Juan Cole quotes GW Bush as saying:

In Israel, terrirosts have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq.

Israel envy is one of the most bizarre characteristics of the Bush regime. The idea that Israel is any sort of success is itself hard to imagine -- its main claim is to be the last colonial outpost of Europe to maintain a rigid apartheid system, leaving it with an endless struggle to suppress the natives, the enmity of nearly all of its neighbors, and disapproval by most of the world. To call that success takes a high pain threshold and inordinate fondness for the exercise of force -- traits that Israelis seem to have, and that Americans like Bush envy.

Even so, it's damn near inconceivable how to map Israel's "success" to Iraq. For starters, who in Iraq is there to constitute the Zionist master class? The Shiites aren't rich enough; the Sunnis have a bad attitude; the Kurds just want to be left alone. That leaves the US occupiers, and there just aren't that many of them, no matter how heavily armed. To some extent the US has managed to find Iraqis to do its bidding, but that has rarely been more than grudgingly, with various trade-offs as various factions seek to profit by angling off the US occupation. The story about how Iraqis never get to where they can "stand up" is really evidence that they have interests that are different from what the Americans expect. Indeed, it's unlikely that you can find any Iraqi politician whose interests are fully aligned with the US, let alone a whole class of them capable of controlling the country like Israeli security services do in occupied Palestine -- not that that's exactly a gold standard.

This isn't the first time Bush has looked for inspiration in past disasters. A couple of weeks ago he was touting America's 62+ year occupation of South Korea as as a model. Sure, a third of the country is stuck in a time warp under the world's most brutal dictatorship, one that can't feed its own people but can threaten the region with nuclear bombs, but even that looks pretty stable compared to Iraq. A while back, Bush even wandered into the dreaded Vietnam analogy, thinking that some events in Iraq had resembled the Tet Offensive, and thinking that was some sort of US victory. (After all, the only reason the US lost Vietnam was the yellow-bellied peace movement! Ah, the perils of drinking your own propaganda.)

I've been arguing for a while now that Israel today is a glimpse of the sort of country the US is turning into: racist, militarist, paranoid, and vicious. Following the same path will be difficult here, mostly because the US is relatively open and inclusive, both in fact and in principle. Israel, on the other hand, styles itself as The Jewish State, so there's never any doubt there about whether one is part of the ruling us or the enemy them. Still, the US has come remarkably close to a functional definition of us-versus-them thanks to the Republican Party's voter profiling -- a distinction the rightwing radio demagogues have no trouble drawing. One thing the self-appointed us has in common is blind support for Israel. As Bush shows, it's only a tiny step from there to envy.