ESCALATION.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq War and George W. Bush's public image)

Last week, in a speech at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, Edward Kennedy said, "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam." The last Kennedy brother--now an aging lion, in his eighth decade of life and his fifth decade in the Senate, a thunderer on a par with his Massachusetts predecessors Daniel Webster and Charles Sumner--then outlined a blistering case that President Bush and his colleagues in the Administration, in almost every area of public policy, have invented or distorted facts to support a radically conservative agenda and have undermined basic standards of candid debate. "As a result, this President has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon," Kennedy said. "He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people."

Analogies with the era of Vietnam and Watergate might have been easy to wave away for those inclined to trust a Bush before a Kennedy. But the headlines that followed in the next few days were impossible to dismiss: "up to 12 marines die in raid on their base as fierce fighting spreads to 6 iraqi cities" (the Times); "under siege" (the News); "40 reported killed in fallujah mosque" (Associated Press). As the grim news flowed in, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy director for coalition operations, was suddenly sounding eerily like General William Westmoreland: "We will pacify Fallujah."

Quite a different historical analogy prevails for the Iraqis: the simultaneous, even coordinated, uprising of the Shia and the Sunnis against British forces in 1920, when the League of Nations established the Iraqi state. After three months of fighting, the British prevailed--in the short term. They preserved their imperial prerogatives until 1932 and didn't leave until 1958. History is propelled by minorities, and an enraged Iraqi minority, including both Sunnis and Shia, now appears to view the Americans in Iraq as the British of the nineteen-twenties--heavily armed but on the losing side of history.

One year after the invasion of Iraq, polls suggest that a slight majority of Iraqis still accept the premise that the United States has no long-term, imperial designs on their country and are glad that Saddam Hussein is in a holding cell somewhere, rather than in one of his palaces. In a poll co-sponsored by ABC News, the BBC, NHK, in Japan, and ARD, in Germany, and published a few weeks ago, forty-eight per cent of Iraqis said that the U.S. was right to invade, while thirty-nine per cent said the opposite. Saddam's record of colossal barbarity was a secret to them only in its details--the precise number of dead and tortured, the location of mass graves--and a future under his sons, Uday and Qusay, was a prospect that few would want to imagine. And yet the sense of liberation, tentative and uneasy but real, that many experienced when American troops entered Baghdad and, later, arrested Saddam has increasingly given way beneath the dispiriting weight of occupation, not merely among insurgents but among ordinary people.

To an extent, this is a familiar pattern. When Western representatives arrived in Kosovo just after the bombing campaign ended terrible Serb violence there, the Kosovar leadership did not betray much warmth toward the visiting representatives of nato or the United Nations. The dynamic of liberation is rarely one of prolonged gratitude. In Iraq, the reasons for resentment are more varied and more profound. A tyrant is gone, but much of Iraqi society has been reduced, at least sporadically, to a Hobbesian state of chaos and insecurity, subject to kidnappings, car-jackings, revenge killings, suicide bombings, armed militias controlling various urban neighborhoods, the pop-pop of gunfire in the distance, and a retreating police force. In the eyes of many Iraqis, the American military presence is at once incapable of maintaining peace and too at sea to avoid terrible mistakes--mistakes that are then shown over and over on Al Jazeera and other outlets in the region, reinforcing the idea that the United ...