"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."Though the phrasing looks Rumsfeldian, the speaker was the general commanding British forces as they entered Baghdad in 1917. Perhaps Iraq's early 21st-century liberation will be more enduring; perhaps the partial restoration of Iraqi sovereignty this week will be a success. All of us must hope so, not least we who stood aghast last year when the Bush administration launched a war whose justification, flimsy at the time, has since proved false.
The wish for success arises not from admiration of the Bush war, but the opposite. So great is the damage already done -- to the international system the United States once led in creating, to prospects for Middle East peace, to the war on terrorism, to American standing in the Arab and Islamic world -- that one can only hope matters get no worse.
A glimmer, not yet a light, flickers at the end of this long tunnel: Iraq's interim government is unbowed by violence grown worse in the run-up to Wednesday's transfer of power. Occupation authorities are working desperately to improve living standards and to create Iraqi police forces. The majority Shiites' revered leader, Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani, has approved of the new government; the rebellion led by a dissident cleric has subsided.Moreover, the Pentagon accepted reality by increasing troop levels in Iraq. And the Bush gang, after scorning and spurning the United Nations, sought its help to cure the chaos. The U.N. Security Council's unanimous approval this month of the handover plan is an encouraging sign.
So let us hope these are signs of better times to come, for Iraq and for the United States. To speak of hope, however, is to acknowledge doubt -- a state of mind foreign to the president. Speaking of the Iraq war to Bob Woodward for Woodward's latest book, Bush said, "There is no doubt in my mind we should have done this. Not only for our own sake but for the Iraqi citizens."
But wise critics have doubts. A bipartisan group of former U.S. ambassadors and generals wrote, in a statement reprinted last week on these pages, that "the administration, motivated more by ideology than by reasoned analysis, struck out on its own. ... Never [before] has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted." An earlier letter, to Prime Minister Tony Blair from former British diplomats -- recent ambassadors to Arab countries and Israel among them -- said in part: "However much Iraqis may yearn for a democratic society, the belief that one could now be created by the coalition is naive. This is the view of virtually all independent specialists on the region, both in Britain and in America."
To meet such criticism -- doubt is too mild a word -- the Bush administration will have to adopt clearly the cooperative internationalism it has so far accepted only grudgingly. The United States turned to the United Nations this spring not out of newfound love of multilateralism, but because on its own it was unable to reconcile Iraq's competing factions, which seemed united only in their opposition to the U.S. presence.
The transfer of civil responsibility this week to Iraq's interim government will help. So will deeper U.N. involvement. Baghdad will not be the Camelot on the Tigris that Bush advisers expected last year, but with the right kind of help it should become better than now.
Knotty questions remain, not least over security. Under the June 8 U.N. resolution and letter agreements between Iraqi and U.S. officials, the United States retains military control. For now that's inevitable. But with some 130,000 American troops in the country and a U.S. embassy larger than in any other capital, Iraqis are unlikely to consider themselves unoccupied.
Willful ignorance of such sentiments by the Bush administration's neocon warriors contributed mightily to its policy failures. Willful means rejecting the findings of the 75 State Department experts who before the war worked on the Future of Iraq Project. It means substituting ideology for experience.
It means failing to recognize the imprint left on Iraq by Ottoman and then British occupation.
In an introduction to his book "The Dust of Empire," Karl Meyer argues that a 2,500-year-old warning about fervor in Greek city-states applies today.
"Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage," Thucydides wrote. "Prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness."
