America is just starting to wake up to the awesome scale of its Iraq disaster

The American public has decided that its boys should come home, but the ghosts of Baghdad will return with them

Timothy Garton Ash in Stanford
Thursday July 19, 2007
The Guardian

"Iraq is over. Iraq has not yet begun. Two conclusions from the American debate about Iraq, which dominates the media in the US to the exclusion of almost any other foreign story. Iraq is over insofar as the American public has decided that most US troops should leave. In a Gallup poll earlier this month, 71% favoured "removing all US troops from Iraq by April 1 of next year, except for a limited number that would be involved in counter-terrorism efforts". CNN's veteran political analyst Bill Schneider observes that in the latter years of the Vietnam war, the American public's basic attitude could be summarised as "either win or get out". He argues that it's the same with Iraq. Despite George Bush's increasingly desperate pleas, most Americans have now concluded that the US is not winning. So get out.....

The American people's verdict is remarkably sharp on other aspects of the Iraq debacle. Asked who they blamed most for the present situation in Iraq, 40% of those polled for Newsweek said the White House, and another 13% said Congress. In a poll for CNN, 54% said the US's action in Iraq was not morally justified. In one conducted for CBS, 51% endorsed the assessment - shared by most of the experts - that American involvement in Iraq is creating more terrorists hostile to the US rather than reducing their number. If once Americans were blind, they now can see. For all its plenitude of faith, this is a reality-based nation......

Americans have probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of their military was "no more Vietnams", they face another Vietnam. There are many important differences, of course, but the basic result is similar. The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary......

Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from a flat roof of the US embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be totemic photographic images of national humiliation as the US struggles to extract its troops and all the heavy equipment it has poured into the country, perhaps this time an image snapped on a mobile phone and posted on the internet. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have done terrible damage to America's reputation for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that it is not even all that powerful.....

In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But so far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic. Looking back over a quarter-century of writing about international affairs, I can not recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster. "