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April 30, 2004

When neocons give you lemons, make bitter, bitter lemonade and gulp it down as quickly as possible

Daniel Radosh

Paul Krugman ends his "bumping up against reality in Iraq" column today with the words, "I don't have a plan for Iraq. I strongly suspect, however, that all the plans you hear now are irrelevant. If America's leaders hadn't made so many bad decisions, they might have had a chance to shape Iraq to their liking. But that window closed many months ago."

The good news from the current New York Review of Books is that Peter W. Galbraith does have plan. The bad news is, even he doesn't like it much.

Galbraith does an excellent job of laying out what went wrong (and right) with the liberation of Iraq — "and liberation it was" — then lays out a strategy for withdrawal. Albeit one that begins with the warning, "Americans like to think that every problem has a solution, but that may no longer be true in Iraq."

He's right that his proposal — Yugolsav that baby — is not pretty. Even I'd like to believe that there's still some way to see Iraq end up as a democracy rather than a loose confederation of states with varying levels of autocracy. But it's hard to deny his implicit argument: there's no reason to believe that pushing ahead and hoping for the best is any more likely to work in the future than it's worked over the past year. And if it doesn't, the result will be far worse than the one he's pushing for.

Long article, but worth a look.

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