TALLAHASSEE - No media voice has been more sympathetic to America's adventure in Iraq than the internationally respected British journal, the Economist. So it had to come as a most unkind cut for President Bush last week when the magazine's lead editorial pronounced this cautionary judgment: "An incompetent imperialist is bad for everybody."
It went on to say that the test of the administration's competence, with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq, would be "the urgent application of more money, attention and ingenuity than America has invested so far."
Not so many weeks ago the focus of debate was whether Bush and his sidekick, Tony Blair, had practiced deception to justify a war whose principal pretext - an abundance of imminently dangerous weapons of mass destruction - still lacks a single spoonful of proof.
The jury is still out as to their integrity. But if their assumptions were honest, then their judgment, which is to say their competence, was hideous.
To be simply wrong about the weapons would be in itself a major blunder. The only other even remotely plausible justification for a war at that time and place was to exchange a tyrant's regime for the Middle East's first functional Arab democracy. So far, however, all that we have to show for it is a dysfunctional state of anarchy, a petri dish for terrorism. Nearly every assumption was incorrect.
Iraq's infrastructure and economy are in ruins, no one's life or property is safe, and almost daily another American soldier comes home maimed or dead. It is becoming stickier than Vietnam. For the president to say that we will not flinch in the face of terrorists is to beg the question of who lit their fire.
There can't be any light at the end of this tunnel until there is more light in Washington.
The president and his flock of chicken hawks are still set on on winning the false peace as cheaply and arrogantly as they thought they won the war. To pacify Iraq will require massive additional investments of troop strength, civilian skills and money, all of which would need to be carried out under the United Nations' authority rather than our own. It is a pipe dream, of course, to expect the United Nations or any other nation to help us so long as Bush insists on being proud boss of the mess he made. To secure the sort of international help that the administration is belatedly seeking, the president will have to control his hubris. It is doubtful whether he can.
There is a perpetual debate about whether it is more useful to a politician to be regarded as competent or honest. The long tenure of such ethically challenged figures as Boss Pendergast and Edwin Edwards seems to suggest that, forced to choose, Americans consider competence more indispensable than integrity.
(Speaking of competence, wasn't the president a bit too quick to assure the nation that terrorism wasn't responsible for the Great Blackout? There was no clue at the moment what had caused it, and the first rumors - of a lightning strike or a fire in Canada - turned out to be wrong. He properly could have said that there was no apparent indication of terrorism, which was and remains true. But they still don't know what really happened, let alone why.)
If the Democrats are smart, they will set aside the issue of whether the administration lied its way into the war, and focus relentlessly on its apparent incompetence. Iraq is already one mistake too many; can those who made it be trusted not to make another?
Inconveniently for the Democrats, though, most of their otherwise credible presidential candidates endorsed the war, which calls their own competence into question; if not their competence, their courage.
Only two, Sen. Bob Graham and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, voted against it. (Not being in Congress, Howard Dean didn't have the opportunity.) For reasons having nothing to do with the issue, Graham and Kucinich seem to be gaining no traction in the race. Kucinich had too little heft to start with. Graham, who is as qualified to be president as anybody in the race (and more so than several), may have started much too late to catch up with either the prowar candidates or with Dean, who has played the issue splendidly.
But to fully exploit the competence issue, the Democrats need a credible exit strategy. Most Americans understand that we can't just pull out, as Kucinich advises, without shameful consequences including but not limited to the massacre of anyone suspected of collaboration. Both Dean and Graham have made this point in the context of internationalizing the effort. Whether that can still be done is as much a matter of hope as conjecture, but it's the only plausible way out.
Those who led us in are not necessarily unsuited to lead us out, but it would require a leap of faith for voters to assume that they have magically acquired the essential judgment and competence. Bearing in mind the adage that wise people change their minds often, but fools never, it would be enormously reassuring to hear from George Bush - or, for that matter, from Sens. Lieberman, Gephardt, Kerry and Edwards - the cleansing words, "I was wrong."
