Tempering ambitions.

• Author: Pipes, Daniel
• Position: Iraq war

WHETHER THE Iraqi expedition is judged a success or failure depends almost exclusively on the views of Americans--not those of Iraqis, other coalition partners, or anyone else. So, fellow Americans, let's debate the topic. My take:

It was right to pre-empt Saddam Hussein before he could oppress his Iraqi subjects further, invade another country, deploy more chemical weapons or build nuclear weapons. The world is a better place with this abominable thug in jail, not lording it in his "presidential palaces."

Alongside the easy and fast victory over Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration made a critical conceptual mistake--raising short-term expectations too high. Nomenclature alone required Operation Iraqi Freedom to quickly produce a vibrant, healthy, open, calm Iraq, with anything less constituting failure. Talk of a "free and prosperous" Iraq serving as a regional model foisted ambitions on Iraqis that they--just emerging from a thirty-year totalitarian nightmare, saddled with extremist ideologies, deep ethnic divisions and predatory neighbors--could not fulfill.

As Iraqis failed to play their appointed role, frustration grew in Washington. Deepening the trap of its own making, the administration forwarded these ambitions by bogging itself down in such domestic Iraqi minutiae as resolving intertribal conflict, getting electricity and water grids to work and involving itself in constitution writing.

Had the U.S.-led coalition pitched its ambitions lower, aspiring only to a decent government and economy while working much more slowly toward democracy, Iraq's progress over the past four years would be more apparent. The occupying forces should have sponsored a democratically minded strongman (1) to secure the country and eventually move it toward an open political process; and this approach would have the benefit of keeping Islamists out of power at a...