Third, what specific criteria do you recommend that we should use over the coming months and years to measure whether the Iraq invasion has been a success?

Let’s try these:

Elections

There’s a saying to the effect that one election is not proof of a successful democracy. Two elections are. I think at least two, preferably three, elections that actually have a chance of changing things, would go a long way toward marking “success”. The franchise should extend to at least 50% of the population in all elections.

Free Market

The system should preserve enough economic freedom to allow individuals to become prosperous. People who are prosperous, who can buy the good things in life and give their kids futures, have a lot less time for suicide bombings or insurrections.

Democratic Form of Government

Here, I’d like to refer the reader to the book, Power Kills by R. J. Rummel. He picks up on the fact that democratic governments are much less likely to make war against each other, and spends some time exploring why. Establishing a government that behaves like other democracies would be a major success.

Exchange Culture

This is what Rummel calls a culture where disputes are solved by negotiation rather than by violence. When a population uses negotiation as a first resort and violence as a last, it creates the expectation that the government will do the same.

Non-violent social field

(This will take years, possibly a generation or two.) The society must adopt a — zeitgeist, if you will — which considers violence to be something completely separate from other methods of settling disputes. When violence is initiated, the initiator has crossed a line into an area that is not part of the social norm. In this way, the mental and emotional barriers to violence are strengthened.

If free elections take place in January, that will be encouraging.

If free elections take place again in 2-4 years, that will be very encouraging.

If many institutions are set up, within about 5 years, to allow people to settle disputes nonviolently, and strict punishments are imposed for using violence anyway, that will be very encouraging.

If the next generation is brought up believing that violence is not acceptable unless the Uncivilized force it upon one, that will be extremely encouraging.

Can we succeed? I don’t know. All I know is, if we bail out now, we’ll certainly fail, and the price of failure will be a death rate that makes the Twin Towers look like a hiccup.

To give Bush credit, the campaign in Iraq was a huge gamble, and totally unnecessary — from the perspective of a political calculation.

He could have stopped with the invasion of Afghanistan. Maybe he could have had people scurrying across the globe looking for Osama. The mainstream public would understand why he couldn’t be found. Bush could have sat on his laurels, and let Iraq wait.

Of course, eventually, containment would have finished breaking down. The Oil for Food Palaces program would have morphed into an Oil for Uranium or Oil for Anthrax program as the underground market opened further.

But the next attack, inevitable as it would have been, might have waited until Bush was safely out of office.

And then again, it might not.

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