Three years ago, Sen. Barack Obama was sharp, forceful and eloquent in his questions to Gen. David Petraeus about the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In a congressional hearing on Iraq, Obama did not mince words with the general:

This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. And we are now confronted with the question: How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in which there are no good options, there are bad options and worse options?

Sen. Barack Obama questions Gen. Petraeus during Iraq hearings, 2007. (Go to 3:00 of this 9:45 minute video for above quote.)

This same candidate Obama was also confidently talking about withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months during his 2007 interviews. He defended a pull-out to two New York Times reporters, saying it would not “backfire” and discourage the Iraqis to find a political solution involving all sides of the conflict, as the critics claimed.

Now, three years later, imperial overreach is once again popular on Capitol Hill. Petraeus returned on Tuesday to the congressional hearing room, now sent by President Barack Obama, to receive his confirmation as commander in Afghanistan. He was greeted like some kind of new hero, and his hearing was, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “a breeze.”

The atmosphere in the hearing room became giddy, and at one point Petraeus played down tensions between the military and Vice President Joe Biden over the strategy in Afghanistan. He revealed that, after meeting in the Oval Office with Obama, Biden pulled him aside to dismiss reports that he wants to shrink the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan.

“The vice president grabbed me and said, ‘You should know that I am 100% supportive of this policy,’ ” Petraeus told the committee. “And I said that I am reassured to hear that.”

Biden was even going to dinner at Petraeus’ house Tuesday to discuss the matter further, the general said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham questions Gen. Petraeus at his confirmation hearing, June 30, 2010. (Go to 3:00 of this 7:07 minute video for above quote.)

What happened? How did withdrawal-in-16 months Obama turn into a “keep-the-military footprint” Obama Administration?

There are really two answers, one political and one spiritual. On the political level, the surface of daily events, Petraeus is benefiting from an official story that he managed to quell violence in Iraq through the surge of 30,000 new U.S. troops. What is really a pacification program has brought an appearance of stability to Iraq. After the horrific chaos and civil war conditions in Iraq during 2007, it seems like a miracle that “only” 10 people are dying in killings, attacks and bombings every day. And a politically ambitious Petraeus is more than willing to play the role of the Caesar triumphing in Gaul.

On the spiritual level, however, the real truth is much darker. The truth is that the forces for imperial domination are re-asserting themselves like a malignant cancer. These forces have spun a seductive lie around events, blinded the once prophetic Obama and are drawing him down the same rocky road to disaster that George W. Bush so enthusiastically traveled.

When the history of this period is written, the events may well take on the appearance of inexorable fate. The spiritual lesson may well be that empire is an addiction, a spiritual disease beyond the control of any one person, including someone as intelligent and well-meaning as Barack Obama.

However, this is only a hypothesis. Some could easily argue that it is spiritually damaging to pay too much attention to the passing events of the moment, since they can easily tempt us into depression, despair and a feeling of powerlessness. If we lose hope that Obama isn’t going to change America’s self-destructive course fundamentally, then on what basis do we have any hope at all? Must we turn to an other-worldly spirituality and hope only in the world to come, העולם הבא, in Judaism or Jesus’ paradise of Christian theology?

From my point of view, the spiritual path demands attention to two opposite realities. We must keep one eye on the reality of this world, העולם הזה, the so-called facts on the ground, but at the same time, we must keep the other on the transcendent lessons that these facts reveal to us about our ultimate destiny, however we define that in our own spiritual orientation.

For now, I leave the spiritual speculations until later. First, we need to look squarely at the realities of the historical moment of this world as it is. At the present time, this is not easy. An empire spins a cocoon of illusion to mask what is really going on. If it didn’t, if the truth were simply admitted, people wouldn’t fall for the seduction of power.

Right now, official Washington believes a lie: That Petraeus made the surge of troops work in Iraq. He produced what seemed impossible three years ago, the appearance of a successful U.S. occupation in Iraq without losing any real power or pulling troops out.

Like any lie, it contains a partial truth. In fact, the number of violent deaths in Iraq has fallen sharply. This year, “only” 10 people are dying each day from attacks, suicide bombs, gunfire, executions and IEDs planted along the roads, according to Iraqbodycount.org. At the time of candidate Obama’s earlier questioning of Petraeus, there were 60 such violent deaths per day.

Put another way, there have been 1,635 violent deaths for the first six months of 2010 in Iraq — half the death rate during a single month in 2006, when they were running 2,400 to 2,900 a month.

