Global Policy Forum

By David E. Sanger

On Monday afternoon, reporters from around the world were invited into the Old Executive Office Building for a briefing about what will happen to Iraq after the war is over - how the United States has pre-positioned food and medical supplies, how quickly Iraqis will be able to pump oil, obtain their food rations and get their children to school. The war itself? It was not discussed. President George W. Bush, the correspondents were sternly reminded, has made no decision on that subject.

On Tuesday, the president himself was asked about the sacrifices Americans should be prepared to make should war come. He skipped past the question with a quick sentence - "Anytime you put a troop into harm's way, that in itself is a sacrifice," he said - and he went on to talk about how cavalierly Saddam Hussein "treats innocent life." By the end, Bush had turned a question on American sacrifices into a warning to Iraqi generals that they could face war crimes trials. There was no talk of casualties, no estimates of the economic costs, no discussion of what could go wrong in an invasion of a country roughly the size of France.

And Wednesday night the president described a vision for the Middle East after Saddam is gone - of spreading democracies, of peace between Arabs and Israelis, a subject Bush has engaged only episodically during his 25 months in office. One aide said it was a "a big-think look" at the Middle East, meant to focus minds "beyond the possibility" of uprisings during a war in Iraq.

It is all part of a White House strategy to refer to Saddam in the past tense, as if the American action to oust him has already come and gone, and to focus instead on Bush's vision of a Saddam-free world. At a moment when 64 percent of Americans want to wait for United Nations approval before taking military action, up significantly from two weeks ago, according to a CBS News poll, and when many here and abroad are still debating whether Saddam can be contained without military action, Bush and his senior aides seem to have decided to float past that debate, talking as if Saddam was already a historical relic.

"He's way past all that," said one longtime Republican foreign policy expert who has talked with the president about Iraq in recent times. "He's convinced that the way to win this is to make everyone think about a liberated Iraq, a Mideast without Saddam in the middle." That explains, he added, how Bush could dismiss the street protesters in Europe as the moral equivalent of "focus groups," and declare it is his responsibility to lead. A senior White House aide put it a little differently. "Let Chirac talk about all the reasons for keeping Saddam in. That leaves room for our guy to talk about liberation."

In a White House known for its discipline, Bush's aides have resolutely stayed on message, sidestepping the daily tauntings of reporters, Democrats, or the French and Germans to delve into a discussion of how many might die, how much might be shattered.

A new White House office now sends a nightly e-mail around the world, "The Global Messenger," full of its talking points for the day and buttressing quotations from those who agree with the president ("The future of peace depends on the disarmament of Iraq," Wednesday night's began. "Saddam Hussein continues to be in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and the terms of that resolution must be fully respected.") A few officials, speaking on background, have engaged in what-could-go-wrong conversations, saying they are kept awake at night by the prospect of a dirty bomb or a biological attack in the United States while the war is under way, or urban warfare in Baghdad, or a quagmire, or the eruption of simultaneous crisis elsewhere, probably on the Korean Peninsula.

But even the Bush White House is discovering that it is difficult to keep its own team, much less the opposition, from veering into dangerous ground. This week it started with Senator Peter Fitzgerald, an Illinois Republican and Bush loyalist, who told a suburban Chicago newspaper that Bush told him that if the United States had what Fitzgerald called a "clear shot" at Saddam, the president would revoke, presumably for just a few days, the executive order banning assassinations.

That clearly was not in the script for the day, and Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, huddled with Bush, and emerged to say the president had "no memory" of saying anything of the kind. It was not exactly a convincing explanation, since Fleischer himself had said, just a few months ago, that "a single bullet" could solve the Iraq problem. Fitzgerald realized that he had said a bit too much as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He said he "assumed" Bush had said that in public, but "maybe if he didn't say that anywhere else, I shouldn't have said that just now." Not surprisingly, he is not interested in elaborating on his conversation, his spokesman said.

But perhaps the greater damage to the White House line came from General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, who suggested in congressional testimony Tuesday that occupying Iraq might take 100,000 American soldiers, joined by tens of thousands of forces from the allies. It was a revealing moment, because in the official White House description of post-Saddam Iraq, there is no lengthy entanglement by the Pentagon, just a quick handover to peacekeepers and civilian administrators. . "He said what?" one of Bush's senior aides said Tuesday night, when informed of Shinseki's testimony. Backpedaling ensued.

Shinseki did not offer an opinion on how long those troops would be tied up. But a few months ago, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told a visitor to her office that she was thinking in terms of an occupation that lasted up to 18 months.

"I'm not paid to worry about that," said a leading member of Bush's foreign policy team. "Karl is paid to worry about that," the official added with a smile, a reference to Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, whose own role in the internal decision-making about Iraq strategy remains a mystery, even to many insiders.

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