Even after deploying 25,000 more troops as part of President Bush’s “surge,” the news out of Iraq doesn’t get any better. Staff Sergeant David Safstrom, on his third tour of duty in the area, recently searched the body of a man killed by his unit in the process of setting a roadside bomb. He discovered that the man was a sergeant in the Iraqi Army. Similarly, Captain Douglas Rogers noted that the Iraqis he and his men had trained were firing at them in a recent battle. And Sergeant Kevin O’Flarity told a reporter, “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents.”

When Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frank met with Iraqi police officials in late May, police Captain Adel Fakry complained that some American soldiers had expressed “distrust” of his personnel. Colonel Frank explained: “The reason there is distrust is because I have a video of six Iraqi officers placing a bomb against my soldiers, and they came from your station.” Add to this the grim statistic showing that April and May 2007 produced the highest two-month total of U.S. fatalities during the entire four-year struggle.

President Bush told the nation his purpose in increasing troop levels was to stabilize the situation so that the Iraqi government would have time to persuade the competing Islamic sects to cease shooting at each other. But, so far, no progress has been made toward ending the escalating civil war that sees our forces being targeted by both sides. And even Mr. Bush has predicted that this summer will be rough with many American casualties.

Yet, despite the continual claims that the troops will be withdrawn as soon as their mission has been completed, a gargantuan embassy complex the United States is now building in Baghdad makes it painfully obvious that our government intends to keep an American presence deeply mired in Iraq for a long time, and that there must be more to our intervention in Iraq than our government has shared with the American people.

The new U.S. embassy, scheduled to open in September, has been aptly described by the Associated Press’s Anne Gearan as a “city-within-a-city.” Gearan noted that it will be “the world’s largest and most expensive foreign mission,” occupying 104 acres, containing 21 buildings, providing desk space for a thousand bureaucrats, hiding behind high, blast-proof walls intended to protect the occupants from the chaos outside — all for an estimated cost of $592 million.

State Department official David Satterfield can hardly be accused of misrepresenting the administration’s true intent when he acknowledged: “We assume there will be a significant, enduring U.S. presence in Iraq.” But there is more to it than that. As Gearan pointed out in her AP column, the embassy will also serve “as a headquarters for the democratic expansion in the Middle East that President Bush identified as the organizing principle for foreign policy” during the remaining months of his presidency. That is, the new embassy will serve as a hub not only for our activities in Iraq but for our involvement with other Middle East nations targeted for “democratic expansion.”

The administration does not view this expansion in solely military terms. The “democratic expansion” envisioned also includes grouping supposedly liberated Middle Eastern nations in a Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA). This proposed pact will parallel other already-established “free trade” blocs, including the European Union. Each has much more to do with compromising a nation’s sovereignty than with facilitating trade.

In our own hemisphere, Mr. Bush’s plan to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas met with enough resistance to have it put on a back burner. So he expended maximum pressure on Congress to gain congressional passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Now, he and his team led by Vice President Cheney are working to expand NAFTA into an independence-cancelling North American Union that will integrate Canada, the United States, and Mexico more completely than was accomplished by 1994’s NAFTA.

The ultimate goal, expressed by many including former Mexican leader Vicente Fox and the Wall Street Journal, is to gather all 34 nations in the Western hemisphere into a duplicate of the European Union. On the other side of the Atlantic, Europeans in the EU’s 27 member states have begun to realize that their parliaments are little more than rubber stamps for the Eurocrats in Brussels. National sovereignty in all 27 has been ceded to the EU superstate.

The MEFTA initiative — proposed in May 2003 by Mr. Bush — is designed to accomplish the same goal in the Middle East, where our new embassy in Baghdad will presumably become a hub for a new regional government intended for that part of the world. To enact yet another regional government, MEFTA, on the path to bringing about global governance, American forces are being killed and wounded in a war that our nation should never have started.

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