"Stuff happens."

That was Donald Rumsfeld's response -- you could look it up -- back in 2003, when reports emerged from newly-liberated Baghdad that looters were sacking the city's art museum. Now, as Frank Rich notes in his Times column today (behind the firewall, so I won't link), it's plain that the indifference the US showed to that looting was a sign of things to come. In recent days, the Iraqi Christian who ran the museum fled the country for his life; the new man in charge is a dentist by trade, and a fundamentalist Shiite close to Moqtada al-Sadr. Who wants to be the country's antiquities from its pre-Islamic past -- those that remain, that is -- will be safe in the tender hands of this guy? As Rich points out, the US has spent all this blood and treasure to empower Islamic fundamentalists. But hey, stuff happens.

I heard a Diane Rehm show interview via podcast yesterday with Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief early in the war. He said his reporting showed that when the Americans allowed the looting of Baghdad, that was when the effort to secure the country and put it on solid footing was lost. Had the Americans refused to let that go on, they would have shown the Iraqis -- all of them, not just the looters -- that order would be maintained. They didn't, and so lost an immense amount of respect. And here we are today.

How bad is it in Iraq? David Brooks writes an astonishing column -- "astonishing" for reasons I'll get to in a minute -- in today's Times (and yes, it's behind the firewall, so I won't link), reporting on new independent survey research done among Iraqis. Here's the gist:

What’s true of children is true of adults, and in Iraq we now have a case study in human insecurity. The people of Iraq have endured decades of dictatorship, war, insurgency and civil strife, and the psychological costs have been ruinous. Iraq is the most xenophobic, sexist and reactionary society on earth.

Researchers from the invaluable World Values Survey have interviewed over 2,300 adults from all over Iraq. The results have just been published by Ronald Inglehart, Mansoor Moaddel and Mark Tessler in the journal Perspectives on Politics.

Inglehart, Moaddel and Tessler describe a people who, buffeted by violence, have withdrawn into mere survival mode. They are suspicious of outsiders and intolerant toward weak groups, and they cling fiercely to what is familiar and traditional.

This didn't start with the US invasion -- Saddam's dictatorship destroyed much of Iraqi civil society -- so it's hard to know how much of this to blame on the US, and how much on Saddam. The invasion and the way we handled its aftermath certainly didn't help things. To read the Brooks column is to see how utterly far gone Iraq today is. I have no idea how on earth we can salvage a decent outcome now. People are absolutely terrified, and as Brooks said, they are reacting like human beings do in such a situation of anarchic violence.

There are two things I found astonishing in the Brooks column. One, Brooks said the US was surprised to learn how religious Iraqi society had become under Saddam; the Iraqi exiles who had Bush's ear hadn't prepared him for that. Oh? Throughout the modern Arab world, the religious sphere has long been the only place where dissent from authoritarian governments was allowed. Of course the Iraqis would have become more religious. So would we have done under similar circumstances. And the men who planned to overthrow the regime and remake Iraqi society didn't understand this? Or they didn't realize that Iraqi religion was not the same as suburban American Evangelicalism? The mind boggles.

Second ... well, here's Brooks:

The larger lesson, as we think about future efforts to reform the Middle East and combat extremism, is that the Chinese model probably works best. That is, it’s best to champion economic reform before political reform.

We know from a wealth of historical experience that when people see their standard of living rise, they reject the reactionary survival mentality and they become more open to others and to change. If people already see their lives improving materially, they will be more likely to keep their cool as their political institutions are reinvented.

In the age of terror, statesmanship means knowing how to create a sense of security so you can lead people on a voyage of reform. Most of all, it means that if you’re going to do nation-building, you have to understand the values of the people you’re going to build a nation with.

You just want to bang your head on your desk. How many times do we Americans have to learn this lesson? Rich says that we are no different in Iraq than the naive Americans portrayed in Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," who just happily assumed that the rest of the world is just like us. We overthrew a country and had no idea what we were getting into. There were conservative voices who said wait, stop, you can't do this, it'll be a disaster, their culture is not our culture. But not enough people listened (once again, I plead guilty to this). For whatever motive -- and there were several -- we preferred to believe that those who were pessimistic about imposing universalist Western values on an ancient, tribal and fiercely religious Middle Eastern country were cynics, even, as Laura Bush said, racists.

And now look at where our idealism has got us. Oh, and by the way? A new top-secret authoritative intelligence assessment by the US Government finds that the Iraq War -- for all the dead and maimed, and all the hundreds of billions poured down a rathole -- has made America less safe from terrorism. Stuff happens.