Village Voice reporter Jason Vest thinks he’s stumbled onto something novel - a [n Iraqi] Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) memo that warns, “U.S. efforts have created an environment rife with corruption and sectarianism likely to result in civil war.”

Vest says the memo is “notable for its candidly troubled assessment of Iraq’s future,” especially against the backdrop of “matter-of-fact optimism” on the part of Bush Administration officials. For this, he includes rosy statements such as Rumsfeld’s saying Iraq has “good days and bad days,” with current challenges being merely “a moment in Iraq’s path towards a free and democratic system,” or Bush’s, “Our coalition is standing with responsible Iraqi leaders as they establish growing authority in their country.”

But Vest shouldn’t wet himself too quickly. Both versions of Iraq could be correct, just as they were in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

American forces in Iraq may have “created an environment… likely to result in civil war,” but so did American Colonial forces. The result was indeed civil war but also the advancement of individual liberties, a democratic government and a nation of united states.

The CPA memo may be “notable for its candidly troubled assessment of Iraq’s future,” but such assessments were commonplace at the birth of our Union.

The conventional wisdom then was that creating a new government was “impossible,” and “the safest bet was that the early American republic would dissolve into a cluster of state or regional sovereignties,” according to Founding Brothers author Joseph Ellis. “The overwhelming judgment of the most respected authorities was that it could not be done… the states and regions comprising the new nation had no common history as a nation and no common experience behaving as a coherent collective.”

Update: welcome Instapundit readers.