Christy Hardin Smith over at the lake warns:

Diplomacy is not just negotiating for what you want. It is also maintaining a balance of relationships, a level of trust, and a constant stream of ties that bind one nation to another. This ensures a long-term level of relationships on which we ought to be able to rely when problems — both big and small — crop up, be they in individual nations, regionally, or globally.

It is another voice in a growing wave that warns Americans that they are not an imperium which holds a complete domination over the other nations of the world, but rose to prominence through a combination of good fortune and a realization that leadership, not ceasership, was the right course. It is a warning that retired General Clark, former President Jimmy Carter - who saw America's influence slide over a previous unilateral adventure falling apart - and a glittering array of accomplished doers, thinkers and policy makers have expressed. It is in the ISG proposals, it has come from the UN, it was the message of Colin Powell, and of John Kerry. In fact, virtually everyone who is not crackdicted to a mythical "victory" in Iraq has accepted. There is no victory in Iraq, it has been a conflict zone for thousands of years. There are no victors in Iraq, merely survivors. We are not going to achieve conquest in Iraq, but we might achieve stability.

Since even Thomas Friedman is no longer hoping for victory in Iraq, ponyhawk in chief has now shifted to the fat old drunk who now has shifted positions to "sectarian violence was inevitable, so it is better we started it sooner." This is exactly wrong. The long slow twilight of an empire - which Saddam's Iraq was, a an empire of different groups under the military heel of an organized minority headed by a despot - is precisely how the various competing nationalities come to establish their own individual nationhood. As the center decays, the peripheries gradually grow in self-reliance, and in doing so, establish their own borders and systems. When an empire is doddering its way to senility, collapsing it prematurely is precisely the wrong move to make. Instead when the collapse comes, the best situation is having as many proto-nation states ready as possible preferrably far up the chain of national development - and then dealing with the inevitable messy cases.

Let's take a look, for example, at Yugoslavia and the Congo as examples. Yugoslavia collapsed at the end of the rope, as a result Slovenia left peacefully, Croatia after a short war, Macedonia needed only some minor sniping, and Montegro was ready to leave and was kept in only by outside pressure. The failure was not in the break up, but the failure to face that a break up was inevitable, and that there were two problematic zones - Bosnia-Herzogovenia, and Kosovo. While both were witness to atrocities, when the international community finally did intervene, it took relatively little effort to interdict the conflict zones and put both areas on a wobbly course towards stability. This is not to label Kosovo a model state - it is a haven for criminal activity through Albania, and Bosnia is still very wobbly - but had the international community intervened earlier and with a surer eye, Yugoslavia's break up could have been managed far better.

The Congo's Mobuto Sesi Seko fell before this point - with large blocks of the country detatched from Kinshasa, but not yet attached to themselves. The ethnic animus was easily let out of the bottle, and the result has been a long running brutal and chaotic conflict which is, in effect, Africa's "Thirty Year's War" - where sides dance in alliances and join each other in slaughtering the civilian population. Without proto-states, there is no beginning of peace.

Because the United States was in no economic or political position to overthrow Saddam after the Kuwait invasion - and I think historians are going to label this one long war, and not separate ones - the chance to impose a unitary Iraq under some kind of internationalized standard of democracy was passed. The Western facing middle class which would have accomplished it by having more loyalty to their bank accounts and televisions than to some musty doctrine about which Imam was Caliph when - has been obliterated and replaced by a feudal nobility composed of nearly nameless warlords. As a result the paths were two - install a despot, which still may happen, or accept a de facto partition of the state, as has happened in Afghanistan - with different nations.

Given these two alternatives, waiting as long as possible was appropriate. Saddam was not destined to live for ever, indeed few people in his line of work retire anywhere but to a hospital bed as they breath their last - the imperative was to wait. Wait as the Kurds finished their civil war and unified, wait as the Shia began the process of forming a counter state in the south, wait as the Sunni's began forming a post Tikriti identity. While the bloodshed would have been sharper, it also would have been shorter.

