Iraqi doubts.(Iraq war and its worth)

NEW YORK, JULY 1

TWO observations about Iraq survive the thousand and one made since the speech of President Bush. They are not coped with in the general slush of arguments for or against our intervention in Iraq, demanding discrete argumentation. The first was given thematic importance in a radio forum, the second was an afterthought on a seminar about Iraq.

The first: Was it worth it?

The air waves seemed to hang in suspense--was it worth the lives we've lost, money spent, alliances disrupted? The difficulty in the formulation is instantly seen. We do not know what has been accomplished, in the sense that we can know how many birds were killed at the dove shoot, or how many dollars were spent by the federal government last year.

So much depends on whether seeds were sown which will bear fruit. In a stirring essay in Commentary, Charles Krauthammer sets out his belief that democratic globalism is afire, and that that which has brought life and hope to the Iraqis is as consequential as the introduction of self-government in the new world proved in the 17th century. One could argue that the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime and the affirmation of that destruction by the voters in January serve to freeze our accomplishments in place, so that we can think of Iraq, unencumbered some time soon by insurgencies, as if it were Switzerland set down in the Mideast, there to cultivate its distinctive freedom on into the future.

Krauthammer does much better, reminding us that it has become U.S. tradition to compromise in hard cases, as we did in accepting the Soviet Union as an ally in order to defeat Hitler. A properly oriented process of strategic purification sets in as when we proceeded to refine our articles of confederation with problematical allies. "Consider two cases of useful but temporary allies against Communism: Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. We proved our bona fides in both of these cases when, as Moscow weakened and the existential threat to the free world receded, we worked to bring down both dictators."

Now is the time, in this analysis, to move to disrupt Syria and to affirm the independence of Lebanon. "Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, ...