http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6678-2004Aug16.html

Another former Bush fan--at least in so far as he was carrying out the Liberal version of the New American Century--decides to ditch. Though I don't know how much I agree with his assessment that there were only two options about how to deal with Baghdad, but he is right, like Andrew Sullivan a few weeks ago, that even if you believed in the ends of the US war on Iraq, the means left much to be desired.

Perhaps Iraq would have been a disaster no matter what. But there's a thinly veiled racism behind such views, implying that Iraqis are savages genetically disposed to produce chaos and anarchy. In fact, other nation-building efforts over the past decade have gone reasonably well, when well planned and executed.

A bit over the top here, but there is obviously racism from top to bottom in this war--the basic premise of it in even Zakaria's understanding, is that the people of Iraq wanted and needed liberation, but were afraid of being liberated AND that Saddam is so very different than all the responible, reasonable white folks in the world that he couldn't be allowed to have any more of the big scary guns we'd been selling him. As for nation building, I would like for him to give some concrete examples of when that has worked and in what context.

Here is where he seems right in essance, though his use of corporate philosophy as opposed to political science is telling.

"Strategy is execution," Louis Gerstner, former chief executive of IBM, American Express and RJR Nabisco, has often remarked. In fact, it's widely understood in the business world that having a good objective means nothing if you implement it badly. "Unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they're pointless," writes Larry Bossidy, former chief executive of Honeywell.