THE Green Zone in central Baghdad is a heavily fortified super-compound where US officials reside comfortably, indeed luxuriously, amid Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, swimming pools and ornate hotels.

There, in a cosy “little America”, the insulated denizens devour a flood of imported goods catered by the price-gouging Halliburton Corporation while the mutilated landscape outside grows ever more bleak and hellish for ordinary inhabitants.

Security policies transmitted into, or dreamed up inside, the Green Zone are imposed heedlessly on the luckless all around it. Green Zoners cannot help but care about their own safety and interests first, and so they judge their success according to what looks good to the few authorities they must care about elsewhere, such as in the White House and Pentagon. This is fairly easy to do. The Green Zoners are sincere. Clueless people always are.

The American managers snuggled deep inside the Zone still manage to imagine that the correct blend of pious posturing, well-meaning rhetoric, and smokescreen statements will cure what ails Iraq. That what ails Iraq most acutely is themselves is a point well beyond their collective comprehension. This wilful, almost dutiful, blindness is not just an American failing. You always will have a very difficult time persuading anyone to see whatever it is not in their interests to see.

The Green Zone is also a metaphor for protective bubbles in which elites around the globe insulate themselves from the external realities they pretend to know and presume to rule. So thinking outside the Green Zone – thinking outside what business people call the “the box” – is absolutely ruled out. (Anyone who urges thinking “outside the box” is usually least capable of doing it themselves and most horrified at anyone who does). For those inside it, the Green Zone is all there is. They imagine they dwell inside an error-free, fool-proof universe. If not, they believe the consequences of their actions will never catch up with them, which for them amounts to the same thing.

As one Bush official told a New York Times reporter several years ago, the administration has the power to “make reality” pretty much as it pleases. In Vietnam a vast gulf quickly opened between such rear echelon types and the troops on the front lines – wherever those lines happened to be on a given day. The statistics that strategists examined soon departed widely from actualities on the ground. The grim parallels are all too apparent in Iraq.

Democracy is designed to square ambitions inside the metaphorical Green Zone, with the preferences of the subjects outside it, but this imperfect system is still skewed towards elites in power. Hence, the Bush administration will never permit a deal that fails to keep Iraq’s energy resources firmly in US control. They’d sooner put Fatah in charge of Israel. Eyes fixed glassily on the “big picture”, they don’t mind how many lower-class young Americans die or are maimed in order to achieve this lucrative end. Iraqi sufferers obviously aren’t even on the edges of their moral radar.

So change must stem from Iraqi resistance and from outside pressures. The slow-motion British withdrawal from Iraq is one earthshaking result and poses an immense problem for US planners. Tony Blair’s endorsement of the invasion was crucial for legitimising it inside the US too. Today 72 per cent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s war.

The Pew Research Centre found 53 per cent believe troops should be brought home “as soon as possible” yet the White House still gets away with its pretence in the media that Iraqis, out of some innate impulse, were slaughtering each other all along and that US troops stepped in to sort them out. An extra push from the Brits is important.

UK Chancellor Gordon Brown, when he becomes premier later this year, is quite likely to “declare victory”, in so many diplomatic words, and pull out of Iraq entirely. Only sustained shrieks from the White House prevented the first UK troop contingent withdrawn from being twice the 1,500 announced. The Brits, despite Blair’s denials, want to scarper rather than be caught in a wringer in the Shia south, especially if Bush and/or the Israelis attack Iran. It’s little wonder.

The Iraqi police force, south and north, is corrupt and rife with Shia militia infiltrators, as was the case in 1969 with NLF infiltrators during the “Vietnamisation” phase onwards to defeat in 1975. In Iraq US and UK commanders report numerous instances of “friendly” Iraqi troops/police warning Shias of US raids. Entire arsenals have been spirited into resistance hands. Even the trumpeted success of American Colonel H.R. McMaster’s Third Armoured Cavalry regiment in Talafar along the Syrian border is clearly temporary – only driving down, but not out, the Sunni resistance and the increasingly powerful mafia elements who will re-emerge at the first opportunity.

British-trained Iraqi forces in the south, according to the Independent’s superb reporter Patrick Cockburn, are linked intimately to Sadr’s Shia forces. There is no chance of Iraqis devising their own legitimate central government until the western powers leave. Whatever governing arrangement they have a hand in creating will be viewed as a western puppet, and the violence will go on.

Blair was warned by his joint intelligence committee prior to the invasion that an attack would intensify terrorism. A month before the July 7 London bombings in 2005 the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre warned that Iraq motivated terror elsewhere, pointing out the double standards of US/UK treatment regarding Palestinians versus Israel. Chatham House, a think-tank on foreign affairs, said the UK was “riding as a pillion passenger with the United States in the war against terror” and that the invasion has “given a boost to the Al Qaeda network” in “propagandising, recruitment and fundraising.”

