Patrick Cockburn: Victory is in sight, but so many enemies remain

Iraqis are exhausted by years of war and deprivation, and the US must ensure they face a brighter future. But the omens are not good.

Even Saddam Hussein, arch-survivor though he is, must see that the end of his regime is near as American columns easily penetrate the heart of Baghdad after a war in which the US and Britain have so far lost no more than 121 dead.

But ordinary Iraqis still have to be very careful in deciding when Saddam's rule is definitely over. Yesterday I was with some Kurdish officers who had sent a messenger named Qader to an Arab village a few miles away with a note to the local sheikh suggesting the village surrender and promising good treatment. A few hours later they found Qader dead beside his car with a single bullet in his head and the note beside him undelivered. They learned later that a local Baathist militant named Wadi had killed him as soon as he learned of his mission.

The good news for the US is that so far the Iraqi regular army and the Republican Guard have not fought hard. Bridges have not been blown. American and British casualties are low. It looks like a re-run of the last Gulf War – unless Saddam has a last-minute surprise up his sleeve – when the Iraqi divisions in Kuwait dissolved, hardly firing a shot.

Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians, have a highly developed sense of personal survival, bred during 35 years of Baathist rule. Iraqi soldiers could see from the beginning that they were going to lose, their ageing Soviet-made tanks steel death traps in the face of American air power. At the same time the Baath party, Iraqi security forces and the Fedayeen were far more successful than in 1991 at keeping soldiers at their posts, by the simple device of holding a pistol to their heads, though it couldn't make them fight in a lost cause.

The Baath party has about between 500,000 and 800,000 members, of whom about 10 per cent form the hard core, monopolising key positions in the army, administration and security services. A few of the Baathists have deftly started to change sides. Last week I met four men who described how their village had risen up against Saddam. "Even the Baath party members joined in," said one. I asked if I could see them. "Well actually we are them," admitted one of the four, shyly.

The problem for the US is that for Iraqis, being opposed to Saddam does not mean that they are pro-American. Indeed, until recently many Iraqis were convinced Saddam was an American agent. They cited the CIA backing for the Baath party in its early years because of its anti-Communism and US support for Iraq in its war with Iran. (The public letter declaring US backing for Iraq was delivered by none other than Donald Rumsfeld). There is a good deal of Middle Eastern conspiracy theory in this, but until the suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre, the US wanted a coup rather than a revolution in Baghdad.

Now President Bush has created the very situation that his father avoided in 1991 when he refused to press on to Baghdad and allowed Saddam to crush in blood the great Kurdish and Shia uprisings. His son could just get away with it if he plays his cards very carefully. The Iraqis are exhausted by almost a quarter of a century of wars and deprivation. There is an almost palpable desire for a normal life.

But the omens are not very good. The first great difference between the 1991 and the 2003 wars is that the international context is completely different. In the first war there was a genuine international alliance. In the second, after US and and British failure at the UN, there is a lack of legitimacy. Regional powers such as Turkey, Syria and Iran all feel threatened by what has happened. While a large American land army remains in Iraq there is not much they can do about it, but in the longer term they will seek to make sure, by backing one Iraqi faction or another, that they have a say in the future of the country.

Everything depends on what kind of government the US tries to impose on Iraq. The declared aim of the war by the US and Britain was that Saddam posed a threat to the region and the world because of his secret arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The low level of allied casualties and the lack of any evidence so far that Saddam possesses such weapons makes the supposed threat from the Iraqi leader look ever more mythical.

This puts a particular onus on the US to justify the war by making sure that the Iraqis have a better life after the war. The best course for the Americans would be to turn over the running of Iraq to a transitional United Nations authority until a democratic government is elected. But since one of the purposes of the Republican right and the neo-conservatives in Washington in launching war was to downgrade the functions of the UN to a purely humanitarian agency, this is unlikely to happen unless Tony Blair can somehow persuade President Bush otherwise.

A problem is that there is no Iraqi opposition ready to take over that would not be seen as carpet-baggers by the majority of Iraqis. Indeed many carpet bags have been packed in the last few months. "I keep getting excited telephone calls in the middle of the night from Iraqis abroad saying the Americans have asked to see them," one opposition leader told me. "They all think they are going to be minister of this or that and almost all are going to be disappointed."

Opposition to Saddam within Iraq in the last 30 years has been almost impossible because of the savagery of the repression. As a result, the only parts of the opposition not wholly dependent on foreign powers are the Kurdish parties that rule a de facto independent state in northern Iraq. But they have their own Kurdish agenda. Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), who has just returned to southern Iraq, has built a career on, as one of his many critics put it, claiming "to represent the Iraqis to the Americans and the Americans to the Iraqis".

Mr Chalabi has an extraordinary array of enemies, including the CIA and the US State Department, but he has powerful friends, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and neo-conservative stalwarts such as Richard Perle. The INC leader has also shown an exceptional talent for dancing between the raindrops of Iraqi opposition politics. But without any constituency in Iraq, he can only play a leadership role in a new administration if backed by the US and the Kurds.

The US may not have a lot of time. If it could immediately raise the living standards of Iraqis by ensuring that an interim administration had cash to spend, then this might defuse hostility for the moment. But it is not clear that an administration as ideological as the present one in Washington will be able to address Iraqi needs. According to CNN, US troops were at one moment trying to charge thirsty villagers in southern Iraq for bottles of water.

The US has quarrelled with so many allies in order to carry out its invasion of Iraq that it has to try to make a success of its occupation. But it has done little political planning. It has created a host of enemies with every reason to make sure that the US does not have a happy time here. The entry of US tanks into Baghdad may be the high point of American involvement in this complex and dangerous country.

The writer is co-author with Andrew Cockburn of 'Saddam Hussein: an American obsession'