Francis Fukuyama Is Our New Grand Hierarch from The Shrill Blog

FT.com / Fukuyama: The Bush administration's failure to plan adequately for Iraq's postwar reconstruction was a big failure of policy, one that will greatly limit future US policy choices. The recent escalation in violence, with US deaths passing the 1,000 mark, underlines just how insecure the country is. But the real debate should not focus on assigning blame for this mess, but on concrete strategies to help the US recover from it.... The long-term plan laid out by the Bush administration since the June handover of sovereignty in Iraq is straightforward.... Anyone who thinks this scenario will materialise is living in fantasyland....

Allawi's government faces dual insurgencies... Moqtada al-Sadr... Fallujah, now a base for religious extremists, seems but one of a number of areas where coalition forces cannot go. The US has, in other words, permitted the establishment of a new terrorist haven in central Iraq....

Equally serious is the lack of state capacity on the part of the new government.... If elections are postponed, leaving de facto power in the hands of militias, the next US president will face a critical choice: continue pressing for a unified Iraqi state, or seek a power-sharing arrangement based on agreement by the Kurdish and Shia communities, in which stability rather than democracy is the goal....

Heavy fighting and more casualties lie ahead, and US force posture in other troublespots such as Korea is under strain. Washington can maintain current US troop levels in Iraq only through a covert draft of National Guard and reserve forces, the very people whose families form Mr Bush's political base....

The Republican convention outrageously lumped the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war into a single, seamless war on terrorism - as if the soldiers fighting Mr Sadr were avenging the destroyers of the twin towers... mismanagement of the war has created a new Afghanistan inside Iraq.... The Bush administration has made any number of foreign policy errors, particularly over Iraq.... But if Mr Bush is returned... the administration will have got away a Big Lie about the war on terrorism and will have little incentive to engage in serious review....