That line, from the uncomfortably prophetic film The Siege, in some ways may say everything that needs to be said about the situation in Iraq as it is evolving, just as it would have summed up Viet Nam forty years earlier. Car bombs, suicide attacks, poorly armed militias holding off the might of the biggest, best, and most powerful military force in the world--it's time to say it out loud: Holbrooke is right. Iraq is Viet Nam all over again, only worse.

Ever since Bush announced his intention to follow the PNAC 'plan' from 1989 and invade Iraq on the strength of innuendo, misinformation, and bald-faced lies, critics like me have been saying it would be Nam all over again, and from the start of the invasion the parallels have been downright spooky. Yes, the physical terrain is different--desert instead of jungle; yes, the people are different, Arabs instead of Asians; yes, there is more at stake in the Gulf than there ever was in Nam--real oil instead of imaginary dominoes; and yes, Nam was not a response to a direct attack on US soil. But the mistakes are the same: arrogance fueled by fear, lies fueled by ideology, disastrous military decisions being made by civilians for political reasons against the advice of military leaders, a steady stream of HappyTalk from the Administration and its loyalists about how much better everything is than it looks, and, most importantly, a native insurgency arising from a desire to expel a foreign occupier being defined by a blind Admin as the rumpus made by a few 'outside agitators'.

The neocon naifs in the Bush Admin are patently still in thrall to Laurie Mylroie's paranoid fantasies and Ahmad Chalabi's self-serving lies. Wolfowitz and Perle are still insisting no more troops are needed and that everything is just ducky even as we have reached and passed the 1000-death mark in a war that was supposed to be over--shades of McNamara grousing about 'negativity'; Bush is running around the country campaigning on his 'Don't listen to them' platform, pleading with people to pay no attention to the reports of chaos and confusion, incompetence and outright theft, a massively botched reconstruction, and instead trust his glowing, optimistic assessment based on--what? He doesn't say. His optimism, one imagines.

It didn't have to be this way. As Jay Bookman points out in a brilliant essay, Tikrit is as quiet as Fallujah is an uproar.

The Army's 1st Infantry Division is headquartered in Tikrit, and its footprint has been heavy and it has been felt. U.S. troops patrol the streets in relative safety, because here, if nowhere else in Iraq, they have been given the numbers to squelch opposition. "I can sit on that corner, on 'RPG Alley,' and eat an ice cream cone now," Lt. Col. Jeffrey Sinclair recently told the Associated Press, pointing on a map to the infamous city's most infamous street.

Before the invasion, the haughty amateurs who planned this brave adventure were warned that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify Iraq. Rather than listen and learn, they scoffed at the four-star generals who spouted such nonsense. These men knew better, for in the Washington think tanks that had nurtured them like fragile hothouse orchids, eager Iraqi exiles had assured them that if we invaded, we would be greeted as liberators, that our path would be strewn with roses, that our leaders would be honored with statues on Baghdad squares.

Tikrit, by its silence, condemns those men for their arrogance. Here, at the very core of Saddam's strength, the difficult has been achieved. The calm may be a sullen calm, an enforced calm, but it is a calm nonetheless. This is what might have been elsewhere in Iraq if competence had been valued over blind allegiance, if we had been led into this war by serious people who understood that when you bet high stakes, you play to win and you assume nothing.

But we weren't. We were led into this war by corporate-style leaders watching the bottom line, ex-corporate executives who believe that the truth is what they say it is and that how it looks is more important than what it is, and corporate consultants who specialize in marketing attractive ideas in order to sell shoddy, defective, and useless products to people who don't need or want them. Corporate executives are valued largely on their ability to convince themselves and others that the impossible is doable, that illusions are what matter, and that products can be forced on unwilling consumers if you tell them the right lies in the right way.

Well, we elected a pile of corporate-trained, corporate-educated, corporate-indulged executives who, like all their class, were so completely cut off from reality, so thoroughly enmeshed in their own private fantasy world of success, so convinced that the lofty heights of business to which they had climbed--largely through political contacts and the Old Boy network--were the direct result of their own genius, that they virtually live in an alternate universe, a universe where their stubbornness is heroism, their incompetence is superior vision, and their blindness is loyalty. So what did we expect them to do? Suddenly become realists after spending their lives investing their energy and resources committing to an illusion? It don't work that way, people.

If we ever get out of this I hope the one lesson we take away with us, indelibly printed in the core of our brainpans, is to never never NEVER again allow corporate managers to grab the reins of government. Because while it matter who is the most committed, it matters just as much what they're committed to.

(Cross-posted at Arran's Alley.)