No Exit Strategy: Critiques within the construct

No Exit Strategy:
"One of the stranger domestic cultural subplots of the war in Iraq has been the confidence with which so many politicians, commentators and journalists alike have felt comfortable claiming, often on the basis of the most fleeting experience there, how postwar Iraq is going to turn out. With his 'Mission Accomplished' speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad to American forces, and the Range Rover machismo of his 'bring 'em on' response to the first serious signs of a homegrown Iraqi insurgent challenge to the US occupation, President Bush remains the world record-holder for this brand of hubris. But any number of people, from Vice President Cheney down to the most hectoring blowhard on Fox News, have been hard at work making a run for his title.
Mostly, it has been a habit of feeling (and of hype), not of thought. Given the fact that Gen. John Abizaid, who heads the US Central Command, and Gen. George Casey, who commands the multinational forces on the ground in Iraq, have both said publicly that over the past six months the insurgency has remained much the same in terms of its lethality and reach, and that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said it could go on for as many as twelve years, it is hard to believe the Vice President really thinks it is in its 'last throes.' But to the right, it is an article of faith that the United States is winning. The problem is that it has been an article of faith since before the war even began. And by the fall of 2003, six months after Baghdad fell, pro-Administration pundits were already insisting that, as Max Boot, John M. Olin fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, put it at that time, 'the world press, which lavished such attention on Iraqi looting back in "
"The contributions both Diamond and Phillips make to understanding what has taken place in Iraq are considerable. But there is a sense in which one of their most important contributions is inadvertent. For both their books illustrate and exemplify the extraordinary consensus about the duty to intervene that has arisen over the course of the post-cold war world. We have not yet begun to pay the price for this--not because we do it ineptly but rather because it rarely seems possible except on the far fringes of the political right and left, what with the 'historic compromise' between the Bush Administration and the human rights movement over humanitarian intervention, if not over torture, rendition, the Patriot Act and myriad other issues, to have a serious conversation about whether the United States has any business trying to create democracies by force of arms. Instead, the consensus not just of these two writers and activists but of the great and the good from the Kennedy School of Government, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the thirty-eighth floor of the UN, to 10 Downing Street seems to be that we--whether the 'we' in question proves to be the United States, the UN or that mythical entity, the international community--must learn to do this sort of thing better, more effectively, perhaps more humanely. It is not only L. Paul Bremer who suffers from hubris. "