THE dramatic announcement of Saddam Hussein’s arrest, and the subsequent flashing around the world of pictures showing a dishevelled and clearly disoriented Saddam undergoing a medical examination, provided a tremendous shot in the arm for the Bush administration the value of which was only partly reduced by the news that there had been yet another attack on an Iraqi police station.

In many ways the images of Saddam in captivity are expected to have an even more dramatic effect on the psyche of the Iraqi people than those of Saddam’s statue being pulled down. His detention, the Americans hope, will signal to the Iraqis an irrevocable end to the era of tyrannical Baathist rule in Iraq and will persuade the fence sitters and other sceptics to finally offer their full cooperation to the occupation authorities and to their plans for returning sovereignty to the Iraqi people. So far, however, this is only a hope.

A triumphant Bush in a short televised address could tell the Iraqis that “a dark and painful era is over...All Iraqis can now come together and reject violence and build a new Iraq.” He carefully avoided, however, promising the American people that this meant the end of the war in Iraq warning instead that “we still face terrorists who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the rise of liberty in the heart of the Middle East”. While promising that such people who “pose a direct threat to the American people” will be defeated he implied that this war against such enemies would be long.

There are three sets of consequences that have to be looked at with regard to what American intelligence has been able to achieve. The first and probably the most important for an administration positioning itself for elections in November 2004 is the degree to which this undercuts the scathing criticism to which Bush’s “Iraq adventure” has been subjected by the Democrats. Al Sharpton, an aspirant for the democratic party’s nomination as presidential candidate, for instance, has repeatedly made the offer that since both Osama bin Laden and Saddam were untraced he could offer Bush after winning the elections in ‘04 a place in his administration as head of the ‘Missing Persons Bureau’. Now, of course, on this issue it is Bush who will be scoring points with the voters.

In the eyes of the world and indeed in the eyes of many Americans the failure to find WMD in Iraq destroyed the case Bush had made for attacking Iraq and called into question either the soundness of his judgment, or his truthfulness (nothing has been found so far despite the devotion of enormous manpower and financial resources to this task by the Americans). There is now speculation that American intelligence will be able to extract from Saddam some revealing information about Iraq’s WMD programme.

If this does not happen there will be another arrow in Bush’s quiver. It is expected that Saddam will be tried by an Iraqi court — modelled on the International Criminal Court — that the Iraqi governing council had decided to set up coincidentally only a few days before Saddam was apprehended. This will yield lots of grisly evidence of Saddam’s murderous rule and provide justification for Bush’s unilateral action against Iraq. Bush’s advisers will of course ensure that the trial is held when the election campaign is at its peak and when its favourable impact will be greatest.

The second consequence will be the impact on the rest of the world and in particular the countries from which the United States wants financial and other assistance for the operations in Iraq. In a move that much of the media in the United States deemed incomprehensible the American defence department announced that the countries which had not contributed troops to the Iraq operation would not be eligible for the reconstruction contracts financed from the $ 20 billion that the United States had allocated for Iraq. The countries that would be most obviously affected were clearly France, Germany, Russia and Canada.

At the same time President Bush had appointed a special envoy to negotiate the forgiveness of the old Iraqi debt, a large part of which was owed to these very countries. There were hints that in case there was debt forgiveness the decision to exclude these countries from securing contracts could be reconsidered.

It was my view that the arbitrary exclusion decision, which invited criticism not only from these countries but also from the United Nations Secretary-General, could have affected not only the extent to which there would have been cooperation in Iraq but also in Afghanistan where the United States had been asking the Nato countries and notably Germany and Canada to assume greater responsibilities for augmenting ISAF and for expanding its operations to cover areas other than Kabul.

It is the hope of many in the Bush administration that the Saddam success would persuade these countries to overlook the differences with the US and back up their messages of felicitations with concrete assistance. For the moment this appears to be a forlorn hope. The messages from the French and Germans welcoming the American success have reiterated the call for giving the UN a role in the transfer of power to the Iraqis and for greater international participation in the reconstruction effort.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly is the consequence Saddam’s apprehension will have on the internal turbulence in Iraq. There is no doubt that among those attacking American troops are diehard supporters of the Saddam regime and for them Saddam’s arrest will be demoralizing.

American commanders on the ground, however, have stated that they had seen no evidence to support the conjecture that Saddam had been directing or coordinating the attacks these elements had been launching. It would seem therefore that even though they may be demoralized they will not be rendered impotent and, as the attack on the police station showed, they will not necessarily be deprived of either the manpower or funds needed to keep the resistance to the Americans alive.

More importantly it seems evident that Baath party supporters are only a small part of the resistance that the Americans are facing. Within what is known as the Sunni triangle many anti Baath Sunnis feel that the American plans appear to provide for a Shia dominated government in which the next most important element will be that the resistance from them will cease only when they are assured that there will be some guaranteed share of power for them even if it is far less than the power the Sunnis enjoyed under Saddam.

For them this is almost as unacceptable as the continuance of the Baath regime. There is an even more complex set of reasons for the resistance in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk much of it coming perhaps from the Sunni Arabs that had over the years chosen to make their homes in these cities or had been encouraged more recently by the Baath regime to move to these cities.

For these elements resistance will cease only when they are assured that there will be some guaranteed share of power for them even if it is far less than the power the Sunnis enjoyed under Saddam.

