The U.S. military said Thursday that 96 U.S. troops have died so far in October, the most in one month since October 2005, when the same number were killed.

Four marines and a sailor died of wounds suffered while fighting in the same Sunni insurgent stronghold in the volatile Anbar province, while a desperate search continued Thursday for a soldier who went missing Monday in Baghdad.

Anti-war sentiment high

The rise in deaths has been a major factor behind rising anti-war sentiment in the United States and has placed increased pressure on the White House to change tactics to curb escalating violence in the country.

Rumsfeld also refused to say whether he will authorize more troops to fight the war, but said the U.S. would increase its support for Iraqi security forces.

"You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult," Rumsfeld said regarding demands for deadlines. "Honourable people are working on these things together."

He said the timelines have no specific deadlines, or consequences if goals are not met by specific dates.

"You're looking for some sort of a guillotine to come falling down if some date isn't met. That is not what this is about," he said.

Polls show a majority of Americans are opposed to U.S. President George W. Bush's handling of Iraq, and at a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, the president indicated he shared the public's frustration, even as he pushed back against calls for troop withdrawals.

"I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq," Bush said. "I'm not satisfied either."

The deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq was November 2004, when military offensives primarily in the then-insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, 70 kilometres west of Baghdad, left 137 troops dead, 126 of them in combat. In January 2005, 107 U.S. troops were killed.

In other violence, 12 police officers were killed in fighting with suspected militia gunmen in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, officials said. Eighteen militants were also killed.

Gen. William Caldwell, the U.S. military spokesman, said there had been a marked decrease in violence in Baghdad since the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, earlier this week.

Caldwell said violence has in the past tended to spike during that month before falling off. He also said it was possible increased U.S. patrols and roadblocks in the search for the missing American soldier could be having an effect.

On October 3, the Associated Press reported that the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal (SICT), the judicial body carrying out the trial of Saddam Hussein, had "postponed the verdict in the former leader's first trial" beyond October 16 -- the date it was originally expected. At that time, according to the AP, the verdict was postponed because judges were "considering the possibility of recalling some witnesses," and a court spokesman "said he could not say when the verdict would be issued."

On October 16, the AP reported: "A verdict against Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants charged with crimes against humanity in connection with an anti-Shiite crackdown in the 1980s will be announced Nov. 5, a senior court official said Monday. Sentences for those found guilty will be issued the same day," he said. An October 16 New York Times article noted: "Other court officials have said in recent days that a major reason for the delay is that after nine months of hearings, the five judges in the case have failed to reach agreement on a sentence for Mr. Hussein and appeared to be undecided between a death sentence for him or a penalty of life imprisonment."

In an October 17 entry on The Nation's weblog, The Notion, Nation Institute fellow Tom Engelhardt noted that the media, in reporting on the postponement, failed to mention that it had been postponed until two days before the midterm elections, writing, "It's the sort of thing that -- you would think -- that any reporter with knowledge of the US election cycle (no less of how [White House senior adviser] Karl Rove has worked these last years) would at least note in an article." While it cannot definitively be said that the verdict was, in fact, postponed so that it would influence the November elections, the postponement suggests several obvious questions, which the media have yet to raise: Are there still witnesses that the judges need to recall? If so, and if there is no verdict yet, how can there be a date certain for the verdict? How did the Iraqi court arrive at the November 5 date? Did Iraqi officials consult with U.S. officials in arriving at that date? More importantly, given the heavy influence of the United States on the court and given the administration's history -- evidenced below -- of timing national security-related actions to the political calendar, was the verdict's date set to provide maximum political benefit for the Bush administration and congressional Republicans?

American officials have heavy influence on the court

According to the Library of Congress, the SICT was established on October 9, 2005, by the Iraqi interim government for the sole purpose of trying Saddam and members of his regime for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The SICT was preceded by the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which was established in December 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Though the SICT is a creation of the Iraqi government, it is heavily influenced -- legally and financially -- by the U.S. government. An October 16, 2005, Human Rights Watch report found that the U.S. Embassy's Regime Crimes Liaison Office "played the lead role in many aspects of the operations of the SICT, including: the building of the courtroom, the conduct of exhumations, interviews with 'High Value Detainees', review of seized documents and preparation of an evidence database, and training of SICT staff."

