[link|http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-etzioni100302.asp|Iraq was already broken when we got there]

Excerpt:

We are warned that what the Iraqi people will next choose as their government may not be quite the one that would meet our standards; that no democracy will follow; even that a new military dictator may arise. Marr argues that if Iraq were left to its own devices after a military operation, nothing much would change and the result would be highly destabilizing. All this may be true, but even our continuing presence in Iraq would not ensure success. None of the countries with similar cultural, social, and religious backgrounds have developed or maintained democratic governments. (Several of them hold elections, but typically there is one candidate and one party and they get 97 percent of the vote, as President Bashar al-Assad in Syria does. They have very little of what a genuine democracy takes: a free press, competing parties, civic education, and pluralism.)

If the Iraqi people are not ready to take to the streets in defense of their newly won freedoms (as the people of Russia and the Philippines did), and a new Saddam-like ruler dominates them, this still does not mean that we are back at the starting gate. First of all, such a new dictator will have learned that it is not conducive to his health and that of his regime to ignore U.N. (and our) demands not to develop weapons of mass destruction, to oppose meaningful inspections, and to support terrorists (whether or not they are card-carrying members of al Qaeda).

Second, if a future head of Iraq is so dense that he cannot learn from the immediate past and chooses to embark on the same course that led Saddam to his downfall, and our various allies again unwisely sell him what he needs to proceed, it still would take him a decade or longer to reach the same level of armament Iraq now commands. I will even grant that in the worst-case scenario, at some point in the future, the international community, led by us, may need to clean up the mess one more time. Still, it readily beats us becoming mired in Iraq for years to come. President Bush should read up on what Candidate Bush said about nation building. It is a very thankless and dubious task. See Afghanistan, see Haiti. One hopes that when Condoleezza Rice told the Financial Times that the U.S. was completely devoted to the reconstruction of Iraq as a unified, democratic country, she did not mean that these were burdens we had to carry, but was mainly seeking to mollify our critics.

I say:

Sooner or later, we'll have to rip out the root of terrorism. But we don't have to do everything all that once, as the whiners seem to think.

The trouble with so-called progressive minded folk is they don't understand the concept of progress.