Collateral damage from opposition to war in Iraq

Anne Applebaum:

Casualties are definitely down. Other places suddenly seem to need more urgent attention. News coverage is shrinking, as is public interest. All of which may help explain the breath of optimism one can now detect in Washington, and even in other places, about the war in Iraq. "It will all come right in the end; wait and see" is an expression I've heard more than once. Other versions of this include: "The surge is working" and "Why doesn't the mainstream media tell the truth about our successes in Iraq?"

Though I don't especially want to perpetuate any stereotypes about the mainstream media, I have to say that this optimism is totally unwarranted. Not because things aren't improving in Iraq -- it seems they are, at least for the moment -- but because the collateral damage inflicted by the war on America's relationships with the rest of the world is a lot deeper and broader than most Americans have realized. It isn't just that the Iraq war invigorated the anti-Americanism that has always been latent pretty much everywhere. What's worse is the fact that -- however it all comes out in the end, however successful Iraqi democracy is a decade from now -- our conduct of the war has disillusioned our natural friends and supporters and thrown a lasting shadow over our military and political competence. However it all comes out, the price we've paid is too high.

Though there are many examples of how this disillusionment has manifested itself -- my colleague Fareed Zakaria has written repeatedly of how an America distracted by Iraq has steadily lost influence in Asia, for example -- one of the most disturbing is unfolding as Europe prepares for another round of meetings with Iran's nuclear negotiators. For those who've forgotten (and this, too, has dropped out of the news), it is not the United States but Britain, France and Germany that are trying to persuade the Islamic Republic to abandon plans to enrich its uranium and to accept assistance in building a civilian nuclear energy program instead.

From the start, however, all negotiations between Iran and the "EU-3," as the group is known in diplomacy-speak, have been haunted by Iraq. Certainly no expert committee in existence could convince Europeans (or anyone else) that Iran really does have nuclear weapons or even that Iran intends to build them. So fresh are the memories of American claims about the extent of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and so vast, therefore, is the skepticism about any assessments of anybody's nuclear program, that even a report bearing any United Nations or European Union label would fail to convince, even if Iranian nukes were on display in downtown Tehran. All analysis coming out of the United States is, of course, automatically discounted.

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What these talks have been haunted by is the belief by the Iranians that Democrats will not support the use of force and therefore there is no incentive for them to reach an agreement. They look at Iraq, not so much as a failure of the US but as an example of how Democrats will undermine any war effort and make it impossible to have a plausible threat of the use of force. All of which is likely to make the use of force against Iran to stop their nuke program more likely than it would have been had Democrats not have behaved so badly in the case of Iraq.