The US and Iraq: Locked in an Embrace Gnawing on Each Other's Heads in the 9th Circle of Hell

Dante wrote one of the allegorical classics of western literature: The Inferno, meant to be a description of Hell. In the 9th (and lowest) circle of hell he placed Count Ugolino of Pisa and Archbishop Ruggieri, both  men frozen in ice up to their necks with Ugolino gnawing on Ruggieri's head for all eternity. This is an apt metaphor for the US in Iraq: the US is frozen in the 9th circle of hell with Iraq gnawing on its head for all eternity. The US can never get away from Iraq because the logic for staying is always circular. If we're winning, we have to stay until the job's finished which it never will be, and, if we're losing, we have to stay until we win which we never will.

Stuck in hell gnawing on each other's heads - the US and Iraq will continue their dance of death until China decides to take away the baby bottle of finance and the whole enterprise collapses of its own weight bringing down the whole economy with it and turning US taxpayers into perpetual slaves as interest and debt are forever. The kind of violence that goes on in Iraq can continue to pop up on and on so there will never be an end game, there will never be a definition of winning, there will be nothing but interminable, intermittent violence leading to more and more death and destruction and pissing money down hell's rathole. And al Quaida is getting exactly what it wants - bleeding the US to death. The US, responsible for a million Iraqi deaths - mostly civilians - is not capable of liberating the people it's killing - only killing the unliberated. It's created 2 million refugees and displaced persons, people who cannot lead any kind of normal life and are condemned to a hellish existence despite their innocence.

Colin Powell's Pottery Barn metaphor for Iraq is not apt. We broke it but we can't  fix it so either we wash our bloody hands and admit our guilt for creating this chaos or we stay frozen in a deathly embrace gnawing on Iraq's head in perpetuity. This is a worse result than admitting that all the lives spent, all the money spent, was not only in vain but was res- ponsible for the des- truction of a nation and a people, reducing a some- what civilized society to a trash heap, a Humpty Dumpty that can't be put back together again. In fact the only hope for its ever being put back together is for the US to get out and let the chips fall where they may because the US prescence there is only making matters worse.

Whatever "improvement" there is in the situation there has come about because the US has bought off some of the fighters. Frantically trying to find every fighter to pay off is a fool's mission, but it's clear the only Iraqis who want the US there are those who have their hands in the US' pockets. The Iraqi government is corrupt; it's being paid off so it wants the US to maintain its prescence there so it can continue to get paid off. This is part and parcel of the gnawing on our neck which will go on until the US cuts the umbilical cord and leaves with past blood but not future blood on its hands - where the line of demarcation between past and future is the point at which the US leaves. Abandon all hope ye who enter here should have been the US' slogan for war in Iraq.