October 30, 2004 - NO MATTER who wins the United States Presidential election the quagmire in Iraq will only get stickier. The figures tell the story. The US has 150,000 troops in Iraq. This is far too few and always has been. But it was not only the wildly optimistic, unrealistic view of the Bush administration that was responsible for the shortfall.

There were simply not enough troops available. And even to get the American forces up to 150,000, the National Guard has been sucked so dry that if there were now a major natural disaster in the US, the depleted Guard would be unable to cope.

The Guard is in a state of, if not revolt, then of deep discontent. Re-enlistments have plummeted and the Guard is undergoing a major re-think of its mission and how to achieve it. "We trained for the wrong war," a Marine colonel in public affairs told me earlier this year. "We trained for WW3—big, set-piece artillery and tank battles. Not for hand-to-hand fighting in cities full of civilians. Now we’ve got to retrain and that takes time. And a lot of guys want out. They joined for the dental plan and now they find that they’re away from their families, their jobs, their community and their country for months, maybe years. They feel we lied to them." The Pentagon is desperate to sort this out because the US cannot fight a war without the National Guard. To give just one example: three out of four doctors in the Army Medical Corps are National Guardsmen. Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq grows worse day by day. An average of thirteen US soldiers are killed every week. There have been instances of soldiers refusing to obey orders. GI chat rooms on the Internet are full of stories of mental breakdowns, drug and alcohol abuse and near mutinies. Rather than highlight the problem by prosecutions, the Pentagon prefers to discharge dissident GIs for "medical reasons".

The truth is that the war in Iraq never finished. Many of the insurgents are led by former Bathists, lots with military experience. It is quite likely that Saddam Hussein planned it this way. Otherwise why was one of the last acts of his regime the throwing open the nation’s arsenals to allow history’s biggest transfer of arms from a government to its people to take place—between eight and twelve million weapons. So whoever becomes the next president faces a stark choice—increase troops levels to finish off Iraqi resistance once and for all (300,000 to 450,000 is one estimate of how many will be needed) or cut and run, thus demonstrating to the world that the US hasn’t the stomach for the neo-conservatives New World Order.

The detail is in the two scenarios that everyone in Washington is trying to ignore. BEST CASE SCENARIO. Bush will win comfortably. The ensuing assault on the insurgent stronghold of Falluja, scene of the earlier defeat of the US Marines, will this time succeed with heavy insurgent losses but minimum civilian casualties. Insurgents in the rest of Iraq will heed the lesson—you can’t stand up to American military might--and the path to elections next January will be clear. Iraq’s new government will then quickly take over its own security operations and the Pentagon will start to withdraw US troops by next Spring.

WORST CASE SCENARIO. No matter who wins the presidential election, the assault on Falluja goes ahead. It fails or succeeds but either way there is a civilian blood bath, all captured on Arab TV, and accusations of American war crimes. Insurgency throughout Iraq spreads rapidly. US troop strength is increased to 450,000 forcing the Defense Department to reintroduce the draft. (Draft Board officers are already being trained and there have been negotiations with the Canadian government to make certain that, unlike the Vietnam draft, resisters cannot shelter in Canada.) The Iraqi elections are postponed indefinitely. There is a joint US-Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities to distract attention from the debacle in Iraq and to ratchet up the fear factor in the American population.

I realise that this is grim stuff but many informed Americans are even more pessimistic. Joseph Wilson IV, the American career diplomat who was punished by the Administration because he reported that the uranium from Niger story was rubbish, says that there is now no honourable way out of Iraq and that the issue will so divide America that the Republicans will push for a one party state. The author Gore Vidal says he would not be surprised to see the American Army mutiny and a new civil war is not unthinkable. Hyperbole, perhaps, but few can doubt that tough times lie ahead.

Phillip Knightley is a London-based political analyst

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