How to deal with irritatingly good news (tags)
Within minutes of Paul Bremer pronouncing the words "We got him" to ecstatic cheers from Iraqi journalists, there were solemn-faced experts crowding on to my television screen to proclaim that the capture was largely irrelevant, or positively counter-productive, to the present difficulties in Iraq. The very same interviewers who had once invited their interviewees to prophesy endless anarchy as a consequence of America's inability to locate this man were now asking more or less the same people if his arrest was not pretty useless after all. Or (better yet) if it might not "inflame" the situation even further.