The Iraq War: One Year On

The war in Iraq has had its share of success and failure. The success is that it got rid of a despicable tyrant. The failure is everything else that has transpired. No nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons have been found, hundreds of American soldiers have been killed, thousands more have been wounded, and Paul Bremer, the current governor of our new fifty-first state, can't get a government working there in time for the handover to the Iraqi authorities intended for June 30. What we're trying to do is build a nation out of nothing, which is exactly what the British attempted in Iraq eighty years ago. This is partly why the United Kingdom is no longer a global power.

Nevertheless, we have to get some kind of workable system rooted in Iraq before we get out of there. And this is based on no matter who wins the presidential election. I don't expect John Kerry, if he is elected President in November, to engineer a massive American pullout. I do, however, expect him to turn to the European Union and the United Nations for help, and work through NATO to secure a lasting peace, rather than acting unilaterally like Dub the Shrub.

Speaking of peace, I sympathize with the antiwar demonstrators in Iraq, but they're mostly irrelevant. Bush didn't listen to them before he went to war in Iraq; why should he listen now? But the demonstrations here in America do at least show that many of us in this country are opposed to the President and his Iraq policy, and that we're simpatico with people in other countries. Nevertheless, the United States remains the only country where the current policy toward Iraq enjoys majority support. :-(