While the celebration of the mythological birth of a certain demigod as usual is drowning it out, we are rapidly approaching the first day of the New Year. One of the only American holidays traditionally involving a philosophical aspect, the New Year is a chance for us to recognize the errors we have made and to firm our resolve to improve ourselves and thereby our world. Of course, rarely do we take to the task of Resolutions with the kind of deep thinking and heartfelt steadfastness that they deserve. More likely, we resolve to fix the little things: perhaps you have resolved to stop smoking, to cut red meat from your diet, to attend Pilades classes 3 days a week. I confess that my resolutions have usually been on this order of magnitude. This year, however, I believe that deeper thinking is required.



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Every American citizen should invest a half hour of these precious remaining days of 2006 to read history's first draft of the chapter on the American Fiasco in Iraq. In the upcoming December 21, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner (author, most recently, of Torture and Truth) writes about Iraq: The War of the Imagination. Danner integrates three recent books about the people and institutions that took us to war in Iraq, and by so doing explains how we got where we are today. The tale is heartbreaking.

Reading Danner's account, it becomes clear what a magnificent and difficult mission our nation undertook in the Middle East. As Danner said before the invasion:

It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq—-secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil—-that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United States troops from the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq would then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical country's evolution away from the mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on Israel. This undercutting of radicals on Israel's northern borders and within the West Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of Yasir Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable solution of the Arab-Israeli problem.

This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world....

Success would have been a tremendous and humiliating strike against the forces of radicalism, inaugurating a new age of international relations in which despots approached the world stage humbly and moderately, always with an eye to the unstoppable American might and competence. The wheels fell off, however, when it came to defining "success": would success have been a rapid removal of Saddam and the quick stabilization of the country? or a period of what administration officials labeled "constructive instability" followed by a complete replacement of Saddam's impure armies, police, and government agencies with a new guard?

Inherent in the War of Imagination were certain rather obvious contradictions: Donald Rumsfeld's dream of a "demonstration model" war of quick, overwhelming victory did not foresee an extended occupation—-on the contrary, the defense secretary abjured, publicly and vociferously, any notion that his troops would be used for "nation-building." Rumsfeld's war envisioned rapid victory and rapid departure. Wolfowitz and the other Pentagon neoconservatives, on the other hand, imagined a "democratic transformation," a thoroughgoing social revolution that would take a Baathist Party–run autocracy, complete with a Baathist-led army and vast domestic spying and security services, and transform it into a functioning democratic polity—-without the participation of former Baathist officials.

How to resolve this contradiction? The answer, for the Pentagon, seems to have amounted to one word: Chalabi. "When it came to Iraq," James Risen writes in State of War, "the Pentagon believed it had the silver bullet it needed to avoid messy nation building—a provisional government in exile, built around Chalabi, could be established and then brought in to Baghdad after the invasion."

This so-called "turnkey operation" seems to have appeared to be the perfect compromise plan: Chalabi was Shiite, as were most Iraqis, but he was also a secularist who had lived in the West for nearly fifty years and was close to many of the Pentagon civilians. Alas, there was one problem: the confirmed idealist in the White House "was adamant that the United States not be seen as putting its thumb on the scales" of the nascent Iraqi democracy. Chalabi, for all his immense popularity in the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office, would not be installed as president of Iraq.

Though "Bush's commitment to democracy was laudable," as Risen observes, his awkward intervention "was not really the answer to the question of postwar planning." He goes on: "Once Bush quashed the Pentagon's plans, the administration failed to develop any acceptable alternative.... Instead, once the Pentagon realized the president wasn't going to let them install Chalabi, the Pentagon leadership did virtually nothing. After Chalabi, there was no Plan B."

In Danner's telling of the tale, it is an institutional failure to engage this difficult contradiction that begins the American failure. The problem is exacerbated by a president whose purpose in organizing his White House was to enable bold, decisive action. Suskind points out, "With fewer people privy to actual decisions, tighter confidentiality could be preserved, reducing leaks. Swift decisions—-either preempting detailed deliberation or ignoring it—-could move immediately to implementation, speeding the pace of execution and emphasizing the hows rather than the more complex whys." This style of leadership proved disastrous on the ground. Brenner disbanded, overnight, the Iraqi army and the top three levels of managers in every branch of the Iraqi civilian government, giving us "350,000 more enemies" than we had the day before.

We created our own enemy. And they have defeated us.

Nobody seems willing to say this yet. Danner does not exactly say this. American leaders--the military, the Congress, the President, the press--are still scrambling for a graceful exit from Iraq. But I believe the conclusion that Iraq is a failure is inevitable, and very fucking nigh.

America has single-handedly turned the threatening post-9/11 world into a world of potentially apocalyptic danger. When we make our exit from Iraq, we will at best leave behind a nest of Al Qaeda strategists, Iranian puppet militias, and willing suicide bombers. (At worst, we may leave behind the disintegration of the entire Middle East.) Meanwhile, Iran will have developed nuclear weapons, Lebanon may have fallen into the hands of Hezbollah, and we will be left even more tied to our treacherous "friends" in Saudi Arabia and Egypt--who, let it be remembered, were the ones whose corrupt regimes bred Wahabiism and raised the 9/11 hijackers in the first place.

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Now, both the officials whose infighting and lack of curiosity got us into this mess, and the American people, are looking for a story to tell ourselves about the war.

