The Iraq Debacle.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq - How America Lost Iraq - Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War - Book Review

Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq By Larry Diamond Times Books. 369 pages. $25.

How America Lost Iraq By Aaron Glantz Tarcher/Penguin. 303 pages. $23.95.

Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War By Anthony Shadid Henry Holt. 424 pages. $26.

For a moment there, after Baghdad fell, I entertained the thought that Bush might just pull it off. It seemed possible, despite the brazen illegality of his war, that Iraqis might welcome the departure of Saddam so much that they would go along with the new regime, or at least give it some time.

From the books I've been reading, Bush had, at most, a year to get things right, perhaps only weeks. But from the very start, he and Donald Rumsfeld and Jay Garner and Paul Bremer screwed the whole thing up, and most Iraqis quickly lost any illusion they may have had that the United States would better their lives. It was incomprehensible to Iraqis that this most powerful nation in the world could not get the electricity grid back up and running, when Saddam managed to do so after the 1991 war in just a couple of months. It was incomprehensible that the United States could not at least supply generators so people could have air conditioning and refrigeration. Or at least provide order so that people could go out at night without fear of being kidnapped or murdered.

But the Bush Administration failed as an occupier. And the Iraqis' predictable hostility to being occupied, combined with a fierce nationalism and an ascendant, politicized Islam, fed the insurgency from the start.

More quickly than almost anyone had guessed (including the great Middle Eastern correspondent for The Independent, Robert Fisk), the U.S. occupation went sour. And today we witness the long, brutal, and tedious denouement: needless death, a hopeless quagmire, and an ignominious departure sooner or later--and probably later.

But the very suggestion that Bush could have succeeded with this occupation assumes too much.

It assumes that the arrogance and willfulness and carelessness that so characterize the Bush Administration could magically turn into humility, prudence, and thoughtfulness.

It assumes that the Iraqi people, long subjugated by foreign invaders and brutally suppressed by Saddam, would act the supplicant for any degree of time.

And it assumes that the Bush Administration went to Iraq for noble reasons and got waylaid by incompetence.

To put it crudely, it assumes that the imperialists were not interested in empire.

All of these assumptions are false.

The occupation was doomed from the start. And the blunders that the Bush Administration committed are integral not only to its lowly cast of characters but to the entire imperial project.

Amazingly, though, there did appear to be a window. Aaron Glantz, in How America Lost Iraq, arrived in Baghdad a month after U.S. tanks dragged Saddam's statue down. "Most Iraqis were overjoyed that Saddam was gone," he wrote. "Children did come up to the American soldiers to give them flowers." Glantz found a man whose wife and niece had died when a U.S. missile had hit their home, and that man still was grateful that the United States had deposed Saddam.

"Only America could do this," he said. "If it weren't for America, Saddam would stay.... But, thank God, now he's gone. God brought America to get rid of Saddam."

Glantz also interviewed a grateful father who said he was going to name his children after the U.S. President. The name would be "George Bush Jassim Farham."

Reporting for the leftwing radio network Pacifica, Glantz felt pressure from his editors not to cover such things and instead to focus on the seething resentment toward the Americans.

But he couldn't furnish that. The situation was too ambiguous. He quotes Ahmed Jalal, a forty-two-year-old resident of Baghdad, saying, "The...