“What more do you want?”

Saddam's capture is clearly the best news to come out of Iraq in months. It is a necessary step toward accomplishing the grandly ambitious goals the Bush administration has laid out as the purpose of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Necessary, but nowhere near sufficient.

By all means, let's celebrate this capture, but let's not pretend — as so much of the media coverage seems to be doing — that this signifies the successful completion of the mission.

Take for instance this widely published AP analysis by Deb Reichman and Terence Hunt. It includes this typical observation:

"The Democrats can't touch him at the moment," said Columbia University historian Henry Graff.

"He said he was going to get him. He got him. What more do you want?"

But the question is not, as Prof. Graff suggests, "what more do Bush's critics want?"

The question is "What more did Bush promise?" And will he make good on those promises?

Let's see how some of those other promises stack up according to Graff's checklist-style analysis. The following is a hasty, top-of-the-head list, one which leaves out many other unfulfilled promises about this war and its outcomes:

Goal: To "get" Saddam.

Result: Got him. Check. Bravo.

Goal: To secure and destroy Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Result: Can't find them.

Goal: Regime change in Iraq.

Result: Half-way there. The old is gone, the new seems to be preparing for a bloody civil war and power struggle as soon as we depart.

Goal: Iraq as a beacon of Western-style secular democracy and stability transforming the Middle East.

Result: Not even close. And little hope that anything like this will occur.

Goal: Making America, and the world, safer.

Result: Let's see, the Taliban and al-Qaida are resurgent since America largely abandoned Afghanistan to focus on Saddam. North Korea, Iran and a dozen places where we're not even looking are racing to acquire the nuclear weapons that they have learned are their only protection against a "pre-emptive" American invasion. And "evildoers" the world-over are studying this new idea of pre-emption to see how it can best work to their advantage, as well as noting this case-study in the limits of America's military power.

Other results unrelated to specific goals and therefore not accounted for by Graff's checklist: Costs approaching $200 billion, 400+ American lives with thousands more maimed and scarred for life; tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians; the alienation of allies and loss of international goodwill.