Hitchens also gets wrong when the current crisis started. It began, not in 1991, but in 1979, when Saddam took power, and moved to sieze the oil rich sector of Iran. That led to the long Iran-Iraq war, whose stalemate left Saddam searching for another imperial target, which led to Kuwait. Iraq has been a conflict zone since the late 1950's. Since he looks at the noon of the crisis and calls it a sunrise, it is not surprising that his Bushite warning is hillariously off the mark:

The unspoken corollary of that, however, was that nobody believed that the Americans were going to withdraw suddenly or of their own accord. In that event, each group would immediately start making contingency plans—such as soliciting foreign support—to grab what it could from the impending scramble. The danger now is that all parties in the region are setting their watches and presuming that all they need to do is wait out the moment. This almost automatically dooms any negotiations that are currently being conducted. So the effect of the "realist" doctrine is to heighten the chances of destabilization and extremism. This is surely not what such vaunted elder statesmen as James Baker and Henry Kissinger can possibly have intended?

No apologist for the Raj in 1930 could have put it better - "If we leave, the scramble will be bloody! We can't set a date, because it is a date that dooms us." No, fat fool Hitchens, it is the matter of life and death that dooms the imperial power. As soon as the locals understand that driving the US out is a matter of life and death for the locals, but not a matter of life and death for the occupier, they will continue to wage war by "what ever means necessary" until the occupier is defeated. The locals have realized that while staying is a matter of life and death for the neo-con movement, it is not a matter of life and death for the American public, otherwise we would have already bitten the bullet, raised taxes, raised an army, built a thousand M1-A1 tanks, backed them with a like number of A-10s and gunships, and Fallujahfied large portions of Baghdad in an orgy of slaughter and destruction. Iraq would be nice, but it is lower on our priority scale than the existing home sales market and the tax cuts.

This is what dooms the US effort - namely that cutting taxes to bail out the very wealthy from the Crash of 2000 and Iraq as it has been implemented are joined at the hip. The size of the bail out was deteremined by the size of the crash, and the need to avoid a "Great Compression" of the wealthy back down to levels of wealth that are closer to the wages of ordinary people. Iraq was forces, because without stimulus to pick up the economy, what was needed was cheap oil and a boom in drilling and oil services. There was exactly one place on the planet where it seemed there were oil fields to be taken. This was obvious at the time, but has now come out in memos written by the neo-conservatives: they realize that the arab petro-wealthy are their rivals for control of the world financial system, which isn't exactly true, but is true if one assumes a continuation of present policy of starving money from the botttom of the economy. Hence, Saddam had to go, not because he had WMD, but because he didn't. Not because he was an immediate threat, but because he wasn't - he was too weak. The more dangerous states - both inside and outside the Isalmic world, were left alone.

Rumsfeld drew the task of "winning the war with the army you have" - namely the army that could be afforded after the revenue reductions were shoved through. They calculated how much spare cash they had fairly well - basically 5% of GDP had to go to the bail out, and the military could slurp up another 1% of GDP. There has been no international financial meltdown, which is what would have happened had they over-estimated how big the charge card Clinton left behind was - but the remaining money was woefull inadequeate to the task of actually winning. The "rosy scenario" strikes again, only this time going the other direction.

That this combination policy was the one in place was obvious in 2002 - had the executive proposed cancelling the revenue reductions to pay for the war, it would have been a sign that the war was, in fact, a separate policy. By insisting on both revenue reductions and the war - not guns and butter, but cruise missiles and caviar - it should have been obvious to all and sundry that Bush was not acting in good faith. Unfortunately, the more shit he piled on, the more the ponyhawks felt their had to be a pony underneath all of it. Unfortunately, it was bull shit.

Since there wasn't even enough money to win the war, it is no surprise that there was no money to establish civil society. We were both there too early, and without the overwhelming occupational force required to impose it. Paradoxically, the state was also in too good a shape. There was enough to fight over, but not quite enough to fight over. Had Iraq been truly pulverized, then the inhabitants would have been dependent on outside help - as the pulverization of Bosnia gradually brought everyone to the table, as only outside help could restore water, power and roads. The occupation of Iraq, crude, cruel, corrupt and weak, managed to unlearn every lesson of the occupation of Germany and Japan. The foremost was that the public had to believe that it would be the inheritors of economic and political success.

