There's been a lot of navel-gazing recently, both from the right and the left about how we're failing in the war in Iraq. My old friend Martin never ceases to inform me that my belief in the analogy between nation-building reconstruction in post WWII Japan and the present situation is naive, and that it's all gone horribly wrong.

It's depressing to be right about uncheerful things, and so far my contentions that the 'peace processes' in Ireland and Israel would have neither peace nor process (a view I've held consistently since Oslo) have turned out to be fairly correct, with respect to Ireland at least inasmuch as the situation is not over. (I still think Ireland will begin breaking down more dramatically in the next few years.) So perhaps I can make a prediction a little more pleasant in nature:

By 2008, Iraq will be a stable, multi-party democracy in which women will have the right to vote. This democracy will look to the United States as its 'founders' with a certain amount of respect, although forces (primarily on the right) within this democracy will be busy rebuilding 'cultural' features of the prior order which had been forbidden during the occupation.

I say this simply because, whilst Martin keeps telling me things are going so much worse than during the Japanese occupation, I'm not so certain. While we're missing a MacArthur figure, certainly, I'd say that's about it. We're still in the first year--in the analogous case families were still scurrying out of cities to live with relatives in the countryside because they could be assured of some small amount of food; the script of the country was going to near worthlessness in an engineered hyperinflation; and a good part of the security of the city of Osaka had been devolved to the yakuza.

Indeed, if there's anything that might cause us to fail in the endeavor, it's not George Will's accusation of 'arrogance,' but rather a lack of ambition. Those men who, under MacArthur, broke down the zaibatsu, reformed the ownership of land, and instituted a system of government completely foreign to the 'feudal' ideals that pertained before the war were not timid men. In this case, if we set out to reform Baghdad, we must reform Badhdad.