There's a lot of talk lately that the war in Iraq has been lost. Maybe it has and maybe it hasn't. However, I think too much of this talk is focused on what the US (read, the Bush Administration) did or didn't do. I never really believed that the US was going to win or lose this war. The key to victory (and defeat) was always the Iraqi people.
The only way the US could "win" was to overwhelm the civilian population as was done in Japan and Germany. We'd have had to do to the Iraqis what we did to the Germans and Japanese - turn their cities to rubble, let them wallow in their own mess for a while and then pull them out before they drowned.
Of course, mistakes were made and some things could have been done differently. Still, I think it was always going to come down to whether the Iraqi people had the wherewithal to get their state in order and find a way to deal with the unreconstructed Ba'athists or whether a power struggle among the various factions and civil war were always inevitable.
I don't think the war is lost yet because I still have faith that the Iraqi people will not let this opportunity elude them. Trouble ahead? Of course, but I don't think civil war is inevitable.
I don't much care whether Iraq is a staunch ally of the US as long as it provides opportunities for its people and it becomes a positive model for what can be accomplished in Arab countries. If that happens, then it's a victory. The US doesn't need Iraq as an ally, it just needs Iraq to not be an enemy.
An Arab, Islamic-flavored Democracy will probably not look much like any of today's secular European states, but it might easily look like Ireland in the 1950s. Hardly a catastrophe if that's what the Iraqi people want.
