Cakewalkers go AWOL

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Two hundred billion dollars later, President Bush is now almost alone in seeing Iraq as a major battlefield against Osama bin Laden's terrorists.

Most of the original armchair strategists of the "cakewalk" brigade had gone AWOL. Inside the 61-square-mile zone surrounded by reality, otherwise known as the District of Columbia, the cacophony of mating cicadas had put the war hawks to flight.

The global newspaper Financial Times' Gerard Baker wrote: "It is hard to find anyone who admits to having supported the war at all. If success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, Washington is now running the largest and most desperate orphanage in modern intellectual history."

Those who were once gung-ho to liberate Iraq listened politely, without objection, to various face-saving, U.N.-sponsored scenarios. Accelerated Iraqi sovereignty now seemed a small price to bring U.S. troops home by April 2005, the second anniversary of the occupation.

The tsunami of anti-American venom unleashed around the world by the Abu Ghraib torture pictures also has crested and begun to subside. But Mr. Bush is still being pummeled mercilessly for what Le Monde called "out of control hoity-toity hubris."

A common editorial thread between the world's most respected journals was that the occupation has weakened the world's only superpower, both within and without Iraq; that its strongest alliances have splintered; and that its policies have been rejected by overwhelming majorities throughout the world. The dominant emotion seemed sorrow, not anger.

The Financial Times' star columnist Martin Wolf, self-described as "a huge admirer" of the United States, wrote that "freedom and democracy survived the 20th century only because of American actions and values," but now, like "the vast majority of humanity," he sees that the Bush administration "fails to understand the basis of U.S. power, mis-specifies U.S. objectives and is incompetent in executing its intentions."

As a result, Mr. Wolf concludes, "The position of the U.S. -- and so of the West -- is worse ... than it was the day after September 11, 2001. Then, a huge proportion of humanity viewed the U.S. as the victim of an outrage. Today ... it is seen as a perpetrator of them."

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, in the current issue of the New Republic, writes, "America's credibility has been tarnished among its traditional friends, its prestige has plummeted worldwide, and global hostility toward the United States has reached a historical high."

Mr. Brzezinski says the United States could still redeem the Iraqi disaster by subordinating "as soon as possible, the American occupation -- which is rapidly alienating the Iraqis -- to the visible presence of the U.N., headed by a high commissioner to whom effective authority should then be transferred. A genuinely empowered U.N. high commissioner could, in turn, progressively yield genuine sovereignty to the Iraqis with much greater prospects of gaining public support for the interim government."