CRITERIA FOR FAILURE

This story raises a critical question that I have been trying to ask supporters of the Bush administration's policy on Iraq (I also asked Josh Chafetz this question in an e-mail a while back): what are your criteria for failure? What would have to happen in order for you to believe that the administration has failed? I'm not attempting to stack the deck here, either. I'm just wondering how people think about the intervention.

In many wars, the criteria for failure are pretty clear: surrender, loss of territory. For humanitarian interventions, the criteria for failure seem to be: continuance of the humanitarian crisis that triggered the intervention, and, in the long term, the persistence of the conditions that led to the crisis (failed states, ethnic oppression and the resulting tensions, etc.). In the context of humanitarian interventions, the criteria are broader and, in many ways, less clear, than the criteria for failure in WWII, for example.

What about here? Part of the administration's answer is to attempt to employ the criteria for wars like WWII: surrender (in a broad sense, at least), withdrawal of troops from the territory in question. But that's simplistic, because this war has become more like a humanitarian intervention in its goals, and, indeed, was always defended as a humanitarian intervention by the administration (in some moods) and by many war supporters.

Larry Diamond's answer is fairly clear, I think. A lack of effective force for establishing security indicates failure. From the SF Chronicle article:

"You can't develop democracy without security," he said. "In Iraq, it's really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don't get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that."

Now for those who believe that the "mission" has already been "accomplished" by virtue of deposing Saddam Hussein, what happens afterward is essentially irrelevant; success has already been achieved. But for those who believe that success is dependent on the establishment of some sort of semi-decent government in Iraq, the question is more complicated. Diamond helps to provide one answer, and it's worth taking seriously.

This is not simply a partisan issue. It's one of the inevitable characteristics of an election year -- and of this particular administration's approach to policy -- that any criticism of the administration's policies is denounced as partisan, or worse. That's a shortsighted view, and at any rate it becomes less plausible as people like Larry Diamond voice their concerns.