The Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War has had two constants – deception and wishful thinking – a dangerous mix of falsehoods used to justify the conflict and unrealistic expectations about success, argues experienced analytical journalist Robert Parry at Consortium News in today’s report.

“This pairing has brought the United States one of the most unnecessary military disasters in its history,” Parry writes. “Yet the Bush administration is sticking with the same tactics, more deceptions and more wishful thinking – from claims that the Iraq War has reduced terror threats worldwide to optimistic talk about upcoming troop withdrawals.”

Parry’s analysis is very good, better in fact than what readers get these days from the New York Times and Washington Post, but there is a little something even Mr. Parry doesn’t quite get yet.

He says, in part, “…a U.S. military withdrawal might not create the catastrophe that Bush and his supporters predict, if the less alarmist analysis is true. Instead, the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis might be forced into practical negotiations for resolving their differences.”

He goes on to say: “The departure of American troops also would eliminate a chief recruiting pitch that terrorists have exploited to get young Muslims to strap bombs on themselves. Without the American presence – and assuming progress on other problems such as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute – the appeal of Islamic extremism might fade rather than grow.”

The analysis is correct here, except for one thing. It is naive. As we have pointed out several times now on this site since going online back in March, the neo-cons who didn’t have to con Bush very hard to undertake this war, rather than focusing on Afghanistan and bin Laden, have no intention of pulling out – not next year, not in 2009, not ever.

As we reported before, this was spelled out in 2003 before the war by Jay Bookman, deputy editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, weeks after I tried to get the New York Times national desk to put me on the same story.

“This war … is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the ‘American imperialists’ that our enemies always claimed we were. Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?”

The Bush administration will make a show of bringing a few reserve units home in time for the mid-term elections in 2006, just to try holding onto a GOP majority in the Senate. But let’s be clear. We are never leaving Iraq, just as we never left Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, just as we never left Germany after World War II or South Korea or the Philippines, etc.

Later on in his analysis, Parry says: “Impeachment of Bush is widely regarded as impossible given the Republican control of the House and Senate and the strength of the conservative news media … but impeachment may be the only political option left if the American people hope to force a U.S. withdrawal before 2009. Also by making Bush’s impeachment a focus of the congressional campaigns in 2006, the American people would be given a chance to impose some measure of accountability for the gross mismanagement of the Iraq War.”

More power to the impeachment movement, but I’m afraid it is not going anywhere for the reasons Parry cites.

The Republican Party sees on the horizon the kind of long-term political realignment envisioned by Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove. This includes the kind of dominance for Republicans that Democrats had after the Great Depression and WWII for half a century, until Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority came along and produced a “shining city on a hill” happy revolution.

That revolution, aided by the Newt Gingrich “revolution” that produced a Republican majority in the U.S. House for the first time in about 50 years, turned American politics back from a progressive march into the future to a religious retrenchment that now has the Christians facing off against Muslims in what can only be described as a religious war by anyone who knows what they are talking about.

Of course the Bush administration and the New York Times will not call it that, because Dog forbid, it might be true – and that would be disastrous for sure.

Well, it is disastrous, and not just for the economy stupid. And it is not going to get any better any time soon. And George Bush is not going to turn around and get out of Iraq as long as he is standing and still the president of the United States and the neo-cons still pull his strings.

The view from here is, there may be no reasonable, democratic, peaceful way to turn this situation around. The corporations are in control of the U.S. government in a way we have not seen since the heyday of what journalism historians call, “The Muckraking Era.”

The scandal over Karl Rove’s role in outing a CIA agent, and a decision by the mother of a slain soldier to camp out in Crawford, Texas, to make news by trying to meet with Bush and hold him accountable, may be the beginnings of another revolution of sorts.

Karl Marx once wrote, “Workers of the world unite.”

How’s this for a new slogan for today

“Smart people of the world unite.”

It is possible to throw the bastards out and force reform. Just ask the artists, writers, professors and teachers in the old Soviet Union, who swarmed Red Square and refused to leave until the Soviet Empire collapsed. Ask the people of Kurdistan, who only last year ran their corrupt leader – who stole the election – out of the building and gloated in his desk chair.