Winners, Losers in Washington

While Iraqis danced in the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday, in Washington -- where the “I told you so” game is a capital sport -- the jibes were out for the naysayers who had feared a grueling and protracted conflict to topple Saddam Hussein.

Vice President Dick Cheney called the war “one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted” and praised the “carefully drawn plan.”

“In the early days of the war, the plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios,” Cheney said. “But with every day and every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.”

Cheney was riding high Wednesday as one of an elite corps of political prophets who had accurately forecast a quick collapse of the Iraqi regime. The vice president is on record as insisting that the war would last “weeks, not months.”

In fact, it took three weeks for Baghdad to fall, compared with the five weeks it took for U.S. forces to seize Kabul and the two months to gain control of all of Afghanistan.

If the current allied blitzkrieg continues, other optimists who were thrown on the defensive when U.S. forces ran into early resistance on the way to Baghdad can now expect their stock as prognosticators to rise. They include:

* Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was quoted as telling troops in February that fighting could last “six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” As U.S. forces were temporarily bogged down on the road to Baghdad, Rumsfeld began snapping at anyone who asked how long the war would last that the answer was “not knowable.” But Wednesday, Rumsfeld’s decision to go to war with four instead of six divisions, a plan criticized not only by the retired generals cited by Cheney but also by many of the current commanders in the theater, appeared to be vindicated.

* Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, who predicted that the Iraqis would welcome a U.S. invading force: “Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.” Wolfowitz has conceded that he “underestimated the Iraqi willingness to commit war crimes” but otherwise stuck to his guns.

* Defense policy advisor Richard Perle, who called the Iraqi regime “a house of cards” and predicted that the war would last, at most, three weeks. Still, some might accuse Perle of overexuberance for saying in July that “of the 400,000 in Saddam’s army, I’ll be surprised if 10% are loyal to Saddam” and predicting that “support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.”

* Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson, who designed the air war against Iraq in 1991 and was quoted in September as saying that if the war was properly prosecuted, “Saddam will not last 30 days.”

Others who argued that military action would be quick and relatively painless include Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.); Brookings Institution scholar and former CIA analyst Kenneth M. Pollack; and former Reagan administration official Kenneth Adelman, who predicted that the campaign would be “a cakewalk.”

Among those who opposed or raised questions about the wisdom of the war and may now find themselves on the defensive are:

* French President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin; Russian President Vladimir V. Putin; German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer; and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

* On Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Rep. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.) and Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who called the administration’s war haste “both blind and improvident.”

Still, many administration officials and Capitol Hill staffers were careful Wednesday not to gloat -- and to douse hopes that the capture of Baghdad meant the war is already won.

“The battle, the campaign is not over,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned in an interview with The Times.

“We have liberated, what, half a dozen cities.... There are other cities that are fully under the control of this now dying or soon-to-die or dead regime.”

And a GOP staffer on Capitol Hill noted, “I sense no glee in here today. None.

“What I sense is sober realism about the challenge that still awaits, first and foremost, the Iraqi people and the coalition of the willing,” he said.

Likewise, an aide to a Democratic congressman who supported the war rejected the notion that foes would be easy marks for the Bush administration.

“Raising questions about a war is one of the most patriotic acts of any elected official, and that’s what these guys are paid to do,” he said.

But critics of the war could still emerge as prescient if a military victory is followed by long-term problems. Most prominent are the fears that U.S. forces could face punishing guerrilla or suicide attacks, that U.S. occupation forces could be drawn into a quagmire, or that their presence in Iraq will lead to anti-American terrorism elsewhere.

“When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences,” Mubarak has said. “Instead of having one [Osama] bin Laden, we’ll have 100 Bin Ladens.”

Others fear that a shattered Iraq will not easily stay unified, and that any genuinely democratic regime that emerges might prove vehemently anti-Israel or anti-American.

Any setback, not just to the military effort but also to the looming reconstruction, could quickly reverse Wednesday’s political landscape. And so, one savvy Washington watcher, asked who were the most accurate prophets of the Iraq war, responded by quoting one of the mid- to late-20th century’s master diplomats, China’s Chou En-lai.

Asked about the historical effect of the 1789 French Revolution, Chou replied: “Too soon to tell.”

In fact, historians may debate the effect of the Iraq war for years to come, said Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and an unrepentant critic of the war. And issues raised by the Iraq war may resurface in Syria, Iran or other nations, he warned.

“If you don’t deal with the underlying political conflicts, people find a way to bring them up again,” Betts said.

Quoting 19th century Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz, he said:

“In war, the result is never final.”