The Washington Post reported on January 25:

The United States has made the prosecution of Hussein -- accused of presiding over the killings of hundreds of thousands of Shiites and Kurds -- one of its priorities since U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars of a $18.4 billion reconstruction package for Iraq to exhume mass graves and gather forensic evidence. It refurbished courthouses, trained Iraqi judges and provided most of the security for the courts. Americans drafted many of the statutes under which Hussein and his associates are being tried.

Though the United States is a strong opponent of the International Criminal Court, the administration's critics say it should have ensured adequate credibility and help for the Iraqi tribunal by making it international or, at a minimum, moving the trial out of Baghdad.

International qualms about the legality of the proceeding, and about the death sentence that Hussein could face if convicted, have left the United States virtually alone in shepherding his prosecution by the Iraqi government. A U.S. official in Baghdad confirmed last weekend that only the United States and Britain had contributed experts to advise the court on how to prosecute governments for war crimes and other such matters.

The official did not say how many British advisers were taking part; Britain, like other countries, has expressed reluctance to help in the case because it is a capital one.

The U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Regime Crimes Liaison Office run much of the day-to-day arrangements for the trial. Plainclothes security workers, many of them Americans, and Iraqi soldiers guard the turreted, fortress-like former Baath Party headquarters in the American-held Green Zone where the trial is playing out.

The New York Times reported on May 21 that "American influence" on the SICT "has been undeniably pervasive, with about 90 percent of the $145 million in annual costs for the court and associated investigations paid for by the United States Justice Department, and lawyers sent by Washington acting as advisers."

The Bush administration has a history of manipulating the timing of Iraq/terrorism announcements for political reasons

There have been several documented and reported instances of the Bush administration manipulating the timing of announcements or actions in the Iraq war and the fight against terrorism for their own political benefit.

• As Media Matters for America noted, on the October 24 broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, CBS News White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reported that a White House official told him, "[D]o not expect to see anything significant prior to Election Day" "as far as a significant change" in the Bush administration's Iraq policy and then quoted the official as saying: "You're not going to see anything before November 8th. It would be political suicide, and Karl Rove would never allow it."

• On September 6, Bush announced that 14 terror detainees had been transferred from secret CIA-run prisons to the Pentagon's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. As Media Matters noted, in an article for the September 18 edition of Newsweek, investigative correspondents Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff quoted an anonymous senior Bush aide acknowledging that Bush's announcement was timed in such a way that the administration might frame the debate over the fight against terrorism in the days before the September 11, 2001, anniversary:

The timing of last week's announcement, just before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, was no accident. It allowed the White House to showcase its successes in capturing terrorists, and to put pressure on Congress to quickly approve the tribunals. "There were obviously messaging opportunities," says a senior Bush aide. "We could sit back and let the war be defined by the media and our critics, or we can define it ourselves."

Also, in his article for the September 10 edition of Time, White House correspondent Mike Allen reported that after Bush's announcement, the White House and Republican Party leaders almost immediately contacted conservatives in the media, urging them to promote Bush's speech "in the context of the election."

• As Media Matters noted, the media were almost totally silent regarding an October 11, 2004, Los Angeles Times report that the Bush administration planned to delay major assaults on insurgent strongholds in Iraq until after the 2004 U.S. presidential election, fearing large numbers of U.S. military casualties. At the time, TV news broadcasts did not mention the Times article prior to the election; however, on November 8, 2004, the top story on each of the major TV networks' morning shows was the U.S.-led forces' assault on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah.

• In 2005, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said that there were times during his tenure when the administration pressured the Department of Homeland Security into raising the terror threat level, even though there was little evidence warranting such a move, as Media Matters has noted. A May 10, 2005, USA Today article quoted Ridge from a forum he participated in that day in Washington, D.C.:

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

[...]

Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "

According to a May 12, 2005, article in the Chicago Tribune, the White House immediately "dismissed" Ridge's allegations:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday that threat-level decisions are based on recommendations from a high-level council that gathers information about potential terrorism. When Ridge was in office, he was on the council with other key administration officials.

