Bush And Blair Admit Mistakes - Road to the Middle Class

IT CAN’T BE a coincidence that the first time that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have “admitted mistakes” on Iraq is the week after the installation of a unity government following the national Iraqi elections back in January.

As reported by Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times, Bush and Blair admitted mistakes in not finding WMDs and taunting the Ba’athists to “bring it on.” Said Blair:

The chance of a major insurgency "should have been very obvious to us" from the beginning.

Bush admitted that Abu Ghraib was a major mistake. So that’s all right.

The problem that the coalition has faced from the beginning is that the government of almost every nation state has been defined and legitimized by war. Britain was defined in its Civil War, and the United States in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

The new Iraqi nation needs to define itself and its legitimacy in the same way. It must establish a “king’s peace” by defeating all the contending centers of power: in the insurgents, the Ba’athists, and all the war lords and barons with their private militias.

But it would be useless if the United States and its allies did all the work of pacification. The Iraqis must do that, the new Iraqi government, its new army, and its new police force. It must prove to the Iraqis, to the Middle East, and to the world that it deserves to govern the Land Between the Rivers. And to deserve to govern it must demonstrate that it has the toughness and power to defeat its enemies.

That is the challenge that the new government of Prime Minister al-Maliki must meet. It must pacify, and be seen to pacify, the roiling powers that contest for power in Iraq today. From that all else follows.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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