Tolstoy began “Anna Karenina” with his now-famous line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” His view might hold true in the political world, too—successful regimes are all alike, while every failing regime fails in its own way. That’s one of the strange rewards of foreign reporting: you can watch an unsuccessful regime unravel before your eyes yet you cannot know the course or pace of the unravelling. Deconstruction can be just as creative as construction. The process of collapse—unpredictable and riveting—would appear to be underway in Iraq. For a taste of it, read this dispatch from John Burns, who gets under the skin of things in Baghdad: “In his speeches, Mr. Hussein has sounded like a man terminally vexed, oscillating between submission and defiance. Generals he has put forward to speak about weapons–and to prepare the 12,000-page declaration now condemned for its omissions by Washington and by Hans Blix, leader of the inspection teams–have reacted, at times, like men not sure whether full disclosure is the order of the day, or whether their brief is to admit only as much as the enemy is likely to find out.”
