Thinking about the mess in Iraq (while you vote)

1. Bush & Blair: The Iraq fantasy
Neither will admit that Iraq is a disaster. But while their state of denial may cost votes in Washington and London, on the frontline in the Middle East, it continues to cost lives
By Patrick Cockburn/The Independent

"When does the incompetence end and the crime begin?" asked an appalled German Chancellor in the First World War when the German army commander said he intended to resume his bloody and doomed assaults on the French fortress city of Verdun.

The same could be said of the disastrous policies of George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq. At least 3,000 Iraqis and 100 American soldiers are dying every month. The failure of the US and Britain at every level in Iraq is obvious to all. But the White House and Downing Street have lived in a state of permanent denial. On the Downing Street website are listed 10 "Big Issues" affecting the Prime Minister, but Iraq is not one of them.

The picture of what is happening in Iraq put out by Messrs Bush and Blair no longer touches reality at any point. They claim US and British troops are present because Iraqis want them there. But a detailed poll of Iraqi attitudes by WorldPublicOpinion.org, published six weeks ago, shows that 71 per of Iraqis want the withdrawal of US-led forces within a year. No less than 74 per cent of Shia and 91 per cent of Sunni say they want American and British troops out. Only in Kurdistan, where there are few foreign troops, does a majority support the occupation.

Hostility to the American and British troops has a direct and lethal consequence for the soldiers on the ground. The same poll shows that 92 per cent of Sunni and 62 per cent of Shia approve of attacks on US-led forces. This is the real explanation for the strength of the insurgency: it is widely popular.

For the past three-and-a-half years in Iraq, one needed to close both eyes very hard or live in Baghdad's Green Zone not to see that the occupation was detested by most Iraqis. At places where US Humvees had been blown up or US soldiers killed or wounded there were usually Iraqis dancing for joy.

Supposedly, the centrepiece of American and British policy is to stay "until the job is done" and hand over to Iraqi army and police who will cope with powerful militias like the Mehdi Army. But in police stations in many parts of southern Iraq, photographs pinned to the wall include one of British armoured vehicles erupting in flames, beside a portrait of Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mehdi Army.

In the first year of the occupation it could be argued that Bush and Blair were simply incompetent: they did not understand Iraq, were misinformed by Iraqi exiles, or were simply ignorant and arrogant. But they must know that for two-and-a-half years they have controlled only islands of territory in Iraq. "The Americans haven't even been able to take over Haifa Street [a Sunni insurgent stronghold] though it's only 400 yards from the Green Zone," a senior Iraqi security official exclaimed to me last week.

But the refusal to admit, as the British army commander Sir Richard Dannatt pointed out, that the occupation generates resistance in Iraq, means that no new and more successful policy can be devised. It is this that is criminal. And it is all the worse because the rational explanation for Mr Bush's persistence in bankrupt policies in Iraq is that he has always given priority to domestic politics. Holding power in Washington was more important than real success in Baghdad.

It is easy enough to say that Mr Bush lives in a world of fantasy in Iraq. His aides are notoriously averse to giving him bad news. Officials who do so lose their jobs. But this probably underestimates the man. After 9/11 he successfully presented himself as the security president. For the first time since the 1920s, the Republicans held the presidency and both houses of Congress. The war in Afghanistan was successful at little cost. He thought the same would be true in Iraq.

There was a spurious series of highly publicised turning points in the war, such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the return of sovereignty to Iraq and the recapture of Fallujah in 2004, the elections and referendum on the constitution of 2005.

In each case reality was always different. Nobody in Iraq thought Saddam was the leader of the resistance, and his capture had no effect on the insurgency. The return of sovereignty had little meaning: last week the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, admitted that he could not move a company of Iraqi troops without US permission.

Fallujah was very publicly stormed by the US Marines in November 2004, but a few days later the insurgents, in an operation hardly mentioned by the administration, captured the much larger city of Mosul in northern Iraq, seizing arms worth $40m (£21m). The elections and referendum in 2005 deeply divided Iraq's communities along sectarian and ethnic lines, and led directly to civil war in central Iraq.

The US media was under extreme pressure to report the non-existent good news that the White House accused them of ignoring.

I used to think how absurd it was for me to risk my life by visiting the Green Zone, the entrances to which were among the most bombed targets in Iraq, to see diplomats who claimed that the butchery in Iraq was much exaggerated. But when I asked them if they would like to come and have lunch in my hotel outside the zone, they always threw up their hands in horror and said their security men would never allow it.

