I don't know what will happen in Iraq. But, as my readers know, I tend to the gloomy in Middle Eastern matters. Still, even a gloomy outlook allows for surprises that are not as terrible as it imagines. George Packer, "reporter at large" for The New Yorker on Iraq, has this week published a longish piece called "Planning for Defeat." The literal backbone of the article is a correspondence with Ahmed who writes to him from an Internet cafe in Saidya. The article is certainly not a reporter's account or even a reporter's impressions. It is a narrative of Packer's discussions with "experts" and experts on what the future holds for the country the Americans freed from tyranny and then put in a maelstrom. This violent maelstrom is now our predicament. He cites one informant, Iraqi specialist Toby Dodge, from St. Mary's College, London, proposing that (these are Packer's words) "the U.S. would offer security guarantees to Iran and Syria in exchange for cooperation...So the Iraqi government is reconstituted within a multi-lateral framework where the E.U., the U.N. and the U.S. are all singing from the same hymnbook." Now, how's that for illusions? Fouad Ajami, who writes frequently for TNR, was sent by the Wall Street Journal to see what is happening at this seminal moment, and his report is in this morning's edition. It is first person reporting after nearly a month in Iraq, the eighth or ninth visit in four years. Maybe he is too committed to the idea of "the foreigner's gift," the title of his book on whether the Americans liberated Iraq. But this analytic dispatch gives those of you who are certain that the project was disaster much with which to conjure. There is in an irony here. Conservatives believe that culture is the decisive factor in societies, and that it is static. Now, conservatives want to see a revolution in culture that turns hidebound Arab autocrats into liberals. On the other hand, liberals intensely dislike arguments from culture. In their eyes, such arguments are racist and reactionary. But now they, too, have switched sides. Arabs are intransigent because they are intransigent, they are doctrinaire because they are doctrinaire, they are violent because they are violent. And that is how it is and will be.