The White House’s watchword was caution yesterday, but the unspoken calculation was obvious. The key to President Bush’s re-election next November may well have been found in a 6ft hole by the river Tigris.
The president received the first tentative news of the capture from his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, on Saturday afternoon, when Bush was at his Maryland retreat, Camp David.
He flew back to the White House to discuss how to handle one of the most significant achievements of his first term. Before Saddam was found on an Iraqi farm just south of Tikrit, the toppling of his statue on April 9 remained a hollow symbol.
One vital element missing from the president’s premature declaration of victory has now fallen into place. The capture was kept a secret until the early hours of Sunday morning when the US envoy in Iraq, Paul Bremer, called the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, with the confirmation of positive DNA identification. Rice in turn called the president at 5.14 am.
Stung by the hasty triumphalism of May, the president’s address to the nation yesterday emphasised the battles yet to be fought in Iraq, ”capture by capture, cell by cell, victory by victory”.
But there was little doubt this was the victory the White House wanted most. It is enough to enable the US troops to begin to pull out of Iraq and for Washington to still claim victory.
Meanwhile, the US economy is striding into a deficit-assisted recovery which should peak just as the election campaign is in full swing. The rebound will almost certainly not recover the 3m jobs lost over the past three years, but it should create an all-important mood of renewal and optimism.
The Democrats’ best hope is to convince voters that Bush is failing to make them safer; today that looks like a much harder line to sell than it was last week.
The Democrat presidential frontrunner, Howard Dean, who has been highly critical of the president’s Iraq policy, could do little else than join in the general euphoria. He told reporters that he expected the capture to change ”the course of the occupation of Iraq”.
”I think the first order of business is to say this is a great day — I congratulate the Iraqi people — and to say that this is a great day for both the American military and the American people and for the Iraqi people.”
Senator John Kerry said the capture of Saddam was ”a great opportunity for the president to get it right for the long term”. He urged Bush to ”use this as a moment to transform the entire operation in Iraq”.
Dick Gephardt, also running for president, chose to remind Americans that the war on terror was far from over. ”For many years, we will be confronted with a war on terrorism that is unfinished.”
On the campaign stump, where slogans count more than concepts, it is unlikely to matter much that Saddam Hussein had little to do with al-Qaeda and September 11, or that he did not possess an arsenal of terrifying weapons.
Americans, like everyone else, require their government to put food on their tables and vanquish their enemies. Few enemies in history looked more vanquished than Saddam when having his hair checked for lice and a torch shone down his throat by a soldier in rubber gloves.
Osama bin Laden would arguably be an even greater prize, and Saddam’s capture will help free intelligence agents and special forces for that job.
As it is, the television pictures of the forlorn, bearded Saddam will soon be spliced into the president’s showreel of achievements, alongside shots of the commander-in-chief in an army jacket mingling with the troops and dining with the Queen, just as the images of captives and victory celebrations were chiselled on to the palace walls of Roman emperors.
The remaining electoral risks for the president are that Saddam’s capture fails to stem the Iraqi insurgency, generating inevitable comparisons with Vietnam, and that the US is targeted by another terrorist assault on a September 11 scale.
Another major attack, however, could just as easily rally Americans to their leader, and make them less likely to experiment politically.
Much would depend on the circumstances, and whether they suggested US forces had been fatally distracted from the task of tracking down al-Qaeda by an unnecessary detour in Iraq.
A continuing Iraqi quagmire would be an unambiguous political liability. The suicide bomb attack in Khaldiya served as a reminder that lives will be lost.
The removal of Saddam may demoralise his supporters, but at the same time remove an impediment to Iraqis who hate the occupation but hated Saddam even more. So it could get a lot worse.
At the very least, though, Saddam is likely to provide a significant amount of information about the whereabouts of the lieutenants thought to be running the resistance in his name.
In purely political terms, the Iraqi leader’s capture offers the administration a last chance to justify its invasion with the threat of weapons of mass destruction. If there is anything to be found, Saddam should know of its existence.
Failing that, the focus of attention can be shifted to the unquestioned brutality of his regime, as preparations get under way for a trial for crimes against humanity. The shaping of the agenda is always in the hands of the incumbent.
President Bush is not invulnerable. Only 52% of the population approved of the job he was doing, according to an Associated Press/Ipsos Reid poll, while 51% thought the country was on the wrong track. A better economy and a Saddam trial should help those figures, but they are certainly not disaster-proof.
However, American voters have in the past been remarkably forgiving of presidents, particularly Republicans who have embarked on ill-conceived foreign adventures that have cost soldiers lives.
In 1983, Ronald Reagan was under heavy criticism for sending troops into Lebanon and leaving them poorly protected in Beirut where 241 were killed by the bombing of their barracks. He went on to sweep almost every state in the nation. – Guardian Unlimited Â