If there was a chance to turn Iraq into a pro-American beacon of democrac

[papau]

that chance perished a long time ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/21/opinion/21krugman.html

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Last Deception
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's Ayad Allawi week. President Bush, starting with his address at the U.N. today, will try to present Mr. Allawi - a former Baathist who the BBC reports was chosen as prime minister because he was "equally mistrusted by everyone" - as the leader of a sovereign nation on the path to democracy. If the media play along, Mr. Bush may be able to keep the Iraq disaster under wraps for a few more weeks.

It may well work. In June, when the United States formally transferred sovereignty to Mr. Allawi's government, the media acted as if this empty gesture marked the end of the war. Even though American casualties continued to rise, stories about Iraq dropped off the evening news and the front pages. This gave the public the impression that things were improving and helped Mr. Bush recover in the polls.

Now Mr. Bush hopes that by pretending that Mr. Allawi is a real leader of a real government, he can conceal the fact that he has led America into a major strategic defeat.

That's a stark statement, but it's a view shared by almost all independent military and intelligence experts. Put it this way: it's hard to identify any major urban areas outside Kurdistan where the U.S. and its allies exercise effective control. Insurgents operate freely, even in the heart of Baghdad, while coalition forces, however many battles they win, rule only whatever ground they happen to stand on. And efforts to put an Iraqi face on the occupation are self-defeating: as the example of Mr. Allawi shows, any leader who is too closely associated with America becomes tainted in the eyes of the Iraqi public.

Mr. Bush's insistence that he is nonetheless "pleased with the progress" in Iraq - when his own National Intelligence Estimate echoes the grim views of independent experts - would be funny if the reality weren't so grim. Unfortunately, this is no joke: to the delight of Al Qaeda, America's overstretched armed forces are gradually getting chewed up in a losing struggle.<snip>

[Warpy]

1. Once the illegal invasion had occurred, there was a small

window of opportunity when this thing could have been salvaged. If they'd hired Iraqi contractors to put the Iraqi people back to work restoring their own country, it might have worked. If they'd decreased the already high unemployment and given them a paycheck and the hope that comes with it, they may have been able to accomplish some of those high minded objectives they pandered to the American people.

However, they chose to allow US and UK corporations a feeding frenzy and forgot all about the Iraqi people. That window of opportunity has long since slammed shut, and there is no way to salvage the situation at present without total withdrawal and delivering rebuilding supplies to whatever government appears in the next year or so, whether or not we like it, probably through an intermediary in the region. We owe them.

George Bush and his corporate cronies have given us a deadly enemy, one that will remain so for many generations down the line.