The domestic fall-out of fighting a war based on lies is dire. Neither the leaders in the US nor Britain can deal with evidence and so resort to fear-mongering, tacit racism, and repressive techniques. An ICM poll found 73 per cent of Britons would give up liberties for security. As the 18th century American Benjamin Franklin said, anyone who surrenders liberty for security deserves neither – and, we add, doubtless will get neither.

Nearly half of Britons (the same percentage who would ban non-violent radical Muslim groups) say another holocaust is possible and 36 per cent believed that most people would do nothing to halt it. Four of five were unaware blacks were Nazi targets or that gays, disabled, and gypsies were targeted too. What exactly is the difference, one wonders, between denying the holocaust, like historian David Irving, who served a prison sentence and the great numbers who have a terribly muddled notion of it or would do nothing to prevent another? The holocaust, lest we forget every key aspect, was enabled by populations who believed in order at all costs.

We are not the only ones to be alarmed by such trends. The UK director of public prosecutions points out there really is no “war on terror” and calls for restraint with regard to a “fear-driven and inappropriate response to threats that lead to abandonment of fair trials and due process” – and which should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, not the military. In both Houses of the US Congress anti-war legislators are working to overturn the 2002 resolution that gave Bush a free hand in his “war on terror”.

The first thing indeed is to stoke the growing momentum on both sides of the Atlantic to get out of Iraq. Brendan Behan, the raucous Irish playwright, once observed – in part unfairly – that he never saw a situation so bad that the presence of a policeman didn’t make it worse. That is exactly the position that western military forces in Iraq are in today.

AT TIMES, President Bush's second term has resembled a laboratory test of what happens to a large institution when all mechanisms of accountability are disabled. The results have not been pretty.

Hurricane Katrina, the chaotic occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, the breakdown at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, the FBI's abuse of Patriot Act powers, the troubling dismissals of eight US attorneys — everywhere, the administration has been plagued by an epidemic of incompetence.

Bush has stumbled so badly at managing the basic responsibilities of government that even the National Review, the flagship magazine of the conservative movement and hardly a traditional critic of the president, used its latest cover to plaintively ask: "Can't anyone here play this game?"

How did it come to this for an administration that, as the National Review noted, initially portrayed itself as buttoned-down "adults" returning to Washington after President Clinton's baby boom bacchanal?

The answer begins with Bush's management style. He combines a distaste for details with a tendency to prize loyalty over performance.

Shaped by those attitudes, Bush typically worries more about signalling resolve to his critics by denying failures inside his government than demanding excellence by punishing it. That impulse explains how Bush could present a prestigious medal to George J. Tenet — who had resigned months earlier as CIA chief — after his agency's declarations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction crumbled like sand, and how Donald H. Rumsfeld survived so long as Defence secretary while Iraq disintegrated.

Bush's instincts were dangerously reinforced by the Republican-controlled Congress, which viewed itself less as an independent branch of government than as a junior partner to the White House in the American equivalent of a parliamentary system.

The Republican majority so completely abdicated its responsibilities to conduct oversight on the executive branch that its governing motto might have been "don't ask, don't tell."

Key House and Senate committees sometimes went months without oversight hearings on Iraq. Neither chamber managed more than a glancing review of the increased police powers the administration acquired for the war on terror. Congress barely noted the collapse in care for many veterans at Walter Reed, and it almost completely avoided issues uncomfortable for Bush, such as global warming and declining access to health insurance.

This deference reflected the widespread tendency among congressional Republicans "to think that your political welfare is tied up with the president, and you don't want to make him look bad," as Rep. Thomas M. Davis III one of the few GOP leaders who maintained some independence from the White House, told The Times.

But the abandonment of oversight had the opposite effect. By refusing to challenge the administration's performance, the Republican majority allowed problems to fester and dysfunction to deepen. One senior House Republican said this week that nothing hurt the GOP more in 2006 than the collapse of its reputation for competent governance.

Many of the decisions now causing Bush grief could have been made only by a politician who did not believe anyone was looking over his shoulder. It's inconceivable that the administration would have been so cavalier about planning the post-war occupation of Iraq — or so dismissive of the Army warnings that it had not deployed enough troops to ensure order — if it knew that Congress would closely examine its plans.

Likewise, it's difficult to imagine that an administration accustomed to serious scrutiny would have dismissed US attorneys involved in sensitive decisions.

— Dawn/Los Angeles Times