Isn’t this “success”? Doesn’t it prove that the answer to trouble is: “More troops, more troops”?

Well, not really. There’s more to this story. The death rate fell sharply at the beginning of 2009 – and in the past two years, it has stopped falling. Even the proponents of the surge admit this.

In May, the rate of killings in Iraq was actually higher than in May a year ago. The big drop that came at the beginning of 2009 hasn’t continuing dropping. For two years now, there has been a steady rate of 200 to 400 deaths per month. In the past week alone, 77 people were killed in several cities. Every day, there is a bombing or two, or a shooting, or an attack.

Why is this significant? Because they reveal the real reason for the “success” of the surge: The U.S. was quietly deploying a new “secret weapon” throughout Iraq: death squads. These were – and are still – both U.S. Green Berets and Iraqis trained by Green Berets to conduct an assassination program outside normal military channels that targets whoever they decide are the “bad guys.”

And the leader of this covert “black op” in Iraq and later in Afghanistan was none other than the indiscreet Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This is where McChrystal made his reputation, got himself promoted to commander of Afghanistan and then blabbed the truth too openly to Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings and subsequently was fired and replaced by Petraeus.

From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal ran the Joint Special Operations Command, a group that the Defense Department didn’t even admit existed until recently.

Even though it is called super-secret, you can easily find a fairly clear description of it by piecing together reports on the Internet. Reporter Bob Woodward revealed some of it in his book, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008, his fourth book on the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq.

Beginning in about May 2006, the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence agencies launched a series of TOP SECRET operations that enabled them to located, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups, such as al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations, which were either Special Access Programs (SAP) or part of the Special Compartmented Information (SCI), incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government.

Senior military officers and officials at the White House have asked me not to publish the details or the code word names associated with these groundbreaking programs. They argue that publication of the names alone might lead to unraveling of state secrets that have been so beneficial to Iraq. Because disclosing the details of such operations could compromise their ongoing use, I have chosen not to include more here. But a number of authoritative sources say these covert activities had a far-reaching effort on violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90 percent of the successful operations and “actionable intelligence” had come from these new sources, methods and operations. Several others said that the figure was exaggerated but acknowledge their significance. Once again, it was American innovation that provided an edge.

Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al Qaeda in Iraq, employed what he called “collaborative warfare, using every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations. Derek Harvey, the DIA intelligence expert and adviser to Petraeus, said privately that the operations were so effective that they gave him “orgasms.”

When I later asked the president about this, he offered a simple answer: “JSOC is awesome.”

Among their successes, McChrystal and his JSOC team is credited with killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, (and several civilians including a woman and child) in a U.S. airstrike on June 7, 2006. Woodward described the scene:

In early June Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the Joint Special Operations commander, called (Army General George W. Casey Jr.) on a secure line and said he thought they had pinpointed Zarqawi in a small house that likely contained women and children.

“How sure are you that he’s there?” (Casey said.)

“I’m sure,” McChrystal said, his voice cracking.

Not long afterward, McChrystal called to report that the planes had hit the target and that the body had been brought to his headquarters.

“We’re going to wait on the fingerprints, but this is the guy,” the Special Operations commander said.

Woodward enthusiastically calls these special forces “an American innovation.” He told CNN that JSOC is “a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have.”

The prime target of these kill squads has been al Qaeda in Iraq. Recently, Gen. Ray Odierno explained in a Pentagon briefing how the U.S. has managed to infiltrate the Al-Qaeda headquarters in Mosel and assassinate their leaders. Odierno said:

In addition to that, over the last 90 days or so, we’ve either picked up or killed 34 out of the top 42 al Qaeda in Iraq leaders. They’re clearly now attempting to reorganize themselves. They’re struggling a little bit. They’ve broken — they’ve lost connection with AQSL [al Qaeda Senior Leadership] in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The “innovation” is that the Green Berets aren’t operating only U.S. squads. They have trained nine battalions of Iraqis forces, called the Iraqi Special Operations Forces, that were at first only answerable to U.S. commanders. A prescient report last year by Shane Bauer of The Nation told the story:

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army’s Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret’s dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.

In 2007, the U.S. transferred the command of these forces to the Iraqi government in 2007, but not to the Iraqi Defense or Interior Ministry. Instead, the U.S. insisted setting up on a new minister-level office called the Counter-Terrorism Bureau, or CTB.