McClellan dismissed the notion that the White House pressured the council into higher levels of security.

"No one suggested that," he said.

However, others raised the issue. On the October 12, 2005, edition of MSNBC's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann documented 13 "coincidences" -- instances characterized by "a political downturn for the administration, followed by a 'terror event' -- a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." One such "coincidence" occurred on August 1, 2004, shortly after the Democratic National Convention had concluded. That day, the DHS raised the alert level for financial institutions in New York and Washington, citing "unusually specific" intelligence. But less than a week later, it came to light that the information that led to the warning was actually "three or four years old," according to an August 3, 2004, New York Times article.

• An article in the July 19, 2004, issue of The New Republic -- posted July 8 on the magazine's website -- quoted two sources from Pakistan's intelligence service and another from its Interior Ministry saying that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistani officials to make arrests of so-called "high-value targets" during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. On July 29, 2004, mere hours before Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, Pakistani officials announced that they had captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an Al Qaeda suspect in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Soon after, it came to light that the Pakistani government had actually arrested Ghailani four days earlier -- before the convention began -- but had delayed announcing the news until July 29.

• The Bush administration acknowledged that it timed the launch of its campaign to build public support for invading Iraq to coincide with the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the 2002 midterm elections. The New York Times reported (subscription required) on September 7, 2002:

White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.

The rollout of the strategy this week, they said, was planned long before President Bush's vacation in Texas last month. It was not hastily concocted, they insisted, after some prominent Republicans began to raise doubts about moving against Mr. Hussein and administration officials made contradictory statements about the need for weapons inspectors in Iraq.

The White House decided, they said, that even with the appearance of disarray it was still more advantageous to wait until after Labor Day to kick off their plan.

"From a marketing point of view," said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, "you don't introduce new products in August."

The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the U.S. Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help-wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.

Like Owen, Mayberry immediately sensed things weren't right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money, and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

"Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai," Mayberry said in an interview. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald's for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door - Gate 26 - that led to an unmarked, aging white 52-seat jet.

"All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti," Mayberry claimed, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad, he's not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and the jet wasn't flying east over the ocean, he said. "I think they thought they were going to work in Dubai."

One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledged that the company holds passports of many workers in Iraq - a violation of U.S. contracting.

"All of the passports are kept in the offices," said one company insider who requested anonymity for fear of financial and personal retribution. As for distributing Dubai boarding passes for Baghdad flights, "It's because of the travel bans," he explained. Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India, and Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.

"If you don't have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do to get out of a bad situation?" he asked. "How can they go to the U.S. State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?"

Owen had already been working at the embassy site since late November when Mayberry arrived. The two never crossed paths, but both share similar complaints about management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that, at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.

The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for days.

Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary conditions and mismanagement.

"There hadn't been any follow-up on medical care. People were walking around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds, and there were a lot of infections," he recalled. "The idea that there was any hygiene seemed ridiculous. I'm not sure they were even bathing."

In reports made available to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Army, and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand-washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers' medical records were in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.

The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured, disorganized, and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription pain killers were being handed out "like a candy store ... and then people were sent back to work."

Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety hazards. "Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30 feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don't give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said 'that's how we do it.'"

The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may be "medical homicide," Mayberry says, because the patients may have been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.

If the State Department investigated, Mayberry knows nothing of the outcome. Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities did not return phone calls or e-mails inquiring about Mayberry's allegations. The reports may have been ignored, not because of his complaints, but because Mayberry is a terrible speller, a problem compounded by an Arabic translation program loaded on his computer, he says.

Owen's account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry's. Health and safety measures were essentially nonexistent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell, broke his back, and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. "The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness," Owen said.

State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently did nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in "virtual lockdown," Owen said.

Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager whom they accused of harassing them. Owen estimates that 375 laborers were then sent home.

Recent First Kuwaiti employees agree that the accounts of Owen and Mayberry are accurate. One longtime supervisor claimed that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly protest that First Kuwaiti "treats them like animals," and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions.

Another former First Kuwaiti manager, who declined to be named because of possible adverse consequences, said that Owen's and Mayberry's complaints only begin "to scratch the surface."

