In the United States, the long-awaited January 30 Iraqi election, might be labeled the “until” election or, more recently, the “in-the-days-before” election. Since “sovereignty” was turned over to the Interim Iraqi Government last June (a previous “until” event), American officials have been predicting — and American press and TV reports generally seconding — that “violence” in Iraq would increase “until” the January 30th date (with the implication, of course, that after hitting a peak it would certainly diminish thereafter). As we’ve gotten ever closer to that day, there have been ever more frantic predictions of intensification “in the days before” the election — and the first hints that in the days after, no matter how many Iraqis do or don’t turn out to vote under terrible circumstances — the violence will not exactly go away.

It’s a no-brainer, of course, that various of the insurgent factions in Iraq want to disrupt the elections; but to focus on the election itself, as on the sovereignty moment before it, is to miss the larger strategic goal that the rebels generally seem to be pursuing, and will surely continue pursuing no less intensely on January 31 or February 31 or March 31 (as we head for the next “until” event, perhaps the writing of the new Iraqi constitution). In the fashion of guerrilla wars, after all, the insurgents are primarily trying to isolate the American occupiers of the country. They are doing so quite literally by cutting roads and supply lines and ambushing supply convoys. (Remember that the full might of the U.S. military has yet to secure even the crucial stretch of road that runs from Baghdad International Airport to the Green Zone in the heart of the capital.) They are also, however, attempting to cut as many ties as possible, as violently as they can, between the Americans and any Iraqis willing (as policemen, contractors, judges, politicians, translators, cleaning ladies on American bases, or National Guardsmen) to cooperate with, or in any way support, or simply to earn a few dollars from the country’s invaders in a land with a jobless rate above 50%. This is a truly brutal campaign — assassinations, beheadings, kidnappings, murders of every sort, car bombings, and mortarings — and, elections or no, it’s on the rise.

In parts of Iraq, just about everything, it seems, is contributing to the rise of, and success of, the insurgency. Oil exports are down from prewar levels. Electricity is in many places next to nonexistent for large parts of the day. (“We don’t want elections, we want electricity!” was a slogan recently noted down by Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid at a demonstration by followers of the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr outside Baghdad’s Oil Ministry.) Gas and kerosene are in desperately short supply. (Shadid, for instance, mentions passing a five-mile-long gas line on his way to the demonstration.) The now notorious Abu Ghraib and other American prisons and detention areas are once again filling up; while — talk about role-modeling — systematic acts of torture and abuse have now spread from the Americans to Iraqi police and intelligence forces, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch. (For all the arguments in and around Washington in favor of keeping torture in the American arsenal, practically speaking in a situation like Iraq, acts of torture and humiliation do nothing other than create yet more enemies and fuel an ever stronger insurgency.)

Oh yes, and, as a headline from a piece by Knight Ridder’s Tom Lasseter and Jonathan S. Landay (who have been doing fine reporting over the last year from Iraq and Washington) puts it: “Iraqi insurgency growing larger, more effective.” They write, in part:

“The United States is steadily losing ground to the Iraqi insurgency, according to every key military yardstick… ‘All the trend lines we can identify are all in the wrong direction,’ said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy research organization. ‘We are not winning, and the security trend lines could almost lead you to believe that we are losing.’”

Panic over ineffective Iraqi forces has led to headlines that come right out of the early years of the Vietnam War — as in the following subhead on the front page of the New York Times, “Plan Calls for Thousands of Additional American Military Advisers” that went with the head, General Seeking Faster Training of Iraq Soldiers — and a plaint that could have come out of almost any year of the Vietnam War: Why do “their” Iraqis fight so much better and more fiercely than “ours”?

No wonder the Bush administration is reputedly planning to pile a new $80 billion military funding request (mainly for Iraq) on top of the emergency $25 billion already appropriated from Congress for fiscal year 2005. (“At nearly $105 billion, total funding for military operations in 2005 would be more than 13 times larger than Bush’s budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.”) And you can place a good bet on the possibility that this won’t be the last of it for 2005 either.

By the way, according to Reuters, that $80 billion doesn’t even include a possible $1-2 billion for the new “embassy complex” we’re considering building inside Baghdad‘s Green Zone. (Talk about settling in for the long haul “until…”!) The military is, at present, expressing its assessment of the direction of events in Iraq by planning for the maintenance of at least present troop levels (and so, undoubtedly, endless further extended tours of duty and an ongoing involuntary draft) through the year 2006 or beyond. And according to a recent Reuters report:

“The White House has scrapped its list of Iraq allies known as the 45-member ‘coalition of the willing,’ which Washington used to back its argument that the 2003 invasion was a multilateral action, an official said on Friday. The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the White House replaced the coalition list with a smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq sometime after the June transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.”

A recent New Yorker magazine piece on the military in Iraq commented that our troops there were the most isolated occupation force in history. Nowhere outside their own bases can they even take off their body armor, no less shop in a market or, for that matter, consort à la Vietnam with bar girls. On an even larger scale, it seems that, with great aid and support from Bush administration policies, the Iraqis guerrillas are managing not only to isolate American forces in Iraq, but the United States in the world — and that is a strange, almost unprecedented development.

Let me end by offering this modest bit of uplift: According to a Washington Post report on the annual Alfalfa Dinner, the President said jokingly of Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice: “People often ask me what Condi is like. Well, she is creative; she is tough — think Martha Stewart with access to nuclear codes.” What about behind bars and with access to nuclear codes? Now doesn’t that reassure?

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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