The fantasy picture of Iraq purveyed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair is now being exposed. The Potemkin village they constructed to divert attention from what was really happening in Iraq is finally going up in flames.

But it is too late for the Iraqis, Americans and British who died because they were unwitting actors in this fiction, carefully concocted by the White House and Downing Street to show progress where there is frustration, and victory where there is only defeat.

(The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn has just been published by Verso)


2. U.S. is casualty in Bush's vanity war -- by ANDREW GREELEY

Why did the United States invade Iraq? The administration, still claiming to be "tough on terror," dances around in its search for a credibility-saving way out. Bloody bodies and great clouds of smoke appear every night on television. American casualties increase. President Bush no longer uses the words ''staying the course.'' He still seems to insist that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on global terror. The issue on this election eve ought to be: Why did we invade Iraq in the first place?

We no longer hear that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction aimed at us. Or, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it, the invasion was the ''right thing to do.'' Or that the American goal is to make Iraq safe for democracy. Or that we must fight to the end to preserve the honor of those who have died.

What, then, was the reason for the war, other than that the rage and fear of the American people after the World Trade Center attack made it easy for the administration to sell the war?

George Packer in this book The Assassin's Gate observes that ''it is impossible to be sure'' why the country went to war in Iraq, and quotes Richard Haass, an aide to the president, as thinking that he would go to his grave ''not knowing the answer.'' Frank Rich in his The Greatest Story Ever Sold suspects that Karl Rove's desire to build a permanent Republican majority was a major factor.

My hunch is that the answer can be found in the president's words when he was told about the attack: "This is war!" In point of fact, it was not. It was a vicious assault by a gang of international criminals, not a war in any sense that the word has traditionally meant. The president's spontaneous eagerness to find a war where there was only a terrible crime marked the genesis of such phrases as ''war on terror,'' ''war on global terror'' and ''war on Islamo-fascism.''

They were catchy phrases and crept easily into the national vocabulary. They made Bush a national hero that some in the media could compare to Abraham Lincoln. They made him a ''wartime'' president who could fly out to an aircraft carrier (within sight of the California coast) and proclaim ''mission accomplished.''

Unfortunately, after the quick cleanup of Afghanistan (as we thought then), there was no war around. Bush needed a war -- another quick, easy victory that would eliminate any discussion of the possibly stolen 2000 election. Whatever the motives of the other chickenhawks, like the neo-cons who wanted to go to ''Jerusalem through Baghdad,'' ultimately the reason for the invasion of Iraq was that the president at some level in his personality wanted a war, needed a war. He also wanted and needed an enemy, and Saddam Hussein was the ideal enemy.

Alas for everyone, Bush and his advisers, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, miscalculated the reaction of the Iraqis to the invasion. They especially misunderstood the propensity in that deeply troubled society for Muslims to delight in killing other Muslims as well as young Americans.

I do not question the president's sincerity. He undoubtedly persuaded himself that war was what God wanted him to do. Yet, we can now understand that the war is kind of a vanity war; the president wanted to prove he was a good wartime president. He isn't. The vice president wanted to prove that he was the toughest man in the Beltway. He isn't, save possibly when he has a shotgun in this hands. The neo-cons wanted to reshape the Middle East and take pressure off Israel. They didn't. The national security adviser (and now secretary of state) wanted to prove she was an astute diplomat. She isn't.

The war has become the main issue in the election. Americans will vote on Tuesday on whether they support the war or oppose it. Have they come to realize that it is a vanity war, or do they still want revenge on terrorists and are they still afraid?


3. What It Will Take to End War -- by James Carroll/Boston Globe

The war in Iraq has emerged as a key issue in tomorrow's election, but in what way can its course be influenced by voting results?

On the one hand, President Bush has just renewed allegiance to Donald Rumsfeld, the contractor of disaster, and to Dick Cheney, the architect. This suggests that, even after abandoning the rhetoric of "stay the course," Bush remains committed to the present folly. Two more years of Rumsfeld and Cheney in charge mean two more years of needless American casualties, jihadist recruitment, Middle East turmoil, and vast additions to the toll of Iraqi dead. If the elections maintain Republican majorities in Congress, the administration will feel no external pressure to change its Iraq policy. Absent that, Rumsfeld-Cheney will simply carry on.

