The Iraq Debacle.

Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq By Larry Diamond Times Books. 369 pages. $25.

How America Lost Iraq By Aaron Glantz Tarcher/Penguin. 303 pages. $23.95.

Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War By Anthony Shadid Henry Holt. 424 pages. $26.

For a moment there, after Baghdad fell, I entertained the thought that Bush might just pull it off. It seemed possible, despite the brazen illegality of his war, that Iraqis might welcome the departure of Saddam so much that they would go along with the new regime, or at least give it some time.

From the books I've been reading, Bush had, at most, a year to get things right, perhaps only weeks. But from the very start, he and Donald Rumsfeld and Jay Garner and Paul Bremer screwed the whole thing up, and most Iraqis quickly lost any illusion they may have had that the United States would better their lives. It was incomprehensible to Iraqis that this most powerful nation in the world could not get the electricity grid back up and running, when Saddam managed to do so after the 1991 war in just a couple of months. It was incomprehensible that the United States could not at least supply generators so people could have air conditioning and refrigeration. Or at least provide order so that people could go out at night without fear of being kidnapped or murdered.

But the Bush Administration failed as an occupier. And the Iraqis' predictable hostility to being occupied, combined with a fierce nationalism and an ascendant, politicized Islam, fed the insurgency from the start.

More quickly than almost anyone had guessed (including the great Middle Eastern correspondent for The Independent, Robert Fisk), the U.S. occupation went sour. And today we witness the long, brutal, and tedious denouement: needless death, a hopeless quagmire, and an ignominious departure sooner or later--and probably later.

But the very suggestion that Bush could have succeeded with this occupation assumes too much.

It assumes that the arrogance and willfulness and carelessness that so characterize the Bush Administration could magically turn into humility, prudence, and thoughtfulness.

It assumes that the Iraqi people, long subjugated by foreign invaders and brutally suppressed by Saddam, would act the supplicant for any degree of time.

And it assumes that the Bush Administration went to Iraq for noble reasons and got waylaid by incompetence.

To put it crudely, it assumes that the imperialists were not interested in empire.

All of these assumptions are false.

The occupation was doomed from the start. And the blunders that the Bush Administration committed are integral not only to its lowly cast of characters but to the entire imperial project.

Amazingly, though, there did appear to be a window. Aaron Glantz, in How America Lost Iraq, arrived in Baghdad a month after U.S. tanks dragged Saddam's statue down. "Most Iraqis were overjoyed that Saddam was gone," he wrote. "Children did come up to the American soldiers to give them flowers." Glantz found a man whose wife and niece had died when a U.S. missile had hit their home, and that man still was grateful that the United States had deposed Saddam.

"Only America could do this," he said. "If it weren't for America, Saddam would stay.... But, thank God, now he's gone. God brought America to get rid of Saddam."

Glantz also interviewed a grateful father who said he was going to name his children after the U.S. President. The name would be "George Bush Jassim Farham."

Reporting for the leftwing radio network Pacifica, Glantz felt pressure from his editors not to cover such things and instead to focus on the seething resentment toward the Americans.

But he couldn't furnish that. The situation was too ambiguous. He quotes Ahmed Jalal, a forty-two-year-old resident of Baghdad, saying, "The American forces have no right to enter an Arab-Muslim country." But Jalal didn't want the Americans to leave, not at that point, anyway. "The occupying powers should work to restore Iraq's infrastructure.... Order should be restored in Iraq so life will go on."

Even in Fallujah, two days after U.S. troops opened fire on a demonstration, killing at least twelve people, Glantz found a man who said, "Please tell the American people an Iraqi farmer loves President Bush." The city, Glantz said, "seemed still to be making up its mind about the Americans."

In this early stage, Glantz says the insurgency was unpopular. People were sick of war, sick of seeing innocent people die. But his editors didn't want to hear about that, he says. And his effort to be an honest reporter, and not a propagandist, makes for the most powerful tensions in this book.

"I realized that covering the insurgency would be a no-win situation for me," he writes. "If I gave the fighters a lot of airtime, I would have to report as well that the vast majority of the people I spoke to did not approve of their actions."

That didn't fit into Pacifica's script, and neither did his story on Saddam's mass graves in a wheat field outside of Hilla. By the time Glantz got there, the remains of 16,000 bodies were being excavated, and women were crying, "Where are you, my son?" Returning from the killing field, Glantz allowed himself to wonder: "Perhaps the main problem with the war wasn't that George W. Bush had launched it, but that it had come too late."

Eventually, Glantz writes a long, impassioned letter to Pacifica, condemning it for "downplaying the gross human rights violations of the regime in an effort to build support for the anti-war movement." It's a bracing charge.

But then the occupation did begin to lose ground. According to Glantz, the U.S. failure to provide electricity and clean water and security took an enormous toll. Then came the repression, with U.S. troops raiding houses, killing civilians, rounding up men, humiliating them in front of their families, and carting them away.

