You know how it is. You're compiling your Christmas card list when the name of an old friend springs to mind. You're unsure whether or not said old pal should receive a card. You were thick as thieves once, but that was long ago. Would sending a card now make up for all that time or would it just serve to highlight the distance that has grown between you? It's a tough one, no doubt.
As for us mere mortals, so for The Most Powerful Man On Earth, Gerorge W Bush. The US President has spent the past year ignoring his old chum, Reality. The American leader is not interested in bad news. He spends his time surrounded by yes men, travels abroad in his "bubble", gives speeches to carefully screened non-hecklers, considers his advisers to be the best source of impartial advice. Add to this his strikingly incurious mind and you have a person who determinedly refuses membership of the "reality-based community."
So all year, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated steadily from terrible to hellish, the US leader hasn't answered any of Reality's calls. Throughout this desperate year, Bush has remained defiantly, magnificently, absurdly optimistic about events in Iraq. He proclaims that freedom is on the march as the air strikes, the beheadings and the car bombs multiply with no end in sight. He assures us that democracy is on its way to the Middle East even as country after country leave his "coalition", as foreign companies pull out, as city after city falls under the sway of the insurgency. Give him his due, Dubya takes his optimism seriously. He makes the cheerful crucifixion victim in The Life Of Brian look positively suicidal.
But having scrupulously avoided Reality these past twelve months, Bush, in the spirit of the season, made partial amends at a press conference on Monday by acknowledging that not all in Iraq is sunshine and roses. Generally, Bush admitted that the insurgency, well into its second year, is having an impact. More specifically, he conceded that some of the Iraqi police force have shown a similar willingness to stand and fight as the French in 1940.
These were hardly stunning revelations. As Christmas cards go it was more a terse: "all the best to you and yours" than one of those cards that doubles as a long treatsie on the year that has just passed.
Having conceded the blindingly obvious, that the insurgents are having an effect, Dubya should now ask himself, why? This appears most unlikely though. Bush and his fellow hawks, it seems to me, can't come to terms with the opposition which their disastrous misadventure in the Middle East has generated. At first they tried to brush off the bombings and shootings as the acts of a few "former regime loyalists" and "foreign fighters". So, when Saddam was captured, some in the war camp predicted that the insurgency would fizzle out. Precisely the opposite has happened. Hawks still harbour hopes that leaning on Syria or Iran will bring the situation in Iraq under control. Again they will be disappointed.
Of course, it's true that some of the men running around Iraq with RPGs hanker after the "good old days" under Saddam. Likewise, it's correct to say that some of the gunmen do not have Iraqi accents. But this is very far from the whole story. Many of the insurgents are Iraqi nationalists, pure and simple, people who hated being ruled by Saddam and now hate being ruled by the Americans. They are resisting occupation, as occupied people frequently do.
But this idea, which is not difficult to grasp, is proving beyond the ken of the war camp. Those who supported the invasion can't make the ideological leap of acknowledging that a significant part of the Iraqi populace which they "freed" now participates or supports attacks against the agents of their "liberation". Until hawks accept this reality, all the tanks and bombers in the world won't make a blind bit of difference.
The current conflict is a result of the occupation of the country by foreign armies. As long as the occupation continues, so will the insurgency. Military "solutions" to the insurgency are like smacking a hornets nest with a stick. The bigger the stick, the worse it is for the guy swinging it.
Take Fallujah. The US used its overwhelming power to subdue the insurgent stronghold and in the process flattened the city. This was hailed as a victory, but what was won? Sure, the insurgency has been disrupted, but the attacks continue, in Fallujah and elsewhere, because the situation which gave rise to the insurgency in the first place - the occupation - goes on.
In the meantime the residents of Fallujah, a quarter of a million people, return home to find their city levelled. Some of the city's young men, witnessing this destruction, will assuredly take up arms against the US as a result. And so it will go on, attack and counter-attack feeding off each other.
But Bush and his coterie show no sign that they are aware of any of this. Until the hawks acknowledge that their war was wrong, spectacularly, disastrously wrong, then the violence in Iraq will continue. Until the White House admits its error and pulls out the troops, there will be no peace. The war will only intensify, becoming so bad that even Bush, with this head deep in the sand, will be forced to acknowledge more regularly, that all is not well on the banks of the Euphrates.