On the other hand, Democrats could take the House, and perhaps even the Senate. What difference would that make to the war? Obviously, in one or both houses, the opposition could then convene hearings in which both the present conduct of the war and past failures and deceptions could be investigated. Congressional hearings can be a powerful forum. Until now, it has not served the Bush administration's purposes to have the American public well instructed on the complexities of Iraq, but intensive media focus on testimony by the war's witnesses, critics, and victims would change that.

We have been here before. Of all the acts of opposition to the war in Vietnam, none was more consequential than the hearings presided over by Senator William Fulbright -- a Democrat challenging a Democratic administration. The Fulbright hearings served as the nation's classroom, with a visceral uneasiness about the war evolving into informed opposition. The decisive election year was 1968, and, sure enough, voters cast their ballots for peace.

But if the past has ever offered instruction to the present, here is one lesson that must not be missed: The Vietnam War dragged on for nearly seven more years after that critical election. Why? Because public uneasiness with the course of the war was not enough. The only way out of the disaster was to accept defeat, and that America was loath to do. President Nixon came into office on the promise that he had a "secret plan" to end the war, but no sooner had he moved into the White House than he swore he would not be the first US president to lose a war. "Peace with honor" became the shibboleth. The killing continued, the air war came into its own, and more people died in Vietnam after 1968 than had died before. The American public's retreat from concern about the war was epitomized by Nixon's overwhelming reelection in 1972. How did that happen?

It is one thing to feel uneasy about your nation's war, or even to move to a position of outright opposition. It is another to face the harsh fact that the only way out of the war is to accept defeat. The goal of "peace with honor" assumes that the nation's honor has not already been squandered. During Vietnam, for all the widespread opposition to the war, the American public was never ready to face the full truth of what had been done in its name, and so the martial band played on. And on. The war ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, with the United States whining that somehow it had been the victim. Not incidental to the present disaster is the fact that the men dragging out that shameful last moment of Vietnam, when our nation's abject defeat was made plain for all the world to see, were Ford administration honchos Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Rumsfeld and Cheney are prepared to do it to their nation again. The question now is whether America will let them? The general uneasiness with the war in Iraq is mostly tied to how badly it has gone. Tactical and strategic planning have been bungled at every level, and the elusive enemy is yet to be understood in Washington. If the Democrats take power with the elections tomorrow, congressional hearings will have a lot of such questions to consider. But what about the moral question? For all of the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted? Can we admit that the loss of honor will not come with how the war ends, because we lost our honor when we began it? This time, can we accept defeat?

(James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.)


3. An Ideology of Lying -- by Glenn Greenwald/Crooks and Liars

It is not news to anybody that Bush followers lie repeatedly and aggressively. But what does continues to amaze is that there is literally no limit on their willingness to do so even when - especially when - it requires them to ignore and contradict even the most glaring facts which everyone can see, as clear as day, right in front of our faces.

In this superb post , Digby uses two examples from this past week - the John Kerry "controversy" and the publication by the Bush administration of how-to nuclear documents - to describe precisely how this process works.

And the Editors provides the illustrated cartoon version of what Digby is describing - a cartoon which would be hilarious if it didn't so accurately convey the process which has destroyed our nation's political dialogue and enabled the most radical and destructive policies imaginable.

This is why I spent the last couple of days focused so heavily on Michael Ledeen's weekend lie in National Review that he "opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place" even though he repeatedly wrote and said the exact opposite. It's not because Ledeen himself matters per se, but because this straightforward incident illustrates the dynamic so perfectly.

Ledeen has no compunction at all about blatantly lying even in the face of a literal wave of conclusive evidence showing that he is lying - and his National Review editors such as Rich Lowry are content to remain silent about it because it's not news to them that their magazine is printing demonstrable falsehoods. It doesn't even warrant a response, let alone a correction, retraction or apology. That's because lying has become not only a perfectly acceptable tactic, but one that is central to their movement. Lying is not something they do sometimes It is who they are. Lying is a central and consciously adopted part of their ideology.

The grandfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, long ago explained the "justification" for lying in an interview with Reason's Ronald Bailey (h/t Mona ):
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people ... There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

It is from that rotted Stalinist root that the right-wing Ideology of Lying emerged, as embodied by the now-infamous warning issued to Ron Suskind by a Bush "senior advisor" after Suskind wrote an article about Karen Hughes which displeased the Leader: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."

