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• What went wrong? , Paul Rogers
  

  The world is in the seventh year of a war with no end in sight. A short six years ago, in late December 2001, it all looked very different. A United States-led campaign had terminated the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the talk in Washington was already about moving on to deal with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. After the visceral shock of the 9/11 atrocities, the George W Bush administration was on a roll - indeed the sheer force of what was just beginning to be called the "war on terror" was already beginning to recapture the vision of a "new American century".

  Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001In January 2002, the president's state-of-the-union address celebrated victory in Afghanistan and extended the war against al-Qaida to an "axis of evil" of rogue states (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea). The message was toughened in his speech at a graduation ceremony at West Point in June 2002, when he reaffirmed America's right to pre-empt future threats.

  It was becoming clear that the Taliban regime was just the first to be eliminated, and that Washington's ambitions extended to "regime change" in a number of countries. In its international relationships, moreover, the mantra became "you are with us or against us" - even more so as preparations to confront Iraq intensified in 2002-03.

  The demolition of the Saddam Hussein regime in the war of March-April 2003 was acclaimed in a further grandstanding speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May, against the backdrop of a giant banner reading "mission accomplished". At that, perhaps the high point of American hubris - with Afghanistan and Iraq counted as successes, and before the insurgency in Iraq had reached a critical point - the way seemed clear for Washington's larger, audacious political and military project: the wholesale transformation of the middle east and its own peripheries.

  Afghanistan itself was planned to evolve into a pro-American state with permanent military bases at Bagram and Kandahar; the country would also provide easy access for new oil pipelines to the Indian Ocean. In the neighbourhood, the bases established in Uzbekistan (and perhaps other central Asian states) would both ensure greatly increased US influence in the oil-rich regions around the Caspian basin and perform the critical geopolitical task of countering the influence of Russia and China.

  The dream project

  This alone was an extraordinary vision, but Iraq would be an even greater prize. There, Saddam Hussein's dominion had now been replaced by the comprehensive control of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under its viceroy, Paul Bremer. The convenient rewriting of the CPA's history suggests that it represented and oversaw little more than unplanned chaos. This is incorrect: the reality was of a precise neo-conservative plan to create a client regime based on an extraordinarily sweeping free-market economy. The intention was to undertake comprehensive privatisation of all state assets (in which foreign investors would included Israeli companies), heavy foreign involvement in the oil industry, a flat-rate tax system, all underpinned by a virtual absence of financial regulation. The imagined result would be a sort of "dream economy", one impossible to create in the United States itself, given the annoying presence of trade unions, citizen movements, business regulations and other hindrances.

  In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
  
  Paul Rogers's most recent book is Why We're Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) - an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 and why a new security paradigm is needed

  The United States would support this economic fantasy by entrenching in power a client Iraqi state, protecting (and overseeing) it via a network of major military bases across the country. The fact that a tenth of the world's oil reserves were under Iraqi soil and waters (four times that of the whole of the US, including Alaska) meant that a US-controlled Iraq would greatly improve oil security in the homeland. Perhaps best of all, the success of this strategy would constrain the real enemy, Iran - to the extent that it might not even prove necessary to terminate the Tehran regime. After all, with two of Iran's neighbours (Afghanistan to the east and Iraq to the west) firmly in American hands, and with the US navy controlling the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, the ruling elite in Tehran - whatever its political colour - would hesitatebefore risking its now vulnerable national security.

  The great chasm

  This, in May 2003, was the plan and the expectation. How do they look in the cold light of reality?

  In Afghanistan, Taliban and other militias have made a remarkable comeback and are now tying down over 50,000 foreign troops. Across the border in western Pakistan, large areas are out of government control and available to al-Qaida, Taliban and their affiliates as safe territory from which to prepare, launch and recover from operations (see Antonio Giustozzi, "The rise of the neo-Taliban", 13 December 2007).

  In Iraq, over 100,000 civilians have been killed directly by violence; as many as 4 million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes (nearly half of them forced to seek refuge in other countries). Tens of thousands of Iraqis have succumbed to disease and malnutrition, including diseases of poverty such as cholera. More than 100,000 Iraqis have been detained without trial. The human cost includes the death of 3,895 United States troops (as of 19 December 2007) and injuries to tens of thousands more.

  In 2007, a determined surge in United States troop numbers has had some effect in curbing the violence in Iraq; though the strategy is unsustainable and has been pursued