Established by a directive from Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, the CTB answers directly to him and commands the ISOF independently of the police and army. According to Maliki’s directive, the Iraqi Parliament has no influence over the ISOF and knows little about its mission. US Special Forces operatives like (retired Lt. General Ray) Carstens have largely overseen the bureau. Carstens says this independent chain of command “might be the perfect structure” for counterterrorism worldwide.

Not only is it the perfect structure, but these are the perfect guys in the view of its military creators. “All these guys want to do is go out and kill bad guys all day,” Carstens told Bauer, laughing. “These guys are shit hot.”

Washington is so enthusiastic about its new Frankenstein that they deliberately exported it to Afghanistan – under Obama. That was why they picked McChrystal in the first place, as Bauer reports:

President Obama has said he plans to increase reliance on the US Special Forces; Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ recent appointment of Stanley McChrystal as commander of Afghanistan suggests that he is keeping his word.

In fact, from Bauer and other reports, it seems that Obama’s White House likes the idea of arming “local allies” to serve as American proxy enforcers. As Bauer writes:

“The eventual drawdown in Iraq is not the end of the mission for our elite forces,” Gates said in May 2008. Gates hasn’t spoken on the issue since Obama took office; but Obama says he will institutionalize irregular warfare capabilities, and the White House stresses the need to “create a more robust capacity to train, equip and advise foreign security forces, so that local allies are better prepared to confront mutual threats.”

There’s one problem with these high-tech death squads: As the al-Zarqawi killing showed, airstrikes are blunt instruments. Civilians get killed. In Afghanistan, McChrystal and his JSOC applied this assassination program against “suspected” Taliban in Afghanistan but ran into too much “collateral damage.”

U.S. airstrikes which have caused hundreds of civilian deaths have become a major political issue in Afghanistan and the subject of official protests by Afghan President Hamid Karzai as well as by the lower house of the Afghan parliament. Many of the airstrikes and commando raids that have caused large-scale civilian deaths have involved Special Operations forces operating separately from the NATO command.

This was only one of the problems with McChrystal’s activities in Afghanistan that Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings wrote about in his well-known article:

In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people,” McChrystal recently conceded.

In official Washington, these “counter-insurgency” death squads might sound like just effective military combat. After all, wasn’t al-Zarqawi in Iraq an enemy who was responsible for hundreds of attacks on innocent Iraqis in mosques and marketplaces?

But the fact is, as the Rolling Stone article showed clearly, the counterinsurgency strategy, dubbed COIN, is failing. The death squads can “take out” visible enemies, like al-Qaeda in Iraq, but how does it build up the country that’s been destroyed? The whole strategy that Obama spent three months developing last year and that McChrystal pushed in Iraq and Afghanistan is a colossal, almost mind-boggling illusion.

Apart from the locker-room talk of McChrystal and his fellow soldiers, the real scandal of the Rolling Stone article is that it shows the madness of the whole venture. Some selections from Hastings’ report show this clearly:

COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government — a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve.

Plenty of U.S. military experts know this:

“The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas MacGregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

And the U.S. generals recognize they are getting away with it only because people don’t know the truth:

“If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular,” a senior adviser to McChrystal says.

But they are planning on pushing Obama to go along with their plans for more of the same:

Such realism, however, doesn’t prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. “There’s a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here,” a senior military official in Kabul tells me.

That’s why no one should be surprised last Tuesday to hear Petraeus obviously preparing Obama to accept a perpetual occupation of Afghanistan. He admitted to the congressional panel on Tuesday that no one in the U.S. military believes in the July 2011 deadline for withdrawal.

Still, even Petraeus, with his finely tuned political instincts, could not completely quash signs of tension. In one revealing moment, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got Petraeus to confirm that neither he nor anyone else in uniform had recommended the July 2011 deadline set by Obama for starting to bring troops home.

“General, at any time … was there a recommendation from you or anyone in the military that we set a date of July 2011?” McCain asked.

“There was not,” Petraeus said.

Petraeus emphasized his support for the deadline as a way to focus the attention of the Afghan government. And he said the pace of the drawdown will be determined by conditions in Afghanistan next year.

The Guardian quoted a metaphor that Petraeus used that shows, for all practical purposes, the impossibility of the central pillar of an Afghan withdrawal – building up the Afghan forces to take over.

But he also acknowledged that it was a “hugely challenging” task to build up Afghan forces to take over: “Helping to train and equip host nation forces in the midst of an insurgency is akin to building an advanced aircraft while it is in flight, while it is being designed, and while it is being shot at.”

