# Posted 12:26 PM by Patrick Belton  

WHAM, BAM, SHUKRAN: Okay, so I know that doesn't really rhyme. Our friend, the Hauser Report's Jeff Hauser, just emailed me this troubling piece from the morning's WaPo, on which Josh Marshall has also commented today.

The tenor of the piece is that a number of well-placed officials are already looking for excuses to pull the U.S. out of Iraq as soon as possible, whether or not there's a functioning democracy left there when we leave. The WaPo cites several unnamed officials at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid as expecting to measure their time in Iraq in "months, not years"; in a similar vein, OMB director Mitchell Daniels recently prognosticated that Iraq "will not require sustained aid."

Possible optimistic interpretations? One may be that the WaPo is attempting to generate a public outcry at the start over the possibility of a quick withdrawal, therefore ensuring that the political environment inside the Beltway is strongly in favor of a sustained, honorable commitment to the Iraqi people. Another might be that these numerous statements on background could be trial balloons from the administration, plumbing possible public responses to different levels of post-war commitment. Of course, there's also the more disheartening third possibility, which is that many segments of government and the military are sufficiently unsympathetic to tasks falling under the rubric of "nation-building" that they are already beginning to look for any excuse to leave, irrespective of the consequences for the U.S.'s credibility as a promoter of democracy.

On the good guys' side, it's emerging, are an unlikely coalition of the willing - USAID administrator Andrew Natsios, Under Secretary of Treasury for international affairs John Taylor, former SecDef Schlesinger, and such voices from think-tankery as CFR's Rachel Bronson and RAND's James Dobbins. And there are glimmerings of hope from the highest levels of the administration: President Bush, in a February 26 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, promised "a sustained commitment" and drew the appropriate analogies to the duration of American commitments to Germany and Japan. General Garner, for his part, commented in an interview over the weekend that the United States would persevere until democracy was established.

As, of course, it must. Our international credibility for the foreseeable future hinges on as much, as do the very crucial questions of stability and democratization in the Middle East and Gulf. And God help us if we don't make good on our promises to the Iraqi people:

lisaanon min rutab wayadon min khashab: a tongue of ripe dates and a hand of wood.

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