There is now far less talk of terrorists infiltrating into the country or of covert assistance, financial and material, for the resistance from neighbouring countries. But it is clear that to the extent that this problem exists it is not going to be deeply affected by Saddam’s arrest.

There is no doubt that Saddam’s arrest represents a major success for the Americans. It would be to the benefit of the Iraqi people if this success were to lead to a cessation of the resistance which now more than anything else creates hardships for the Iraqi people today. It would, however, be naive to expect that this will happen. Bush is right in warning the American people that this does not represent the end of the story in Iraq.

In America Bush’s election prospects have registered a dramatic improvement. If, however, more is not done to address the sense of alienation of the Sunnis in Iraq and if more is not done to enlist international cooperation Iraq will continue to be a “quagmire” and the current improvement in Bush’s standing may well dissipate before the crucial November date rolls around.

In the meantime it is likely that the questions already being asked about contracts granted without competitive bidding to companies like Halliburton and the excessive prices they have charged for petrol supplies will multiply in the next few months. Saddam’s arrest may mute them for a while but given the ammunition such allegations provide it is likely that the Democrats will raise them as a major campaign issue.

Saddam’s arrest has definitely made the Iraq issue less of a liability for the Bush administration but it is too early to say that the effect will be durable. To make it so will need the sort of multi-pronged effort of which there are few signs yet.

The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan

a THE Iraq war was supposed to be a short and swift affair lasting for just about a few weeks. But the fact is that this is not proving to be so. Casualties continue to mount daily. The Americans and their allies have already lost several hundred soldiers and there seems no early end in sight to the war.

Instead of being able to demonstrate to the world its capability of doing a quick job, there are signs of bogging down. The situation is further complicated by the Americans running from pillar to post round the globe searching for reinforcements from countries other than their own. An American presidential election is less than a year away.

The first and foremost priority that the sitting US government has shifted in the middle of the Iraqi military campaign. President Bush is redesigning at the same time strategy by means of which wants to win the presidential election at home and not lose the war in Iraq.

There is immense confusion prevailing in both Washington and Baghdad. The comings and goings between the two cities indeed make a sorry reading. Already the American “viceroy” in Iraq, Paul Bremer has made several trips to Washington to personally receive the changing nuances of his instructions on what he is to do in Iraq. The inflow of top-level visitors from Washington is a regular feature and no less a person than the American president found it necessary to make one of the shortest foreign trips ever to Baghdad to spend some time with American troops on Thanksgiving Day in a bid to bolster their flagging morale.

What stands out quite clearly is that Washington is no better than Third World countries in handling policy executions. The Americans have already made a number of changes after some self-confessed mistakes, and have resorted to all sorts of policy formulations in their conduct of the war on terror. One can only find oneself in extreme suspense as to what will happen next on the world scene? Just before the Iraq expedition and immediately after the war started over there, there was talk of also invading Syria, Iran and North Korea which may well have been on the cards had Iraq not proved itself to be as hard a nut to crack as it has turned out to be.

Already there has been one change in the top American position in Iraq and that has caused enough confusion in the country in respect to policies in the pipeline. And now James Baker a veteran from the Senior Bush days is being inducted into the Iraq fray possibly to smother the pent-up feelings of the Arabs in general and the Iraqis and Saudis in particular.

After having first virtually gone the whole-hog for Israel and having in the process destabilized Iraq — and consequently opened up the proverbial Pandora’s box in the Middle East, is it that second-thoughts are occurring as to what wrong has been done and what might begin to happen that may have never been intended.

But can all this sort of policy not be described as decision-making by whim? The road map for the Middle East enunciated by the Americans and promptly rejected by the Israelis is suddenly exhumed in the form of a private peace initiative for the Middle East which describes itself as the Geneva Agreement.

Can the world sustain this sort of a leadership coming from the sole surviving superpower that is the US? This oscillation from extreme one-sidedness to trying to apply the balm of conciliation and pacification is hardly the sort of path the world’s unrivalled superpower should be resorting to.

It is indeed quite hard to believe that an American administration which had commenced holding the reins of office with an almost reckless world-wide policy should suddenly be having cold-feet. The hard fact unfortunately happens to be that merely being a world power does not necessarily result in sagacious policies. What we may well be witnessing is the beginning of the decline of American power. Sometimes there is talk of staying on in Iraq indefinitely and sometimes there is the old wobble of seeking a hasty pullout.

The question naturally arises why is all this happening? Is it the practice of serious statecraft or is it a cavalier business by a bunch of novices not good enough for the world responsibility that willy-nilly rests on their shoulders? Or is the policy being made solely on the periodical swings and vicissitudes of gallup polls that are coming in from the pollsters to Karl Rove? And whether we like it or not, the rest of the world probably does not matter one way or the other.

The days of international joyrides are probably over. All that matters is as to who is going to be elected next November at the hustings of the American presidential elections. That is precisely why Iraq has the makings of another self-inflicted crisis that unfortunately is of America’s own making.

America cannot sustain casualties indefinitely and so it has to think of making a peace even if it ends up in the sort of peace it hurriedly had to make in Vietnam. America in the same breath also cannot afford to have a world at peace and so bush-fire wars are needed to be triggered in different spots of the world to keep its military-industrial empire in fine fettle and in the fullest of production. This indeed is the dilemma of our times but that even more so makes Iraq look the likely quagmire that would have been best avoided.