But scratching the surface is the only view yet available of what may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. As of now, only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project's walls. No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.

In AD 750 the Abbasid Dynasty "de-Bedouinized" Islam by defeating the Ummayad Dynasty based in Damascus. The culture of the Abbasid court ceased being Arab-only and started to include Persia and the Turks. Islam turned into a universal religion, no more constrained by geography. "Baldach" - that's what European travelers called Baghdad up to the late 18th century - was catapulted to the center of the world.

From AD 786-809, under fabled Haroon al-Rashid - who established relations with Tang Dynasty China and the "illiterate emperor" Charlemagne - Baghdad gave the world astronomy, alchemy, hydraulics, diplomacy, fiscal administration and the postal service. Up to the early 12th century it remained the most important intellectual center in the world.

Baghdad had been under siege by the Assyrians and later by Cyrus the Great from Persia. But it was only in 1258 that Baghdad was sacked for the first time by what was then the equivalent of Desert Storm - the Mongols riding their lightning-quick horses under the command of Hulagu, Genghis Khan's grandson. Legend has it that he erected a pyramid of 700,000 skulls out of his victims.

In 1401, another foreign invader, the Turco-Mongol Tamerlan ("Timur the Lame"), devastated Baghdad yet again. In 2003, after the devastation of "shock and awe", came the Christian armies of President George W Bush. From the beginning the comparisons with Hulagu and Tamerlan were vivid in the popular imagination. Over time, Baghdadis - Sunni or Shi'ite - were saying, we will dictate our rhythm and impose ourselves over the occupiers. This is already happening.

Quagmire Iraq is not a 21st-century video game of Arabs playing extras in a slow-motion Armageddon. This is a wrenching story with rivers of real blood and a terrible accumulation of real corpses. The story was engineered in Washington - and the plot would not be advancing were it not for the United States. The US bears all the moral and legal responsibility for the destruction of the fabled former capital of the caliphate and the de facto Western flank of the Arab nation.

It is in this context that the current avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak in the US should be placed.

The recent bloody holy month of Ramadan in Iraq has reflected the hellish mechanism unleashed by the invasion and occupation - the daily, gruesome banquet of death provoked by state-sponsored terror, counterinsurgency, stoked by sectarian hatred or the total collapse of the social contract.

This logic of extermination of a society and culture was inbuilt in the process since March 2003. In fact, the systematic annihilation of 2-3% of the entire Iraqi population, according to a study by The Lancet, not to mention the 1 million people displaced since March 2003, follow the more than 500,000 children who died during the 1990s as victims of United Nations sanctions. Iraq has been systematically destroyed for more than 15 years, non-stop.

And it gets worse, because for the Bush administration all this death and destruction is just a minor detail in the "big picture".

In a perverse replay of what happened in the Vietnamese jungles, the Pentagon lost the asymmetric guerrilla war raging in the Sunni belt. Sunni Arabs are totally alienated. Seventy percent are in favor of attacking the occupiers, no holds barred. No wonder Saddam Hussein is still popular. This month, about 500 Sunni Arab tribal chiefs and former Ba'ath Party officials in the police, army and intelligence got together in al-Hindiya, 25 kilometers west of Kirkuk, to pledge allegiance to Saddam, qualified as "supreme combatant and legitimate president".

It's true that Saddam's regime had already started to disintegrate from the inside after the Gulf War of 1991 - a process coupled with the devastating effects of UN sanctions. The resulting loss of civic spirit accelerated the re-tribalization of Iraq. Even as tribal affiliation nowadays is the only way to solve any problem in Iraq, for the silent majority what really matters is security: nobody is troubled by perceived (by the West) Sunni and Shi'ite divisions; and most Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen share plenty of social, cultural and commercial interests. Contrary to Western-propagated myth, Iraqi civil society as a whole - apart from a few factions - abhors civil war.

The coalition of the drilling
World public opinion must switch to red alert. The real, not virtual, future of Iraq will be decided in December. The whole point is a new oil law - which is in fact a debt-for-oil program concocted and imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is the point of the US invasion - a return on investment on the hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayers' money spent. It's not war as politics by other means; it's war as free-market opening by other means - full US access to the epicenter of the energy wars and the perfect geostrategic location for "taming", in the near future, both Russia and China.

