However, the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, defended Mr Blair against the critique, written by the outgoing Chatham House director, Victor Bulmer-Thomas.

Mrs Beckett described the publication as "threadbare, insubstantial and just plain wrong", adding: "Chatham House has established a great reputation over the years, but this paper will do nothing to enhance it."

While the report said there had been qualified successes in Mr Blair's first term, the decision to provide diplomatic cover for Mr Bush's decision to invade Iraq was the defining moment of his foreign policy and premiership.

"It will shape his legacy - for better or for worse - for many years to come," it concluded.

As so often with British prime ministers, Mr Blair thought unwavering public support for the US would bring private influence and lead to changes in US policy favouring British interests, but this had not happened.

Mr Bulmer-Thomas said there had been an "inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way, despite the sacrifice - military, political and financial - that the United Kingdom has made".

Given the Byzantine complexity of Washington politics, it was always unrealistic to think that outside powers - however loyal - could expect to have much influence on the US decision-making process, he said.

"The bilateral relationship with the United States may be 'special' to Britain, but the US has never described it as more than 'close' ... Tony Blair has learnt the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for very little," the report said.

It said there was no evidence that British pressure was responsible for Mr Bush's announcement that the US would accept a two-state solution in the Middle East, because this was simply a restatement of policy under the Clinton administration.

The report added that, whoever was the prime minister in future, there would "no longer be unconditional support for US initiatives in foreign policy".

In the absence of UN support for a humanitarian intervention in Iraq, the paper said it had been a "terrible mistake" to emphasise Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction as a justification for war.

"The jury is still out" on the extent to which Mr Blair knew the claims about Iraqi WMD were "overblown or even fabricated", the report said.

The decision to commit British troops in the absence of a UN security council resolution "drove a horse and cart" through the principle Mr Blair himself set out in a speech in Chicago in 1999 setting out a "doctrine of international community".

The report also said it was "unforgivable" that Mr Blair had failed to foresee the consequences of a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, given the impact on heroin use on Britain's streets.

In contrast, it said his most positive legacy in foreign affairs would be his determined advocacy of the need to tackle climate change.

In its latest quarterly report to Congress on the progress of the Iraq campaign, the US military found that attacks against American troops, their Iraqi comrades and civilians reached 959 per week in the period from August to November, up 22 per cent on the previous three months.

The increase means that 93 Iraqi civilians are killed or injured every day in Iraq, while 33 Iraqi security staff are killed or hurt. An average of 25 US and coalition soldiers were killed or injured every day in the same period, just short of the 2004 high, during the assault on Fallujah, the bloodiest period of the war for US troops in Iraq.

It is the highest number of attacks recorded by the Pentagon since it was ordered to present three-monthly updates to Congress on Iraq in mid-2005.

The Pentagon said that the level of sectarian violence meant that "conditions that could lead to civil war do exist" in Iraq and identified the Mahdi Army, the Baghdad-based Shia militia, as more dangerous than al-Qaeda in Iraq in the current climate of tit-for-tat ethnic killings. [Ed: No mention of the US-sponsored death squads?]<

"The group that is currently having the greatest negative affect on the security situation in Iraq is Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM)," said the report. The conclusion is a blow to the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who has been criticised for failing to crack down on the militia loyal to Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric, which has taken control of several Iraqi government ministries.

"The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace," said Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a briefing for journalists. "We have to get ahead of that violent cycle, break that continuous chain of sectarian violence."

Another senior Pentagon official, Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs, acknowledged that Iraqi militants with the aim of causing civil war had achieved a "strategic success" by bombing the Shia al-Askariya shrine in Samarra, an event that triggered a massive rise in sectarian warfare.

"The tragedy of Iraq is that in February in Samarra, the insurgents achieved what one could call a partial strategic success -- namely, to trigger what we've been dealing with ever since, which is a cycle of sectarian violence, that indeed is shaking the institutions," he said.

The report was presented to Congress just hours after Robert Gates, a former head of the CIA, was sworn in as America's 22nd Secretary of Defence. At a ceremony at the Pentagon attended by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Mr Gates said the US could not afford to fail in the Middle East.

"Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."

Mr Gates said he intended to travel to Iraq and discuss the situation with commanders on the ground as soon as possible. His first task will be to enter what is being described in Washington as an "intense debate" between the White House and US military officials about the next step to take in the conflict.

