Reading Between the Lines

You'll know that America has truly made progress in Iraq when its leaders no longer feel they can only travel there by "surprise visits."

Condi Rice made a surprise visit to Baghdad today to warn the Maliki government that Americans have run out of patience and expect to see tangible signs that democracy has truly taken hold in Iraq, "The American people want to see results and can't wait forever."

"Some of the debate in Washington is in fact indicative of the concerns that some of the American people have for the prospects of success if the Iraqi government doesn't do what it has said it will do,'' Rice said.

Bringing democracy to Iraq, if that is possible at all, is of a generational scale, a reality for which the US does not have either patience or committment. That might be viable in a homogenous state not undermined by internal ethnic and sectarian divisions, but that would be someplace like Japan, not Iraq.

Rice has made clear that Iraq's future hinges on one thing above all else - America's dwindling patience. That patience, in turn, has been defined by the way this adventure was sold to the American people: invasion, regime change, almost instantaneous democracy and exit - six months at the outside. It was all bundled up as a neat, clean and tidy package but it was really a bag chock full of delusion and deceit.

Imagine if Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice had gone on the Sunday morning talk shows to announce that they wanted to topple Saddam but that it would entail an occupation of at least ten and probably twenty years, would cost easily a trillion dollars or more, would cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of wounded and, even then, might not work. But they didn't. They cast out fantasies, dangerous myths and illusions. Just what did they think was going to happen to their political support when their own people stopped believing their fantasies?