Osama Can Wait
It doesn’t matter too much whether bin Laden is killed before or after Saddam Hussein.

December 19, 2001 2:30 p.m.

veryone by now is well aware of the drawbacks of proxy armies, as the Eastern Alliance's endless surrender negotiations may have helped let Osama bin Laden slip away to Pakistan.

The only thing the Eastern tribes were better at than negotiating and arranging bogus ceasefires was boasting: Every day for about two weeks, there were reports that the anti-al Qaeda tribes had claimed the capture of Tora Bora.

I wonder if, for all the footage we saw on TV of Northern Alliance/Eastern Alliance tanks firing, they ever actually hit anything. I kind of doubt it.

But now there will be much less of that footage as the war enters the new phase, with new hand-wringing over whether we can "get" bin Laden or not. The search for bin Laden will be the media's latest "quagmire" — which has been steadily shifting from Mazar-e Sharif, to Kandahar, to Tora Bora, and now to points unknown.

There is some legitimate worry about the fight against terrorism being so personalized.

As the brilliant Richard Perle warned at a National Interest forum in early October, "It is terribly important that we not define the objective at the outset as 'getting' Osama bin Laden, because if we do not get him, it looks as if we have failed. Unfortunately, the administration may have lost control with perceptions on this. Whether they can reestablish it, I don't know."

Of course, perceptions have lurched even further in the getting-bin-Laden direction since October. The problem with this is that we have limited control over when we actually can get bin Laden. It will depend on some luck. It could happen tomorrow, or could take months.

But there's a political upside to an ongoing hunt for bin Laden, which is that it will keep the American public mind focused and maintain the urgency of the war on terrorism. There's no reason bin Laden cannot remain terrorism's poster boy as we take the fight on to the next logical target, Iraq.

The New York Times had an extraordinary piece Tuesday on how Iraq suddenly seems much more doable to the Arab world in light of our victory in Afghanistan, a vindication of what Daniel Pipes and other writers on NRO have been saying for weeks: The Arabs mostly want to be on the winning side.

The Times quotes a highly placed Arab diplomat:

The diplomat, who refused to be identified, noted that most countries in the region harbor a latent desire to be rid of Mr. Hussein. He argued that the current military success in Afghanistan, the demonstration of a new model of warfare there and the undermining of Osama Bin Laden's radical message have created a new opportunity to act in Iraq.

"I now think it is a doable," the diplomat said, adding that his own government might oppose such an operation in public until it became clear it was going to succeed. "This would require a lot of governments to accept big political risks, but I believe that in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, the governments are strong enough to hold the people and not have an uprising."

"How many people will cry for Saddam if he goes?" he asked.

What we'll witness, in coming weeks, is a direct relationship between the Arab attitude toward a war against Iraq and our seriousness about pursuing it. The more serious we are, the more likely the Arab states are to go along.

As NR contributing editor John Hillen points out, in 1990 the Saudis wouldn't have been willing to accept a U.S. troop deployment of anywhere between 100 all the way to 250,000 soldiers. Anything under 250,000 would have been judged a half-measure.

It was only when Dick Cheney told them we would pony up a quarter of a mil that they knew we were serious about prosecuting the war, and welcomed us with open arms and wallets.

Also, as the debate over Iraq progresses, watch for liberals to be "more Arab than the Arabs," arguing against the war more fiercely than Arab governments on the ground who will be perfectly happy to see Saddam go (so long as they're sure we will actually make him go).

As for bin Laden, we shouldn't be too picky about timing: It doesn't matter too much whether he is killed before or after Saddam Hussein.