Washington ? Don’t go wobbly on the Sunnis now, George. Margaret Thatcher’s famous words of advice to George W. Bush’s father about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 bear updating in the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein. The dictator’s surrender does help to open the way to national reconciliation. But it could also lead to misjudgments about how best to accomplish that noble goal while winning a guerrilla war.

Politics involves the manipulation of symbols in all complex societies, and Iraq is more complex than most. Saddam behind bars, seemingly waiting to be sent to the gallows by Iraqis he once tortured, is both a sign of and a catalyst for change in Arab and Iraqi politics.

The Bush administration has a golden opportunity — actually, a clear need — to accelerate the granting of significant new authority and power to an interim Iraqi government in advance of the formal transfer of sovereignty next June. Failure to empower Iraqis now to deal with the dictator’s fate will make the occupation even more unpopular and difficult to manage.

Saddam’s trial, which should be carried out in multiple phases and perhaps several different venues, must also at some point be a trial of the Baathist system and ideology that sustained and sought to justify his atrocities — atrocities that went undenounced by many who now profess shock that Iraqis might want to exercise sovereignty by having a death penalty.

The dictator’s arrest was a direct result of a change in tactics by the U.S. military, and an indirect result of a change of heart by administration decision-makers about the strategy for terminating an occupation that seemed to be bogging down only a few months ago.

The change in tactics was visible. Saddam was tracked down as part of an escalating military roundup of his kin and other Baathist fugitives who had previously moved with impunity in the Sunni heartland around Baghdad. The get-tougher tactics replaced the efforts inspired by the CIA to buy off or otherwise co-opt Sunni influentials and tribes, who took the money but never delivered.

The Sunni Arabs make up less than 20 percent of Iraq’s 25 million people, but they have for a millennium monopolized privilege and power in the territory of Mesopotamia, lording it over a Shiite Arab majority based in the south and a Kurdish Sunni minority in the north.

Less apparent was the dawning realization in Washington that the Sunni strategy favored by the intelligence and diplomatic bureaucracies was bringing no results while it was increasingly alienating the Shiite majority, which had acquiesced in or been supportive of the coalition occupation.

“In the summer it became clear that if we lost the Shiites we would lose the country,” says one U.S. official. “The priority became understanding and trying to respond to their political needs rather than winning hearts and minds in the Sunni triangle. That’s important. But this was important and urgent.”

The change in attitude cleared the way for Washington to set a firm deadline for transferring sovereignty back to Iraqis and to overhaul the coalition transition plan. An interim executive would exist alongside an interim parliament that would inevitably reflect a Shiite majority. This new thinking also brought authorization for the tougher tactics in the Sunni heartland that led to Saddam’s capture.

The Sunnis now confront directly a fundamental choice. They can come to terms with a democratic Iraq in which other groups will also wield power. Or they can continue to tolerate or even shield the Baathist remnants and foreign terrorists responsible for appalling carnage and destruction in their country. The pressure on the Sunni community to make the right choice should not be relaxed now.

A new argument is brewing within the administration over rescinding or modifying the coalition’s “de-Baathification” decree, which bars many former party members from the government jobs and other privileges they held under Saddam. The Sunnis almost exclusively would benefit from a rollback, which they would no doubt credit to the pressure being exerted on Bush by Sunni Arab rulers and their friends in office in Washington. Thus are delusions fostered.

Liberalizing the decree to make exemptions easier is to be expected at some point. But it must be preceded by new signs of Sunni acceptance of a democratic Iraq and, more importantly, a rejection of the terrorists in their midst.

More than 80 percent of the country’s population has not joined an insurgency that is at this stage little more than a reactionary attempt to regain power and privilege. Ending the occupation sooner and letting Iraqis determine Saddam’s fate will help inspire the shared sense of destiny that all Iraqis need to overcome a tragic and humiliating past.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.