Resident Fellow  Richard Perle

The most important thing we can do to help the Iraqis and ourselves is to recognize--and reverse--the seminal mistake that followed the quick destruction of Saddam Hussein's murderous regime: the foolish (however well-meaning) and arrogant belief that we know better than the Iraqis how to rebuild their devastated society.

Some of our technical assistance has certainly been useful, but for five years, we have been telling the Iraqis how to construct a political and legal system, how to elect their leaders, who should occupy which cabinet posts, who should be their prime minister, how to develop and allocate their resources, how to organize and regulate their economy. We have been telling Iraqi Shiites how they should deal with Iraqi Kurds and Sunnis, how an independent Iraq should relate to the Arab world, how Iraqis should reconcile sectarian differences, when to negotiate, when to fight and how to measure progress.

Stop! Iraqis know far better than we what makes sense for them. When administration officials and members of Congress, with their diplomatic, intelligence and political advisers--whose knowledge of Iraq is often recent, shallow and wrong--hector and lecture the Iraqis who are struggling to find a way forward, I wonder whether we have learned anything from our past mistakes.

Richard Perle is a resident fellow at AEI.