The Washington Post reported today that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leaders of the various branches of the American armed forces that advise the President on military policy, are unanimously opposed to a White House plan to send an extra 15,000 to 30,000 troops to Iraq for the next eight months.

The military officials say a small surge in US troop numbers will only exacerbate levels of violence in the country, the newspaper reported, without giving the coalition or Iraqi soldiers a decisive advantage over the sectarian militias and militant groups that are driving the fighting.

"The Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission and is latching on to the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives, despite warnings about the potential disadvantages for the military, said the officials," the newspaper reported.

"The chiefs have taken a firm stand, the sources say, because they believe the strategy review will be the most important decision on Iraq to be made since the March 2003 invasion."

He had been detained at a police station on the outskirts of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified compound that houses the Iraqi government and the U.S. and British embassies, to await trial in up to 12 corruption cases, a judge said on Monday.

The head of the police station and a second officer have been arrested, said Ali al-Shaboot, spokesman for Iraq's independent Public Integrity Commission, which is investigating nine cases of misuse of public money against Samarraie.

"The warrants of arrest were issued by the investigating judge," Shaboot told Reuters.

The commission says Samarraie was taken from the station by plain-clothes Americans and that the minister had previously employed a private American security firm to protect him. A judge close to a trial in which Samarraie was convicted of corruption in October and sentenced to two years in jail offered a different version of events. In October, armed Americans took Samarraie from court shortly after his conviction. He had expressed fears for his life and decried the "political" verdict. He was handed over to Iraqi police to begin serving his sentence after the government objected to the interference. Samarraie, who spent years in exile in the United States, said he was being victimized because of his opposition to Iranian influence in Iraq and Shi'ite militias, who are accused of killing thousands of members of his minority Sunni Arab sect.

Iraqis are forgetting almost what a child needs. Dr. Ahmed Aaraji of the Baghdad Societal Organisation, an Iraqi NGO which monitors the state of Iraqi schools and families in an effort to assist families where possible, is trying to remind everyone what that should be.

"To build a child's character, the home atmosphere should be appropriate, parents should attend to children, the school environment should be proper, and the whole society should function at the best level," he told IPS. "But none of these factors seems to exist in Iraq any more."

Iraq was awarded The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) prize for eradicating illiteracy in 1982. At that time, literacy rates for women were among the highest of all Islamic nations.

Education today presents a quite different picture. An IPS correspondent visited a primary school in the capital city, located in the volatile al-Amiriyah district in western Baghdad not far from the airport, after making his way through piles of garbage. And these piles grow bigger by the day, residents say.

The two-storey building looks neat enough with a fresh coat of yellow paint, but one step inside reveals years of neglect.

"During the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi schools suffered from the poverty of the state due to the U.S.-backed UN sanctions," the headmaster told IPS. "The main problem now is the corruption of contractors and senior administration staff."

Contracts have been handed out for refurbishment, he said. But in effect, "they just paint the walls and fix some cheap accessories to collect their cash, and go."

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) declared as early as October 2004 that the education system in Iraq was "effectively denying children a decent education, and the poor quality of the learning environment delivers a major blow to children."

The study also confirmed that thousands of schools lacked the basic facilities to provide children a decent education.

UNICEF representative Roger Wright said in the October 2004 report: "Iraq used to have one of the finest school systems in the Middle East. Now we have clear evidence of how far the system has deteriorated. Today millions of children in Iraq are attending schools that lack even basic water or sanitation facilities, have crumbling walls, broken windows and leaking roofs. The system is overwhelmed."

Two years later, the situation has grown far worse. Now it is so bad that international agencies are not around to survey it any more.

Still, several parents continue to send their children to school. "We have to because what is the alternative," Um Abdulla told IPS at the front gate of a school in Baghdad as she waited to collect her children.

Literacy is declining with school education. UNESCO estimates that the literacy rate in Iraq as of Dec 11 is below 60 percent, meaning six million illiterate adults. The average literacy rate in Iraq 2000-2003 was 74 percent, according to UNICEF in 2004.

In the rural areas illiteracy is worse. Only 37 percent of rural women are literate, and only 30 percent of Iraqi girls of high school age are even enrolled in school. That compares with about 42 percent of boys, according to the UNESCO report this month.

Security is the prime concern, for parents and teachers.

"Roads are unsafe, with all the explosions and abductions that threaten our children on their way to school," mother of three Um Suthir told IPS.

Mothers usually accompany their children to school and bring them back home. With abductions on the rise, neither are safe.

