A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I'm glad I'm not the only one to whom this has occurred.  It does feel that way every now and again.

Charles Krauthammer makes a point I wonder that critics of the Bush administration's war policy haven't made long before now.  Of all the things Bush and his team can be said to have failed to plan for -- the insurgency, problems with reconstruction, sectarian conflict -- surely the evident failure to plan for a timely trial of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen ranks up there among the most important.  It was always known that if he were taken alive he would need to be tried, yet his trial is just starting though he was captured fully two years ago.  As I noted the other day, that's more time than it took to arrest, arraign, try and execute the top Nazis at Nuremberg. 

And after all this time Saddam and his defense team are still being allowed to turn their trial into a circus.  We all understand that in the Bush administration no one is ever held accountable for anything -- this is apparently a corporate management style thing beyond the ken of those of us who never went to business school -- but the questions still need to be asked:  what have Bush's people been doing, and thinking about, all this time?  They couldn't make this trial happen any sooner?  With the fiasco of the Milosevic trial flashing a big red warning, could they not see that Saddam and his greasy lawyers might try to make this trial about the court and the occupation rather than about the crimes of the former regime?

A real political strategy for Iraq, as opposed to a strategy document designed to respond to a public relations emergency in the United States, was always going to need to deal with the place of the former regime in the Iraqi mind.  The trial of Saddam Hussein was always going to be key to that -- his crimes and those of his henchmen were going to need to be exposed, discussed publicly, and paid for in a timely manner.  Yet this is just another one of those things that the Bush administration assumed would happen whenever it happened.  The damage to our cause in Iraq first from the delay and now from the spectacle Saddam's trial is now becoming doesn't seem to be something anyone in Washington was that worried about.

Since January 2001 no one, not even Osama bin Laden, has been denounced more often or with more vigor by the President and his team than Saddam Hussein.  Detailed planning for this man's trial and disposal would seem to follow from this as a matter of course.  Except it didn't.  The truth is, it probably didn't even occur to the President or the other senior officials in his administration.  I swear it is hard for me to get a handle on how these people think.  It's as if having started this war they've decided it isn't interesting enough to demand their time and attention.