The Foreign Service Journal, March 2005

or Iraq’s own military and security forces — the key to an eventual orderly U.S. disengagement. An End to Illusions It was an intoxicating idea — a liberal democracy embracing free markets, human rights and the rapid expansion of oil production to help fuel a global eco- nomic boom; a different kind of Arab country, one that would embrace Western values and peace close to Israeli terms. In fact, it never had much to do with Iraq. But many U.S. government and opinion leaders, relying more on ideological fantasy than hard facts, bought the seductive notion that the conquest of Iraq offered huge potential benefits for modest inputs of force and money. Believing that such achievements were close at hand, the Bush administration reached for a quick and easy victory over the twin threats of ter- rorism and the proliferation of really nasty weapons. The long-term payoff promised to be great, and a deci- sive president, a vice president of unprecedented influ- ence and a forceful Secretary of Defense overrode the warnings of many experts in the CIA, the State Department and the uniformed military. After all, if Washington is the new Rome, it has only to lead and the rest of the world will follow or be crushed. It was visionary, all right. But it was also more than impru- dent. The architects of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and of the subsequent occupation were not evil men. In key respects, however, they were dead wrong. They sincerely believed that the American commit- ment would rapidly transform the Middle East for the better, and make Iraq a positive element in global secu- rity and the war against terrorism. They imagined that Iraq would readily become a model of democratic gov- ernance and free market economics — the Norway of the Middle East. Moreover, they thought this could be accomplished with a modest application of U.S. mili- tary force and a commitment to postwar stabilization F O C U S 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 5