Has Iraq Passed a Tipping Point to Peace?

March 6, 2005 — -- The Iraqi elections, imperfect as they were, convinced some American leaders that the Iraqi people had reached a point of no return -- quite literally turning a corner in the direction of democracy.

"That has to cause a tipping of support for the government, whoever's elected, because of the confidence that all of those people have to feel as a result of seeing so many others of the same view," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said.

But the continuing chaos in parts of Iraq has others worried that the country could still tip either way -- toward democracy or disintegration.

That very notion that specific events, violent or peaceful, can tip a neighborhood -- or an entire nation -- is at the very heart of Malcolm Gladwell's influential best seller, "The Tipping Point."

The author cites the example of a bottle of ketchup. Tap the bottle a few times and a few dribbles of ketchup come out. But at some precise point, the tipping point, those dribbles turn into a steady stream.

Many years from now, when the outcome has been settled, historians may focus with blinding clarity on a particular moment or event and proclaim that is when the outcome of the war in Iraq was sealed.

If Iraq evolves into a thriving democracy, people might point to January's elections as the crucial breakthrough event. If the country breaks up in a bloody civil war, Washington's dissolution of the Iraqi army in the spring of 2003 may be identified as the critical mistake.

It takes time.

For example, it was seven years after the North Vietnamese launched their Tet offensive in January 1968 before the last American troops finally left Vietnam. Militarily, the North Vietnamese may have won nothing in 1968, but they did achieve a huge psychological victory by driving into the heart of Saigon and onto the very grounds of the U.S. Embassy. It's fair to say 1968 was the beginning of the end.

D-Day in June 1944 was clearly a major tipping point in World War II, despite the fact that the killing and the devastation ground on for almost another year before the Germans surrendered.