The authoritarian Bush movement is so Wise (in the case of neoconservatives) and so Good (in the case of the religious fundamentalists who are their loyal comrades) that everything, including the most blatant lies, is not only justifiable, but necessary. Reality can and must be fundamentally distorted for our own good. As Mona put it - and as the two posts linked above illustrate - "for neoconservatives [which has subsumed the so-called "conservative" movement itself], falsehood is a feature, not a bug."


4. The Rat Pack -- by William Rivers Pitt

“Blaming George W. Bush for everything that has gone wrong these last years is a lot like blaming Mickey Mouse when Disney screws up.” -- Me

"There is probably some long-standing rule," wrote Hunter S. Thompson, "among writers, journalists and other word-mongers that says: 'When you start stealing from your own work, you're in bad trouble.'" Indeed. It is truly bad form to quote yourself, but I am at a loss to frame this situation without deploying that old line, which I used to throw out as the occupation of Iraq began spiraling into the horrific bloodbath we see on the news every night.

It is what it is, and I can live with the shame, because it's undeniably true. Mr. Bush is not running the show, and I can't think of a better way to say it. We saw this on 9/11, when he sat there like a pithed frog as the citizens he was supposed to protect and defend died in fire and dust in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. We saw this when Dick Cheney chaperoned him during the 9/11 Commission's interview of him. Neither man was under oath, but Dick was there anyway, because George can't be trusted to manage anything on his own. We saw this after Katrina, and we have seen it every day for three years of this Iraq war. It has become, by now, axiomatic: water is wet, sky is up there, and George W. Bush might as well be animate furniture for all the actual governing he does. Water him twice a week, turn him towards the light, and he'll be fine ... but for the love of God, don't expect leadership or vision from the man. We're dealing with a sock puppet in a three-thousand dollar suit, no more, no less.

The actual culprits are, of course, well known. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are the real ideological muscle behind this administration, with Paul Wolfowitz playing the role of Rasputin. Rice has some input, and Rove calls the shots. Water is wet, sky is up there, and that's the deal.

But what of the others, the smart boys in the back room whose white papers and dreams of empire fueled the mayhem and slaughter that has marked our passage through these years? These are the ones most people never hear about, the speechwriters and think tankers, the ones who grind the grist and make the arguments, the ones who truly craft policy. There are lots of them, and they are as much a part of the story as Dick and Don and Condi and Karl.

Usually, these folks get to operate behind the scenes. Today, however, the curtain has been rolled back and the smart boys have been exposed. David Rose has popped off with an astonishing Vanity Fair article titled "Neo Culpa." In it, the fellows who helped to design and implement the radical foreign policy catastrophe we currently endure, to a man, remove themselves from blame for all this and throw George W. Bush under the bus.

Ken Adelman, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and Richard Perle have spent many years waiting for the opportunity to road-test their wild ideas about how to deal with the world, and with the installation of the Bush administration, they finally got their big chance. Now that the wheels are coming off, however, they are trying to pretend that none of this has anything to do with them.

It is, in a way, uproariously funny reading. Some quotes from Rose's Vanity Fair piece:

"I just presumed," saith Adelman, "that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional. There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."

"Ask yourself," saith Ledeen, "who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura (Bush), Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

"(Bush) doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle," saith Gaffney, "who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."

"The decisions did not get made that should have been," saith Perle. "They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly. At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible."

For the record, Ken Adelman served the Bush administration as an assistant to Don Rumsfeld, and was also a Reagan administration official. Michael Ledeen is fellow at the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute, and has served in the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council. Frank Gaffney is another hardcore think tanker who has worked with The Committee on the Present Danger and the Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was an aide to Richard Perle, who was serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense. Perle is also a think tanker who served the Bush administration as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Each, in his own way, has worked to bend American policy around the needs and desires of the hard-liners within the government of Israel.

These are the four horsemen of this neo-conservative apocalypse, and almost everything that has happened in the last several years can be laid directly at their feet. Compare and contrast, if you will, their statements in the Vanity Fair piece to their words from just a few years ago.

"I believe," said Adelman in a February 2002 Washington Post editorial, "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps."

"Change - above all violent change," wrote Ledeen not too long ago, "is the essence of human history. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically. It is time once again to export the democratic revolution." Ominously, Ledeen is also the spiritual leader for those who think total war in the Middle East is the way to go. "The time for diplomacy is at an end," he wrote in April of 2003. "It is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon."

