End the crusade.

• Author: Simes, Dimitri K.
• Position: The Realist - Iraq War, 2003-

HERE THEY go again. After spending more than three years, the lives of nearly 3,000 American soldiers, and well over $300 billion in Iraq, the coalition of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who brought America into the quagmire now tell us that the problem was not with having the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but rather with poor implementation for which they unsurprisingly deny responsibility.

And just as the Crusaders a millennium ago blamed their defeats in the Middle East on a lack of faith, we are told today that it is the realists--those heretics with an insufficient faith in the ability of American values and power to rapidly transform the world--who are poised to sabotage the entire project for spreading freedom throughout the region; that the realists and their false gods of stability and national interest will seduce Americans away from their true calling of spreading liberty throughout the world, even at the barrel of a gun.

But the debacle that is Iraq reaffirms the lesson that there is no such thing as a good crusade. This was true a thousand years ago when those European Christian knights tried to impose their faith and way of life on the Holy Land--pillaging the region in the process--and it is equally true today. As Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has observed, "America cannot impose a democracy on any nation--regardless of our noble purpose." He also noted, "You cannot have a foreign policy based on divine mission. We tried that in the Middle Ages, that's what the Crusades were about." Divine missions and sensible foreign policy just don't go together.

And the crusaders of the last millennium and this one as well have had little qualms about using ignoble means to advance their noble purpose. The modern-day domestic requirements in launching a crusade, such as building public support and obtaining funding in a democratic system, force a degree of dishonesty that inherently undermine its nobility.

Consider the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration told the United Nations, U.S. allies and--most importantly--the Congress and the American people, that we had to remove Saddam Hussein because he had Weapons of Mass Destruction, active links to terrorist groups (often implying a close relationship with Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 plotters) and was aggressively developing a nuclear weapons program. No other explanation would have allowed President George W. Bush to win congressional support or to assemble a coalition of the willing with participation much beyond subsidized allies in "New Europe."

Did the Bush Administration in its entirety intentionally mislead the American public and the world alike? Certainly not! Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell by all accounts believed that there was strong and sufficient evidence that demonstrated Iraq's WMD capabilities. Indeed, his credibility did much to legitimize the administration's case. For many others, Saddam Hussein deserved the presumption of guilt--and his duplicitous and underhanded dealings provided sufficient cause for concluding he was engaged in a clandestine weapons program. Still, it is equally apparent that the administration did not address the serious questions raised by many in the intelligence community about the quality of evidence regarding Iraqi WMD capabilities.

At the same time, quite a few of the most enthusiastic proponents for an invasion of Iraq both within and outside the administration what we might term the "war faction"--were less interested in deliberately...