There are at least two major sets of elements in the problem of time for a solution in Iraq.

One calculation has to be based on common sense, that is, an evaluation which takes into consideration the general conditions of the country and what the U.S. is trying to do. Remolding a society, even in the most primitive way, is an enormous undertaking. It is why presidential candidate George W. Bush rejected it in 2000 as did a large part of the conservative base of his Republican party.

And it seemed only a matter of time when the birds of a feather would flock together to test and further threaten American security around the region with Iraq as an epicenter. Every day, now, we see evidence of the falsity of superficial analyses which posit the impossibility of Sunni and Shia collaboration, the impossibility of state terrorism such as exists in Iran and Syria uniting with the freelance fanatics, or even of the collaboration in international affairs of cynical regimes such as the Chinese Communists with racial fanaticism and tyranny as in Darfur and Zimbabwe.

America as a target for a multitude of reasons makes strange bedfellows.

To leave Iraq in retreat and chaos now would be to leave to chance the probability of its becoming a new sanctuary for these same enemies who used so effectively a much less likely host in poverty-stricken, isolated Afghanistan to accomplish 9/11.

But building a framework of civil government in Iraq which would be a keystone of stability in the Arab world is a daunting task.

Creating an honest and effective police force is never an easy task even in more stable societies. [Ask those who would do it in New Orleans after Katrina]. The esprit de corps of an army is a mystical thing, and again, not to be done overnight. Cleaning up the debris of a lawless regime and creating a judicial system after almost four decades of ruthless control of a psychopathic family and tribe is a gigantic task.

How long would an American presence be necessary?

Even if and when Iraq establishes what the Russians dissidents alas! always aspired to but have so far failed to achieve, “a normal society”, there is little guarantee that a friendly and cooperative government in Baghdad would not require U.S. presence. One has only to be reminded that more than a half century after the end of World War II, the U.S. maintains a major presence in its now democratically governed former enemies, Germany and Japan, as part of a worldwide security system. [There is a historical link to why German authorities captured terrorists in early September aiming to attack the critical American and NATO Ramstein Air Base with its 40,000 American military and civilian employees and dependents.] The presence of 35,000 American troops on the Korean Peninsular is another example. [Bush rightly told the South Korean president publicly at the Asia and Pacific Economic Summit in Sydney only North Korean nuclear disarmament could produce a peace treaty and their possible departure.] Those are commitments that few of the Bush Administration’s critics question.

Congressman Ron Paul and his libertarian golden key to all problems is floating on a cloud of nostalgia. In another time with a one-ocean navy and the British Empire shield, the U.S. could afford the luxury of withdrawal from much of the world’s uglier shenanigans. With the Iranians already able to deliver a conventionally armed weapon to much of Europe and with their so far unimpeded drive toward nuclear weapons, for example, the world becomes an increasingly dangerous place. A failed state of 160 million Moslems in Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons is a geopolitical nightmare.

Therefore, an Iraq which is not a threat to regional peace but a part of an always fragile but necessary skeletal world alliance for security and stability is essential.

But stretching beyond Petraeus own immediate schedule for producing results in Iraq has to be the understanding of that simple but difficult to appreciate concept that Washington is dealing with a different culture.

That old defender of empire Rudyard Kipling was not wrong when he said it rather simply, ”… a fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

In the pre-industrial societies of Eurasia, time has a different meaning than in the industrialized societies. Nor is the difference simply spelled out, even among the principal Asian cultures, and the world that has moved on to a more structured recognition of life’s brief span and all the things to do with one lifetime. Perhaps that is why their opponents celebrate life while the Islamofascists proudly say they worship death and martyrdom.

Each of the major Asian societies has a different concept of time. There is an old bromide that the difference between China and India, for example, can best be summed up by the fact that there are acres of physical ruins of ancient societies in the Indian subcontinent that can’t adequately be dated. On the other hand it’s said that one of the first projects of a new dynasty in China always is to rewrite the annals of the preceding regime including modifying not a few of the dates. [The Communist leadership recently gave Chinese academics permission to pick up the annals of the Ching [Manchu] Dynasty [1644 – 1911] abandoned by the Kuomintang government in the confusion of the Japanese invasion and civil war before and after World War II.]

Arabic, like Biblical [but not modern Israeli] Hebrew, has no future or past tense. That, some argue, among traditionalists it makes difficult/or is an expression of an inability to distinguish between recent past events and events much further back in the history of political Islam. And that, they argue, leads to a sense of time which is totally different from a more sophisticated world environment in which almost every interaction among individuals is dictated by when it occurs or is supposed to happen and its estimated or completed length.

Thus Petraeus comes back to Washington not only facing the characteristic American impatience with any difficult problem, but looking back over his shoulder, he has to cope with an Iraqi regime yet to understand the nature of a sprint. Not for a long time has one man had such a monumental task in asking for more time.