CAN WE GET IT RIGHT?

Some thoughts on Iraq from Fareed Zakaria, which closely echo my own.

I did not believe Saddam had a lethal arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and I wrote as much in the months before the war (though, like everyone who is being honest, I am utterly astonished by what appears to be the lack of any weapons). But Saddam was an erratic, unpredictable leader who had been actively working against the United States and its interests--and peace in the region--for two decades. That meant he was a looming threat. Given the collapsing sanctions regime, at some point the United States would have to decide to move in one direction or the other. It could either welcome Saddam back into the community of nations and let him do what he would as a free agent. Or it could gather an international coalition to replace him. I wish that this latter policy had been pursued slowly and deliberately, with a genuine effort to forge a broad coalition and get the United Nations behind it. But, in the end, you have to decide whether to support the policy the president is pursuing--not the variation of it you wish he were pursuing. And I decided that, while timing and circumstances were not perfect, getting rid of one of the most ghastly regimes in the world, one that was a continued threat to U.S. interests, was worth supporting. Morality and realpolitik came together in the case against Saddam.

The biggest mistake I made on Iraq was to believe that the Bush administration would want to get Iraq right more than it wanted to prove its own prejudices right. I knew the administration went into Iraq with some crackpot ideas, but I also believed that, above all else, it would want success on the ground. I reasoned that it would drop its pet theories once it was clear they were not working. I still don't understand why the Bush team proved so self-defeatingly stubborn. Perhaps its initial success in Afghanistan emboldened it to move forward unconstrained. Perhaps its prejudices about Iraq had developed over decades and were deeply held. Perhaps the administration was far more divided and dysfunctional than I had recognized, making rational policy impossible.

Following on Zakaria's comments about the roots of Muslim feeling toward the U.S., here's an interesting piece by Larry Johnson from Sunday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

My impression is that people in the Arab and Islamic world still have considerable admiration, at least for our ideals, and for what they see as our life of individual and economic freedom -- and that the minority that really hate us, enough to do us in at any given opportunity, are a very small minority.

It seems that the democracy and freedom we enjoy in the United States are the main reasons that people still love us. Love us, not our government. Over and over we were told that the foreign policy of our government (and the Bush administration was singled out repeatedly) has made it the most hated in the world.

Of course, Johnson's attempt to understand the nature of Muslim antipathy toward the United States is being condemned as "appeasement" by the usual suspects.