Posted on: Sunday, April 6, 2003

EDITORIAL
In Iraq, huge jobs, uncertainty are ahead

One thing about the war in Iraq that almost everyone agrees on, whether they support or oppose the effort, is that U.S.-led coalition forces will win against the Saddam Hussein regime.

There is great debate, of course, over whether choosing to confront Saddam was the right decision or will be worth the cost. Eventually, history will offer the answers. But there is little uncertainty about the immediate outcome.

Where the uncertainty comes now is in defining and deciding what comes next, both in Iraq and beyond.

For starters, there is the dicey business of deciding when victory has been achieved. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration has come up with a strategy of a "rolling" victory that would emerge over time rather than occur in one dramatic moment.

And that makes sense. It is highly unlikely that the day will ever come when Saddam walks up to a U.S. general waving a white flag. And even when the United States has imposed general security control on the country, there will continue to be pockets of resistance from guerrilla fighters and the like.

So the endgame will focus on convincing greater and greater numbers of Iraqis (and the rest of the world) that the Saddam regime is gone and a new order is in place.

This will be an enormously challenging task. For starters, many Iraqis will be understandably reluctant to come forward publicly and embrace the new reality unless their security is assured. There is early evidence that some Iraqis have taken the risk to welcome the allied troops and oppose regime forces, but not yet in mass numbers.

Then, too, Iraqis — and certainly their Middle East neighbors — will be watching to see what kind of government structure emerges in the post-battle era. It is imperative that an indigenous authority emerge as swiftly as possible even if allied troops remain in country as a necessary security presence.

That's a lot of responsibility to place on the young men and women who have a frontline role in this scenario: They must be at once fighters, security forces, diplomats, liberators and self-effacing "supporters" of the new Iraqi leadership.

If the role of those post-war troops is difficult, so, too, will be the role of the diplomats in the post-war era. An early signal of this troublesome challenge emerged last week when Secretary of State Colin Powell made a European swing to discuss the war and its aftermath.

Powell reassuringly and appropriately insisted that the United Nations "will play a role" in the rebuilding of the civic and physical infrastructure of Iraq. But in a clear signal that resentments remain over the failure of the U.N. to stand with the United States in this war, Powell also said that it will be the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" that "leads the way forward."

That diplomatic work was not helped, frankly, by an effort in the U.S. House to ban the participation of German, French, Russian and Syrian contractors in the post-war reconstruction effort. The emotion behind that resolution is understandable, but it serves no useful purpose.

Surely, even immediate uncertainties lie ahead. Despite their many successes, our commanders have still been forced to consider the thought of horrendous urban warfare in Baghdad and the possibility that the Iraqi forces might unleash weapons of mass destruction against allied troops.

We can take some comfort in the fact that some horrors have failed to materialize, such as the global environmental crisis that would have followed destruction of the Iraqi oil fields.

But even if a "rolling victory" is swiftly declared, our work will be far, far from done.