The Road to Baghdad: Paved with Good Intentions!

David Brooks is on hand to glorify America's past when America's present isn't looking so golden:

American history sometimes seems to be the same story repeated over and over again. Some group of big-dreaming but foolhardy adventurers head out to eradicate some evil and to realize some golden future. They get halfway along their journey and find they are unprepared for the harsh reality they suddenly face. It's too late to turn back, so they reinvent their mission. They toss out illusions and adopt an almost desperate pragmatism. They never do realize the utopia they initially dreamed about, but they do build something better than what came before.

This basic pattern has marked our national style from the moment British colonists landed on North American shores. Overly optimistic about the conditions they would find, the colonists were woefully undercapitalized, underequipped and underskilled. At Jamestown, there were three gentlemen and gentlemen's servants for every skilled laborer. They didn't bother to plant enough grain to see them through the winter.

[...]

And it is that way today. . . . Hope begets disappointment, and we are now in a moment of disappointment when it comes to Iraq. During these shakeout moments, the naysayers get to gloat while the rest of us despair, lacerate ourselves, second-guess those in charge and look at things anew. But this very process of self-criticism is the precondition for the second wind, the grubbier, less illusioned effort that often enough leads to some acceptable outcome.

To extend his metaphor, the next move Americans make in Iraq either involves 1) enslaving Iraqis or 2) exterminating them. And frankly if Brooks insists on big ideas gone bad, there are better recent examples, but we'll put aside the Vietnam analogies, because—despite himself—Brooks is right. Iraq is urgently in need of some pragmatic direction from the administration. It doesn't look forthcoming. June 30 is, what, a month from now, more or less? Not only is there no identifiable government on deck or in the rough to whom we will likely transfer authority, there's no identifiable intersection of Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish interests that has a real stake in taking over the reigns. How do we hand a unified Iraq to three parties that don't have an interest in it being unified?

UPDATE: Chalabi is finally out. I guess they realized that tack wasn't going to work.

Posted by Kriston at May 18, 2004 12:26 PM