Iraq: The New War

The irony, nearly six months after the US launched this war, is that while Saddam Hussein has been unseated, the threat that Iraq posed to the Gulf has not been removed.

Indeed, it may be that the United States, with its overwhelming military power, has succeeded only in transforming an eventual and speculative threat into a concrete and immediate one. Now the Bush administration finds itself trying to perform the tightrope walk of building a stable and friendly government beneath the shadow of escalating violence and a growing and inevitable nationalism—and it does so in the face of an impatient and bewildered public and an approaching election campaign.

The administration began its Iraq venture with an air of absolute determination, taking a kind of grim pride in defying the United Nations and "doing what is right." America, and Iraq, will need a different kind of determination now—and a new-found honesty to go with it.