WOLF!, PART XII (via Kevin Whited):

Democracy Now: The Bush administration seems not to recognize how widespread, and how bipartisan, is the view that Iraq is already lost or on the verge of being lost. (Robert Kagan and William Kristol, 05/17/2004, Weekly Standard)

[I]raq could be lost if the Bush administration holds to the view that it can press ahead with its political and military strategy without any dramatic change of course, without taking bold and visible action to reverse the current downward trajectory. The existing Bush administration plan in Iraq is to wait for U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to name an interim Iraqi caretaker government by the end of May that will take power on July 1, and prepare for elections in January 2005. This plan might have been adequate a couple of months ago. But it is inadequate to meet the new challenge.

Among the biggest mistakes made by the Bush administration over the past year has been the failure to move Iraq more rapidly toward elections. It's true that many, inside and outside the administration, have long been clamoring to hand over more responsibility to Iraqis, responsibility above all for doing more of the fighting and dying. But the one thing even many of these friends of Iraq have been unwilling to hand over to Iraqis is the right to choose their own government. This is a mistake.

We do not believe in the present circumstances that the current administration plan moves quickly enough toward providing Iraqis real sovereignty.

You can set your watch by these two, who seemingly declare defeat for the Administration anytime the folks they see on the cocktail circuit make them squirm. The beauty of this essay is that it directly contradicts their own of last November, when any sign of moving the transfer of power forward meant we'd been defeated. The other amusing thing to note is their belief that discrete actions by the United States government are determinative of the future of Iraq. Such faith in the State is what keeps most neos from actually being cons.

Having said all that, their conversion to the side of democratizing more rapidly is certainly welcome. If only they'd been advocating it in May of 2003--instead of dreaming of Iraq as a semi-permanent U.S. military base of operations--we'd not be where we are today.

MORE:
Crisis of Confidence: The cause is still just, but to keep it moving forward, we
have to reboot. (DAVID BROOKS, 5/08/04, NY Times)

It's pretty clear we're passing through another pivot point in American foreign policy. A year ago, we were the dominant nation in a unipolar world. Today, we're a shellshocked hegemon.

We still face a world of threats, but we're much less confident about our own power. We still know we can roll over hostile armies, but we cannot roll over problems. We get dragged down into them. We can topple tyrants, but we don't seem to be very good at administering nations. Our intelligence agencies have made horrible mistakes. Our diplomacy vis-à-vis Western Europe has been inept. We have a military filled with heroes, but the atrocities of a few have eclipsed the nobility of the many.

In short, we are on the verge of a crisis of confidence.

Just because neocons start wetting their pants doesn't mean the nation has night terrors.
-'Lowering Our Sights' (Robert Kagan, May 2, 2004, Washington Post)

Calls for a withdrawal from Iraq are starting to pop up all over the place now and will proliferate in the coming days and weeks. I find even the administration's strongest supporters, including fervent advocates of the war a year ago and even some who could be labeled "neoconservatives," now despairing and looking for an exit.

They don't put quite that way, of course. Instead, they say that seeking democracy in Iraq is too ambitious; we need to lower our sights and settle for stability. But this is probably just a way station on the road to calling for withdrawal, for it ought to be clear that even establishing stability in Iraq will require a continued American military occupation and continued casualties for quite some time to come.

Faced with that reality, conservatives and even neoconservatives can be heard muttering these days that if the Iraqis won't take responsibility for their own country, we should leave them to their fate. That is what "lowering our sights" really means.

-What the British learned in 1920 by not leaving Iraq (Scott Peterson, 3/11/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

It's one of the loneliest places in Baghdad - the British military cemetery, where hundreds of forlorn gravestones attest to the price of imperialism in Iraq.

In 1920, a Shiite revolt erupted against British occupiers, who had arrived in Mesopotamia at the start of World War I. Britain pushed out Ottoman forces, but didn't move fast enough to create a promised new nation state. The uprising surprised the British, left more than 2,200 occupation troops and an estimated 8,450 Iraqis dead or wounded - and cost, by one account, three times as much as British financing of the entire Arab revolt against the Ottomans.

Today the US faces the same dilemma that dogged the British: How to grant self-rule to Iraqis as promised, while keeping overall control. Despite rhetoric from Washington that it will transform Iraq into a democratic beacon in the Mideast, few Iraqis believe the US is sincere.

"The Americans believe in democracy, but they do not believe in its results," says Gailan Ramiz, an Iraqi political scientist with degrees from Princeton, Harvard, and Oxford. "The ballot box should rule - period. It is so in America, and it should be so in Iraq. It can't be avoided by any more tactics." Changing such attitudes will require the US to learn lessons from the British colonial experience - lessons applied only fitfully so far.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2004 8:11 AM