assault, Iraqi premier Nouri Kamel al-Maliki complained about the tactics used, which he labeled "unjustified," and about the fact that neither he, nor his government, was included in the decision-making leading up to the assault. As he put it to an Agence France-Presse, "I reiterate my rejection to [sic] such an operation and it should not be executed without my consent. This particular operation did not have my approval."

This happened because the U.S. has functionally expanded its own forces in Iraq by integrating local Iraqi units into its command structure, while essentially depriving the central government of any army it could use purely for its own purposes. Iraqi units have their own officers, but they always operate with American advisers. As American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad put it, "We'll ultimately help them become independent." (Don't hold your breath.)

3. The Recent Decline in American Casualties Is Not a Result of Less Fighting (and Anyway, It's Probably Ending)

At the beginning of August, the press carried reports of a significant decline in U.S. casualties, punctuated with announcements from American officials that the military situation was improving. The figures (compiled by the Brookings Institute) do show a decline in U.S. military deaths (76 in April, 69 in May, 63 in June, and then only 48 in July). But these were offset by dramatic increases in Iraqi military fatalities, which almost doubled in July as the U.S. sent larger numbers of Iraqi units into battle, and as undermanned American units were redeployed from al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, to civil-war-torn Baghdad in preparation for a big push to recapture various out-of-control neighborhoods in the capital.

More important, when it comes to long-term U.S. casualties, the trends are not good. In recent months, U.S. units had been pulled off the streets of the capital. But the Iraqi Army units that replaced them proved incapable of controlling Baghdad in even minimal ways. So, in addition, to fighting the Sunni insurgency, American troops are now back on the streets of Baghdad in the midst of a swirling civil war with U.S. casualties likely to rise. In recent months, there has also been an escalation of the fighting between American forces and the insurgency, independent of the sectarian fighting that now dominates the headlines.

As a consequence, the U.S. has actually increased its troop levels in Iraq (by delaying the return of some units, sending others back to Iraq early, and sending in some troops previously held in reserve in Kuwait). The number of battles (large and small) between occupation troops and the Iraqi resistance has increased from about 70 a day to about 90 a day; and the number of resistance fighters estimated by U.S. officials has held steady at about 20,000. The number of IEDs placed -- the principle weapon targeted at occupation troops (including Iraqi units) -- has been rising steadily since the spring.

The effort by Sunni guerrillas to expel the American army and its allies is more widespread and energetic than at any time since the fall of the Hussein regime.

4. Most Iraqi Cities Have Active and Often Viable Local Governments

Neither the Iraqi government, nor the American-led occupation has a significant presence in most parts of Iraq. This is well-publicized in the three Kurdish provinces, which are ruled by a stable Kurdish government without any outside presence; less so in Shia urban areas where various religio-political groups -- notably the Sadrists, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Da'wa , and Fadhila -- vie for local control, and then organize cities and towns around their own political and religious platforms. While there is often violent friction among these groups -- particularly when the contest for control of an area is undecided -- most cities and towns are largely peaceful as local governments and local populations struggle to provide city services without a viable national economy.

This situation also holds true in the Sunni areas, except when the occupation is actively trying to pacify them. When there is no fighting, local governments dominated by the religious and tribal leaders of the resistance establish the laws and maintain a kind of order, relying for law enforcement on guerrilla fighters and militia members.

All these governments -- Kurdish, Shia and Sunni -- have shown themselves capable of maintaining (often fundamentalist) law and (often quite harsh) order, with little crime and little resistance from the local population. Though often severely limited by the lack of resources from a paralyzed national economy and a bankrupt national government, they do collect the garbage, direct traffic, suppress the local criminal element, and perform many of the other duties expected of local governments.

5. Outside Baghdad, Violence Arrives with the Occupation Army

The portrait of chaos across Iraq that our news generally offers us is a genuine half-truth. Certainly, Baghdad has been plunged into massive and worsening disarray as both the war against the Americans and the civil war have come to be concentrated there, and as the terrifying process of ethnic cleansing has hit neighborhood after neighborhood, and is now beginning to seep into the environs of the capital.

