Posted: April 24, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
President Bush bet his entire wad on a short and relatively painless war against Saddam Hussein. The Democrats, perforce, were left to hope that it would be long, agonizing and bloody. For a few days in late March, they nursed a wild surmise that the facts on the ground would prove them right.
Basra resisted the British for several days, and when at last they occupied it there was little dancing in the streets. (The Iraqis, we now know, were just being cautious – Saddam hadn't been defeated yet.) The American supply lines from Kuwait to Baghdad looked dangerously long – maybe Donald Rumsfeld had indeed underestimated the troops that would be needed to defend them. And when that hope faded, there was still the prospect of a long street-by-street, house-by-house slog through Baghdad, with huge casualties on both sides. But Baghdad fell in a few days, after a series of miscellaneous skirmishes – and then came the dancing in the streets.
Meanwhile, the "Arab street" all over the Middle East failed to rise, as predicted, in homicidal fury against America. And Osama bin Laden, after taping a summons to his followers to wreak vengeance on the Great Satan, is still waiting in his cave for their response.
The New York Times' Johnny "Quagmire" Apple scarcely had time to write his usual obituary for the president before it was clear that George W. Bush had won the gamble and would pocket every poker chip on the table. The Democratic National Committee is reportedly negotiating with Saddam's famously imaginative Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, to serve as an adviser on how to make the party's prospects in 2004 look encouraging.
But the political game is never really over, and Bush's foes are determined to wring some comfort out of what they will, of course, deem his "mismanagement" of postwar Iraq.
For one thing, Gen. Tommy Franks, who saved countless civilian lives with his precision bombs, seems to have been slow about converting his troops into guards for the National Museum of Iraq and its archeological treasures, which suffered from looting in the chaotic days before the city fell. One would have thought its resident curators might have anticipated that problem and prepared against it, but there are reports that the looting was an inside job.
Then there is the whole vexed question of how – if at all – Iraq can be converted into a functioning free-market democracy. Bear in mind that Iraq has been a one-party socialist dictatorship since 1958, so no Iraqi under 60 – which is to say, the vast majority of the population – can have any mature recollection of what it is like to live in a free society. Whether they are ready and able to do so now is, therefore, a very good question.
We can be sure that Bush and his advisers will do their very best, but it is wise to recognize that the road is strewn with pitfalls. What political leaders will emerge – either among the returning exiles or from the indigenous population – who can capture the confidence of the people and build the political and economic institutions that are indispensable to a free society?
How can Iraq's immense oil wealth, which must be used for the benefit of its people, be protected from the sort of business predators who looted post-Soviet Russia? What skilled American corporations can be enlisted in the vast project of national reconstruction without being denounced by the Democrats as mere house pets of Bush and his cronies? How can we fend off the predictable efforts of the United Nations (meaning, of course, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder) to take over economic and political control of the new Iraq on the grounds that only in this way can it acquire "legitimacy"?
These are just a few of the questions that will predictably be blown up into major issues by the president's critics in a desperate effort to blame him for alleged "blunders." But the American people are realists and will not expect perfection. We, in turn, must hope that the Iraqi people, having tasted the elixir of freedom, will want more of it, and be ready to sacrifice for it. It would be a tragedy, indeed, if it turns out that the only economic skill they have an aptitude for is looting.
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