Many schools in the capital have lowered their hours of classes to less than four a day due to shortage of teachers and facilities, and lack of security.

In war-torn Fallujah, many of the schools destroyed in the November 2004 U.S.-led attack on the city have not been rebuilt. This has led to reduced hours of classes being held in sometimes three shifts in makeshift buildings.

Ali al-Ka'abi from the Ministry of Education said the problem is worse in the capital and in cities in al-Anbar province to the west of Baghdad, where up to 30 percent of school buildings are being used by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. This province, that includes Fallujah and Ramadi, has seen the fiercest resistance to U.S. occupation.

The collapsing economy is also keeping several children away from school. Many children have had to leave school because of family poverty or after the families were evicted from homes and hometowns for sectarian reasons.

"We are now living in a factory building, and there is no school near our shelter," a Baghdad resident told IPS. "I've had to ask for my oldest boy to help cover expenses by working as a cleaner at a mechanic's shop nearby."

The man said he used to own a small supermarket where he also lived; he now works as a porter. And he has no hope his children can ever go to school any more.

The Washington Times went on to report, "Gen. Schissler said he is concerned that Washington politics is weakening the will of the nation."

"I don't care about the politics," he told the newspaper. "I care about people understanding the facts of what our enemy is thinking about, what's our strategy to defeat them, and for [Americans] to understand that it will take a long fight, mostly because our enemy is committed to the long fight." He added, "They're absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan."

"One of my concerns is how to maintain the American will, the public will over that duration," the general said. He described this task as "very difficult."

Difficult indeed. How is the "public will" to wage global warfare for the next century to be maintained, particularly when "politics" gets in the way?

Given the political context of Schissler remarks, his warnings have unmistakable and chilling implications.

Barely six weeks ago, the Bush administration, which initiated the "war on terror" and proclaimed Iraq to be its most important front, suffered a stunning defeat at the polls. The Republican Party's loss of both houses of the US Congress was the result of mass popular opposition to the Iraq war.

This opposition has only deepened in the intervening weeks, as a series of opinion polls have demonstrated. A CBS News poll, for example, found that just 4 percent of Americans believe that terrorism is the most important problem confronting the country. The same poll found that a record 35 percent believe that the war in Iraq is the principal problem, with 71 percent saying the war is going badly and only 9 percent believing that the US is very likely to succeed in Iraq.

A USA Today poll found that two-thirds believe that the costs of the US succeeding in Iraq outweigh the benefits. A clear majority wants all US troops withdrawn from the country within the next year, while 74 percent say all combat troops should be withdrawn by March 2008.

Not only is the American public unwilling to support a century of wars of aggression, it has reached the conclusion that the three-and-a-half-year-old war in Iraq should never have been launched and should be brought to a speedy end. This is the threat to the "American will" about which Gen. Schissler is so concerned.

This supposed "will" to wage war-what could better be described as a temporary and forced acquiescence-was achieved through political deception and intimidation, by terrorizing the population with the supposed threat of attack in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy.

As all of the pretexts used to promote the war-weapons of mass destruction, Baghdad-Al Qaeda ties, etc.-were exposed as lies, and as the war itself turned into an ever-more bloody debacle, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and either killing or wounding 25,000 US troops, the demand for withdrawal of US forces from Iraq was embraced by millions of Americans, including many in uniform.

The issue posed is not really sustaining the "will" to wage a 100-year war, but suppressing the mass opposition to war that has already found powerful political expression.

Among masses of American working people, there never was a will to wage wars of aggression. That outlook reflected the aims and schemes developed within the corporate and financial elite that rules America. This ruling layer has utilized the "global war on terror," in which Gen. Schissler is a senior strategist, as the pretext for carrying out a military campaign aimed at imposing US domination over the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia as part of American capitalism's pursuit of global hegemony.

In the aftermath of the 2006 midterm elections, it has become increasingly apparent that this ruling elite has no intention of bowing to the actual will of the people, as reflected at the polls, by bringing an end to the war and withdrawing US troops from Iraq. It is driven by its own economic necessity to offset a declining position on the world market by means of military force. And it fears that a withdrawal from Iraq will expose the underlying weakness of American imperialism, raising the danger of revolutionary crises both at home and abroad.

In his interview with the Washington Times, Schissler said that the century-long struggle he foresees will be waged against extremists determined to establish a global "caliphate" stretching from Spain to Indonesia. While there are, no doubt, a small number of radical Islamists who believe in such a crackpot scheme, this supposed threat has nothing to do with the military interventions now being carried out by Washington in the regions possessing the largest reserves of petroleum in the world.

