Summary:  The Bush administration's "revolutionary" foreign policy rhetoric has not changed, but its actual policies have: after squandering U.S. legitimacy, breaking the domestic bank, and getting the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, the Bush doctrine has run up against reality and become unsustainable. The counterrevolution should be welcomed -- and, if possible, locked in.

  PHILIP H. GORDON is a Senior Fellow in

It is not too late to put U.S. foreign policy back on a more sustainable course, and Bush has already begun to do so. But these new, mostly positive trends are no less reversible than the old ones were. Another terrorist attack on the United States, a major challenge from Iran, or a fresh burst of misplaced optimism about Iraq could entice the administration to return to its revolutionary course -- with potentially disastrous consequences.

What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable
By Larry Diamond, James Dobbins, Chaim Kaufmann, Leslie H. Gelb, and Stephen Biddle

In his trenchant analysis, Stephen Biddle ("Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon," March/April 2006) argues that the escalating violence in Iraq is not a nationalist insurgency, as was the Vietnam War, but rather a "communal civil war" and that it must therefore be addressed by pursuing a strategy different from "Vietnamization

if the United States were simply to turn over responsibility for counterinsurgency to the new Iraqi army and police forces, it would risk inflaming the communal conflict, either by empowering the Shiites and the Kurds to slaughter the Sunnis or by enabling a Trojan horse full of Sunni insurgents to penetrate the multiethnic security forces and undermine them.

Although the war in Iraq is mainly a communal conflict, it is not only that. It also contains an important element of nationalist insurgency. One misses an essential piece of the puzzle -- and a reason the conflict is so difficult to contain -- if one does not grasp that many Iraqis (mostly Sunnis) are fighting in some significant measure because they believe they are waging a war of resistance against American occupiers

Biddle misses another crucial element of the conflict in Iraq. His proposed strategy of threatening to manipulate the military balance of power among the factions rests on two reciprocal assumptions, both highly questionable. On the one hand, Biddle assumes that the Sunni resistance would be compelled "to come to the negotiating table" if Washington threatened to throw in its lot with a Shiite-Kurdish force.

U.S. and international mediation must begin by facilitating the work of the Constitutional Review Commission. This commission, which was conceived just before last year's October 15 constitutional referendum but has yet to be formed, is to be appointed by the Iraqi Parliament and given four months to recommend amendments to the constitution; those amendments will then have to be adopted by a simple parliamentary majority and approved by another referendum. This process was established because the current constitution has not been able to garner a consensus and is thus not viable. The document leaves Iraq with an extremely weak central authority. And it implicitly splits control over future oil and gas fields between a new Shiite superregion containing 80 percent of the country's oil and gas resources and a Kurdish region that, once it incorporates Kirkuk, will contain the other 20 percent.

A truly international mediation process in Iraq would need to be carefully planned, designed, and coordinated. And there is relatively little time to do this. But there is no better option for achieving the political compromise necessary to stabilize Iraq and prevent it from descending into all-out civil war.

James Dobbins

When Baghdad fell, the Bush administration initially seemed to view Iraq as a prize won rather than as a burden acquired. It banned French, German, and Russian companies from reconstruction contracts. President George W. Bush rebuffed Prime Minister Tony Blair's efforts to give the United Nations a central role in the mission. The United States chose to designate itself an occupying power, basing its continued military presence on the laws of armed conflict rather than the UN Charter. All these positions were eventually reversed. But by then, an armed resistance movement had emerged, and with it disappeared any opportunity to draw the rest of the international community into Iraq more deeply.

In Iraq, however, this reduced military engagement will have to be paired with a much more active U.S. campaign of regional diplomacy if the slide toward wider civil war is to be averted.

Chaim Kaufmann

Three different civil wars are now raging in Iraq: the first between U.S.-led coalition forces and antigovernment insurgents, the second between the Kurds and other communities in northern Iraq, and the third between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs in the center of the country. The last is the most important because it represents the greatest potential for humanitarian disaster as well as for long-term instability in Iraq and in the region.

Perhaps, but saving at least some lives would require getting only a few brigade commanders in a few places to think seriously about refugee protection.

Last Train From Baghdad

Leslie H. Gelb

The Bush approach looks like an attempt on Bush's part simply to avoid defeat and pass the tar baby on to his successor, Democrat or Republican. The alternative looks like a way to have the United States escape from a quagmire, whatever the consequences. Either way, Americans and Iraqis lose.

Helping decentralize Iraq is also more honorable and realistic than either hanging in there or getting out.

This policy has five elements. The first is to establish, consistent with the current constitution, three strong regions with a limited but effective central government in a federally united Iraq. Doing so would build the post-Saddam Hussein Iraq around Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shiite Arab regions, each largely responsible for its own legislation and administration. Each region's government could pass laws superseding those passed by the central government, as stated in the present constitution, except in areas of the central government's exclusive jurisdiction. The central government would have the deciding responsibility for foreign affairs, border defense, oil and gas production and revenues, and other countrywide matters, as agreed to by the regions. Its writ would be limited and restricted to areas of clear common interests, which would allow Baghdad to meet its responsibilities effectively. The oil provision, in particular, would strengthen the central government beyond its present powers. The underlying principle behind this policy would be to hold Iraq together by allowing each group to satisfy its real ethnic and religious aspirations.