Very few observers have detailed what's at stake. In US corporate media the silence is stratospheric.

US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman duly landed in Baghdad this past summer, insisting that Iraqis must "pass a hydrocarbon law under which foreign companies can invest". Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani was convinced, and said the law would be passed by the end of 2006, as promised to the IMF.

No wonder: the Green Zone US Embassy colossus has always made sure that the US controls - via well-paid Iraqi servants - the Petroleum Ministry, as well as all key management posts in key Iraqi ministries. The draft hydrocarbon law was reviewed by the IMF, reviewed by Bodman and reviewed by Big Oil executives. It was not and it will not be reviewed by Iraqi civil society: that was left to the fractious Iraqi parliament - which can be largely bought for a fistful of dinars.

The Bush administration needs somebody to sign the law. The nation of Iraq as it emerged out of British imperial design is an artificial construct that can only be "tamed" by a hardcore strongman a la Saddam. It has to be "our" strongman, of course: when Saddam started to act independently he was smashed. Insistent rumors of a US-engineered coup to replace the hapless current premier Nuri al-Maliki have surfaced of late. Poor Maliki, if he clings to a minimum of integrity, can't possibly sign the oil law. Enter the Washington/Green Zone-backed strongman a la Saddam: a likely candidate is former interim premier Iyad Allawi, who ordered the destruction of Fallujah in late 2004.

No matter what happens in the US mid-term elections next month, this is the post-December scenario: Iraq enslaved by the IMF; Big Oil signing mega-lucrative production sharing agreements (PSAs); "partial" troop withdrawal; relentless guerrilla warfare; further disintegration; open road to partition.

Vast swaths of the US electorate have now understood how the whole Iraqi adventure has been built on lies: lies about the causes of war, lies about the methodology of war, lies about the terrible consequences of war. Inevitably, the current media-targeted avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak had to be also meaningless. This includes "phased withdrawal", "empowering" the Iraqi government, "putting security ahead of democracy" and "partitioning Iraq". Surrealism in international relations would reach new highs (or lows) with the US ordering by decree that a sovereign nation must dismember itself. Compared with it, the current carnage in Baghdad - which is already divided anyway - would be a Disney flick.

There's more: the Shakespearean despair over "Redeploy and Contain" or "Stability First" - newspeak coined by Bush family consegliere James Baker's Iraq Study Group, staffed with plenty of pro-war neo-conservatives. A notorious casualty of the newspeak war seems to be "stay the course" - replaced, according to Press Secretary Tony Snow, by "a study in constant motion". Anyway, the winner - after the mid-term elections - will be "Stability First", which is basically a remix, with a horn section, of "stay the course".

How can Americans - and world public opinion - be engaged in serious, meaningful debate when the Iraq tragedy is reduced to a mere catch phrase? This incoherent whirlwind, this "study in constant motion", is the travesty that passes for Iraqi policy debate among educated elites.

Another reading is more ominous. It spells the Bush administration and its attached elites losing control - of everything. And that's how they can become even more dangerous. On October 19, Vice President Dick Cheney once again stated that the only way out in Iraq was "total victory". A recent historical parallel is nothing but gloomy. When the US was confronted with defeat in Vietnam, it did not "Redeploy and Contain": on the contrary, death and destruction were extended to Laos and Cambodia. Baker's "Stability First" might contain undisclosed subtexts.

"Total victory", in Cheney's world view, means that the Bush administration was not, is not and will never be interested in Iraqi, or Middle Eastern, "democracy". What matters is control of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on the planet, 112 billion barrels of it in proven reserves plus 220 billion barrels still to be exploited, at a cost as low as US$1 a barrel; a cluster of sprawling military bases; the largest embassy/fortress-by-the-Tigris in the world; and the indispensable client regime.

In sum: a "Coalition of the Drilling" secured by the Pentagon's Long War apparatus. It's up to ancient and proud Baghdad to spoil the party. Baghdad survived and buried Hulagu. Baghdad survived and buried Tamerlan. Baghdad may as well survive and bury George W Bush.