America counts the cost of fighting an invisible enemy
THERE is a moment in the classic 1972 movie The Candidate when Bill McKay, the inexperienced and fresh-faced young lawyer played by Robert Redford, turns to his advisers just after he has won election to the US Senate and anxiously asks "What do we do now?" It is a question that is being asked with increasing frequency in Washington these days as the human and financial costs of American involvement in Iraq steadily rise nearly five months after US President George W Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq.
Like McKay, few in the Bush administration appeared to have given much thought to what happens after the main event and now they are struggling for ways to understand and deal with the unfolding drama. It was all meant to be very different. Before the war, the neo-conservative hawks within the administration clearly believed that the post-war occupation what is known in Pentagon jargon as 'phase four' would be cheap and easy. Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz told Congress: "We are dealing with a country that can... finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon".
