Recovering our nerve.

• Author: Ferguson, Niall
• Position: Iraq policy

"GETTING the wind up", is an old British expression for panicking. To be "windy" in the trenches during World War I was to be openly terrified. Since the graphic revelations of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Washington, DC, has replaced Chicago as America's windy city.

But it is not just America's political elites who have got the wind up. To judge by the most recent opinion polls, nearly half the electorate feels the same way. As many as 50 percent of voters say they would like to see American troops wholly or partially withdrawn from Iraq, and soon. The starting point for any serious analysis of America's predicament must be that this is not a serious option. Sometimes, to borrow a more recent British catchphrase famously used by Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative. That lady was not for turning. This president must make sure that the wind blowing through the nation's capital doesn't turn him either.

First, let's refresh our collective memory. It was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein; the biggest defect of American policy towards Iraq was that the task was left undone for twelve years. The Bush Doctrine of pre-emption is eminently sensible and has good historical precedents. But the overthrow of Saddam wasn't preemption; it was post-emption, since he had done all the mischief of which he was capable some time before March 2003.

Continuing with "containment"--the implicit alternative proposed by France and others last year--would have been a worse policy. The regular Air Force flyovers and strikes were expensive and indecisive. Sanctions were simply impoverishing ordinary Iraqis. The United Nations' Oil-for-Food program was a screaming farce that did nothing more than to entrench Saddam in power. Regime change was not the Bush Administration's invention; it had been U.S. policy since 1998. We should all be glad Saddam is gone, as are most Iraqis. The most vociferous critics of the Bush Administration cannot seriously wish him back in power.

So what went wrong? We all need to admit that mistakes have been made, some of them grave. I count seven,

1. In planning for a war to topple Saddam, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did a brilliant job. But in planning for the peace that would follow, he did a dreadful job. The wild over-optimism on the part of key Washington decision-makers about the way Iraqis would welcome an American occupation was inexcusable. Anyone with any historical knowledge of the region could have...