Despite administration rhetoric, things in Iraq do not look good. For a summary read these posts by Juan Cole and MaxSpeak. The new constitution is not supported by many sunnis and the country’s constitution has effectively eviscerated any real civil rights protections. The ambitions to create a democratic, pro-American Iraq are ending in utter failure – a failure a lot of us predicted. Matt Yglesias points to a lot of good reasons why the Germany/Japan examples were poor ones. I’d just like to add another in passing – namely that those countries already had a history of representative, constitutional government. We just had to get them in working order again.

To make big problem even messier, there is no real prospect for a change in strategy. The Administration seems unable to recognize a change in objective realities and unwilling to cut their losses, as witnessed by Bush’s pathetic attempt to revive his social security privatization plan.

So we can all expect that the insurgency will continue pretty much as it has so far, with minor fluctuations in the intensity of conflict. The legitimacy of the new government is likely to evaporate whether we are there or not, given magnitude of the task they face and the slender resources they have to meet it. The most likely outcome within the next few year is either a civil war, the creation of an Islamist Iranian client-state, another dictator, or all of the above.

We must recognize the reality of the situation. It is not that I am “encouraging defeat.” It is that we have already been defeated. Our project to create a democratic Iraq, if it was ever possible, failed during the first few weeks of occupation – when we went in virtually alone, didn’t have sufficient troops, disbanded the standing army, and didn’t protect the infrastructure of the country. These errors made an American victory, as remote as it was, even more so.

Will we be withdrawing our troops soon? Should we? I’m not sure. But I can say this with confidence: it doesn’t matter either way. The end result will be unaffected by what we do. The only thing left to be decided is the body count – ours and theirs.

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