The Unimaginable Price of Failure

BAGHDAD -- Five rockets hit the al-Rashid Hotel here just a couple of hours before we had been scheduled to check in.

The irony was a tragic one. The attack, killing one and wounding 15, postponed for a day briefings that had been set up to convince our small group, a fact-finding mission sponsored by the Aspen Institute Berlin, that the situation in Iraq wasn't as bad as portrayed in most media reports.

Yet when faced with a choice between the arguments of U.S. spinmeisters and a multiple rocket launcher, it's hard to discount the irrefutable logic of the death lob toward one's intended bedroom. The attack was a stinging message to those trying to reconstruct Iraq, for whom the al Rashid was home base, that they weren't safe even behind the impenetrable concrete barriers that rise like a latter-day Berlin Wall around their "green zone."

At the same time, nothing could be more dangerous in today's Iraq than overattention to the daily deaths and explosions, as horrible as they become. That may be harsh to say after two of the bloodiest days since the war's official end, a lethal demonstration of the opposition's growing ability to coordinate and strike. On Tuesday alone, four explosions including an attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross left 35 dead and more than 220 injured.

Yet the aim of this terror is less to kill than to further erode not only American but also international public support for an engagement that can only pay off in years and not months.

One member of our group spoke of this danger as he put on his kevlar helmet and flak jacket. Mideast scholar Foaud Ajami worried about the threat of a "noble failure" of U.S. policy in Iraq. His point: America's effort to deal with the rot in the Mideast, starting with Iraq, is both justified and noble; the question is whether America has the stomach and creativity to stick it out. "We have an imperial mission but lack an imperial culture," he frowns. Commentators for the Arab news channel Al Jazeera are already predicting that Baghdad will be like Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993 -- ignominious withdrawals.

Yet this time the stakes are higher. Failure in Iraq may not only lead to civil war here between Shiites and Sunnis. Arab liberal intellectuals believe it would also set back the best chance the Mideast has seen for decades, if not centuries, to modernize and democratize. That in turn would erupt in new rounds of terrorism and renewed strength for radical Islam. It would also thwart the dreams of Arab liberals who had hoped that the American defeat of the ugly Islamist regime in Afghanistan and the despotic nationalist regime of Saddam Hussein meant that Washington had finally learned that its long-time unquestioning support for authoritarian Mideast regimes had to end.

"This is all about how seriously we can take America," says Shafeeq Gharba, the president of the new American University of Kuwait that will open in September. Changes are underway in the region that could be put in jeopardy if America stumbles. Mr. Gharba believes for example that his institution, like three other new private universities, is a direct result of the September 11 aftermath, when Kuwait's rulers gave the green light to private education and some privatization of the economy. He says he watches with concern as Democratic presidential candidates in the U.S. launch political rocket attacks on the Bush administration, which strengthens the opponents of the Iraq experiment ranging from France and Germany to neighboring Mideast states. "When the U.S. is hesitant or unclear it has an impact. It hurts."

Wandering around Saddam Hussein's vast former palace in central Beirut, where the Coalition Provisional Authority has its headquarters, one literally sees Mr. Ajami's point about America's insufficient imperial instinct. Indeed, the most imperial aspects about the setting are Saddam's over-the-top decor and the Gurkha guards who provide the palace's outsourced protection, reminiscent of their historic role as the fiercest warriors of the British army. (They now wear the uniform of the private company Global Security.)

American officers, Italian carabinieri, Spanish soldiers and staff members from the vast coalition bureaucracy munch frankfurters and chicken cordon bleu off red plastic trays in a vast ballroom of marble floors, marble walls and a 60-foot high lattice-work ceiling. The greater the threats are outside, the more the CPA hunkers down inside, leaving on official missions beyond the green zone only under armed escort. It's an inefficient way to win hearts and minds, but more deaths also erodes highly conditional American public support.

One U.S. officer says with frustration that the last military generation had it easier "re-educating" the Japanese and Germans because they were more disciplined societies than Iraq's. He nods toward 19- and 20-year-old soldiers, many of whose first brush with things foreign is Baghdad. "Nothing has prepared these kids to understand a people willing to blow up their own oil pipelines or even themselves when they could be creating a better society," he says.

It would be asking too much to expect these young soldiers to understand entirely their role in the grand drama being played out in Iraq, as a terrorist-struck America gambles for the soul of the entire Mideast by trying to force positive change here. Attacks on coalition forces escalate even as Iraqis begin to lay the groundwork for a more pluralist, free-market society with liberal universities, lively street markets and unknown freedom to speak out against authority. Across the Mideast, Arabs are debating the role of Islam among themselves as seldom before.

Ahmad Bishara, the head of the National Democratic Movement in Kuwait, says, "You in America began to ask yourselves, 'Why do they hate us.' What we're asking now is, 'Where did we fail? Did Islam fail us or did we fail Islam.' You cannot find an intelligent newspaper today not raising these issues. Where did we fail that our children crash planes into the World Trade Center instead of building planes."

American success in Iraq won't bring progress and modernization to the Mideast, but nothing will happen without it. When America's enemies launch rockets at the al Rashid Hotel and blow up the Red Cross headquarters, it isn't time to cut and run but to answer the challenge. If America and its friends don't stay the course now and help change Iraq for the better, they'll have failed to learn the real lesson of Sept. 11: problems don't go away when they aren't addressed. They just grow uglier.

Write to Frederick Kempe at fred.kempe@wsj.com¹

Updated October 29, 2003