Stardate 20030415.1616

(On Screen): With the fall of Tikrit, the war in Iraq is over. Our military accomplished all the political goals we needed from it, both in terms of the local situation and in terms of more global effects, and did a superb job. From top to bottom it was a masterful performance.

It was not just that Saddam was eliminated. That was important. We needed to conquer Iraq, and Saddam's regime needed to end. But it was also that it was a quick and relatively bloodless and extraordinarily competent victory. Specifically, American and British casualties were low (by historical standards) and civilian casualties were extremely low (by historical standards) and none of the frantic predictions of disaster were fulfilled. This has already had global consequences.

As it became clear last week that the war was going extremely well, and that it would end soon, and that predictions of us being stuck in a bloody quagmire fighting in Baghdad were wrong, more and more political attention was paid to the question of what would happen afterwards.

And you saw, for a few days, an almost deafening series of demands from all over the world for the UN to be given control over post-war reconstruction and nation-building (and, just incidentally, awarding of contracts) from the EU and France and Latvia and the UN and the EU and Jordan and Security Council members and "World lawmakers" from 115 nations and Russia.

I think this was a combination of old habits, a failure to understand the new reality, and simply the longshot hope that if there was enough clamor it might embarrass the Bush administration into giving ground. Which didn't happen.

Some of it was, I think, attempts both to put pressure on Tony Blair and to some extent to try to give him ammunition. Blair was always the most internationalist of the three primary leaders in the coalition. Australian PM John Howard never wavered, and it became clear that Bush didn't either. (And I'm extremely happy, though not at all surprised, to learn that Howard is benefiting from his support for the war.)

Blair seems to have done his best to convince Bush to give in on this, to no avail. Bush didn't want to publicly humiliate Blair on the subject, and after their meeting in northern Ireland they made a joint announcement which at least partially satisfied Blair's desire for UN involvement, but without actually granting UN primacy as others had been demanding.

After a couple of interviews given by Powell in Europe were, apparently, deliberately misreported there as indicating that the US was actually going to give way on this point (in hopes, I suspect, of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and of making any other course seem like American backtracking), he ended up making a rather blunt announcement on the subject which pretty much closed the door.

Mr Powell also said that the US and its coalition partners would not be willing to hand over political authority to the UN once Saddam Hussein's regime had been removed.

"The suggestion... that now that the coalition has done all of this and liberated Iraq, thank you very much, step aside and the Security Council is now going to become responsible for everything, is incorrect," he said.

"And they know it. And they were told it."

And as has become a pattern with the Bush administration, once it actually made a decision on the subject, the subject was closed. This has often been indicated by having Colin Powell (the "reasonable one") make the announcement.

President Bush's decisiveness and apparent complete insensitivity to foreign criticism are becoming legendary, and after a few days it had become clear that he really meant it this time, too. The post-war American administration began to move into Iraq as planned, and a lot of people in the world began to realize that there was not really anything they could do about it.

And especially in France there seems to be a growing realization that the old diplomatic stance was an almost unmitigated disaster. Chirac is now softening it, and is trying to hold out a hand to Bush for reconciliation. Or at least, that's what he's trying to make it look like