Dreams turned to dust

THREE YEARS AFTER IT BEGAN, it is still impossible to know whether the United States has lost the war in Iraq, as many critics and journalists on the ground there have long believed (and as some conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. have come to think as well), or whether disaster there might yet be averted. But what is clear is that the Bush administration’s prewar ambition to transform Iraq into a modern model for a democratic Middle East has already failed.

Yes, there have been elections, but far from demonstrating the ordinary Iraqi’s thirst for democracy, each poll has confirmed what should have been clear from the start -- that Iraqis would vote along ethnic and religious lines for ethnic or religious parties. If anyone needed empirical verification of Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria’s theory of the rise of “illiberal democracies,” Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein has provided it in spades.

At best, when all is said and done, we may scrape by with a weak federal Iraq whose national institutions will be controlled by the Shiite religious parties, but in which Kurdistan will only nominally remain part of the country (this, in fact, has happened already). At the same time, a protracted home-grown insurgency verging on civil war will continue in the so-called Sunni Triangle and in Baghdad.

Kurdish autonomy and Sunni rage are already known quantities, and anyone wanting to see just how illiberal the Shiite areas of Iraq are likely to become in what, again, is the best-case scenario need only travel to the southern city of Basra. There, you quickly realize that for all the vaunted (and real) differences between Iraqi Shiism and Iranian Shiism, where women’s rights, civil law, religious toleration and the like are concerned, little separates their respective visions about how society should look.

But that’s the best case. All the other realistic scenarios are worse. The inter-communal conflict or low-level civil war -- call it what you will, it’s still a catastrophe for ordinary Iraqis caught in the middle of it -- could easily escalate into a full-scale fight, as even the Bush administration conceded after the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra a few weeks ago.

Even without such a conflict, it is by no means clear that Iraq can hold together. Even if you leave the Sunni insurgency out of the equation, the current de facto governing alliance between the Kurds and the Shiites is little more than an uneasy marriage of convenience. It may well not survive the looming conflict over which group gets to control the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk.

Where does this leave the United States? In retrospect, it is now clear that we mistook our success in overthrowing Hussein for victory in Iraq -- “mission accomplished,” as President Bush so unfortunately put it shortly after the fall of Baghdad. In reality, the brilliantly orchestrated march to Baghdad proved to be only the first and, paradoxically, the least costly battle (both in terms of American and Iraqi lives) in a war that has now lasted more than three years and has proved, at best, inconclusive.

Although it is true that U.S. forces have not been and probably cannot be defeated on the battlefield, American ground commanders will admit if you press them that we have neither broken the will of nor materially weakened the insurgency, though U.S. forces are generally thought to have killed many thousands of insurgents.

In any case, the insurgency is increasingly becoming a secondary concern in the overall scheme of things. The Baathist insurgents who slipped away as U.S. forces entered Baghdad -- abetted by Abu Musab Zarqawi’s foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, for whom the Iraqi Sunnis have no love but have known how to use -- have succeeded in stoking the once-smoldering inter-communal fires. You only have to look at the increasing self-segregation in Baghdad of Sunnis with Sunnis and Shiites with Shiites to see how well those who seek to provoke a civil war in Iraq have done their work.

American officials still speak of creating a national army and police force that they say will represent all Iraqis, but the facts on the ground tell a different story. The Interior Ministry forces are basically the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia, in national uniform; the Shiite political coalition needs the support of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, so it lets his private militia move freely from Basra to Baghdad; and, of course, the Kurdish peshmerga militia constitutes a separate army that reports to Kurdish leaders, not to the national government in Baghdad.

This is the situation that Bush administration officials routinely describe as hard but nevertheless headed in the right direction. In fairness to them, had we found the weapons of mass destruction they were so sure were there, perhaps even the Hobbesian nightmare that Iraq has become would not seem quite so dispositive today.

But there were no WMD and, in effect, we are stuck in a situation in which the only real rationale the administration can give for “staying the course” is that if we pull out of this calamity we helped engineer, things will get even worse, and the only real rationale the uniformed military can provide is that we must go on fighting so that the sacrifices of the troops we have already lost will not have been in vain.

However, from the polls it would appear that the American public’s patience is pretty much at an end. The Bush administration may now see virtues in nation building that candidate Bush mocked in the 2000 presidential campaign, but the public apparently does not. Nor is there much of a constituency for undertaking in Iraq, let alone elsewhere, the kind of imperial version of America’s global mission that the neoconservative wing of the Bush administration and its intellectual supporters have campaigned so hard for.

As the third anniversary of the fall of Baghdad approaches, as American dead cross the threshold of 2,300 and the wounded of 16,000 (not to speak of the thousands of Iraqi civilians who have been killed by our forces, let alone of the far greater number killed by the jihadis and Baathists), it seems fair to ask whether we have learned anything. All I can say is, “I hope so.”

I do think we’ve learned that former Secretary of State Colin Powell was right when he invoked the “Pottery Barn” principle of “you break it, you own it,” in cautioning Bush in the summer of 2002 about the dangers of an American invasion. And there is a corollary that is probably even worse than what Powell was talking about. We did break it, but after three years of inconclusive, low-intensity warfare against an elusive, ruthless and resourceful foe, an overwhelming majority of the American people have no wish to own it.

In political terms, this probably means that, whatever happens on the ground in Iraq, there will have to be a significant drawdown of U.S. forces before the November elections. The broader truth is that despite the utopian visions of exporting democracy outlined by Bush in his second inaugural, no American president for a very long time is likely to engage in a war of choice of the kind we started in Iraq. Those dreams well and truly have come to dust in the deserts of Al Anbar province, at Abu Ghraib and in the streets of Baghdad.