The United Nations, particularly the five permanent members of the Security Council plus the European Union, should precede the conference with appropriate diplomacy and help promote some kind of regional mechanism to ensure that the proposed nonaggression deal, once in place, is respected.

Biddle Replies

What, then, is to be done? Given all the uncertainties, how long should the United States keep trying in Iraq? The longer it persists, the more Americans will die. Yet withdrawal could produce near-genocidal sectarian violence, a regional war, the disruption of international oil supplies, and both a recruiting windfall and new basing possibilities for al Qaeda. If these outcomes are inevitable, then the United States should leave Iraq now. But if they are not, then sacrificing U.S. lives now could save many more later, and staying is an imperative.

Bad Trade
By Barbara R. Bergmann

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006

Blinder says that U.S. educators will have to plan for schools that do better at fostering creativity and imagination in their students. If the future of the United States depends on their achieving that, heaven help us. Blinder also suggests strengthening the (very modest) U.S. social safety net. That is a good idea, but a weak economy with a strong safety net is still an economy in trouble. Is there anything else that can be done? Certainly: impose tariffs on manufactured goods and on services imported through electronic means and prescribe criminal penalties for violators, levy heavy taxes on corporate importers and use the proceeds to increase the income of consumers, and control illegal immigration, which is just another form of job outsourcing.

Beinart has a Big Idea: liberal Democrats, who saved the free world during the Cold War with a sophisticated blend of idealism and pragmatism that he calls "liberal antitotalitarianism," can do it again in the war against the global jihad by returning to those ideals.

In response to the far left's soft policy toward Soviet-directed communism, centrist liberals organized the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in early 1947.

the breakup of the mainstream Democratic consensus into factions represented by two powerful Democratic senators, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, of Washington State, on the right and George McGovern, of South Dakota, on the left. The split has continued, with different players, right up to today.

anecdotes from every phase of a journalistic career that began in 1968, Klein describes how almost every ounce of spontaneity has been squeezed out of politics in the United States by political consultants who view their candidates as commodities to be marketed.

Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid. BY JOE KLEIN. Doubleday, 2006, 272 pp. $23.95.

Klein saves some of his strongest words for Robert Shrum, the longtime Democratic political strategist who has constantly sought to recast the candidates he has advised -- including Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 -- in neopopulist terms while downplaying the importance of national security and foreign policy.) At times, Klein lets Republicans off the hook too easily, perhaps because his personal closeness to many Democrats leads him to be tougher on them. But this is his story, and there is real value in seeing U.S. politics through the very personal lens of one of the country's best journalists.

And if Beinart's book gives the Democrats a better sense of their heroic history and helps them organize around a new-old principle about the United States' role in the world -- well, that would really be something.

Respsonses to "What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable"

Web Exclusive (posted July 17, 2006)

by Fred Kaplan

After the analyses and critiques, one is faced with the discomfiting question: "So what would you do?" Or, as Kevin Drum poses it: To withdraw or not to withdraw; and, if not, why not?

Should the Iraqi government collapse and the military crumble into sectarian militias, the big danger would be that Iraq's neighbors would rush into the power vacuum, whether out of aggrandizement or defense: the Saudis taking over Sunniland, the Iranians unfurling their "crescent arc," the Turks crushing the Kurds. At that point somebody would have to step in and mediate, to stave off not just a civil war but an even bloodier and more destabilizing regional war. Here, too, the United States is—at least potentially—in the best position to play that role, a position that would be enhanced by having a military presence on the ground.

For Washington to play such a constructive role, however, it would have had to lay the diplomatic groundwork ahead of time. That is why I support the otherwise amorphous idea of a "regional conference"—not because it might devise a peace pact or a formula for security (it won't), but because it would at least get all the players in the same room talking.

Much ink as been spilled in the last 30 years about the possible rise of a true third party in America. One of the reasons, and there are many others, that no third party has materialized out of the numerous third party candidacies during that period, I think, is that most independent candidates were running against the Incumbent Party rather than taking affirmative steps to unify voters around an identifiable set of beliefs. Opposing the Incumbent Party is the thread that links Perot, Nader, and the outsider candidacies by the likes of Jesse Ventura.

I think of this as the "bin Laden strategy," since there's considerable evidence that the goal of Osama bin Laden's terrorist attacks was to provoke the United States into a massive military response that he hoped would enrage and unify the Muslim world. Shatz claims that Nasrallah is doing the same thing on a smaller scale.

Is someone in charge down there with a sense of humor?

Ares for those who don't follow Greek mythology was the god of war, but he was drawn as cowardly, arrogant and stupid.

Great name for the rocket being created for Bush's plans for space. The only thing better would have been to name it the "Arbooster".