Farewell to Baghdad

"Somebody tell the president the war is over," says Frank Rich of the New York Times.

In his best war editorial to date, Rich says, "LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. 'We will stay the course,' he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?"

(To read the Times articles you have to register to gain access to the site. It's worth it. Registration is free, easy, and forever.)

Rich's opinion is bolstered by a hard news story in today's Washington Post, which is nicely encapsulated by Atrios:

"The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

"The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society where the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

"'What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,' said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. 'We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.'

...

"'We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,' said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "'That process is being repeated all over.'

"'The most thoroughly dashed expectation was the ability to build a robust self-sustaining economy. We're nowhere near that. State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there,' said Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute. 'The administration says Saddam ran down the country. But most damage was from looting [after the invasion], which took down state industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric' system."

What's interesting, but hardly surprising, is that one "senior official involved in policy," (somebody very high up -- Rumsfeld maybe?) and another "familiar with policymaking" were willing to contradict the official party line on condition that their identities were concealed.

Even protected by anonymity, they can't express the reason for the policy change: the Iraq War is over and we lost. The same article neatly reveals the reason for the lost war: "'We didn't calculate the depths of feeling in both the Kurdish and Shiite communities for a winner-take-all attitude,' said Judith S. Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University."

In other words, this government didn't realize its splendid little war included attempting to re-engineer a tribal society rent with irremediable ethnic divisions and animosities. They had absolutely no clue what they were getting into.

What shall we do with a drunken sailor?