A S I WRITE, a couple of days into the war, the hawks are optimistic and the liberals are bracing to get beaten about with sticks. The hawks are optimistic because the Iraqi regime seems to be crumbling. None of the terrible things the doves predicted has yet come to pass: no mass riots on the Arab street, no coup in Pakistan or Jordan, no Scuds landing on Tel Aviv, no surge in oil prices, no fierce resistance from the Iraqis, either from the soldiers or the men in the streets. "Surging hope" is how Andrew Sullivan describes his mood.

Meanwhile on the left, it's like settling in for a long, cold winter. "Brace yourself for a round of I-told-you-sos from Iraq hawks," Robert Wright writes in Slate. "In the foreseeable future," Al Hunt concedes in the Wall Street Journal, "the Bush critics will be very much on the defensive."

War opponents emphasize that while things might go well in the short term, in the long term, Iraq is likely to be a mess.

Honorable liberals also find themselves twisted into an emotional pretzel, hoping that their forebodings about the war are proven wrong, but not quite looking forward to a moment when Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz might be proven right. A New York Times editorial aptly summarizes their conflicted mood: "If things go as well as we hope, even those who sharply disagree with the logic behind this war are likely to end up feeling reassured, almost against their will, by the successful projection of American power."

The striking thing about the early commentary on the war is that very little of it is actually on the war. Some people, mostly on the left, are still rehashing yesterday's debate on whether to go to war in the first place. Leon Fuerth, Al Gore's foreign policy guru, published an antiwar op-ed in the Washington Post the day after hostilities started. A group of liberal Jews took out a full-page ad urging Bush not to go to war as U.S. troops were surging into Iraq. Four days after the U.N. process ended, Michael Kinsley wrote a column rehashing the arguments for working within the U.N. Toward the end of it, Kinsley declared that "George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world," elevating him to Napoleon and Caesar rank.

Meanwhile, others, mostly on the hawkish side, are deep in the middle of the argument about the post-Saddam world. Kanan Makiya, in his superb online diary for the New Republic, has issued daily updates on the Iraqi opposition movement. Charles Krauthammer has written a characteristically bold column arguing against going back to the U.N. once the conflict is over. Dennis Ross has published a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal describing how leaders across the Arab world, sensing the prevailing winds, have begun repositioning themselves as democratic reformers.

It is as if you had one prewar political debate about whether to go to war, and another debate on how to rebuild Iraq postwar, but the war itself is a political vacuum that only military analysts and retired generals are qualified to talk about.