Zakaria: A Vision, and Little Else (*'s Iraq and Afghanistan)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5915512/site/newsweek/

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The problem with the president's speech was not the lofty goals he outlined, but the fact that his policies are not actually moving us any closer to achieving them. It's true that a democratic Afghanistan and Iraq would be powerful, progressive forces in the Muslim world. But our postwar policies in both places have done little to make that likely. We do not help democracy take root in Afghanistan by ceding large parts of the country to warlords and drug dealers. We have not helped democracy in Iraq by destroying the old order with no idea of what to do next.

On Iraq, the president seemed strangely disconnected. It was as if it were May 2003 and the statue of Saddam Hussein had just fallen. There was no recognition that events in Iraq are not going well, that for a year our troops have found themselves facing a widening insurgency and, more importantly, deepening hostility from the general public. Islamic fundamentalists with armed militias—our deepest enemies in the war on terror—now run several cities in Iraq. Moqtada al-Sadr has just emerged from a clash against the United States with his militia unharmed and his reputation enhanced. Support for the United States, which was around 70 percent at the start of the occupation, is now under 5 percent.

President Bush mocked press reports detailing the problems in Iraq, comparing them to gloomy accounts of Germany in 1946. If the president really thinks that Iraq today looks like Germany in 1946—an advanced industrial country with a long liberal tradition, centuries of experience with capitalism, the rule of law and a defeated population that fully cooperated with American occupation—then he's in for a rude surprise.

Bush's attitude is, in fact, partly responsible for the problems in Iraq. Perseverance is a good quality, but one can sometimes persevere in error. Months into the occupation, the administration stubbornly insisted that there was no insurgency (just a few "dead-enders"), that no more troops were necessary, that the Governing Council had widespread support, that disbanding the Army was the right thing to do, and so on. It could not accept the inconvenient facts that were staring it in the face. Commenting on this aspect of Bush's speech, the conservative writer Andrew Sullivan noted, "empirical evidence doesn't matter for him ... like all religious visionaries, he simply asserts that his own faith will conquer reality. It won't."