Despite some minor glitches, the plan is coming along nicely

I think this Chris Floyd article pretty well sums up what has happened in Iraq, even though it simplifies it. We lost control of our one-time puppet, Saddam Hussein. He got too big for his American-made britches and decided he might do better selling his oil for euros instead of dollars. He needed to be replaced.

This has been the plan all along: to install a "strongman" in Iraq who can "hold the country together" and protect the imperial flank while America "projects its dominance" over the oil wealth -- and political life -- of the Middle East and Central Asia. There's no great secret here: Team Bush has been talking about it for years in the corporate-funded "think tanks" [where] they published their dreams about a "new Pearl Harbor" that would "catalyze" the American public into supporting wide-ranging militarization at home and extensive "interventions" abroad. This vision was most clearly articulated in a September 2000 report published by the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, Project for the New American Century....

Central to this dream -- besides the Pearl Harbor bit, which those lucky duckies got only a year later -- was the conquest of Iraq, a project that PNAC said "transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." The crimes of their now-captured errand boy -- most of which (including "gassing his own people") were committed when he was being serviced and pampered by the Reagan-Bush administrations -- were always irrelevant to the PNAC catalyzers, except as a PR pitch to help sell their "transcendent" invasion.

...Chalabi's cronies at Erinys are hiring Chalabi's militiamen for the new "security" contract. In other words, Bush has given Chalabi armed control over Iraq's oil industry. This has drawn strident protests from other members of the Governing Council, who know exactly what it means: Chalabi's gun is pointed at the nation's jugular. But their voice is meaningless; Bush's word alone is law in Babylon.

That's why the occupation seems such a shambles. The stated policies don't really matter; they're just window dressing for the master plan. Thus they can be discarded the moment they're no longer politically expedient. What matters is getting the strongman in place -- Saddam 2.0, a more obedient, more presentable, less quirky upgrade, who will "invite" a lasting American military presence and uphold Bush's arbitrary decrees granting foreign corporations a stranglehold on the Iraqi economy.

...Despite his conviction in Jordan for massive bank fraud, despite his dubious husbandry of the millions in covert aid thrown at him by U.S. officials, despite the fact that even the CIA finally washed its hands of him, dismissing him as an ineffectual poseur peddling false intelligence to inflate his importance and attract more funding, the PNAC boys kept faith with Chalabi.

...Now, is this an evil plan, conceived in ignorance and arrogance, predicated on the war crime of military aggression, an act of terrorism on a scale that bin Laden could only dream of? You bet. But let's be fair: it is a plan. You can't say that Bush hasn't got one.

....but hey, say what you want....you will anyway.