What Lurks in the Ruins?

The war against Iraq is on the road to failure in its most important, durable objective: to transform this construct of British imperialism, Baathist oppression, and American fantasies into a willing replica of Western democracy.

The results of the war cannot be measured by the U.S. military capacity to control Baghdad, occupy the entire country, and eradicate the odious Saddam Hussein regime. Discovering chemical and biological weapons may also be a trophy of the war. But the key goal -- articulated time and again by the Bush administration, supportive Democrats, and even some hawkish progressives -- has been to liberalize Iraq, thereby setting an example for nearby Muslim countries and altering the Middle East forever. But because of the way both the war is being conducted and the plans for postwar Iraq are designed, this vision of a democratic oasis in the desert of Muslim despotism is appearing more and more a mirage.

The fantasy of the good hegemon bringing liberation to the Iraqi people is being shattered first by events on the ground. The resistence in the south, the delay of the relief effort, the uncertain reception granted to the liberators, and the deep supply of contenders for the hearts and minds (and souls) of Iraq's majority Shi'ite population make for a very dispiriting specter for American warriors. Reports of the casualties from Baghdad and Basra are especially troubling.

The deprivations of war, the civilian deaths, the ruined lives, the smoldering cityscapes will not soon be forgotten, and, for the locals, who fired the weapons is practically irrelevant. The war planners did not count on this, we are now often told, and the struggle through the news media to assign blame to Saddam loyalists for war crimes and dirty tactics scarcely matters outside the precincts of Fox News and CNN. The fact that the United States started the war that is visiting havoc on the people of Iraq is the central fact shaping the social narrative that will guide politics in the south for the foreseeable future. The longer the fighting and deprivation last, of course, the sturdier and darker that narrative becomes.

This disquiet in the Iraqi Shi'ite population is not inert. Among those oppressed by the Baghdad regime are the Muslim clerics who finally see their main chance to liberate their people on their own terms. They look very similar to the fearsome ayatollahs of Iran that drove Presidents Reagan and Bush the Elder to embrace and support Saddam in the 1980s. Today, twenty years after supplying money, intelligence, military equipment, and political blessings to Saddam -- saving his regime in the brutal eight-year war with Iran -- many of the same decision-makers in Washington are opening the door to Shiite militancy. The Ayatollah al-Hakim, with his 15,000-strong Badr Brigade of well-trained Iraqis at the ready, waits across the river to re-enter history in his sacred homeland. He may do so brashly, inviting an American military reprisal, or he may wait until the occupiers have gone home and then move easily into the scarred terrain of his youth. Then we will see the hero's welcome "our boys" so unfairly were denied.

Nor is al-Hakim the only contender for Iraqi loyalties. There will be others -- clan leaders, for example, or rivals among religious outliers and former military men. Reports of an active presence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is Sunni, also present a sobering notion for those who will govern Baghdad.

This scenario is all the more disconcerting if seen alongside the Pentagon's postwar planning. While close-lipped and probably scrambling to adjust to the less-than-celebratory climate in Iraq, the planners by the Potomac have designed governance to ensure that security and civil order are the premium objectives of the first months and years. Shadow ministers from Rumsfeld's stable will govern behind Iraqi puppets. Even the State Department's suggestions for these consuls -- former ambassadors who know a little about the Arab world -- were rejected by the Secretary of War.