After the United States does a Mussolini on Saddam Hussein and leaves him hanging upside down outside a Baghdad Gas 'n' Go station and Dick Cheney's Halliburton moves in, it has even bigger plans.

It will set up a military administration like the one that ruled Germany and Japan after the Second World War, a postwar regime backed by 75,000 soldiers and run at an annual cost of $16-billion (U.S.), presumably paid for by stolen Iraqi oil. General Douglas McArthur will by played by Gen. Tommy Franks. He will be titled SCAP (Supreme Commander Allied Powers). Then Ahmad Chalabi will run the U.S.-sponsored puppet government, like the Shah of Iran did, but no one will care when it's overthrown in 2012 because Iraq will be nothing but an oil-free pile of sand.

(Oh, and there will be a remake of Casablanca with Madonna, George Clooney and Jude Law forming the love triangle. The gin joint will be called not Rick's, but Dick's.)

Bushites and their pathetic Canadian lickspittles can call this American scenario anything they want, but I smell a colony in the making and a previous millennium in the revisiting.

A flood of images comes to mind. Pith helmets. The baskets of severed black hands collected by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo. The French guillotine in Algeria. Amritsar. The Black Hole of Calcutta. E.M. Forster novels. Portraits of the Queen in a Northern Ontario post office in the 1960s, her gelid skin and blue satin gown melding into an approximation of flesh. Meryl Streep blithering on about her farm in Ahfrika at the foot of the Ngong Hills and her soul pilot, Robert Redford.

Colonies started in riches and ended in tears and stupid movies, plus a certain nausea when we contemplate Africa's suffering now. Didn't the Americans learn from the British experience? The Brits built their empire on colonies and then retreated from them, becoming a nation of peasants, Londoners and arms dealers. The Americans have an empire now and are going to accompany its decline with colony-building.

I should say "hasten" its decline because the resentful natives these days have more weapons to hand. They have fighters, guns, land mines and missiles, all purchased from the last empire. And if Osama bin Laden was distressed by American airfields in Saudi Arabia, he won't like American prefabricated picket fences in suburban Basra.

What does America bring to a colony? After a decade of sanctions and all those dead children, some food would be nice.

Norwegian journalist Erik H. Thoreson tosses off a list: HMOs, unaffordable drugs, household guns, fast food, obesity, factory farms, universal Wal-Mart, two weeks of annual holiday, SUVs compulsory, oil and coal vs nitrogen as fuel, and credit-card debt as a social asset.

I would add: white plastic patio furniture, novels with only nice characters, the copyrighting of everything, hostility toward clever, literate people, and the use of spy planes in neighbourhoods even after that Washington sniper is caught.

There are good things too, but even I can't see how an Iraqi will benefit from the American things I love: Macy Gray CDs, casual friendliness, David Chase teleplays, Woody Guthrie, blues music and a beautiful sexual sprawl.

Canada has already participated in its own transformation into an unofficial U.S. colony by adopting their slogan "We want stuff and we want it cheap."

But after the new American colony of Iraqlahoma emerges, and it will, Junior Bush will start casting around for more. He will notice Canada. He already has our oil reserves. Under NAFTA, our gas is proportionately their gas. As Eric Reguly of The Globe and Mail has reported, if Canada wants to export 50 per cent less gas to the Yanks, it must cut back its supplies to its own population by half. We're one big family!

But Canada has the next big thing that Americans need, even more than oil: water, for which there are no industrial substitutes.

Our SCAP won't need to be military, since we don't have a military. He will be GE's Jack Welch, author of Straight from the Gut,who will move to Toronto with his itty-bitty new wife, as Ottawa's too far from New York. Brian and Mila will clean his pool and walk his dogs. St. John's will be renamed St. Condoleeza, then Lauraville. French-speaking Quebec will be crushed under Donald Rumsfeld's personal boot. The cultural attaché will be Mary Higgins Clark. Agricultural Commander will be Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who will divert all rivers out of Saskatchewan or scoop the stuff up in Canadairs, but one way or another, California and the rest of the American dust bowl is going to be green again. As for Death Valley, let's put it this way: A river runs through it.

The Canadian Protectorate will be a boon for oldie-mouldie Americans. Walter Cronkite will come out of retirement to read The National. Andy Williams will sing The Star-Spangled Banner at hockey games. Elly May from The Beverly Hillbillies,her face a wizened white prune offset by those gingham shirts, will be Ontario's deputy SCAP. Alberta gets Strom Thurmond. B.C. gets Morgan Fairchild.

Welcome to Canadaho, the 52nd colony. Next stop Cubachusetts.

hmallick@globeandmail.com