Ajami: War is honorable

TNR has run a book review--of The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace by Ali Allawi--that can only be described as long. In that review, Fouad Ajami notes:

President Bush's Wilsonianism may have erred on the side of excessive optimism, and may have come to him only after the hunt for weapons of mass destruction ran aground; but that is only the American side of this story. The Arab side is that modern-day Arabs had for decades been lamenting the cozy accommodation of American power to the forces of local autocracy. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were brutes and sadists, but tens of thousands of American soldiers had for Iraqis nothing but tender mercies. The terrible errors of this war can never smother its honor, and Ali Allawi is schooled enough in the history and the sorrow of his land to know that. A new history is offering itself to the Iraqis, and in the tale of disappointment that Allawi brilliantly narrates, there is still the furtive shadow of hope, an echo of deliverance, an undisguised sense of fulfillment at the spectacle of men and women released from a terrible captivity.

I don't understand why Ajami imagines he can convince anybody that the question of this war and its honor comes down, at this point, to a distinction between soldiers who do bad things and soldiers who do good things. The debate--such as there is any--is something more like: Now that this war has proven--by people more powerful than soldiers--to be dishonorable and unwinnable, when are we going to end it. I thought TNR was at least on that page.

Ajami, it should be noted, has been an adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz, and shares with them a certain special blame for what's happened in Iraq because he was well aware that it would become a debacle, but recommended moving forward anyhow.