He conveys these lessons through excellent reporting on the ground. "The Americans treat us worse than animals," one man told him. "I want you to know that I hate the Americans now."

Two months before the revelations of Abu Ghraib, Glantz interviewed a former prisoner who had been abused by guards using what the prisoner described as a "wolf dog." When the revelations came out, Glantz said the Iraqis were not surprised. "In the United States, the images were met

with shock and outrage," he writes. "In Iraq, they were met with a sense of resignation. Atrocities committed by the Americans, described by so many Iraqis, had finally been confirmed."

Another significant blow to the occupation came when the United States cracked down on Muqtada al-Sadr, who has strong grassroots support, Glantz writes. This helped "turn the armed insurgency from a handful of fundamentalists to a national resistance with broad public support."

And finally, the scorched earth policy in Fallujah removed any doubt that this was not a benign occupation. On Bush's orders, the U.S. military went into Fallujah to avenge the killing of four U.S. mercenaries working for Blackwater Security. A friend of Glantz's, a British filmmaker, returns from Fallujah with video and indignation: "Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Your people are butchers. I have to find the technical definition of genocide because your government may be committing one." U.S. snipers were shooting innocent women and children in the neck and firing on ambulances, she reported.

By the end, Glantz sees the folly of the continued occupation. "A lot of people in America think that there need to be more troops in Iraq in order to make the country safer," he writes. "But it's not really like that. The more troops that are here, the more they make the Iraqi people angry, and the more people join the resistance."

Someone, send a copy of this book to Joe Biden.

Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid covers similar ground in Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War.

Shadid won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting last year, and he deserves it. He writes from below, talking to people on the ground, not transcribing official press conferences or getting scoops on background. A Lebanese American, Shadid notes how this give him a rare perspective. And he was fortunate to spend time in Baghdad prior to the war, cultivating sources and making friends. He follows several different families and individuals, including a fourteen-year-old girl who writes a moving diary, as they experience the war and the occupation.

Like Glantz, Shadid notes how almost universally loathed Saddam was. "Few objected to his demise; many hoped for it," he writes. "But the feeling most prevalent was subdued anxiety" prior to the war. One man warned him: "They're going to burn the forest to kill the fox."

When Shadid lets his sources describe what the bombing was like, you can almost feel the walls shuddering around you. A mother begs for a greater interval than ten minutes between thuds.

And despite the relative precision of the bombing raids, which Bush boasted so much about, the hospitals filled with innocent victims.

"Ahmed Sufian, tired and overwhelmed, discarded the detached demeanor of a physician," Shadid writes. "He spoke of a young child, still breathing but with his intestines pouring out a wound in his abdomen, and he became angry. 'Our floors are covered with blood, the walls are splashed with blood. We ask why, why, why?' Ahmed's words raced his emotions. 'They came to free us? This is freedom? We have done nothing.'"

Shadid speaks with several Iraqis who tell him they're grateful that the U.S. knocked off Saddam, but that it's time for the United States to go. And this was just days after the war began. From the very beginning, he notes, "there was great ambivalence over the prospect of an occupation."

"Humiliation" is a word that Shadid uses a lot, both in English, and in Arabic, Ihana. The humiliation of not being able to get rid of Saddam themselves. The humiliation of having a foreign and Christian army in their midst. The humiliation of losing the material and cultural progress they had made in the 1970s. The humiliation of a grand, ancient city laid low.

Many Iraqis had warned Shadid of the risks of violence and looting, and when Bush and Rumsfeld did nothing to stop it, Iraqis took note.

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shrugged: 'Stuff happens'--words that would be repeated ruefully by Baghdadis in the weeks ahead," Shadid writes.

Iraqis viewed the plunder as "the result of malicious inattention or inattentive malice" on the part of the Americans, says Shadid. "Either way, many Baghdadis had soured on their new overlords." This created a divide that "had become impassible, perhaps as early as April"--the first full month of occupation.

Shadid picks up on a nuance that seemed lost on Bush and Rumsfeld. On May 22, 2003, the United Nations formally recognized the United States and Britain as the occupying powers. By blessing the occupation, and by using that term, the United Nations, Washington, and London were humiliating Iraqis. Occupation "denotes inequality, a relationship of two unequal powers, the weaker submitting to the will of the stronger," he writes. And Iraqis chafed under it.

To show how out of touch U.S. soldiers were, Shadid tells of how he and Thomas E. Ricks, his colleague at the Post, collaborated on a story. Ricks went along with Bravo Company in Baghdad, and Shadid followed behind, talking with the Iraqis after the troops left.

"Everybody likes us," Specialist Stephen Harris, twenty, tells Ricks.

"Despicable," Mohammed Ibrahim tells Shadid. "They're walking over my heart."

Shadid asks, point-blank, "Was it inevitable?" He toys with the idea that if the Bush Administration had done everything right, maybe the occupation could have worked. But he doubts it. "Perhaps history condemned the project from the start," he writes. He tallies up the factors: Iraqi citizens had high expectations, after years of deprivation, that were difficult to meet. Iraqis were inherently suspicious of a Christian invader. And the United States had sullied its reputation years before by allying so closely with Israel, by its brutality in the 1991 war, and by the punishing sanctions that it insisted on for more than ten years.

