This morning on CNN someone asked, angrily, “Where were all the Iraqis who support our efforts during this horrific act?”
The answer to that question is not unrelated to Secretary Rumsfeld’s flip declaration that he doesn’t understand soft power.
International legitimacy has always been, in my opinion, the key to rebuilding Iraq. My tentative guess is that, if this goes badly, historians will point to the murder of Sergio Viera de Mello as the day things started to go downhill.