And the story just gets stranger. The U.S. Department of Defense has ushered its preferred candidate, Ahmed Chalabi, into Iraq with a force of a few thousand fighting men, the so-called Free Iraqi Forces, trained shortly before the war at a base in Hungary. As noted here, the FIF seem to be everywhere at once, suggesting that Gen. Franks is under orders to promote Chalabi's fortunes through his men's artificial exploits. Two similar ploys come immediately to mind: the British attempt to have Arab irregulars precede Western forces into Damascus in 1918, and the Arab liberation of Kuwait City in 1991.

At the same time, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid, headed by Jay Garner but seemingly riven by the same infighting visible everywhere else, has been signalling vigorously - too vigorously - that Chalabi is not their guy. The loudest signal to this effect was their disassociation from Chalabi associate Mohsen Zobeidi, the self-proclaimed governor of Baghdad. Sometimes the protests ring somewhat false, as in this New York Times report:

Of the new government body, General Garner said: "It will have Iraqi faces on it. It will be governed by the Iraqis." Of Mr. Chalabi, he said: "Mr. Chalabi is a fine man. He is not my candidate, he is not the candidate of the coalition."

Despite General Garner's words about Mr. Chalabi, he was having dinner with him tonight.

So it seems that President Bush's singular vision for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was not matched by an equally intense focus on Iraq apres-Saddam. Insofar as the success of a military campaign can only be measured by the achievement of its underlying political goals, it may be too soon to declare victory after all. At this point, no one should question whether there actually were any political objectives worthy of the name. (#1, Get Saddam; #2, Establish democracy throughout the Middle East.) But how to get from point A to point B was never carefully thought through. As an unnamed defense analyst commented to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin last December,

...there is a "don't-worry-be-happy Zeitgeist" in official Washington that "tends to portray Iraq as the next Japan, a Sleeping Beauty merely waiting for her prince's precision-guided kiss from 15,000 feet or higher."

When [Bush] met with Makiya and two other Iraqis in January, I was told by someone not present, the exiles spent a good portion of the time explaining to the president that there are two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him. War has turned Bush into a foreign-policy president, but democratizing an Arab country will require a subtlety and sophistication that have been less in evidence than the resolve to fight.