EDITORIAL: "What If We Lose? The consequences of U.S. defeat in Iraq," Wall Street Journal, 22 March 2006, p. A16.

EDITORIAL: "Hobbes in Sudan: What a world without U.S. power looks like," Wall Street Journal, 23 March 2006, p. A16.

OP-ED: "Speak Softly and Carry a Smaller Stick: Americans aren't isolationist, just more cautious," by Andrew Kohut, New York Times, 24 March 2006, p. A21.

Great pair of editorials from the WSJ, which is firing on all cylinders for me lately.

They're great because they make you challenge your assumptions, especially on the far better second one.

In the first editorial, the staff reaches in the right direction, but they cite symptoms, not the disease. If we lost in Iraq, we'd lose credibility on non-proliferation (no, the deal with India did that--and good riddance to that chimera, say I), we'd lose all credibility with Muslim reformers (also a bit weak, since the reality we face is figuring out how to tame the Islamists, not the secular reformists), and we'd invite attacks on the U.S. (dead to right, there).

I don't deny the truth of these statements, I just say they would only be symptoms of a far larger problem: the forces of disconnectedness inside the Middle East would see a great victory in pushing Iraq into the abyss. What they cannot achieve by popular acceptance (civilizational apartheid), they would at least achieve through fomenting chaos locally. And in doing so, they'd trigger more rigid authoritarianism throughout the region, thus playing into the hands of those who prefer violence as the pathway to power. Money would stay away, the youth bulge could not be served, and the West would think much harder about speeding up their own pathway down the carbon chain to hybrids, fuel cells and hydrogen. Africa would not be next. Instead, it's chaotic violence would be replicated in the Middle East, eventually encompassing it. And the two-thousand combat deaths we've suffered to date would be expanded dramatically in coming years, with many of those deaths happening on our shores.

Sitting on the Gap and trying to firewall ourselves off from its consequences will not work. Other nations will have to settle this situation if we cannot lead some larger, collective effort than the sort our strangely myopic fixation on WMDs got us in Iraq. You want some real colonialism? This is the fastest route: making it every great power for itself in the Gap.

All that becomes eminently possible and highly probable if we lose in Iraq.

Having said all that, our expectations of what constitutes victory needs to get a whole lot more realistic. Everyone with any experience or expertise on the subject of counter-insurgencies says those efforts typically run about a decade. But it's hard to see how any such effort of that length could survive the self-criticism we regularly heap upon ourselves over the lack of instant results.

Ah, but how can we have patience with the casualties?

Ask yourself the better question of why it has to be our casualties. If we get enough friends in the SysAdmin effort, there are no significant casualties, as in the Balkans. And please, don't rewrite that experience ex post facto to make that one somehow seem "easy" compared to the Middle East. And to the extent that some must occur, they should obviously be spread among the Core's great powers. If you have 2,000 combat casualties in Iraq and they're 500 American, 500 other Old Core, and 1000 New Core (Russia, India, China, Brazil, to name the biggies), then it's not an issue among an American public that sees collective authority, collective effort and collective sacrifice.

Americans don't tire of the effort, nor the sacrifice, but the sense that we're in this somehow alone, uncredentialed by the support of others.

Build the larger rule set, or what I've dubbed the A-to-Z rule set for processing politically-bankrupt states, and the Americans will not see a "global test" but a global ratification process for identifying shared interests, shared tasks, and shared burdens. Americans give. They just want to see results.

This rule set must inevitably come. I would just rather see America lead in its enunciation rather than wait to have it imposed upon itself by others.

Why? I want America to lead, not follow. And I want to stop wasting time between here and there.