But Shadid doesn't own up to a few basic issues that cut to the heart of the question more quickly than his ruminations about the "predetermined" nature of the failure. For one thing, he barely discusses oil. And in his fantasy description of what a benign occupation looks like, he writes: "Foreign and Iraqi companies compete for the bounty of the reconstruction of a country awash in oil." Of course, that was never Bush's or Cheney's or Rumsfeld's intention. They wanted the contracts for their cronies.

And Shadid doesn't dwell on Rumsfeld's desire to establish permanent military bases in Iraq, and the leverage those bases would provide in the Middle East.

Shadid also neglects to puncture the balloon that the United States invaded to depose the brutal Saddam Hussein. For as Shadid must know, Bush gave Saddam a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq right before the invasion. Shadid's colleague Bob Woodward reported in Plan of Attack that Bush was prepared to invade Iraq even if Saddam fled at the last moment. According to Woodward, Bush said: "If Saddam leaves, we'll go in anyway."

Nevertheless, Night Draws Near is an amazing book. And like Glantz's, it shows the futility of U.S. troops staying in Iraq. Their presence was provocative, and their "visibility only deepened the strife," he writes. In a menacing echo of Vietnam, Shadid reports on the reaction of U.S. soldiers to the tenacity of the under-equipped insurgents. "It wasn't the victory of his colleagues that he remembered," Shadid concludes. "It was the way his enemies died. It was their absolute conviction."

In Squandered Victory, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, chronicles the blunders of the Bush Administration. His point of entry is an invitation from Condoleezza Rice to go to Iraq for four months in the beginning of 2004 to help the so-called transition to democracy. While he opposed the war, he believed when he got there that the occupation could still be saved.

Sometimes, he acts as if it could have been saved if Rice or Bremer had only followed his brilliant advice, which he serves up in lengthy excerpts from memos to these superiors. (And the account of his work in Iraq is stiflingly boring.)

But when he isn't being self-serving, he does present a damning, detailed, and surprisingly vehement indictment, calling Bush's occupation "one of the major overseas blunders in U.S. history."

Here is the bill of particulars.

First, the "original sin," as one diplomat put it: launching the war in a "hasty and largely unilateral" way.

Then Rumsfeld's short-handed strategy: failing to send over enough troops to secure the country.

Then ignorance: Jay Garner, Bush's first viceroy, was urged to meet with Ayatollah Sistani. Asked Garner: "Why? Who is this person?"

Then arrogance: "Rumsfeld insisted that it didn't matter whether Iraqi civil servants got paid. 'They can wait two weeks or two months,'" he said.

Then petty bureaucratic turf battles: Bush gave the Pentagon the sole responsibility for rebuilding Iraq, and so Rumsfeld threw out the State Department's "Future of Iraq Project" and dismissed the author from Garner's staff.

Then foolishness: Garner dismisses four professional Arab American translators.

Then foolishness to the nth degree: Bremer disbands the army.

Then braggadocio: There is "a swelling tide of good news," said Bremer.

Then selfishness: "We never listened carefully to the Iraqi people. We failed to move with the necessary dispatch to transfer power to an Iraqi interim government."

Then a failure of nerve: Diamond says the U.S. should have arrested or killed Sadr early on, though Shadid and Glantz suggest that would have been exceedingly counterproductive.

Finally, a near-total lack of understanding of, or even interest in, Iraqi history and culture. The United States didn't even "ponder seriously the lessons of the British colonial experience in Iraq," Diamond writes.

All in all, Diamond says the Bush Administration is guilty of "criminal negligence" for "going to war so unprepared for the postwar." And he's not just being rhetorical. "There are laws against individuals and corporations who take grossly negligent actions," he writes. "There are no laws--and there probably cannot be--against negligence, however gross, on the part of government officials at the highest level. But in the broader calculus of moral responsibility, which is the greater offense?"

Diamond's Hoover institutional bias occasionally gets in the way. For instance, he applauds Bremer for bringing "a bold agenda of free-market economic reforms." But those very "reforms"--the privatization of much of Iraq's economy, the repatriation of profits--galled many Iraqis.

"Our intentions were basically good," Diamond asserts. But he himself notes that the United States didn't want to hold early elections for fear that Islamist parties might prevail that weren't sufficiently sympathetic to Washington. And he says that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz "were looking to hand power over fairly quickly to Ahmed Chalabi."

Occupations are always resented. A Christian, Western occupation of an Arab land is a bad bet under the best of circumstances. (Just ask the French about their Algerian experience.) And with the tarnished reputation of the United States in the Arab world, this was an especially bad one. On top of all that, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld invaded largely because of ideological hubris and imperial greed. Thus sprang the toxic lies, neglect, and brutality that ensnare America in Iraq today.