It was a warm early spring day and our two car convoy—of old, beat up, and unembedded Iraqi cars—had just entered the highway out of Baghdad and on the way to Falluja. Even on the cusp of the occupation's first year, in March 2004, it was never a good idea to get stuck in traffic on the highway; too many things could, and often did, go wrong if you stayed in one spot for more than a minute or two.

So I wasn't too thrilled to see yet another freight-train length truck convoy, with heavy military support, cut in front of traffic, bringing it to a halt. But I was also fascinated by the sight--it was telling me, and everyone else on that highway, something about the Bush Administration's plans for Iraq that was clearly not being shared with the American public: the United States was in Iraq for the long haul, and nothing was going to make us leave.

“It's heading up to the base they're building up north,” my driver Maher explained, his matter-of-fact tone barely masking his anger at the implications of his explanation. By the time I saw my first construction convoy I had already sensed that the American media was missing the real story in Iraq. In the papers and on the network and cable news, the talk was of incompetent administration and a strategic failure to understand that Iraqis would not sit idly by while we dismantled their institutions and remade their country in our image. One senior academic colleague told me with an exasperated tone, “Mark, you can't imagine how incompetent the military is” when I recounted what I had seen “in theatre.”

I didn't buy it. What looked like incompetence from home looked in Iraq like a deliberate policy of sewing chaos to ensure Iraqis couldn't ask us to leave, even if they wanted to. The President could blithely declare: “We'll leave if Iraqis ask us to,” or “As Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down,” but these claims meant little when, as far as I could tell, we were standing on top of their collective chest and making sure they couldn't ask us to leave.

As one doctor, a military psychiatrist who had worked with the Americans for a time, put it to me as we toured the woefully underequipped Qadamiya Hospital: “The Americans can't be this incompetent. The chaos has to be deliberate, at least partly.”

I had already seen chaos advance the goals of Israel's leaders in the West Bank and Gaza, where three years of intifada-related war had squeezed Palestinian society to the point where various militias, and even ordinary teenagers, were increasingly engaging in fratricidal violence rather than suicidal violence against Israelis. As I processed my trip with colleagues who worked on other strife-torn regions, it became clear that the deliberate use of chaos was a hallmark of civil wars and political rule across the “arc of instability” stretching from Africa to Central Asia in the post-Cold War era.

Whether in Central Africa, where it was termed the “instrumentalisation du désordre,” or in the former Soviet Union, where it was called “Bardok” (chaos in Russian), the goal was the same: Instead of trying to create stability, embrace and even thrive on the chaos of the post-1989 order by using it to one's military and political advantage.

In Iraq, sponsoring and then effectively managing large-scale chaos served a range of interests and needs of the Bush Administration. First and foremost, it made it impossible for Iraqis—the vast majority of whom were and remain against the occupation—to come together to push the US out. As long as violent resistance could be kept to manageable levels, most Americans would do little more than gripe about the ongoing occupation, which is exactly what has happened in the four and a half years since U.S. troops first arrived in Baghdad.

Second, keeping Iraq in a state of chaos would prevent any power from arising who could threaten American dominance in the near term. Arming one side and then the other,and throwing foreign jihadis into the mix (conveniently franchised under the al-Qa'eda brand), would ensure the country's leaders dare not ask us to leave for fear of jeopardizing their tenuous hold on power. Allowing chaos to rein over the country's reconstruction would not only allow for unprecedented (and sometimes fraudulent) profits for contractors, it would ensure that Iraq remained unable to "stand" on its own two feet for the foreseeable future.

More broadly, making Iraq a cause celebre for jihadis around the world would ensure that the war on terror continues indefinitely, securing massive military budgets, and unprecedented profits for oil and arms companies, for the foreseeable future.

Finally, and most important today, bet that while things might get ugly in the short term, eventually Iraqis would tire of killing themselves wholesale and tone down the violence enough so that the Bush Administration could declare that its policies in Iraq are working—even though in reality the “reduction” in violence is a reduction merely to the sky-high levels of 2006, while violence in other parts of the country has increased.

Everyone played their role to the 'T' in this drama: Iraqis killed each other instead of coming together peacefully to force the U.S. out. Few leading Democrats had the courage to oppose the war on principle; but limiting their criticism to its management meant that there is little they can say now that Bush's policies seem to be working. And the American people, who “own” Iraq as much as does President Bush, are happy to let him manage “his” war as long it allows them to avoid owning up to their collective responsibility for the consequences the occupation has brought to Iraqis, American soldiers, and the health of American democracy more broadly.

And now, as has just been disclosed, the Bush Administration has convinced--or perhaps coerced--Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, to sign an agreement that would allow the US to keep large numbers of forces in Iraq and otherwise have a controlling interest in the country's future for... the foreseeable future.

Simply put, the Bush administration has outwitted Democrats, and the American people, at almost every turn since the President and his senior advisers decided to invade Iraq in the wake of September 11. The sooner Americans realize this, the less will be the likelihood that they will be so easily fooled the next time a President decides to lead the country into a war that everyone says they don't want.