I. Surging Toward the Ultimate Prize The reason that George W. Bush insists that ‘victory’ is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it’s that his definition of ‘victory’ is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned ‘surge’ of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand. At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new ‘hydrocarbon law’ essentially drawn up by the Bush administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reported. The new bill will ‘radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world,’ says the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. ‘It would allow the first large-scale operation of […]