WAGING PEACE.(effects of US efforts to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

President Bush has now taken to suggesting that a war to get rid of Saddam Hussein be thought of as analogous to the Second World War. Last week, the President spoke in utopian terms of the aftermath of such a war, for which he is openly impatient. Never mind disarmament; the true objective, Bush said, is to replace Iraq's tyrant with a regime that, as he described it, might have pleased the Founding Fathers, and which would serve as a model for the democratization of the rest of the Middle East. "America has made and kept this kind of commitment before in the peace that followed a world war,"he said. "After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions, and parliaments. . . . In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home."

As uplifting as the memory of the aftermath of the Second World War may be, the analogy is at best premature. In 1945, the Allied victory was total, the...

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