Who lost Iraq?

Via Daily Kos, another conservative gets shrill.

By invading Iraq, the United States in effect took Fallujah and much of the rest of Anbar Province from Saddam and gave it to Osama bin Laden. If that is George Bush’s definition of victory, it would be interesting to know what he would consider a defeat.

Is George Bush an Iranian agent? Discuss.

Tomorrow's NY Times Magazine cover story (not yet online) about Fern Holland is pretty illustrative of how bad things have become in Iraq. Ir's depressing. She went over there to fight for Iraqi women's rights and ended up in a hail of bullets, executed by a group of Iraqi police. A lot of good people have gone over there with the best intentions to help build a civil society. Unfortunately they and their government never took into account the cultural fissures that were sure to erupt in the absence of a working Iraqi government, let alone the Iraqi army. Add to that the complete lack of planning and a a CPA apparently staffed by callow political appointees with no experience of nation-building and no knowledge of international law, and you've got quite a situation.

It was an exciting time. Visions were grand. Cash was flowing by the truckload from Baghdad. Because it was confiscated money from Saddam's coffers that the U.S. was distributing and not official American funds, there were almost no regulations on how it was spent. As Rachel Roe, a reservist and lawyer who was rebuilding the legal system in Najaf, told me: "Fern showed up in the palace in Baghdad looking for the head of democracy and human rights to see what's the plan and found some 21-year old political appointee who had no idea what was going on. Someone would just say, 'O.K., take this cash, put it in a backpack and build democracy centers.' It was insane. I was looking for guidance on Iraqi law and was met by a 22 year-old American in charge of the Ministry of Justice who said, 'Don't worry about that, I' pretty sure we're going to rewrite that constitution anyway.' This is a country of 23 million people, and we're there with no plan for what we're going to do. So we just started figuring it out ourselves."

[...]

Fern Holland was making a name for herself. Those she touched called her Barbie, the doll, the white dove or the angel dropped from the sky. But there were also the other names that adhere to Westerners -- spy, Jew -- and, in her case, dangerous agent injecting Western notions in the minds of good Muslim women. Oumashi too, who had lived for a time in the United States and brought back her American clothes and airs and ideas about women's liberation, was considered an American agent. They were, after all, touching Najaf, the center of the Shiite world. It is the home of the shrine of Ali and of the Shiite's most sacred burial ground, where millions have transported their dead for burial in the city's catacombed cemetery. Billions of dollars were at stake from the pilgrim industry, as was the power to define much of the Shiite majority's future in the new Iraq. The last thing male religious leaders wanted was Holland and Oumashi teaching women that they had the power to select their own leaders.

[...]

As if suspecting that Holland's death might breed doubts, one of her colleagues at the C.P.A. in Baghdad wrote me to: "Fern had no patience for the narcissistic anguish about the legitimacy of American power that now pervades the foreign-policy establishment, and that is all about what Americans feel about themselves. For Fern it was all about the Iraqi people and what she could do to help this obviously tortured people pull themselves out of the morass of repression."

But how do you separate Fern's humanitarian mission from the politics of American occupation?

UPDATED to fix a typo.