WARS AND IDEAS.(The Talk of the Town)(a sovereign Iraq will have to fight to survive)

Nir Rosen on the problem in Falluja

The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq

Sheikh Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, who this week will take over Saddam Hussein's old job as the president of a sovereign Iraq, recently mentioned a favorite philosopher. In the spirit of his American counterpart, he might have noted the Prophet Muhammad; instead, the name that came up was Thomas Paine. A British-born deist and revolutionary pamphleteer of the Enlightenment is not the first figure you would expect to be named by a Sunni Arab leader who wears tribal dress in his official role and was living in Saudi Arabia when the American-led war began, last year. But the new Iraqi President's choice helped to clarify what is at stake as the occupation limps to an end.

The Iraq war, from its inception in Washington think tanks to its botched execution on the ground, has always been a war of ideas--some of them very bad ones. There's the idea of preemptive war, America's divine right of intervention; the idea of tyrannies falling like dominoes in a strategically realigned Middle East; the idea that American power is worse than the worst dictatorship. Facts have reduced most of these to rubble--notably, the argument that this was a war of urgent national security (although facts can be less stubborn than officials in the grip of ideological truth). Only two serious, and competing, versions of the Iraq war's meaning are left standing: one, that this is a war against tyranny and for democracy; the other, that this is a war of American domination. It's about liberalism, or it's about imperialism. Where you fall on questions like how long foreign troops should remain in Iraq, or who is to blame for the ongoing violence, or whether the most apt analogy is the Second World War or Vietnam tends to depend on which of these two versions you accept. Few Americans, Europeans, Arabs, or other non-Iraqis have been able to hold both versions in their heads at the same time and continue to function. But the Iraq war has always contained them both: Iraqis were liberated, and they were occupied; the invasion greatly benefitted Iraqi human rights, and it subjected Iraqis to an incompetent and sometimes harsh foreign rule. Yawar--who, as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, was one of the sharpest critics of the occupation--shows the complex understanding that the situation requires: in insisting on Iraqi independence from America, he invokes a hero of America and a champion of universal rights.

The last days of the Coalition Provisional Authority have the feel of a deathwatch. Soldiers who once spoke ardently of wanting to rebuild Iraq now express open contempt for a people who seem unwilling to help themselves. "I sympathized with the Iraqis when we first got here," a young sergeant who has served every single day of the occupation in Iraq said. "But now I'm cold. I feel no remorse. When some of your friends get killed, and you came here to help these people, it changes you." A majority of the American public has finally turned against the war. As for the Iraqis, their opinion of the Americans in their country has long since gone ...