No subject

assurances that all will come out well. AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht assures us
that the moment to acknowledge "democracy's success in Iraq" has arrived. To
his colleague Michael Ledeen, the explanation for the turnaround couldn't be
clearer: "We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it." In an
essay entitled "Mission Accomplished" that is being touted by the AEI crowd,
Bartle Bull, the foreign editor of the British magazine Prospect, instructs
us that "Iraq's biggest questions have been resolved." Violence there "has
ceased being political." As a result, whatever mayhem still lingers is "no
longer nearly as important as it was." Meanwhile, Frederick W. Kagan, an AEI
resident scholar and the arch-advocate of the surge, announces that the
"credibility of the prophets of doom" has reached "a low ebb."

Presumably Kagan and his comrades would have us believe that recent events
vindicate the prophets who in 2002-03 were promoting preventive war as a key
instrument of U.S. policy. By shifting the conversation to tactics, they
seek to divert attention from flagrant failures of basic strategy. Yet what
exactly has the surge wrought? In substantive terms, the answer is: not
much.

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and
economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The
recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstanding,
signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States
has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is
incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than
three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed
President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty
remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the
United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany
and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to
Hurricane Katrina. Even today, Iraqi electrical generation meets barely half
the daily national requirements. Baghdad households now receive power an
average of 12 hours each day -- six hours fewer than when Saddam Hussein
ruled. Oil production still has not returned to pre-invasion levels. Reports
of widespread fraud, waste and sheer ineptitude in the administration of
U.S. aid have become so commonplace that they barely last a news cycle.
(Recall, for example, the 110,000 AK-47s, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of
body armor and 115,000 helmets intended for Iraqi security forces that,
according to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon cannot
account for.) U.S. officials repeatedly complain, to little avail, about the
paralyzing squabbling inside the Iraqi parliament and the rampant corruption
within Iraqi ministries. If a primary function of government is to provide
services, then the government of Iraq can hardly be said to exist.

Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the United States is tacitly
abandoning its efforts to create a truly functional government in Baghdad.
By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents -- an initiative that has
been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence
than the influx of additional American troops -- U.S. forces have affirmed
the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the
Green Zone.

Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal
leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war
touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a
Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue
linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with
insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt.
Richard Meiers of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right:
"We're paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what
happens when the money stops?"

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of state
Colin Powell's now-famous "Pottery Barn" rule: Iraq is irretrievably broken,
and we own it. To say that any amount of "kicking ass" will make Iraq whole
once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma remains unchanged: continue to
pour lives and money into Iraq with no end in sight, or cut our losses and
deal with the consequences of failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has
ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of
the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst
Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose
of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting
calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had
pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as
too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and
leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and
out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a
masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William
Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat out
of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in recent months
all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of
Iraq for the foreseeable future.

Such success comes at a cost. U.S. casualties in Iraq have recently
declined. Yet since Petraeus famously testified before Congress last
September, Iraqi insurgents have still managed to kill more than 100
Americans. Meanwhile, to fund the war, the Pentagon is burning through
somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion per week. Given that further
changes in U.S. policy are unlikely between now and the time that the next
administration can take office and get its bearings, the lavish expenditure
of American lives and treasure is almost certain to continue indefinitely.

But how exactly do these sacrifices serve the national interest? What has
the loss of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and the commitment of about $1 trillion
-- with more to come -- actually gained the United States?

Bush had once counted on the U.S. invasion of Iraq to pay massive dividends.
Iraq was central to his administration's game plan for eliminating jihadist
terrorism. It would demonstrate how U.S. power and beneficence could
transform the Muslim world. Just months after the fall of Baghdad, the
president declared, "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the
Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."
Democracy's triumph in Baghdad, he announced, "will send forth the news,
from Damascus to Tehran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation."
In short, the administration saw Baghdad not as a final destination but as a
way station en route to even greater successes.

In reality, the war's effects are precisely the inverse of those that Bush
and his lieutenants expected. Baghdad has become a strategic cul-de-sac.
Only the truly blinkered will imagine at this late date that Iraq has shown
the United States to be the "stronger horse." In fact, the war has revealed
the very real limits of U.S. power. And for good measure, it has boosted
anti-Americanism to record levels, recruited untold numbers of new
jihadists, enhanced the standing of adversaries such as Iran and diverted
resources and attention from Afghanistan, a theater of war far more directly
relevant to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Instead of draining the jihadist
swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it.

Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and
the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to
bequeath the Iraq war to his successor -- no doubt cause for celebration at
AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the
stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush's
successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United
States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach
to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not
find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.

According to the war's most fervent proponents, Bush's critics have become
so "invested in defeat" that they cannot see the progress being made on the
ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so
passionately invested in a futile war's perpetuation. They are unable to see
that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder
that persistence will only compound.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at
Boston University. His new book, "The Limits of Power," will be published
later this year.