The attempt to cast the wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq in religious terms has become an increasingly common refrain within the most right-wing sections of the political establishment in Washington, as well as within the military command. There is no doubt that this depiction of events is aimed at solidifying a base of support for war among a layer of Christian fundamentalists.

The most notorious example of this attempt to drum up a religious-based "will" to wage war came to light in 2003 with press reports of speeches delivered by Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to audiences assembled by the Christian right.

Boykin repeatedly told audiences that the war was being waged by a "Christian army" and a "Christian nation" against Islamic forces aligned with Satan. He proclaimed that his own confidence in victory over a Muslim foe was based on the knowledge that "my God was bigger than his . . . my God was a real god and his was an idol." He likewise declared that George W. Bush was "appointed by God," despite having failed to win the majority of the votes in 2000, and indicated that he saw himself as answerable only to God's commands.

While the general's anti-Islamic bigotry and profoundly anti-democratic remarks provoked outrage, the Republican right and the Bush administration leapt to his defense. The general himself asked that a Pentagon inspector general investigate the controversy. The result was a report that avoided the content of Boykin's remarks, delivering only the mildest rebuke for his failure to assert that they were his personal opinion and to clear them first with superiors.

General Boykin remains to this day the senior uniformed officer in military intelligence and a top policy-maker in the "war on terror," overseeing assassination squads, illegal abductions and torture.

Schissler is not known to have delivered any similar religious-political diatribes. His service record posted on the Defense Department's web site does, however, include the notation that in 1998, while climbing the promotional ladder to the Pentagon's inner circle, the Air Force officer found time to complete a master's degree in "pastoral studies."

The politically protected ravings of Boykin as well as the expressions of concern by Schissler that "politics"-that is, the real will of the people-not be allowed to interfere with the official will to wage war are indicative of the right-wing and authoritarian tendencies that are being nurtured by American militarism and colonial-style occupation.

In the end, imposing upon the American people the "will" to sustain a 100-year war could be achieved only by dictatorial means similar to those utilized by the Nazis in their attempt to generate the "will" of the German people to sustain a 1,000-year Reich.

The danger posed by such right-wing tendencies is not that they have any substantial base of popular support, but that they emerge under conditions of deepening social and political polarization in which the opposition of American working people to war and repression can find no genuine expression within the political establishment and its two-party system.

Gates stressed that the United States could not afford a failure in Iraq.

"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again, but, as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East," he said, noting that "failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."

Although putting Iraq at the top of his list of major concerns, the new defense secretary said he did not forget Afghanistan, where U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban regime shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"The progress made by the Afghan people over the past five years is at risk...," he said. "Afghanistan cannot be allowed to become a sanctuary for extremists again."

"The right man to meet challenges"

At the ceremony, U.S. President George W. Bush praised Gates as "the right man to meet the military challenges confronting the United States."

"We are a nation at war," the president said, "and I rely on our secretary of defense to provide me with the best possible advice and to help direct our nation's armed forces as they engage the enemies of freedom around the world."

Bush said he was counting on Gates to bring a "fresh perspective" to the Pentagon as the United States charts "a new way forward in Iraq" to build a country that can govern, sustain and defend itself and be an ally in the war against "extremists and radicals."

The change of guard at Pentagon was taking place at a crucial juncture in the Iraq war, a conflict that cost Donald Rumsfeld the job of defense secretary and will likely define Gates' Pentagon tenure.

When U.S. President George W. Bush announced last month that he will change Pentagon chiefs, he said he wanted "fresh perspective" on Iraq, acknowledging that the current approach was "not working well enough."

Rumsfeld was a chief architect of the war strategy and still defends the decision to invade in March 2003.

This proposal-known widely in Washington as the "80 percent solution," the percentage of the Iraqi population comprising Shia and Kurds-the Times writes, "basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they're likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni."

The plan reportedly has been promoted by Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of the Iraq war from the beginning.

A key consideration, the article adds, is control of Iraq's oil fields. "The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they're the ones with the oil," the Times states. "A handful of administration officials have argued that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas."

An off-shoot of the plan, which the Times cynically describes as something "some hawks have tossed out in meetings," is a suggestion that the US could reap the benefits of a region-wide sectarian conflagration. "America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq's Shiites; that could deepen the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead to a regional Shiite-Sunni war," the Times writes. "And in that, the Shiites-and Iran-lose because, while there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there are more Sunnis than Shiites almost everywhere else."

