Iraq a Failure?

NewsMax, a usually pretty conservative and pretty pro-Bush source, reports that both William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama now publicly call Bush's Iraq policy a failure.

Maybe so.

Best of intentions, but the Bush administration may indeed have been wrong about the idea of importing democracy to Iraq or to the Middle East by arms.

I said at the time I thought this was the wrong idea: I thought they should take out Saddam, but hand power quickly to a king or anyone else with some chance of holding things together, and leave things to evolve on their own.

Then I started to think the theory might be right, watching developments from here in the Middle East. There has been a clear movement to democracy in Egypt, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine, and there is every reason to believe Bush's policy in Iraq has been the catalyst.

But Iraq specifically has not been going all that well. If it is too soon to call it a failure, the cost is getting high enough for the US that it is fair to say it was not, for them, worth it.