Hayes comes closer than anyone else I've read to getting at the absurdity and pointlessness of the current Iraq debate. Much of that debate purports to deal with how close we are to achieving "our goals" in Iraq. Republicans say, "We're getting there, so stay the course". Democrats say, "We're still too far away, and we're probably never going to get there. Let's leave or re-deploy or something."

But both of these perspectives overlook the fact that Bush and Cheney have already achieved their main goal: they, and we, are in Iraq. And they work assiduously now on the completion of their secondary goal: to make sure that we stay in Iraq permanently, and that neither the Congress nor the American people are able to get any bright ideas about leaving off the ground. The whole debate is getting rather absurd now, and further removed from the plane of reality each day. We have a pattern of six months, congressional punt, six months, congressional punt, etc. This is just going to continue as the issue of Iraq falls further and further away from the center of public attention. Eventually they won't even bother to hold these silly six month interval hearings.

I see no evidence of any real political will to get the US out of Iraq. The three remaining presidential candidates are just talking about different forms and fashions of staying in Iraq: How many troops? In what part of the country will they be deployed? What missions will they be authorized to conduct? So, I'm about ready to say, "It's over; the imperialists won."

Cheney, the former head of Halliburton, and Bush, the scion of a Texas oil clan, looked out at the world and its petroleum-rich sandy places and said, "Iraq is a great geostrategic prize. Eventually some foreign power is going to be effectively running that place. Some global winner is going to be pumping the oil and profiting from it, and some global losers are going to be looking on in envy from the outside. The winner might be us, or it might be one of our rivals. Better us than than a rival. So, let's grab the prize."

And grab it they did. They have since built the bases and the embassy fortress that will comprise the infrastructure of the permanent US military and administrative presence in Iraq. They are now in the process of negotiating the terms of our permanent arrangement with the Iraqi government. The international pressure to get out is diminishing. Shahrastani is in the process of entertaining bids and cutting deals with the international oil giants who are going to be managing and profiting from Iraq's oil fields for years. As those firms move in, the global acceptance of the US presence and security guarantee will grow. Even the Iranian government seems committed to the survival and prospering of the current Iraqi government, and that latter government is dependent on the US for security.

The Congress seems about two years behind the curve on all this. They are still debating what is now in effect just a part of history. The present eludes them. And given the rigid orthodoxies and pieties of American political discourse at the leadership level, they are forbidden from even acknowledging the reality of that present.

Americans, we all learned in school, don't just "grab" places and things they covet. Americans are exemplary; they're exceptional; they dwell in the city on the hill. Only those bad old imperialists from pre-democratic times engaged in the brute, violent seizure of attractive assets.

And since we all know we don't do this kind of thing, there is no point in our leaders acknowledging the fact that we just did it, and that no one was able to stop it.