President Bush’s deadline for war with Iraq is the culmination of a massive failure of diplomacy, but not his alone. Certainly, he failed to present his important case to the world in a careful and persuasive way. He failed, but so too did the United Nations in keeping up pressure on Iraq. France failed, diplomatically and strategically, making it much easier for Iraq to resist UN demands. No one expected Saddam Hussein to overhaul his regime and end his weapons programs, so he can be said to have not even failed.

The list of failures could go on – among Iraq’s neighbors, in the Security Council, in Congress and in the Clinton and first Bush administrations. War was avoidable and is avoidable still, but the opposing sides have hardened on this question of Iraqi disarmament and the opportunity for talking is at an end. The next awful steps will soon take place; the expectation is that U.S. military superiority will quickly overwhelm the weakened Iraqi defenses and the battle soon will be over.

President Bush properly warned Monday, “Our goal will not be achieved overnight. But it can come over time.” The goal has many pieces. It is, as the president said, “to advance liberty and peace in the that region”; but it is also to defeat terrorism as it affects the United States, to demonstrate to other nations the resolve of this nation to go to war and to assert unilateral authority to influence the course of the world. (Britain and a few others are joining the United States in this war, of course, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been clear how unnecessary these additions are to the cause.)

Congress has been largely silent on the coming events, a strange muffling of voices for such a talkative body. But Congress will be crucial for what comes after the war. The Bush administration forgot funding for Afghanistan in its last budget. It could just as easily forget funding for Iraq if, say, the next member of the axis of evil becomes the administration’s focus. That cannot be allowed to happen, and a Republican Congress that is sure enough in the president’s course to support him with only a few qualms must also take responsibility for the unglamorous work that lies ahead. That includes large amounts of foreign aid – the funding it has spent the better part of the last decade trying to eliminate.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, commentators have reminded the public of its unwillingness to engage in the world until crisis was at hand. If there is a lesson in the countdown to war for the administration and for its supporters and opponents, it is in the harmfulness of isolationism. The United States has a quarter-million troops about to engage in conflict in part because of it. May they all return safely and may the politicians who lead them work harder at diplomacy in the Middle East and elsewhere to keep them home the next time.