Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Iraq's Future – and Ours
- 2 The Right War for the Right Reasons
- 3 Iraq: Losing the American Way
- 4 Intervention With a Vision
- 5 An End to Illusion
- 6 Quitters
- 7 A More Humble Hawk; Crisis of Confidence
- 8 Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq
- 9 Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead
- 10 The Perils of Hegemony
- 11 Like It's 1999: How We Could Have Done It Right
- 12 Reality Check – This Is War; In Modern Imperialism, U.S. Needs to Walk Softly
- 13 A Time for Reckoning: Ten Lessons to Take Away from Iraq
- 14 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win
- 15 The Neoconservative Moment
- 16 In Defense of Democratic Realism
- 17 ‘Stay the Course!’ Is Not Enough
- 18 Realism's Shining Morality
- 19 Has Iraq Weakened Us?
- 20 Democracy and the Bush Doctrine
- 21 A Time for Humility
- 22 Birth of a Democracy
- Index
21 - A Time for Humility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Iraq's Future – and Ours
- 2 The Right War for the Right Reasons
- 3 Iraq: Losing the American Way
- 4 Intervention With a Vision
- 5 An End to Illusion
- 6 Quitters
- 7 A More Humble Hawk; Crisis of Confidence
- 8 Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq
- 9 Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead
- 10 The Perils of Hegemony
- 11 Like It's 1999: How We Could Have Done It Right
- 12 Reality Check – This Is War; In Modern Imperialism, U.S. Needs to Walk Softly
- 13 A Time for Reckoning: Ten Lessons to Take Away from Iraq
- 14 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win
- 15 The Neoconservative Moment
- 16 In Defense of Democratic Realism
- 17 ‘Stay the Course!’ Is Not Enough
- 18 Realism's Shining Morality
- 19 Has Iraq Weakened Us?
- 20 Democracy and the Bush Doctrine
- 21 A Time for Humility
- 22 Birth of a Democracy
- Index
Summary
Amilestone does not inform us whether the trail ahead is smooth or rocky, well marked or obscure, but it provides a place to pause and reflect. So too with the Iraqi election. It may weaken the insurgency by endowing the Iraqi government with a legitimacy and authority it now lacks, or by reinforcing Sunni resentment, strengthen it. But the election indubitably demonstrates the power of freedom, and the courage that love of it can elicit even in a terrorized population. Surely, even those so-called realists who disparage the project of building civil society in Iraq share Lincoln's wish, expressed about another group, also believed incapable of self-rule, “that all men every where could be free.”
This is a victory, no doubt about it. Iraq's journey may take many turnings, but it will not return to a past in which a totalitarian regime brutalized 85% of the population. It may, in the future, have its Salazar or Pinochet, it may writhe in anarchy or civil war, but Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party are gone. That is an achievement which, however perilous their condition now, most Iraqis do not wish to reverse. The menace of an Iraqi regime that intended to rebuild and extend its most dangerous capabilities has been removed, and possibly forever. Most of the Arab world may hate America, but a disjointed yet palpable movement for reform has gathered strength.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Right War?The Conservative Debate on Iraq, pp. 233 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005