Our Last Real Chance

Newsweek: Images of America's massive operations in Fallujah have generated anti-American sentiment across Iraq. The United States could be entering a ruinous cycle. As attacks on its troops grow, it uses full-blown military might, which produces anti-Americanism, which helps insurgents. When pro-American members of the Governing Council resign in protest, it must be that they sense a shift in the public mood.

The contest to succeed the Americans is beginning. Shia religious leaders and politicians are beginning to speak out against the American occupation because being against foreigners—"Out with the infidels"—is an easy way of demonstrating nationalist credentials. There is a growing market for anti-Americanism in Iraq, and politicians are beginning to compete for it.

...Washington's grander plans for a new Iraq will have to be put on hold. The goal for now is to create a stable, credible, even popular Iraqi grouping to which Washington can hand over power. If that means incorporating Islamic fundamentalists, tribal chieftains and even some former low-level Baathists, so be it. If this step is successful, the United States can push for reforms because of its forces on the ground and its offers of aid. It should ask the United Nations to administer the political process and some of the aid, so that the handover is seen as the return of Iraq to the international community with new participation from the world. Otherwise, June 30 will change nothing—certainly not the attacks on American imperialism.

The date, June 30, is less important than the entity to which power is transferred. If that new government is seen as an American puppet, then challenges to it will persist, and America will find itself propping up an unpopular local regime that is doomed to fail. And that dilemma reminds one not of the British in Iraq, but of the United States in Vietnam.