Gotcha! This One For Daddy

Bush was restrained as he announced the capture of Saddam, compared to the flamboyant flight suit and the macho aircraft carrier he used on May 1 after the fall of Baghdad. But by the next day a bit of the folksy swagger was back as he declared: "Good riddance. The world is better off without you, Mister Saddam Hussein." Then, to underscore what many had noted about the circumstance of Hussein's capture, Bush said: "I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole and you crawled into it." With those words, the US president had done the equivalent of stepping on Saddam Hussein and squashing him with a heartfelt "Gotcha".

Bush also made it clear he wanted the "ultimate penalty... for what he has done to his people". He had once referred to the Iraqi leader as "the guy that tried to kill my dad", recalling an assassination plot allegedly hatched by Saddam to get Bush Sr during a 1993 visit to Kuwait. The arrest closed a long chapter for the Bush family.

Uncomfortable questions about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction remain but Bush pushed them aside as irrelevant. Whether or not wmd are found, he said the world was better and safer without Saddam—a political shift that will come in handy in campaign ads next year.

Within hours of the news filtering in, Bush's approval ratings climbed from 48 to 59 per cent, according to a CNN/Gallup poll. The surge was welcomed by the Republican Party as it prepares to launch Bush's re-election campaign next year. Some pundits have already declared Bush unbeatable, given his formidable $112 million campaign chest. But others caution against early conclusions. A week is a long time in politics, to say nothing of a year that remains between now and voting day.

But there's no denying the confusion Saddam's capture created in the Democratic camp. It robbed the presidential hopefuls of their punch line, their best ad on a war going wrong. They admitted it was a "crown jewel" of the military campaign but continued to question whether it was a "turning point". Four of the eight candidates who voted for the war used Saddam's arrest to attack Howard Dean, the emerging Democratic frontrunner, whose anti-war stance has generated grassroots support. A minor bloodbath is in progress in the Democratic Party with the Republicans enjoying a ringside view, popcorn in hand.

Dean, who has secured the liberal flank, stressed that Saddam's arrest "has not made America safer"—precisely the opposite of what Bush claimed this week. "The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show that the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, at unbelievable cost," Dean said in a major foreign policy address. He blamed Bush for creating an environment that was breeding more terrorism, not less.

True, the Democrats can use the ongoing insurgency in Iraq to slow Bush's race to the finish but the meat is gone from their argument. Now if Osama bin Laden is suddenly found in the wilds of Pakistan, as some cynics suggest given Gen Pervez Musharraf's predictable periodicity in delivery runs to Washington, Bush will surely retain the White House.