At the same time, there are growing indications that a proposed "surge" of tens of thousands more American combat troops into Iraq will have as its first objective taking on the militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, meaning a brutal assault on the impoverished Shia masses of Baghdad.

The formulation of such mutually contradictory policies appears to be less the product of diplomatic and military calculation than political insanity. Underlying what seems like madness is the desperation and disorientation at all levels of the American state over the deep crisis that its policy has produced.

What predominates is the conception that provided it carries out a sufficient level of killing-whether in a genocidal slaughter of Sunnis, a bloodletting against the Shia, or a combination of the two-US imperialism can somehow extricate itself from a humiliating defeat in Iraq.

The leaks concerning the strategies now under consideration only underscore the abject criminality of the war as well as the desperate crisis that is gripping the American political establishment, which remains deeply divided over how to confront the political and military debacle confronting the US occupation.

Less than two weeks after the release of the report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, the Bush administration has repudiated the panel's prescriptions for reducing the US military role in Iraq and pursuing diplomatic initiatives aimed at winning cooperation from the neighboring countries of Iran and Syria.

The White House, backed by the Republican right and the most ruthless sections of the American ruling elite, is instead preparing what amounts to a re-invasion of the ravaged country and the pursuit of a broader regional war, ultimately aimed at toppling both the Iranian and the Syrian regimes.

It was reported late last week that the Pentagon has already ordered the 3,500 troops of the Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, currently based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to prepare for deployment to Kuwait next month. This would be the first contingent for what is anticipated to be a "surge" of between 30,000 and 50,000 additional troops.

Not only is the political establishment deeply divided over the way forward in Iraq, but the US military command as well. Some, such as Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, and Gen. John Abizaid, the senior commander of US forces in the Middle East, have questioned the value of a "surge" of American troops into Iraq, noting that such an increased deployment could not be sustained and warning that it could serve to further delay Iraqi forces taking over security operations.

On the other hand, a number of recently retired senior commanders have advocated the escalation, and the scheme is reportedly supported by Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who assumed command of combat troops in Iraq last week. Odierno commanded the Army's 4th Infantry Division in Anbar Province in 2003 and 2004, gaining a reputation for heavy-handed counterinsurgency operations and repression that is credited by many with generating much of the popular support for the Iraqi resistance.

"We are going to go after any-any-individual who attacks the government, who attacks the security forces and who attacks coalition forces no matter who they are and no matter who they are associated with," he said at a ceremony in Baghdad last Thursday.

The remark appeared to be a warning that the immediate target of the new offensive now being prepared will be the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr. According to press reports, the Pentagon's uniformed command has been unanimous on its insistence that any increased deployment in Baghdad be accompanied by unrestricted rules of engagement for US forces going after Sadr's followers.

Such an offensive would signal not only a US-engineered coup against the current Iraqi government, in which Sadr's movement holds substantial power, but also a massive loss of civilian life, as an all-out war would be waged in the crowded Shia slums of Baghdad's Sadr City.

Barely six weeks after growing popular opposition to the war in Iraq produced a stunning defeat for the Bush administration at the polls, there is every indication that the White House intends not only to continue the war, but to escalate it substantially.

The Democratic leadership, meanwhile, exhibits no such conviction or determination as it prepares to assume the leadership next month of both houses of the US Congress.

On Sunday, incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared in a television interview that he is prepared to support the proposed "surge" in Iraqi troop deployment if it served as part of a broader strategy to achieve the Baker-Hamilton commission's proposal for reducing the number of troops in Iraq by early 2008.

"If the commanders on the ground said this is just for a short period of time, we'll go along with that," Reid said, adding that an escalation for two to three months would be acceptable, but not one that dragged on for 18 months or 24 months.

The Democratic Senate leader's qualms were dismissed by one of the prominent advocates of the "surge," former Army vice chief of staff Gen. Jack Keane, who pointed out, "It will take a couple of months just to get forces in." Keane said that it would take at least one and half years for an expanded force to suppress Iraqi resistance.

Meanwhile, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, considered the most liberal Democrat in the US Senate, appearing on the Fox News channel, voiced opposition to the increased troop deployment, but rejected any move to cut off funding for the war-the only means, short of impeachment, that the Democrats have to rein in the escalating militarism of the Bush administration.

