One Year After

One year ago, President Bush began the war in Iraq. Most Americans expected military victory to come quickly, as it did. Despite the administration's optimism about what would follow, it was also easy to predict that the period after the fall of Baghdad would be very messy and very dangerous. In that sense, right now we're exactly where we expected to be.

It's nonetheless important to remember that none of this might have happened if we had known then what we know now. No matter what the president believed about the long-term threat posed by Saddam Hussein, he would have had a much harder time selling this war of choice to the American people if they had known that the Iraqi dictator had been reduced to a toothless tiger by the first Persian Gulf war and by United Nations weapons inspectors. Iraq's weapons programs had been shut down, Mr. Hussein had no threatening weapons stockpiled, the administration was exaggerating evidence about them, and there was, and is, no evidence that Mr. Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Right now, our highest priority is making the best of a very disturbing situation. Even our European allies who opposed the war want to see Iraq stabilized and turned over to its citizens — even if they don't necessarily see Washington as the force to do that. The other possibility, an Iraq flung into chaos and civil war, open to manipulation by every unscrupulous political figure and terrorist group in the Middle East, is too awful to contemplate.

This is a good moment to take stock of what has been accomplished and what has not, especially since the day is rapidly approaching when the United States hopes to turn over the governing of Iraq to the leaders of the nation's three major ethnic or religious groups — who have shown no serious signs of being able to cooperate.