Lessons From the Rubble

• Share

(2 of 6)

That view may be honestly held. In much of Iraq, life is slowly improving (though three British soldiers were killed in Basra on Saturday), and coalition forces continue to pick up leaders of Saddam's regime. Last week Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons in northern Iraq, was taken into custody. But honesty also requires a plain admission that the audacious attempt by the Bush Administration to pacify an arc of crisis that runs from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush has provoked many such desperate reactions by those opposed to its policy. Nearly two years after American and allied forces entered Afghanistan to shut down terrorist training camps and remove the Taliban regime, that nation remains unstable; in the past two weeks, about 100 people have died, including an American soldier, in skirmishes between regrouping elements of the Taliban, local militias and security forces. The same day as the explosion in Baghdad, a Palestinian suicide bomber in Jerusalem killed at least 20 people on a bus. Two days later, Israel responded by killing Ismail Abu Shanab, a leader of the Islamic radical group Hamas. Together the events cast doubt on whether the road map to a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine dispute, to which Bush is personally committed, would lead anywhere other than the same wrecking yard in which lie all other peace plans for the region.

But whatever the difficulties confronting the Administration elsewhere in the Islamic world, Iraq poses problems of a different order. In Afghanistan and in the the Israel-Palestine morass, Bush has pursued goals that are widely shared by other nations. Iraq--where the U.S. and its ally Britain waged a pre-emptive war against a regime that had not yet acted against their own vital interests--is another matter. By the Administration's own lights, Iraq is the centerpiece of its foreign policy because it is only there that the U.S. is directly attempting to midwife the birth of a peaceful, democratic state that can act as a model for the Islamic world. Yet it is precisely this effort to turn a wolf into a lamb that has never won widespread international support. Whether the Bush Administration achieves its most dearly held goals, and whether it convinces others that those goals are the right ones for the world, depends on success in Iraq.