However, outside Baghdad (with the exception of the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, where historic friction among Kurd, Sunni, and Turkman has created a different version of sectarian violence), Iraqi cities tend to be reasonably ethnically homogeneous and to have at least quasi-stable governments. The real violence often only arrives when the occupation military makes its periodic sweeps aimed at recapturing cities where it has lost all authority and even presence.

This deadly pattern of escalating violence is regularly triggered by those dreaded sweeps, involving brutal, destructive, and sometimes lethal home invasions aimed at capturing or killing suspected insurgents or their supporters. The insurgent response involves the emplacement of ever more sophisticated roadside bombs (known as IEDs) and sniper attacks, aimed at distracting or hampering the patrols. The ensuing firefights frequently involve the use of artillery, tanks, and air power in urban areas, demolishing homes and stores in a neighborhood, which only adds to the bitter resistance and increasing the support for the insurgency.

These mini-wars can last between a few hours and, in Falluja, Ramadi, or other "centers of resistance," a few weeks. They constitute the overwhelming preponderance of the fighting in Iraq. For any city, the results can be widespread death and devastation from which it can take months or years to recover. Yet these are still episodes punctuating a less violent, if increasingly more run-down normalcy.

6. There Is a Growing Resistance Movement in the Shia Areas of Iraq

Lately, the pattern of violence established in largely Sunni areas of Iraq has begun to spread to largely Shia cities, which had previously been insulated from the periodic devastation of American pacification attempts. This ended with growing Bush administration anxiety about economic, religious, and militia connections between local Shia governments and Iran, and with the growing power of the anti-American Sadrist movement, which had already fought two fierce battles with the U.S. in Najaf in 2004 and a number of times since then in Sadr City.

Symptomatic of this change is the increasing violence in Basra, the urban oil hub at the southern tip of the country, whose local government has long been dominated by various fundamentalist Shia political groups with strong ties to Iran. When the British military began a campaign to undermine the fundamentalists' control of the police force there, two British military operatives were arrested, triggering a battle between British soldiers (supported by the Shia leadership of the Iraqi central government) and the local police (supported by local Shia leaders). This confrontation initiated a series of armed confrontations among the various contenders for power in Basra.

Similar confrontations have occurred in other localities, including Karbala, Najaf, Sadr City, and Maysan province. So far no general offensive to recapture the any of these areas has been attempted, but Britain has recently been concentrating its troops outside Basra.

If the occupation decides to use military means to bring the Shia cities back into anything like an American orbit, full-scale battles may be looming in the near future that could begin to replicate the fighting in Sunni areas, including the use of IEDs, so far only sporadically employed in the south. If you think American (and British) troops are overextended now, dealing with internecine warfare and a minority Sunni insurgency, just imagine what a real Shiite insurgency would mean.

7. There Are Three Distinct Types of Terrorism in Iraq, All Directly or Indirectly Connected to the Occupation

Terrorism involves attacking civilians to force them to abandon their support for your enemy, or to drive them away from a coveted territory.

The original terrorists in Iraq were the military and civilian officials of the Bush administration -- starting with their "shock and awe" bombing campaign that destroyed Iraqi infrastructure in order to "undermine civilian morale." The American form of terrorism continued with the wholesale destruction of most of Falluja and parts of other Sunni cities, designed to pacify the "hot beds" of insurgency, while teaching the residents of those areas that, if they "harbor the insurgents," they will surely "suffer the consequences."

At the individual level, this program of terror was continued through the invasions of, and demolishing of, homes (or, in some cases, parts of neighborhoods) where insurgents were believed to be hidden among a larger civilian population, thus spreading the "lesson" about "harboring terrorists" to everyone in the Sunni sections of the country. Generating a violent death rate of at least 18,000 per year, the American drumbeat of terror has contributed more than its share to the recently escalating civilian death toll, which reached a record 3,149 in the official count during July. It is unfortunately accurate to characterize the American occupation of Sunni Iraq as a reign of terror.

