Monday, 15 December 2003

Window of opportunity. Capturing Saddam gives the Bush Administration a rare chance to adjust its Iraq policies from a position of strength. Bush's flypaper strategists produced a blueprint for military victory in Iraq, but their plans for the post-war have been in serious need of retooling: From Jay Garner's useless playbook of plans to contain nonexistent health epidemics, to Paul Bremner's spectacularly bad decision to disband the Iraqi army, to the elusive plan for Iraq's transition from dictator to student council to full-fledged democracy, Bush's Iraq has been a long slow train wreck since his triumphant strut across the deck of the Abraham Lincoln.

But Saddam's capture changes that. It gives the Administration a short window in which they can retool and rethink their policies without the appearance of desperation; if, for example, the Army had realized that surrounding Iraqi villages with razor wire was not an effective way to stop terrorists (but was doing a really good job of costing them the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds), Saddam's capture offers a perfect excuse to take the wire down, without having to concede it was a mistake to put it up in the first place.

Similarly, Bush now has a brief opportunity (two weeks at most, say) to announce a timetable for democratic elections in Iraq, and have that plan received as an inspiring vision for the future instead of as Bush's proposal to reduce his political liabilities before the 2004 election. This is the time when you make a speech like the one Bush gave to the National Endowment for Democracy last month, if you want it to have an impact outside your circle of supporters; the Baathist resistance is reeling, and it's time for the coup de grace.

If Bush misses this opportunity, then the resistance will regroup and fight on. Anti-American slogans carry a lot more weight when the Americans don't have a solid plan for putting the Iraqi people in charge (or when the Administration pulls a "spoils of war" move and sticks yet another thumb in the eyes of our allies—yeeeesh, that was short-sighted); the Baathists will have some difficulty coalescing around a new leader with Saddam and his sons out of the picture, but it won't be long before they find one, and re-submit their own bloody alternative to the American occupation. If Bush steps forward with a plan that inspires the average Iraqi, the Baathists will be reduced to gang warfare in due time; if he doesn't, the situation in Iraq will eventually return to what it was before Saddam's capture.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:24 am. 0 comments.