Rodney

The original question was, "What went wrong in Iraq?"

I think it boils down to this, as neutrally as I can put it: the Bush Administration decided what needed to be done to and for Iraq, got the American public to buy in on the basis of world security against terrorism, and then went in and did what they did.

But nobody asked the Iraqi people what _they_ wanted. Chalabi doesn't count. He's got his own agenda, and it seems to involve lots of money.

We went in intending, on the record anyway, to establish a modern liberal democracy, and that's not something that the Iraqis trust at this point. Frankly, the only authority they know that hasn't ruled them (usually) under threat of violence are their own religious communities. And that's what a great many of them still want to rely on. American-style separation of church and state looks too much like the dictators, who almost always cloak themselves in flimsy trappings of democracy. They need to go through this joint religion/stae stage and then graduate from it, as we did a few hundred years ago and Iranian society is trying to do now.

Nobody likes to be occupied, and we've made so many missteps that now more and more Iraqs are loathe to trust us, especially as an Europeanoid power that in the Islmaic Mideast mindset can be easily associated with colonialism, which is a dirty word in the Mideast.

If the invasion of Iraq was necessary, we should have come in with the UN, and brought a whole lot of peacekeepers from non-Arab Islamic countries like Indonesia. We should have been more humble, and considered that what was best for us was not necessarily a good thing for the Iraqis. And we shouldn't have insisted on running the show. Even if Bush honestly believed in the WMD and their immiment use, the evidence shown should have been much more assiduously evaluated.

As it turns out, there is so far no sigh of a WMD threat, immediate or even medium-term. And personally, I have seen no evidence that there ever was any. At this point, the Bush administration would have no good reason to keep any hidden intelligence secret any longer. And if they did, they could say so: "We have damning evidence that we can't show you right now." Hell, I'd buy it. But they haven't.