If It's Civil War, Do We Know It - Iraq

By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: July 24, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The first signs that America's top officials in Iraq were revising their thinking about what they might accomplish in Iraq came a year ago. As Iraq resumed its sovereignty after the period of American occupation, the new American team that arrived then, headed by Ambassador John D. Negroponte, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer III.

The new team called the departing Americans 'the illusionists,' for their conviction that America could create a Jeffersonian democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein's medieval brutalism. One American military commander began his first encounter with American reporters by asking, 'Well, gentlemen, tell me: Do you think that events here afford us the luxury of hope?'

It seemed clear then that the administration, for all its public optimism, had begun substituting more modest goals for the idealists' conception of Iraq. How much more modest has become clearer in the 12 months since."