"I believe," said Gaffney two months before the Iraq invasion, "that when you find, as you will I hope shortly, that the Iraqi people welcome the end of this horrible regime, even if it comes at some further expense to themselves, knowing as they do that the alternative is more of the horror that they've lived under for the past two or three decades. You'll see, I think, an outpouring of appreciation for their liberation that will make what we saw in Afghanistan recently pale by comparison."

"A year from now," said Perle, "I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush." Perle also noted once that, "If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Pretty much says it all right there. But we also have this: a slide-show presentation by Perle's Defense Policy Board to the decision-makers within this administration titled "Grand Strategy for the Middle East." The final slide of the presentation described "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot (and) Egypt as the prize."

Gaffney and Perle were also centrally involved in the policy formulations that came out of the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC. The blueprint for this administration's Middle East policies can be found in the seminal PNAC white paper, published in 2000, titled Rebuilding America's Defenses . Other notable members of PNAC include Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams, Donald Kagan and Lewis "Recently Indicted" Libby.

In the aftermath of the conviction of Saddam Hussein, and the trumpeting of the menace to the world he supposedly presented, it is worthwhile to note what PNAC had to say about the man at the turn of the century. "Indeed," reads page 14 of the document, "the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Got that? Hussein didn't matter. It was about carving out a permanent military presence in Iraq, the ultimate purpose of which would be to knock off every other regime in the region, friend and foe alike. Adelman, Ledeen, Gaffney and Perle husbanded these concepts all the way into the White House and the Pentagon, and now that their plans have been exposed as being horribly flawed, they are desperate to cut and run from their own undeniable responsibility.

"Huge mistakes were made," said Perle in the Vanity Fair piece, "and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Reading this, there can be but one unavoidable conclusion to make: these men, ultimately, are nothing more or less than the worst form of coward to be found in this country. They talk tough about global domination while sending other people's children off to die, and then run like rabbits when the scab is ripped off their festering ideology. That they said all those ridiculous things before and during the occupation is bad enough. That they have now attempted to blame it all on Bush, while denying their own culpability, is nauseating beyond words.

The best bit of all, perhaps, came after Rose's article hit the wires. A National Review "symposium" published on Sunday morning sprayed heated outrage from these four men over the fact that their thoughts about Bush and Iraq were made public. Each was apparently shocked - shocked! - that they might actually have to stand by their words.

"Concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday's election," said Perle on Sunday, "I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before the election. I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country. I believe the president is now doing what he can to help the Iraqis get to the point where we can honorably leave. We are on the right path."

These rats are trying to scramble off the sinking ship they helped put to sea, but don't you dare take anything they have to say about it, anything they ever said about it, at face value. They lack the courage of their earlier convictions, and flee even the chance to repent. They are neither here nor there, but nowhere. They are a vapid void where morality and simple integrity have not, and never will, find purchase.

If only the folks in the White House and Pentagon had known this a few years ago. They could have taken the words of Phaedrus to heart - "A coward boasting of his courage may deceive strangers, but he is a laughing-stock to those who know him." - and saved us all a great deal of death and sorrow.

(William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence .His newest book, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation , will be available this winter from PoliPointPress.)


5. If We Miss This Last Chance, Then Our Soldiers Will Have Died in Vain -- by Timothy Garton Ash/The Guardian

"They died in vain." Four words that are unbearable for the mother of a dead soldier and shaming for the politicians who sent them to their deaths. So our leaders say "they did not die in vain". But who now believes them?

Contemplating the scale of the American-British failure in Iraq, I have been struggling to see if there are any future circumstances, any lines of long-term strategic action, which would one day enable us honestly and credibly to say to the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq: "Your son did not die in vain." At the moment, that seems nearly impossible.

Yes, our troops removed a very nasty tyranny, to widespread initial rejoicing among the people of Iraq. For some Iraqis - especially Kurds and Shia - some things about their lives have got better. People who were in prison or in exile are now at home. Millions of Iraqis turned out to vote for political parties of their choice, despite intimidation. They have incomparably more free media than before and less reason to fear repression from the central state. A few have prospered. In places, the occupying powers have done major reconstruction work. But that's about all one can say on the plus side; the minus list is so much longer.

As Patrick Cockburn, a writer with rare in-depth knowledge of Iraq, chronicles in his new book The Occupation, the dimensions of our failure over more than 40 months of occupation are breathtaking. It starts with the most basic services. Despite the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, US government witnesses told the Senate foreign relations committee earlier this year that the performance of the Iraqi electricity, water, sewage and oil sectors is still below pre-invasion levels. The economy is worse in many respects than it was before. Instead of going in fear of Saddam's secret police and torturers, people go in fear of gangs, militias, criminals and fanatics.

