The president was careful not to take direct credit for that "hopeful new direction," knowing that democracy has a better chance of taking root in the Middle East if it is seen as rising up naturally from its citizens, rather than imposed by the Americans. But there's no doubt whatsoever that his decision to invade Iraq and try to create a democracy in that country has contributed to the "critical mass of events" that the president described.

In many ways, in fact, what's now happening in the Middle East as a whole parallels the American experience in Iraq of the past two years, only on a much larger scale and with much greater consequences.

When the United States and its allies launched the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, there was no question that it would succeed, at least in narrow military terms. The decrepit and dispirited Iraqi military had no chance of fending off the forces arrayed against it.

The fate of the effort rested instead on what came after the war. Would the United States be able to reconstitute an effective Iraqi government? Could it provide security and get the Iraqi economy going again? Almost two years later, with more than 1,500 American dead and Iraqi deaths that measure in the tens of thousands if not more, those goals are very much unaccomplished.

In fact, many who enthusiastically supported the initial decision to invade now admit that the Bush administration did a terrible job in handling the critical aftermath. It was simply not prepared for the difficulty of the task, either intellectually or in terms of the resources that would be needed. It did not anticipate the depth of anti-American sentiment it would confront in Iraq, nor did it comprehend the religious and cultural landscape. The repercussions of that failure have been substantial.

Much the same can be said of the Middle East as a whole. Destabilizing the region, which is essentially what we've accomplished so far, was never going to be the hard part of the job. To the contrary, governments in the region were known to be brittle institutions that survived by suppressing not just their own people, but suppressing change of almost any sort. The searing discontent of millions of Arab citizens, awaiting only an outlet for its expression, has never exactly been a secret either.

The Bush administration is right in identifying that suppressed discontent as a leading cause of terrorism (it is far less willing to admit that blind American support for Israel and resentment against U.S. meddling in the region play equally large roles).

However, previous American administrations have avoided trying to provoke dramatic change in the region for the same reason that President Clinton and the first President Bush chose not to topple Saddam Hussein. They understood that while destroying the existing status quo might be relatively easy, by doing so you unleash forces that you may not even comprehend, let alone control.

That doesn't seem to faze this President Bush, however.

"No matter how long it takes, no matter how difficult the task, we will fight the enemy, and lift the shadow of fear, and lead free nations to victory," he told his audience at National Defense University.

In a recent article, Marine Col. Thomas Hammes, a senior fellow at the National Defense University, was more specific about the challenge.

"When the United States has to fight, it prefers to wage short, well-defined wars," Hammes pointed out. "For the United States, a long war is five years."

However, Hammes warned, the kind of struggle we now face defies such a timetable.

"The Chinese Communists fought for 28 years; the Vietnamese Communists for 30; the Sandinistas for 18," he wrote. "Numerous other insurgencies in the world have lasted decades."

That's the kind of struggle to which we are now committed in the Middle East, and the reality is that Iraq may be just the beginning.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor of hte Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

© 2005 Atlanta Journal-Constitution

###