It's Time to Wonder What Iraq Is Doing To Change the U.S. - WSJ's Seib

[question everything]

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The war against terrorism started with a firm, national conviction that America was in the right. The war against Iraq began with a firm conviction that the U.S. could change the Middle East. The scandal has sown new doubts about both premises. Above all, the U.S. has come face-to-face with the possibility that it isn't changing the Middle East, but rather being changed by the Middle East -- and not for the better.

As Mr. Rumsfeld was sworn in before a Senate hearing on Friday morning to testify, the nation's capital, and along with it the country, seemed to stop to ask how a campaign that began with such moral clarity had evolved into a picture of an American soldier pulling a naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash... The subject on Friday seemed to go much deeper: Had something happened along the way to the American soul?

America's friends in Israel, who are in many ways our ancestors in the war against terrorism, have traveled this same path. By occupying Palestinian territories, they often ask themselves, have we improved our security but lost a piece of our soul? Does being an occupying power either tempt or require a country or its soldiers to do nasty things they would otherwise find unacceptable -- maybe even repugnant? Does occupation inevitably lead to a kind of moral callousness?

These questions seem especially pertinent in the Middle East, where the norms of behavior are drawn a little differently. Middle East hands often use a kind of grim insider's shorthand to make their point. "Hama rules are in effect," they will say to each other -- a reference to the city in Syria where former dictator Hafez Assad, having encountered some domestic resistance to his rule two decades ago, sent in his army to kill thousands of his own citizens and simply level swaths of the place. Evoking "Hama rules" simply means that a lower kind of moral standard has taken over as the order of the day.

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The very fact that the defense secretary was hauled before Congress on a few days' notice to answer for the actions of soldiers just about as far down his line of command as it's possible to reach was a sign that American rules, not Hama rules, still prevail.

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But that question now has been supplemented by a new question the country began to grapple with on Friday: Is Iraq affecting America as much as America is affecting Iraq? There is little sign that President Bush's answer -- that America has the power to change the world for the better, starting in Iraq -- will be altered. His challenge of convincing fellow Americans has become tougher.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at [e-mail]

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