Three years and eight months after the Iraq war began, the secretary of defense and his allies see in Iraq not one war but two. One is the Real Iraq War—the "outright success" that only very few would deny, the war in which American forces were "greeted as liberators," according to the famous prediction of Dick Cheney which the Vice President doggedly insists was in fact proved true: "true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly." It is "within this context" that the former secretary of defense and the Vice President see America's current war in Iraq as in fact comprising a brief, dramatic, and "enormously successful" war of a few weeks' duration leading to a decisive victory, and then...what? Well, whatever we are in now: a Phase Two, a "postwar phase" (as Bob Woodward sometimes calls it) which has lasted three and a half years and continues. In the first, successful, Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died—-and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war, something unnamed, unconceptualized-—unplanned.

Bush administration officials are beginning to settle upon an explanation for the failure of Iraq War Part Two. The story that they are telling is of an Iraqi populace that does not thirst for peace; of Iraqi politicians too hungry for power and revenge, too lacking in personal strength and moral compass, to compromise and negotiate a political solution. In this version of the story, our failure was our idealism and optimism in believing that the Iraqi people were ready for democracy. "This is not a civilized people. No one's actually saying this out loud—-yet—-but it's widely implied. Iraq is ungovernable, this reasoning goes, because Iraqis turn out to be backward and pathologically unable to get along with one another."

With a failure of this magnitude, our need for an explanation is quite understandable. No story offered by the administration has made any sense; no explanation offered by the media has cohered into a story. It was not until I read Danner's article that I found myself able to understand why we failed. The story comes down to elements that are well-known: human fallibility and hubris. These elements run through stories back to the beginning of history, and self-sure leaders have always ignored them at their own peril.

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I now feel empowered to look beyond the failure itself, to the peril we now face. Where previously I had despaired the unintelligible fiasco, now I am beginning to sense that the story will continue, perhaps for the rest of my life. Bush has been right about this one thing: if we are to escape the grave we are digging ourselves, we cannot focus on the mistakes of the past. Iraq is not going away. Sooner or later--and I suspect sooner than later--most of the troops will be pulled out. But America's role in the story will continue. We will leave behind us of of the messiest political and military cauldrons on earth. Containment of the mess will prove impossible, and sooner or later the cauldron will boil over.

Despite the frequency with which it is discussed, I do not believe that most Americans understand the Islamic concept of jihad as anti-colonialism. (I do not claim to understand it myself; I mean to point to my own ignorance here as well.) It seems to be a powerful and dangerous idea. History provides many examples of economically and militarily weak groups converting to Islam and waging war under the name of jihad, toppling seemingly strong powers. Of course, the Islamic caliphate that controlled the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian peninsula in the Seventh century is the best-known example. Wars inspired by and united in Islam also took place in Western Africa, in the Eighteenth century in Futa Jalon and Futa Toro, and in the Nineteenth century in Sokoto and Tukolor. More recently, Muslim nations threw off colonial rule by the French (including Egypt and Algeria) and escaped from colonial rule by the British (including Iraq and Iran). The uprisings serve as potent fodder for a belief by Osama bin Laden, and his (now numerous) admirers, that American hegemony over the Middle East can and will be ended. As long as Iraq serves as a base for anti-American forces--as it probably will for some time--I for one will not feel safe.

I do not pretend to know what can be done. I do not pretend to be the one who can do it. But I believe that it is time to throw off my despair and begin seeking and demanding a philosophy and strategy for the future.

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Throughout, we must keep in mind the tragic lessons of the Iraq fiasco. First and foremost is the humility that must come from our attempts to understand what is happening across the globe in cultures almost, but not quite, entirely unlike our own.

You know, though you spend your endless, frustrating days speaking to Iraqis, lobbying them, arguing with them, that in a country torn by a brutal and complicated war those Iraqis perforce are drawn from a small and special subset of the population: Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives by meeting with and talking to Americans. Which is to say, very often, Iraqis who depend on the Americans not only for their livelihoods but for their survival. You know that the information these Iraqis draw on is similarly limited, and that what they convey is itself selected, to a greater or lesser extent, to please their interlocutor. But though you know that much of your information comes from a thin, inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and Iraqi life, hundreds of conversations during those grueling twenty-hour days eventually lead you to think, must lead you to think, that you are coming to understand what's happening in this immensely complicated, violent place. You come to believe you know. And so often, even about the largest things, you do not know.

As this precious stream of flickering knowledge travels "up the chain" from those on the shell-pocked, dangerous ground collecting it to those in Washington offices ultimately making decisions based upon it, the problem of what we really know intensifies, acquiring a fierce complexity. Policymakers, peering second-, third-, fourth-hand into a twilight world, must learn a patient, humble skepticism. Or else, confronted with an ambiguous reality they do not like, they turn away, ignoring the shadowy, shifting landscape and forcing their eyes stubbornly toward their own ideological light. Unable to find clarity, they impose it.

For the foreseeable future we will face real dangers from this twilight world--dangers to our lives, our livelihoods, our psychological well-being, our way of life. Perhaps it never had to be this way. Perhaps we could have reacted to 9/11 with constraint and wisdom, building a world of greater connection and fellowship. We will never know. What we instead face is a monumental mess that our generation will be handed. If we do not find a way to clean it up, it may well destroy the world as we know it.

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So I return to the introspective and preachy note on which I began.

In the coming New Year, let us resolve--collectively and individually--not to avert our eyes from the mess. Willful ignorance, the feeling that unacknowledged problems go away, is what brought us this problem. Only patient engagement will deliver us from it. Cleaning up our own mess has been handed to us as the great task of our generation.

I resolve to no longer dwell on the massive incompetence, corruption, and hubris that brought us here. I resolve to focus my thoughts on what our generation can do to build a safe and stable world from the rubble being left us by our elders. I resolve not to be deterred by the impossibility of perfect solutions. I resolve to be humble in my abilities, open in my beliefs, but brave in my actions.