AFTER three weeks of war, America has won the scenes of liberation that it wanted: Paris in August 1944 with an Arab cast. An old man beating a poster of Saddam Hussein with a shoe in deliberate insult. The statue of the Iraqi President with a noose around its neck and an American flag over its head like an executioner’s hood, the crowd below gathering to tug it from its pedestal. And, of course, the smashed glass and splintered wood of the shopfronts of Basra as looters fill the vacuum left by the vanished police.



But this isn’t Europe in 1944. The purpose of this war was hardly that clear, nor now, in the giddiness of success, is the direction of the peace. Aside from the mystery of Saddam’s fate, the pressing question is: “What next?” There are two completely opposing visions of the region’s future, one as savage as a recurrent September 11, the other a long, bright episode in the American dream. Either could prompt the United States to take further aggressive steps to change the region. But in the exhilaration of this victory, Washington should not fool itself that it has as much control over the region’s future as it has had over Saddam’s demise.

The Pentagon was understandably cautious yesterday in giving warning that there might be as much fighting still to come as there has been so far. We still don’t know why the regime crumbled when it did, but the chain of command clearly snapped, whether because of Saddam’s death, his sons’ death, or their flight. All the same, the campaign appears to have achieved regime change in just 21 days.

The bleak vision of the region’s future is that the American victory will spawn tens of thousands of Osama bin Ladens, fired with the obsession of mounting an attack on the US or Britain that would command the world’s appalled attention.

It could easily happen; while Western intelligence can presumably be given some credit for the lack of any successful attack to date, it is impossible to say how much. Nor is it easy to judge what the American reaction would be; it would depend on which country was perceived to have spawned the terror. After all, September 11 brought American retribution down on Afghanistan but not Saudi Arabia.

Would progress along the “road map” of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict help to head off this bleak scenario? Yes, a bit. It might not make much difference to the bitterest and most radical young men in those societies, but failure by George W. Bush and Tony Blair to make good on their promises of engagement could seriously inflame more moderate Arab opinion.

What about the more optimistic vision? If there is one person who embodies these beliefs, it is Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Defence Secretary. More than any other member of Bush’s team, he has become identified with the notion of rebuilding Iraq as a prosperous democracy, to spread those qualities across the region.

It is a notion that he developed in his time as Dean of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and during his stint in President Reagan’s State Department. It is regarded with suspicion, if not hostility, by Donald Rumsfeld, his boss, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and, if Wolfowitz fails, his career in the Administration will be over. Yet as of yesterday, the US sees Iraq as enough of a blank slate to test his theory.

Is he disastrously naive, or fabulously optimistic in a quintessentially American way? He is blithe, certainly, in brushing over the depth of anti-American feeling in the region, and the lack of experience of democracy; the question is whether he is also right about the desire for change.

Although Arab analysts tend overwhelmingly to disparage his stance, they insert important caveats. After all, there have been periods in which Arab governments have desperately wanted to be modern, not least the socialism of the 1950s, to which Saddam’s Baath party originally laid claim.

In testing this theory, the decisive point will be whether Iraqis can accept a blueprint for development that is offered by American hands, or whether their resentment towards the US outweighs their desire to reproduce its own success.

There is, of course, a middle way between the two visions and, in the manner of these things, it is perhaps the most plausible. The US might succeed in establishing a more or less stable and representative government in Baghdad, but not one that is entirely helpful to the US. This is more likely if the country’s Shia majority manages to dominate the new government. Those on Capitol Hill who rushed to rename their “French fries” in furious indignation at France’s supposed ingratitude for 1944 might give this a moment’s thought.

Will the US now stop at Iraq? The noises from the Administration suggest that victory in Baghdad offers a tempting vision of easy regime change elsewhere. This is the progression that Wolfowitz’s critics particularly fear, arguing that it will destabilise, not modernise, the Arab world.

Of all the possible targets, it would be surprising if the Administration had not put Syria at the top of its list within the region, even though Bush cited Iran in his “axis of evil” instead.

For four decades Syria has also been run by Baathists, albeit very separately from those in Baghdad. It helped Saddam to duck United Nations sanctions by oil-smuggling, and fostered attacks by Hezbollah terrorists on Israel. The reforms hoped for when Bashar Assad succeeded his father as President in 2000 have not transpired.

While troops were advancing on Baghdad, Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, signalled the Administration’s exasperation with Damascus: “Syria can continue to direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course. Either way, Syria has the responsibility for its choices and for the consequences.”

From Powell, the Administration’s reluctant hawk, this counts as an unambiguous warning of American inclination. If a new Baghdad government is formed as planned, then Syria will be surrounded by countries sympathetic to the US: Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Turkey. Its own people are impatient for change. From Washington’s perspective, this makes regime change look “doable”; in Iran, political complexity, size and fierce nationalism probably do not.

Even though the Administration’s optimists have been proved right about the course of the war, they would be wrong to think that they can entirely control whether Iraq and the region become a success. That depends on whether the American dream provokes more desire than fury; the reaction of Iraqis in the coming weeks will give the answer.

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