Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have had a good week. Ten days ago, when American supply lines appeared dangerously strung out and Iraqi resistance formidable, criticism of the administration's Iraq war became almost respectable.
In last week's New Yorker, Seymour Hersh quoted several generals accusing Rumsfeld of having bungled the war. The Washington Post reported that senior advisers to Bush I had warned Bush II that Rumsfeld and company were giving him bum advice. The New York Times's Maureen Dowd ridiculed ultra-hawks who pronounced themselves surprised at outbreaks of guerrilla warfare. ''I know our hawks avoided serving in Vietnam,'' she wrote wickedly, ''but didn't they, like, read about it?''
What a difference a week makes. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seem poised to roll over their critics just as surely as American troops are poised for the final assault on Baghdad. Wolfowitz was all over the Sunday talk shows basking in his apparent vindication and framing the agenda for the next stage. The United States, not the United Nations, will be in charge of the rebuilding of Iraq, he made clear. Occupation comes first, Iraqi self-government will come later. And the toppling of Saddam should signal other hostile and undemocratic regimes either to get with the program or face regime change.
This grand design was laid out in writings of neo-conservative theorists like Wolfowitz over the past decade. Iraq is just the first step in a grand project, one part the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and one part the imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt, to remake the map of the Mideast. Will the hawks be vindicated here, too?
In this project, two heroic premises are taken for granted. First, democracy will flower in these nations that have never had Western-style civil societies. Second, the shift to more-democratic rule will coincide with greater friendship for the United States.
Let's take these one at a time. Is Iraq likely to be a stable democracy? Wolfowitz and company cite the example of the Kurds. Paradoxically, the Kurds have democratic, nation-building yearnings partly because they are the one large ethnic group in the area that did not get their own despotic state when the British cynically carved the former Ottoman provinces into new, artificial kingdoms in the 1920s. But the more the Kurds thrive as a democratic, semi-autonomous region of post-Saddam Iraq, the more awkward a situation they create for both Turkey, with its large Kurdish population, and Iraq.
Iraq itself presents a far more daunting challenge. An artificial creation of three dissimilar provinces of the Ottoman empire, Iraq, as even President Bush knows by now, is a collection of warring Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Yugoslavia, by comparison, was the picture of ethnic cordiality. Such nations are held together as dictatorships and tend to fly apart as democracies. Afghanistan today is governed by feudal warlords. President Mohammed Karzai functions more as mayor of Kabul. This reality may be more in the American interest than an Afghanistan brutally unified by the Taliban. But a stable, Western-style democratic society it is not.
This raises the second question. Will the Wolfowitz doctrine really bring about more pro-U.S. regimes and more popular affection for the United States? Here, the odds are even slimmer. One reason is that in this region, the hands of the Anglo-American coalition are far from clean.
The original generation of kings and sheiks were imposed by the British and were closely allied with Anglo-American oil companies. They were accurately seen as pawns of the West and detested by their own people. U.S. policy was purely opportunistic, seldom pro-democracy. Some brutal successor regimes, like Saddam's, were intermittently backed by the United States when that was convenient. Others were overthrown in U.S.-sponsored coups that installed other despots. When the United States turned against Saddam in the first Gulf War, it soon betrayed anti-Saddam Shiite forces who were encouraged to rebel and then were left to be slaughtered. None of this endeared Americans to ordinary Arabs (and I haven't even mentioned the U.S.-Israel alliance, much less the Crusades). Post-Saddam, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have made clear that American interests will come before Iraqi wishes -- and the cycle of resentment will continue.
So even if the American occupiers behave in exemplary fashion and resist the parade of Christian missionaries, oil company profiteers and puppet exiles, there will be little love for the United States. That reality will not prevent the neo-conservatives from pursuing their designs. But unlike the Iraq war, the issue will not be settled by one swift military action.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect.
This article first appeared in yesterday's Boston Globe.