Posted on: Friday, November 14, 2003

EDITORIAL
Iraq: growing urge to 'Afghanize' it?

It only deepened that sinking feeling, amid growing casualties, when the chief administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, was called back to Washington so suddenly this week that he left the Polish prime minister waiting to see him in Baghdad.

Despite assurances that our efforts in Iraq are on track, an eyebrow-raising number of "sources in the Bush administration" began leaking a torrent of news to the contrary.

Bremer returned to Baghdad stripped of his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two. Contrasting with the many vows in Washington to stay the course in Iraq, whatever it takes, an official in Baghdad said the thinking is focusing on "where is the exit." We're hearing increasing mention of Afghanistan as a desirable prototype for Iraq.

Afghanistan is not a model for an acceptable outcome in Iraq. Al-Qaida is active, Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, venal warlords are sparring over control of most of the countryside, aid workers are murdered and opium poppy production has been restored very nearly to pre-Taliban levels.

The war in Afghanistan, a necessary response to the Sept. 11 attacks, is unfinished business. The Iraq war was an option undertaken in spite of world opinion, with great hopes of unprecedented success. An outcome in Iraq no better than that achieved so far in Afghanistan thus would amount to failure.

The question, then, is why would the Bush administration work its way into such an agonizing situation in Iraq only a year away from the election?

The answer, it becomes increasingly clear, is that the White House is as surprised by the outcome so far as any of the rest of us.

That is underscored by a new, top-secret CIA report warning that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the resistance.

What's telling is that the report was leaked only two days after it landed on the desks of senior policymakers — because their greatest fear was that President Bush would never see it unless they made it public.

It's quite clear that the invasion of Iraq defied earlier conventional wisdom. "Had we gone the invasion route," wrote the president's father in a 1998 book explaining his failure to oust Saddam Hussein in 1991, "the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." Apprehending Saddam, Bush père added, "was probably impossible."

The younger President Bush is right in saying "that if America were to leave and the terrorists were to prevail in their desire to drive us out, the country would fall into chaos."

We'd suggest that a wise alternative, if it's not too late, is to revisit European hopes for transfer of the process to a United Nations authority, thus enabling a broadly international sharing of Iraq's security problem.

With Iraqi support for the rebuilding plan eroding, it's imperative to find one they will support — quickly.