The more sophisticated will declare that the Iraqis were culturally destined to fail. ~Robert Kagan

What exactly are we talking about here?  Is it the Iraqi failure to cultivate a working, nonsectarian, representative democracy under the rule of law?  Well, then, yes, they were “culturally destined” to fail at this, since the overwhelming majority of them had absolutely no experience of this kind of politics and their political tradition has never had such a thing.  Then again, it is totally unreasonable and actually quite mad to expect that any people on the face of the earth could pull together a functioning government based on principles and habits that they had never had before while simultaneously suffering from the effects of war and rampant insecurity.  Had Americans not had decades of experience and centuries of legal and constitutional tradition and received wisdom in political theory, we would have made quite a hash of things as well (as virtually every liberal revolutionary movement elsewhere in the world did).  There is all the difference in the world between guarding a constitutional inheritance that has been thoroughly elaborated and developed and making one up from scratch based on largely alien models.  Some conservatives still understood that in 2002-03, but not nearly enough.

In another sense, the Iraqis “failed” to create or re-establish their nation-state after Hussein.  This is because their nation-state is a cobbled-together, artificial contraption that lost whatever meaning it once held for a large number of “Iraqis” some time ago.  Yet again, they “failed” to do the impossible.  So, yes, the Iraqis “failed,” but they could not have succeeded at the tasks they had before them.  I doubt very much that any people in the world could have done any better, given the resources at their disposal.

They have failed to create a functioning army and security force, but then it was our occupation authorities that got rid of the old army and security force in the name of ideological cleansing.  That one mistake probably accounts for 50% of the mess today.  Fools with WWII analogies dancing in their brains did more damage to this war effort than any number of insurgents. 

Of course, the impossibility of the Iraqis’ tasks underscores the futility of the American mission.  If American success rests on Iraqi political reconciliation, it is not going to happen.  Iraqi failure is mitigated by the recognition that “success” as determined by the goals set out by the administration was never realistic, which also means that American success was never realistic.  Those who didn’t want to create an opportunity for Al Qaeda should have not started an unnecessary war.  Once it was started, and the unreachable goals were set down, Al Qaeda and others were going to exploit the situation.  This was foreseeable.  Some foresaw it, and they were largely written off as appeasers or worse.  Complaining that the outcome that will follow U.S. withdrawal is not “tolerable” is useless: of course it isn’t “tolerable,” in the sense that it is a dreadful outcome, but neither is it all that avoidable.  In politics and foreign policy, serious people tolerate what they cannot eliminate, fix or avoid.  Other people follow the advice of Robert Kagan.