-:-

This series of self-interested blunders, largely for the benefit of a small segment of the American public, and the failure of the rest of the country to rein in the perpetrators in any significant way, now dooms any attempt to turn the situation in Iraq around. Simply put, no matter whether there is a date, or none at all, the clock is ticking and the bell is tolling. In fact, there is a date already 21 January 2009. On this date an American President committed to withdrawal will be elected, since there will be no victory or progress to victory in the next two years. The same people who got us into this mess, are still trying to manuever matters to keep the aspects of Iraq that matter to them - the flow of pork, the permanent bases, and the access to oil drilling. The rest is inconsequential to them. The "troop surge", really a speed bump on the road to anarchy, is meant only to build bases as fast as possible, in order to be able to scream bloody murder if the bases are turned over to the Iraqis. "You wouldn't give up what our boys died to build! Traitor! Coward! Islamofacist sympathizer!"

The failure to restore power, water, a functioning court system, secure the roads and the markets - is a clear indication that the United States is not in control of this occupation. It is also a clear sign to all that the United States cannot be trusted to impose justice, however rough and imperfect a form of justice that international law allows - either at home, or abroad. Since the primary American export, the one that allows us to run trade deficits for decade after decade - is the "Pax Americana", when there is a belief that that Pax Americana is not worth the cost of holding devaluing BushBucks, then the privilege will be revoked. States unfriendly to the US have already started - Iran for example - but it will eventually spread to those who simply have better choices.

Thus we come full circle - that Iraq was an adventure in bad faith led to failure, that we cling to the bad faith tells others that the failure was not accident, mistake or forces beyond our control, but a failure of moral substance. That we insist on continuing failure by giving Bush another $190 billion, more men and another year - tells others that neither American party can be trusted, and that sooner or later, America will elect another George W. Bush. In fact, as our own fiscal situation deteriorates, it is more likely that we will try Iraq again, in order to avoid having to deal with the fiscal hole that Medicare will blow in the budget in about 8 years.

What sends this signal is not the failure in Iraq, but the manner of failure, and the response to failure. That the beltway 500 are acting as if McCain-Lieberman just won the 2006 Presidential Election, with their plan keep troops in Iraq as we rotate their replacements in, while bare double digits - 11% in CNN, 12% in the LA Times poll - of the public supports such an idea - tells the outside world everything they need to know - the American elites are degenerate, that they are sollipsistic, militaristic, bombastic, delusion and dangerous - or willing to be meekly complicit in same. American electorates cannot be trusted to sweep these people out of power, but merely put people in charge who have promised to document very carefully the road to hell that is paved with bullets and bones.

If this sounds bleak - and realize that 8 years of Hillary in her current form, followed by 8 years of a Republican reaction will take us well over the fiscal, oil and global warming waterfall - then also realize that the powder for a political explosion that will dwarf 2006 is already being prepared. There are some 35 Republican districts that are already in play for 2006. There are only a dozen - mostly in the Sowth that are in play for the Republicans, plus some vulnerable first termers elsewhere. The southern tide will stay put for the Republicans in the Senate, but that makes vulnerable a sweep of seats elsewhere - including New Hampshire and Maine. This explosion may well force even candidates who bet big on Iraq, to realize that there is no double down option on this table.

If the long slow twilight is not what you desire, then there is no magic leader with a magic smile who will come and change matters. If the "person of the year" is "you" then the test of the assertion will be whether the you, plural, of the country decides to force the issue of American accountability and demand a shift in direction, not stepping on the gas pedal in hopes of making to to the border before the future catches up with us. If we watch history, then history is already scripted and written. The other option is to make history.

The first act of that play has a name, and that name will be "Justice must be seen to be done." For it is the want of justice in American actions - here, with our allies and in Iraq, which must be corrected before anything else can be.