No one knows if Saddam really has all those look-alikes they say he has, but it's a shame Bush doesn't have one. Maybe he could do a better job of running the war, with a lot fewer mistakes than the original Bush. Because what we are looking at now is certainly a bushel of them.
Mistake No. 1: While the war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan enjoyed international support, Bush has not been able to prove that Saddam and global terror are linked. Suspicions that he is settling a family feud has cost him the support of the world and triggered mass demonstrations. The editor of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur wrote this week that Bush has managed to turn a despised dictator into the heroic successor of Salah a-Din.
Mistake No. 2: The United States went to war without adequate intelligence. The campaign started off with 60 Tomahawks aimed at a certain building where Saddam was supposedly staying, but he walked out of there alive, well and speechifying. On top of that, there is still no information on the whereabouts of his chemical and biological weapons, which means that for the moment, the United States has yet to get its hands on the corpus delicti touted as the main excuse for going to war. U.S. intelligence also failed to predict the suicide bombings, and it was wrong in its assessment that the Iraqis would greet the Americans with glee and showers of rice, not to mention the Iraqi army turning its guns on Saddam. That hasn't happened yet.
Mistake No. 3: Preparations for the war went on for half a year. With battle plans, maps crisscrossed with arrows, and attack routes shouted from every hilltop, Saddam had plenty of time to ready things on his end. One of the things he did was brainwash his troops that the target is not his regime but the Iraqi homeland. For the American soldiers, the fighting spirit of the Iraqis has come as a surprise. On TV they said this wasn't the sort of combat they were trained for.
Mistake No. 4: In Afghanistan, there was a fighting opposition and an alternative regime waiting in the wings. No such opposition has been cultivated to take over when Saddam is gone. The only ones who have the power to move in are the Shi'ites, taking their cue from Iran. Israeli military intelligence wasn't joking during the Gulf War when it said a live but weakened Saddam was preferable to Shi'ites running the show from Iran to Lebanon.
Mistake No. 5: U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld pooh-poohed Iraqi military strength. At first he wanted a surgical operation deploying 50,000 U.S. troops, tops.
In the Gulf War, America's goal was liberating occupied Kuwait, and all the Arab countries were on its side. The current war is not a surgical operation but a large-scale occupation. There's a fatal difference between liberation and occupation. In 1967, we thought we'd liberated the territories and all of a sudden we found ourselves occupiers with the whole world down our throats.
America has underestimated Iraqi endurance. When it became clear that Turkey was not about to let U.S. troops pass through its territory to open a northern front, why wasn't the offensive postponed for a few days rather than leaving the troops vulnerable to attack and far from supply lines? Now another 200,000 troops are being rushed in. Mistakes like that around here would end in a commission of inquiry.
Mistake No. 6: The U.S. administration was wrong to add the goal of inaugurating a democratic regime in Iraq to its primary objective of wiping out terror. In doing so, it is biting off more than it can chew. As President Mubarak once explained to an American news broadcaster, the type of government in this part of the world - a blend of democracy and dictatorship with a dummy parliament and a secret police - is the perfect cocktail for political stability.
If Jordan and Egypt were democracies in the Western sense of the word, the peace treaties with Israel would have been null and void long ago. Democracies grow. They aren't parachuted in by a Tomahawk.
Mistake No. 7: Bush did not manage to win global sanction for the war on Iraq. The amount of resistance put up by the Iraqis has been a shocker for the army, and the hostility of the world media has been a shocker for the powers that be in Washington. U.S. troops were prepared for a snap war, but it's going to be a longer haul than expected. Sooner or later, victory will come. The people of Iraq do not love Saddam, and the soldiers of Iraq will not want to die to save his skin. He will disappear. But Bush's America, after its break with the world, will not be what it was.
And why is that worrying? Because those same mistakes - the smugness and the bullying - could be repeated when they start on us
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