World View: Invasion, liberation and occupation are uneasy bedfellows, as the Anglo-World View American forces are discovering in Iraq following their military conquest of most of the country, writes Paul Gillespie
Occupation continues the war by other means, while the war itself continues north of Baghdad. Liberation sours in the face of systematic looting driven by regime, ethnic and class oppression, which reinforces the collapse and destruction of civil authority.
The simple facts of language underline the urgency of having it restored by Iraqis themselves, since very few of the invading forces (and few of the visiting journalists) speak any Arabic. Reliance on the highly mobile and flexible US Marines to win the war means there are very few troops available to fulfil the predictable policing task, in breach of Geneva Conventions on an occupying power.
No wonder winning the peace looms suddenly so much more difficult than winning the war. This is giving some of the Bush administration neo-conservatives who conceived and pursued the war pause for caution. Debates among the group are worth close attention because they are so influential and ambitious to project US power. If this war heralds a "new world order" all the more reason to follow what they want.
Thus Robert Kagan warned against three post-war temptations in Wednesday's Washington Post:
Being seen to push Ahmed Chalabi into office over other Iraqi candidates: "if it ever starts to look as if the United States fought a war to put Chalabi in power, President Bush's great success will be measurably discredited."
Punishing European allies, particularly France, Germany and Turkey for opposing the war: the "world's sole superpower doesn't need to hold grudges, and sometimes can't afford to."
Ratcheting down its public diplomacy campaign: "in fact the Bush administration needs to work even harder to justify this war."
Along with a number of other such analysts Kagan has signed a letter calling on Bush to seek UN Security Council endorsement of any civilian administration in Iraq.
Such prudence may be contrasted with the hubris shown by administration hawks in the aftermath of military victory. Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld renewed their warnings to Syria and Iran not to harbour Iraqi fugitives or aid terrorism. These states detected here an emerging US-Israeli agenda to reorder the Middle East, in which the emphasis is put not on the Israeli-Palestinian question but on authoritarian regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
There has been renewed talk recently, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, about reopening the oil pipeline that used to run between Mosul and Haifa, which would require a compliant regime in Damascus. There is great uncertainty about the future of northern Iraq following the Kurdish capture of its main cities and Turkey's determination not to allow this to become the basis for secessionist demands.
Turkey is equally suspicious of a federal Iraq in which Kurdish areas might be granted ethnic rather than territorial rights. Given the chilling formulation of another neo-conservative figure, James Woolsey, former CIA director and hopeful nominee to the position of director of information in the Interim Iraqi Authority, the Syrians and Iranians may have a point. He argues that "Iraq can be seen as the first battle in the fourth World War - for the Middle East" (the third was the Cold War). The Saudis' "Faustian pact" with the extremist Wahhabi Muslim sect, Iranian theocrats and Baath Party "fascists" in Iraq and Syria are the enemies in this war.
"We want you to be nervous," he told Mubarak and the Saudis in a speech in Los Angeles last week. "We want you to realise now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, that this country and its allies are on the march, and that we are on the side of those you most fear: we're on the side of your own people."
He denies supporting a clash of civilisations, saying he seeks to empower silent and moderate Muslim majorities for democratic change in an alliance with Washington. But asked whether if tomorrow democratic elections threw up victories for Islamist parties hostile to Washington he replied: "Well, then perhaps the election should be the day after tomorrow."
We shall see who dominates the Iraqi interim government under Jay Garner, a former US general close to the Sharon government. The tension between State Department and Pentagon nominees is paralleled in their debate about how much the UN should be involved in appointing, endorsing and arranging that government and how it hands over to Iraqis. This was the nub of the US-British discussions at Hillsborough on Tuesday. Following the Franco-German-Russian call yesterday for the UN to be centrally involved it will be a major feature next week at the EU summit in Athens. Such debates in Washington about pre-emptive and exemplary wars illustrate that a lot more than Iraq's future is at stake. This applies as much to the expressed war objectives as to wider changes in international politics. Thus there are disquieting signs the same neo-conservatives want to define Iraqi disarmament unilaterally after their military victory. UN arms inspectors say the US is setting up its own inspection group on suspected weapons of mass destruction in an effort to bypass UN verification and monitoring. Iraqi war crimes would be judged under US law. Threats to regional peace and stability would be evaluated through a mindset assuming Israel's interests under the Sharon government should be the primary benchmark of its well-being.
Kagan's cautionary advice is well-taken in these perspectives. He has written about the US's Hobbesian approach in contrast to Europe's Kantian one. But Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, says Iraq has been thrust rather into a "pre-political primordial state of nature" by the conquest and subsequent collapse of authority and the US now has the primary responsibility for normalising it. This poses the wider question of whether the US alone can do the job of restoring Hobbesian sovereignty. Or must it - can it - not do so only along with the UN and in alliance with the EU acting as a balancing force to unilateral US power? Blair's bridging role could be crucial here.