To exchange tyranny for anarchy is merely to move from one circle of hell to another. As one Iraqi recently commented: under Saddam we had a state, a bad state, but to have no state is even worse. Even if the Johns Hopkins University estimate of some 600,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion is an overestimate, extrapolating from too small a sample, the number of Iraqi civilian deaths is horrendous. The country is already in civil war. As foreign troops leave, that's almost certain to get worse before it perhaps - but only perhaps - gets better, if Shia, Kurd and Sunni leaders, and their foreign patrons, can hammer out a compromise based on a more or less disintegrated confederal state. And that's only the story inside Iraq. In the world at large, the balance-sheet is even worse. An intervention that was intended to make the world safer for democracy has made the world more dangerous for all democracies. The United States' own recently released National Intelligence Estimate confirmed that Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for terrorists. It has infuriated Muslims in our own countries, including the London bombers of July 7. By distracting forces and attention from our original, legitimate mission to extirpate al-Qaida's bases in Afghanistan, it has allowed the Taliban to regroup and come back in force there. It has turned a militant, Islamist Iran into a regional winner, increasing the likelihood that it will try to develop nuclear weapons. It has made the United States more unpopular around the world than at any time since reliable polling began and dramatically decreased the United States' capacity to get its way. North Korea, for example, cocks a nuclear snook at Washington. So much for "the world's only hyperpower".

Oh yes, and there's the cost. The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the total, eventual costs of the Iraq war, "including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion" - that's $2,000,000,000,000. That would be $2,000 a head for each of the world's poorest billion people, who live (and die) on less than $1 a day.

It's not too soon to suggest that the American-British invasion and occupation of Iraq has proved to be the greatest strategic blunder of our time. So what can we honestly say to that grieving mother or father? "Your son (or daughter) died in vain"? Brooding on this, my thoughts have strayed to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the 50th anniversary of which we mark this week. Both stories started with joyous crowds celebrating round the toppled statue of a tyrant (Stalin in Budapest, Saddam in Baghdad). In both places, celebration had turned within weeks to bloodshed and misery. Virtually all Hungarians would have acknowledged three years later, in 1959, that the revolution had ended in defeat. Many said it had ended in disaster, and subsequently embraced the course of pragmatic "realism" steered by Janos Kadar, who had authorised the execution of the revolution's leader, Imre Nagy. Yet 33 years after the defeat, in 1989, I witnessed in Budapest Nagy's ceremonial reburial, an unforgettable celebration of the eventual triumph of that revolution. Heroes' Square was bedecked with huge red, white and green flags, each with a hole cut out where the communist insignia used once to be - as had been done in 1956. Here was what one Hungarian historian has memorably called "the victory of a defeat".

Of course the cases of Hungary and Iraq are quite different in all sorts of ways. Unlike British and American soldiers in Iraq, the Hungarians were fighting directly for the freedom of their own country. But the point of the comparison is simply that our judgment of such dramatic events will change over decades, depending on their long-term consequences - but also on our own policies. Given a fortunate turn of history, and if democracies can learn from their mistakes, committing themselves more intelligently to a long-term struggle, even a defeat can be a milestone on the path to victory.

After 1956, the western democracies did learn from their mistakes, abandoning any talk of "rollback", no longer letting Radio Free Europe encourage the peoples of central and eastern Europe to rise up, but engaging constructively in what I call "offensive detente" with both the states and societies of the communist world. Fifty years on, after what is - let's call a spade a spade - a major defeat in Iraq, can we again learn from our mistakes? Can we accept that this "war" against terrorism, like the cold war, will never be won by military means? Do we have the confidence to engage diplomatically with everyone in the region, including Iran and Syria, beginning a regional security negotiation comparable to the Helsinki process in 1970s Europe? Can we - working with Arab and Iranian dissidents and intellectuals - craft policies of "offensive detente" towards both the states and societies of the Muslim world and sustain those policies over a generation? Or will the United States simply cut and run, retreating into its own vast carelessness (to adapt a memorable phrase from Scott Fitzgerald), and, under its next president, adopt a new, unhappy mixture of isolationism and so-called realism? If the former, we may yet, in decades to come, have available some honest words of comfort to the still grieving mother. If the latter, there will be no honest consolation.

(www.timothygartonash.com)