If Obama does not overrule his military advisers, including Petraeus, over the next year, the withdrawal-Obama of 2007 will have completed his transformation into “military-footprint” Administration. He will have been seduced into the trap of military overreach that draws every aging empire into collapse.

One sign of this is that Obama’s White House seems to have acquired a taste for the exercise of power. In firing McChrystal and appointing Petraeus, Obama was praised for asserting presidential “authority” and showing he was back “in control.” Power gets “a lot done.”

“I think we used this week or so not only for a reassertion of executive authority, but as an demonstration that, when presidential power is judiciously applied, you can get a lot done,” said Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, who argued for a more confrontational approach to BP and for General McChrystal’s ouster.

Such words echo the “presidential supremacists” like UC Berkeley torture lawyer John Yoo who advised George W. Bush.

Right now, the information on these U.S. death squads is largely told from the point of view of the occupiers. As long as the U.S. military is telling its own story, the true ugliness of night-time murders outside the control of civilian, military and judicial institutions is downplayed. Someone like Woodward who seems to have forgotten the lessons of history can fawn over “American innovation” that produced these tactics.

At some point, however, the truth will surface. To those who remember Vietnam, these kill squads sound like the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program that murdered 27,000 Vietnamese civilians who were believed collaborators with North Vietnam’s National Liberation Front in the south.

Wikipedia quotes Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, who served as the intelligence-liaison officer for the Phoenix Program for two months in 1968:

The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It’s not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, ‘Where’s Nguyen so-and-so?’ Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything.

Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, ‘When we go by Nguyen’s house scratch your head.’ Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, ‘April Fool, motherfucker.’ Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they’d come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.

This is the kind of thing that is likely happening right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 20 years, when the full moral dimension of the truth comes out about U.S. behavior, there will be a long and painful reckoning. Our children are likely to struggle to find moral legitimacy in the history of their country, in a way that the post-World War II generation never did. Instead of taking pride in the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the democratization of Japan, and the post-war Marshall plan, they will be forced to confront Abu Ghraib, torture, secret assassinations and death squads outside military control.

They will wonder: How could this have happened? And what does this tell us about the kind of world we live in?

What will we say?

I’m not sure there will be any easy answer.

From a spiritual perspective, I think one lesson is that the spiritual disease of domination transcends individuals. A key moment in recovering from any addiction comes when addicts recognize that they can’t “manage” their compulsion to engage in self-destructive behavior. They are forced to discover that no matter how much their mind tells them not to drink or get stoned, they lose all willpower and control as soon as they take the first sip or hit. A craving takes over their mind and body that draws them against their will into another binge and eventually jail, hospital or death.

Perhaps something of the same thing is happening in Washington. Barack Obama was elected under the illusion that his good heart was stronger than the spiritual disease of militarism. And we’re discovering that the disease is stronger than any one person. The illusion that an occupation can be managed successfully has tempted him and the exercise of power is seducing him, awakening a craving for control that can’t be quieted by willpower alone.

If militarism is an addiction, then we need a definition of a sober foreign policy. How would this work? Does it mean prohibiting all bombs, armies and missiles? And yet how would this work in the “real world” of greed, aggression and domination?

This revives so many difficult questions that maybe those of us on the anti-imperial left should have more compassion for those caught up in power. Perhaps we were wrong to blame George W. Bush personally for what was actually nothing more than his powerlessness in the grip of a new addiction.

Perhaps we are making a similar mistake with Obama. We expected him to change Washington’s direction by force of intellect and will. In this way, we unwittingly bought into the illusion that a single person directs history. After all, Obama was hailed as some kind of savior when he was elected by the same American public that elected Bush a second time, when the occupation of Iraq was clearly a disaster.

Perhaps the spiritual lesson is that the robes of emperor change the person who dares put them on. They may look resplendent in the morning, but by evening they turn into dark tentacles that blind, wound and twist the soul.

Once, in his last years in the 1980s, I heard the great investigative reporter I.F. Stone address an audience about the policies of Reagan. Someone in the audience angrily denounced the right-ward move toward ultra-capitalism and militarism, and wanted to know how this could happen in a supposedly democratic country. Stone smiled as he listened to the diatribe, a critique which he entirely agreed with.

He was quiet for a moment and then said something I’ve never forgotten:

“Once people are elected and take office, they lose a lot of their freedom of action. They become prisoners of their power.”