Stardate 20030124.1332

(Captain's log): It's an engineering aphorism that the sour taste of poor quality lingers long after the sweet scent of early delivery is forgotten.

The point being that when customers, management and marketing are all yapping about slipped schedules, you need to stand firm and take the time needed to make the product actually work right. Shipping crap early is worse than shipping something good a bit late, all other things being equal. And what people worry about in the run up to shipment is different from what they remember after the fact. Once you actually ship, no one will talk about that part of it any longer.

This applies to politics, too, and it appears that Bush knows this principle, though he likely learned it elsewhere. And much of the kvetching about the upcoming war in Iraq is based on misunderstanding this principle.

For instance, many have wondered why it was that it's taken so long to prepare for war. Likely it will be years before we truly find out, but among other things it appears that there were certain logistical necessities which couldn't be prepared before now. For instance, more than a year ago it became clear that we couldn't rely on the Saudis, and that meant we couldn't depend on using the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia. It wasn't just that the runways would not be available to us for airstrikes; it was that our regional military command center was located there. Starting about a year ago, we picked up and moved, and built up the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar into an alternative command center. That only became operational in December, and General Franks and his staff have spent the last month shaking it out and making sure everything works correctly.

Another problem was that we had run through a substantial percentage (probably more than half) of our stockpile of precision guided munitions in Afghanistan, and we were not producing them at a wartime rate. It takes a long time to ramp up production of this kind of thing, because the manufacturing pipeline is extremely long for modern high-tech weapons. And even after the higher rate finally emerged from the back end of the pipe, it was necessary to wait for our stockpiles to build back up. But that's happened now, and we again have a lot of JDAMs and Tomahawks and the rate of production is much higher now.

And though we are capable of fighting nearly anywhere, in almost any kind of conditions, there are some which are better than others and favor us more. It turns out that February and March are the best months in which to fight a war in that region because of the weather and the climate (as Donald Sensing pointed out last August). It's no accident that the last Gulf war ground action was also at this time of year.

The point is that what looks from the outside like dithering and stalling may simply represent unglamorous but critical hidden progress.

There probably were other issues involved, some of which we may not learn about for decades. If we'd ignored those things and gone in earlier, we certainly could have won – but it might have been an extremely ugly victory, one which was more politically damaging than politically useful. Remember that the point of war is to advance your political goal; you don't fight wars just because you're pissed at someone. (Not if you're intelligent, you don't.)

So in the run up to war, many who favor the war are frustrated by what they see as unconscionable delay. But when everyone looks back on this, in two years time (or, rather, in about 18 months) no one will obsess over whether it was fought in February of 2003 rather than in November of 2002. After the war actually begins, that will no longer matter. What people will look back on is whether the war was fast, efficient, relatively bloodless, and whether it helped to make us more safe. From a political standpoint a war in February 2003 which does those things is better than one in November of 2002 which failed at one or more of them.

The only way that a delay would have turned out to be critical is if it had not only let us improve our situation but also helped Iraq to improve its situation. If as a result of the delay Iraq managed to get a nuke together, and if they use it, then the delay will have been a mistake. But that's one of the judgments that leaders have to make, and the best guess now is that a two year delay had a good chance of letting Iraq do that but a two month delay didn't. Of course we won't know for sure until afterwards.

Still, you see comments in the press now to the effect that American support for the war is declining in the polls, and that overseas opposition is rising. Such reports seem to assume that Bush has to pay attention to those things. Either such articles try to claim that he needs to give up entirely on attacking (and "let the inspections work") or that the Bush administration needs to "make a case" by revealing evidence of Iraq's WMD programs.

But he doesn't, and this is critical. Our system of representative government forces our leaders to face us on a regular basis for a reaffirmation of their mandate to lead, but they don't do this continually and this is deliberate. And right now, just after an election, Bush is as unfettered from short term public opinion as it is possible for him to be. It doesn't matter right now how much support he has; all that will be important is how