"One thing about the Democrats is we will support the troops," Kennedy declared, adding, "We are not going to pull the line, in terms of the troops."

Pressed by interviewer Chris Wallace as to why he was unprepared to support a vote to defund the war in Iraq, when Democrats had pursued just such a course during the Vietnam War, Kennedy stressed that "This is a different situation than Vietnam" and "we are not at this point at this time."

What is different is that in Iraq, decisive sections of America's ruling elite remain determined to pursue the goal of establishing US domination over one of the largest reserves of petroleum in the world by means of military force and colonial-style domination.

While there are intense divisions over how this goal is to be pursued, the defense of the geo-strategic interests of American capitalism is upheld by every faction of the political establishment. It is for this reason that the Democrats have served as the Bush administration's accomplice in this war since voting to authorize an unprovoked invasion more than four years ago.

The growing threats to escalate the assault against the Iraqi people and potentially unleash a conflagration that could spread throughout the Middle East and worldwide demonstrate that the popular opposition to the war cannot find expression through the present two-party political set up in America.

Even before the new Congress convenes, it has become starkly apparent that the struggle to end the war in Iraq and to hold those who are responsible for launching this war politically and criminally responsible can be advanced only through the emergence of a new independent political movement of working people in opposition to the American financial oligarchy and both of its parties.

The Baker-Hamilton report stakes out a position for managerial changes that dodge the fundamental immorality of the war effort. And President Bush shows every sign of rejecting the report's call for scaling down that effort.

Meanwhile, most people in the United States favor military disengagement. According to a new Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll, "Seven in 10 say they want the new Congress to pressure the White House to begin bringing troops home within six months."

The nationwide survey came after the Baker-Hamilton report arrived with great -- and delusional -- expectations. In big bold red letters, the cover of Time predicted that the report would take the White House by storm: "The Iraq Study Group says it's time for an exit strategy. Why Bush will listen."

While often depicted as a rebuff to the president's Iraq policies, the report was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq -- as Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out during a whirlwind round of network interviews.

Hours after the report's release on Dec. 6, Baker told PBS "NewsHour" host Jim Lehrer that the blue-ribbon commission was calling for a long-term U.S. military presence: "So our commitment -- when we say not open-ended, that doesn't mean it's not going to be substantial. And our report makes clear that we're going to have substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time."

Baker used very similar phrasing the next morning in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" -- saying that the report "makes clear we're going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time."

That was 24 hours into the report's release, when media spin by Baker and Hamilton and their allies was boosting a document that asserted a continual American prerogative to devote massive resources to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And, in a little-noted precept of the report, it said: "The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise."

In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fallback position for U.S. military intervention -- and for using Pentagon firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies. But the report's call for tactical adjustments provoked fury among the most militaristic politicians and pundits. Their sustained media counterattack took hold in short order.

President Bush wriggled away from the panel's key recommendations -- gradual withdrawal of many U.S. troops from Iraq and willingness to hold diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. War enthusiasts like Sen. John McCain denounced the report as a recipe for retreat and defeat. The New York Post dubbed Baker and Hamilton "surrender monkeys." Rush Limbaugh called their report "stupid."

By the time its one-week anniversary came around, the Baker-Hamilton report looked about ready for an ashcan of history. Bush had already postponed his announcement of a "new strategy for Iraq" until after the start of the new year -- a delay aimed at cushioning the president from pressure to adopt the report's central recommendations. Even the limited punch of the report has been largely stymied by the most rabidly pro-war forces of American media and politics.

But those forces don't really need to worry about the likes of Colin Powell, James Baker and Lee Hamilton -- as long as the argument is over how the U.S. government should try to get its way in Iraq.

"We are losing -- we haven't lost -- and this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around," Powell told CBS viewers on Sunday. That sort of talk stimulates endless rationales for continuing U.S. warfare and facilitates the ongoing escalation of the murderous U.S. air war in Iraq.

Powell's mendacious performance at the U.N. Security Council, several weeks before the invasion of Iraq, is notorious. But an obscure media appearance by Powell, when he was interviewed by the French network TV2 in mid-September 2003, sheds more light on underlying attitudes that unite the venture-capitalist worldviews of "moderates" like Colin Powell and "hardliners" like Dick Cheney.

Trying to justify Washington's refusal to end the occupation, Powell explained: "Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women -- and we have a large force there now -- we can't be expected to suddenly just step aside."

Norman Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.