Peter Singer from the Brookings Institution just said on Fox News that we should wait until military victory to put the new government into place in Iraq. Evidently, we're talking about putting a provisional civilian government into place within the next week. As long as we get the right kind of government - one that doesn't draw on the Ba'ath party for anything - this seems to me to be a good idea. It gives the Iraqi populace something to rally to, and can only hasten the fall of the government. His example was that we didn't declare victory in WWII until Hitler was dead and the German high command had surrendered. True enough. But there was a Free French government-in-waiting, ready to take over as soon as we had Paris, even without the rest of France.