The legacy of war

AT PRESS TIME the war images in the mainstream media were just starting to get bloody. For the first few days, high-tech images of cruise missiles taking off and bombs exploding never showed death or maiming on the other end. Over the weekend, the casualties were starting to roll in, a few U.S. and British soldiers dead – and, as Robert Fisk reports on page 22, countless Iraqis blasted to pieces by artillery and precision-guided bombs, or buried in the rubble after explosions.

So the war is, as we expected, getting ugly. In the best-case scenario, which the generals are happily promoting as troops roll toward Baghdad, the fighting will end soon, with relatively few additional deaths. Most Iraqi soldiers will surrender, and most of the civilian infrastructure in the cradle of civilization will remain intact. Saddam Hussein will be gone, the Iraqi people will be "liberated," and a U.S.-friendly government will be peacefully installed.

It's hard to imagine things will actually be that simple. Taking Baghdad, it now appears, will afterward be difficult and bloody – and ruling the divided nation will be, to make a phenomenal understatement, something of a trick.

In fact, the most difficult and painful part of the process may well come after the combat ends. Neal Ascherson notes in the Guardian of London (which, like the London Independent, continues to provide invaluable perspective on the war, not filtered through U.S. glasses): "Incredibly, with American tanks halfway to Baghdad, there is still no agreement on how to run a military occupation regime, let alone on a program to reconstruct an Iraqi state."

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who opposes the unilateralism of the Bush administration, still argues that war could make sense – if the United States spends the time and money to create a real Arab democracy in Iraq that could serve as a model for the rest of the largely undemocratic Middle East. But even Friedman admits that's not likely to happen: Bush disdains "nation building" and the slow, frustrating experience of diplomacy, both of which will be essential in pulling together an honest democracy out of the deeply riven population forced after World War I into the modern state of Iraq.

As Ascherson points out, a "Mesopotamian Marshall Plan" is almost unthinkable to the Bush administration. Instead, he warns, "Iraq will probably be abandoned to the joys of an uncontrolled free-market regime, supervised by the World Bank."

The result: corrupt crony capitalism, controlled by the surviving senior members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party, mixed with a mob-style underworld – all combined with growing Islamic fundamentalism in what is now, technically, a secular state.

The other alternative, of course, is the installation of a puppet government, controlled by and answerable to the United States. And that, many say, is exactly what the Bush administration has in mind.

The U.S. left loves to toss around words like imperialist, and the overuse of that sort of rhetoric renders it almost meaningless. But it's hard to argue that there's any real purpose to this war beyond promoting U.S. interests – especially business interests – in a part of the world that just happens to have a huge supply of oil. Already the contracts have been let to Halliburton (Vice President Cheney's old firm) and others – to back up the military occupations. Soon more contracts will go out, to run the oil fields and process Iraq's massive liquid wealth.

As the author Said Aburish notes in the Guardian, "The scramble for Iraq's oil has already begun. American oil companies have been negotiating concessions with the Iraqi opposition for months. The British are staking a claim based on the original pre-nationalization control of the Iraqi Petroleum Company."

All of this will only lead to increased anti-U.S. anger in the Arab world, more fertile ground for groups like al-Qaeda to recruit new members, and less security for people in the United States.

But even if those scenarios don't play out – even if the end of the war is quick and painless and a U.N.-sponsored transition to a democratic Iraq gets under way with only modest problems – this war will still have been a terrible mistake. The Bush administration has already severely damaged the United Nations, undermined the fundamental multilateral consensus of the post-cold war era, and set back U.S. relations with the rest of the world for many years to come.

Bush's war represents a dangerous turning point for the United States, a statement that the world's lone superpower has no concern for international law or world opinion – and that wars of aggression, aimed at getting rid of a leader whom the U.S. government doesn't like, are perfectly acceptable conduct.

That will be Bush's legacy, and it will take a long time to repair.