But I think the larger problem is with the world community, not the American people. Bush may end up winning this election and not paying a heavy (electoral) price.

However, the damage the US has done to its ability to operate effectively on the world stage is very large. Very large. The US has virtually no credibility, even in countries like Britain. Their ability to use military force has been severely circumscribed by Iraq.

Ben P

offer the promise of establishing a democracy in the heart of the Arab world as the primary reason for invading Iraq. And you can be certain that if he had done so, congress and the American people would've balked. If he is reelected, and is able to turn Iraq around, and onto the path of liberal democracy, a majority of Americans will forgive him for his deceptions. But if the Iraq war fails you can be sure that the deceptions on which it was based will be the least of our worries. You can expect instability to spread throughout the region, and elsewhere, possibly even here at home, with the culture war potentially metastasizing into something worse.

does very much have the potential of destablizing other gulf states, particularly if the situation on the ground worsens. If the House of Saud were to fall, and oil supplies from the region were severely curtailed, or interrupted, huge swaths of America are a week away from being plunged into the nineteenth century. In a country as politically divided as ours, this could be a very, very bad thing.

I enjoy chatting with you as well. You're quite a smart person.

" However, I suspect that this fools gold vision of finding easy countries to invade and attempting to democratize them will not prove to be popular strategy, say 10 years from now, because I don't think it has much chance of success."

That's a very compelling point. I have no idea how this is all going to play out, but there is the real possibility me thinks that the conflict could begin to spill out over the borders into neighboring states, and that will be the pretext for America becoming militarily involved with said states.

"The neocons think we can fight Islamic terrorism like we could fight Communism or Nazism, but we can't."

Well of course the neoconservative strategy of radical democratic interventionism worked against Nazism, but was a miserable failure in the cold war (although of course America defeated Germany in a total war, rather than the kind of relatively "polite" war we've waged in Iraq to date).

"In this sense, Saddam Hussein would almost be a desireable kind of leader in that his "presidency" (or whatever it was) flowed from a Eurocentric, enlightenment model of the nation-state and modernization, much in the way that Nasser's Egypt did. His is the end of the era. What will emerge in Iraq will most likely be more amenable to Islamic fanaticism than Hussein's regime. People like Al-Sadr are more the future than not, I suspect."

There shouldn't be any question that the failure of Arab nationalism in all its forms (including Baathism) to liberate the people of the Arab world from their sense of historical grievance and humiliation (not to mention provide them with a decent standard of living) has played a central role in creating the Islamist monster in the Arab world, but that's not to say that any Arab government in the last century has been a model for enlightenment liberal democracy. Some have introduced certain aspects of modernity, but all have lacked the best that enlightenment has to offer - political, economic, and cultural freedom.

centralization cum populist wave is Germany (and no doubt other western European countries soon):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1324934,00.html