A distinguished American writer reported after visiting Iraq: ‘The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.” Friend and foe alike look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly disappointed they are in you as an American…. Instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction, we came in full of evasions and apologies. A great many Iraqis feel that the cure has been worse than the disease.’
I have cheated by substituting the word Iraq for Europe in the passage above. It was written by John Dos Passos for Life in January 1946. His piece was resurrected by an American newspaper a fortnight ago, to reassure modern fainthearts in Iraq. Here was evidence, said the hawks. Even after the United States triumphed in the most honourable war in history, the difficulties of reconstruction proved awesome.
Yet in Iraq today the pessimists are in the ascendant. Newsweek’s front cover last week was headed: ‘Bush’s $87 billion mess. Waste, Chaos and Cronyism’. The great Arthur Schlesinger, at the age of 86, produced a coruscating critique of Bush’s foreign policy for the New York Review of Books. ‘Like Milton’s Samson in Gaza’, he wrote, ‘we are eyeless in Iraq.’
Even Donald Rumsfeld has abandoned his relentless triumphalism to concede in a leaked memo to senior aides that the allies face a ‘long, hard slog’, and that he himself is uncertain whether the United States is winning or losing the ‘war against terror’.
There is a military school of thought in Baghdad, London and Washington which today argues that Saddam Hussein and his associates planned the current Iraqi scenario way back before the war. They knew they could not win a conventional battlefield confrontation. So they backed off and bided their time, in accordance with Maoist wisdom.
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