The Sunni terrorists like those led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have utilized the suicide car bomb to generate the most widely publicized violence in Iraq -- hundreds of civilian casualties each month resulting from attacks on restaurants, markets, and mosques where large number of Shia congregate. At the beginning of the U.S. occupation, car bombs were nonexistent; they only became common when a tiny proportion of the Sunni resistance movement became convinced that the Shia were the main domestic support for the American occupation. (As far as we can tell, the vast majority of those fighting the Americans oppose such terrorists and have sometimes fought with them.) As al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, these attacks were justified by "the treason of the Shia and their collusion with the Americans." As if to prove him correct, the number of such attacks tripled to current levels of about 70 per month after the Shia-dominated Iraqi government supported the American devastation of Falluja in November 2004.

The Sunni terrorists work with the same terrorist logic that the Americans have applied in Iraq: Attacks on civilians are meant to terrify them into not supporting the enemy. There is a belief, of course, among the leadership of the Sunni terrorists that, ultimately, only the violent suppression or expulsion of the Shia is acceptable. But as Zawahiri himself stated, the "majority of Muslims don't comprehend this and possibly could not even imagine it." So the practical justification for such terrorism lies in the more immediate association of the Shia with the hated occupation.

The final link in the terrorist chain can also be traced back to the occupation. In January of 2005, Newsweek broke the story that the U.S. was establishing (Shiite) "death squads" within the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, modeled after the assassination teams that the CIA had helped organize in El Salvador during the 1980s. These death squads were intended to assassinate activists and supporters of the Sunni resistance. Particularly after the bombing of the Golden Dome, an important Shia shrine in Samarra, in March 2006, they became a fixture in Baghdad, where thousands of corpses -- virtually all Sunni men -- have been found with signs of torture, including electric-drill holes, in their bodies and bullet holes in their heads. Here, again, the logic is the same: to use terror to stop the Sunni community from nurturing and harboring both the terrorist car bombers and the anti-American resistance fighters.

While there is disagreement about whether the Americans, the Shia-controlled Iraqi Ministry of Defense, or the Shia political parties should shoulder the most responsibility for loosing these death squads on Baghdad, one conclusion is indisputable: They have earned their place in the ignominious triumvirate of Iraqi terrorism.

One might say that the war has converted one of President Bush's biggest lies into an unimaginably horrible truth: Iraq is now the epicenter of worldwide terrorism.

Where the 7 Facts Lead

With this terror triumvirate at the center of Iraqi society, we now enter the horrible era of ethnic cleansing, the logical extension of multidimensional terror.

When the U.S. toppled the Hussein regime, there was little sectarian sentiment outside of Kurdistan, which had longstanding nationalist ambitions. Even today, opinion polls show that more than two-thirds of Sunnis and Shia stand opposed to the idea of any further weakening of the central government and are not in favor of federation, no less dividing Iraq into three separate nations.

Nevertheless, ethnic cleansing by both Shia and Sunni has become the order of the day in many of the neighborhoods of Baghdad, replete with house burnings, physical assaults, torture, and murder, all directed against those who resist leaving their homes. These acts are aimed at creating religiously homogeneous neighborhoods.

This is a terrifying development that derives from the rising tide of terrorism. Sunnis believe that they must expel their Shia neighbors to stop them from giving the Shiite death squads the names of resistance fighters and their supporters. Shia believe that they must expel their Sunni neighbors to stop them from providing information and cover for car-bombing attacks. And, as the situation matures, militants on both sides come to embrace removal -- period. As these actions escalate, feeding on each other, more and more individuals, caught in a vise of fear and bent on revenge, embrace the infernal logic of terrorism: that it is acceptable to punish everyone for the actions of a tiny minority.

There is still some hope for the Iraqis to recover their equilibrium. All the centripetal forces in Iraq derive from the American occupation, and might still be sufficiently reduced by an American departure followed by a viable reconstruction program embraced by the key elements inside of Iraq. But if the occupation continues, there will certainly come a point -- perhaps already passed -- when the collapse of government legitimacy, the destruction wrought by the war, and the horror of terrorist violence become self-sustaining. If that point is reached, all parties will enter a new territory with incalculable consequences.

Michael Schwartz is a professor of sociology and faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University.