IRAQ: ONE BIG F'ED UP MESS

From the Houston Chronicle, Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, considers American options in the new Vietnam:

So get ready for the coming national debate over withdrawal. The unthinkable is becoming thinkable. And it isn't hard to understand why.

All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now. Consider Fallujah: One week they're setting deadlines and threatening offensives; the next week they're pulling back. Then they briefly name one of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard generals to lead the pacification of the city — the kind of bizarre idea that only desperate people can conjure. The Bush administration is evidently in a panic, and this panic is being conveyed to the American people.

Events in Fallujah have also conveyed another impression: The administration is increasingly reluctant to fight the people it defines as the bad guys in Iraq. This reluctance is perfectly understandable. No one wants more American casualties. And no one doubts that more violence in Iraq may alienate more of the Iraqi population. But this reluctance can also appear both to Iraqis and to the American public as a sign of declining will. Among the many lessons of Vietnam is that American support for that war remained remarkably steady, despite high American casualties, until Americans began to sense that their government was no longer committed to what had been defined as victory and was looking for a way out. If Americans see signs of wavering by the Bush administration — and Fallujah may be one of those signs — support for the war could decline sharply.

It is the sense that Bush officials don't know what they are doing that has fed all the new talk about "lowering our sights." No one will say, "Let's cut and run." Instead, people talk about installing a moderate but not democratic government. They talk about letting Iraq break up into three parts: Kurd, Shiite and Sunni. But at the core, this is happy talk, designed to help us avert our eyes from withdrawal's real consequences. The choice in Iraq is not between democracy and stability. It is between democratic stability, on the one hand, and civil conflict, chaos or brutal, totalitarian dictatorship and terrorism, on the other.

To top it all off, this whole thing is America's fault. No one to blame but the good old US of A.

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