'Squandered Victory' and 'Losing Iraq': Now What?

By REUEL MARC GERECHT

COULD the administration have chosen a different course in Iraq that would today have the country farther down the road to popular government and cost fewer lives? Two new books -- among the first ''insider'' accounts by former Iraq advisers -- find the White House guilty of an incompetent occupation. Representative government may, just possibly, still take hold in Mesopotamia, but neither Larry Diamond, a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who was called by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to temporary service in Baghdad in early 2004, nor David L. Phillips, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as an adviser to the State Department before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein, are at all optimistic.