More importantly, Krugman in the Times does his usual superb job of distilling A No-Win Situation (though his recommendation for handing the place over to Sistani is a bit strange):
For a long time, anyone suggesting analogies with Vietnam was ridiculed. But Iraq optimists have, by my count, already declared victory three times. First there was "Mission Accomplished" - followed by an escalating insurgency. Then there was the capture of Saddam - followed by April's bloody uprising. Finally there was the furtive transfer of formal sovereignty to Ayad Allawi, with implausible claims that this showed progress - a fantasy exploded by the guns of August.
Now, serious security analysts have begun to admit that the goal of a democratic, pro-American Iraq has receded out of reach. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies - no peacenik - writes that "there is little prospect for peace and stability in Iraq before late 2005, if then."
Cordesman is far from a flaming liberal, and his piece is worth reading in full.
Also worth reading is Larry Diamond's What Went Wrong in Iraq from this month's issue of Foreign Affairs.
Actually, the best piece I have read on how the Bush administration conducted the Iraq war is already a bit old, but still extraordinary reporting: James Fallows' Blind into Baghdad from the January/February 2004 Atlantic Monthly. WPU students can get the full article through our library homepage. Fallows documents the amazing amount of work that went into planning for the aftermath of a military victory over Saddam. Fallows shows the various reports and study groups etc that have been meeting for the past ten years at least. And he shows how the Bush administration -- for many different reasons -- ignored each one. That is, what Bush now calls "catastrophic success" was all foreseen. You have to read the article to get the full sense of how much and why they ignored the planning, but I will try to summarize a few of the reasons: arrogance, interdepartmental turf battles, Clinton hating (Rumsfeld even firing someone for actually having previous successful experience in nation building -- alas, in Kosovo, for the Clinton administration).... Perhaps the most important reason they refused to plan (again, Rumsfeld explicitly instructing his employees NOT to attend postwar planning meetings) was that if they opened up any of this to discussion, then they might have to discuss the costs of the war and the possibility that things might not go as planned. But since they had no plans, things could never not go as planned! got that?
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