William Raspberry / Syndicated columnist
Keeping the mess from becoming a catastrophe

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WASHINGTON — Think of a National Football League owner who knows less about pro football than, say, Dan Snyder. Then imagine him turning the decision-making over to a coach who is long on theory and lacking in actual professional experience — like Steve Spurrier, for instance. Now, toss in a series of embarrassing setbacks — with no realistic hope that things will get much better anytime soon — and what have you got?

What you've got is either the Washington Redskins or Iraq — the key difference being that only one of them involves destabilizing a good chunk of the world, wrecking the U.S. Treasury and an escalating number of body bags, discreetly hidden from TV cameras when they arrive at Dover, Del.

It'll probably sound like Bush-bashing, but it is becoming clearer every day — it became crystal, with David Rieff's exhaustive piece in The New York Times Magazine of Nov. 2 — that we went into Iraq with no postwar plan save unfounded optimism. And now with so little going according to predictions, we don't know what to do next.

George Bush is not a dumb man. But before he decided to seek the presidency, he was willfully ignorant of international affairs — or at least strangely incurious. How many Americans of his age, opportunity, means and family connection hadn't visited even London, Rome or Paris? His mind became a blank slate for a set of neocon ideologues, whose audacious goal was to reshape the geography of the Middle East, and the 9-11 attacks gave them their opening.

What the Rieff piece makes clear is how methodically the neocons, mostly in the Defense Department, managed to strip influence and power from the experienced and knowledgeable pragmatists, mostly at State. The former already had met and been enthralled by an Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi. And it was mostly on Chalabi's reassurances that the administration came to anticipate that, once Saddam Hussein was out of the way, the postwar pacification and democratization of Iraq would be a stroll in the park — flowers strewn in the path of our liberating troops, a quick move toward an American-style democracy, a prosperity that would be an irresistible model for Iraq's neighbors — and all of it paid for by Iraq's oil riches. Gun 'n' fun, Spurrier might have called it.

Except it didn't happen that way. A carefully planned and executed war has been followed by an unplanned whistling-in-the-dark attempt to set things right — so far without much outside help or any expectation that Iraqi oil will pay for any of it. What we are facing is, as even the determinedly optimistic Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, "a long, hard slog."

This, by the way, is not just second-guessing by someone who hoped someone else would have won the 2000 election.

Someone has dug out and put on the Internet a fascinating passage from the first President Bush's memoir, "A World Transformed." The senior Bush is explaining why he didn't pursue and kill Saddam at the end of the Gulf War (the elisions are for space only and in no way change the meaning of the passage):

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream ... and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq ... (t)here was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see. ... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome."

One wonders if the present executive ever bothered to read his father's book.

Yet, for all the logic that says we shouldn't have launched this war, the fact is we did, and the problem now is how to get out before an unfortunate and deadly mess becomes a full-blown catastrophe. The last best hope seemed to have been to get the rest of the world to help us out — with troops, money and an internationalizing of the occupation. But the president chose to behave like a headstrong owner, jealous of his power and irrationally committed to a losing coach.

What now, boss?

William Raspberry's column appears Tuesday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com

Copyright 2003, Washington Post Writers Group