The battle may be won, but it won't make us safer

Far from being a liberation, the occupation of Baghdad will be seen as an exercise in American power

To listen to the way that the names of Adlai Stevenson and Winston Churchill are being thrown about, you would think that the world was facing a superpower in Iraq. Not to fight Saddam Hussein would be an act of cowardice is the implication. In reality we know – at least according to Donald Rumsfeld – that the Americans are expecting it to be a quick victory. A couple of hundred missiles and the first assault of the US marines, and it will all be over.

For all I know, the armchair generals of Washington may be right. Most military historians will tell you that the road to war is paved with the bones of those sacrificed to the cry of "it will all be over in a week." But it is a great mistake for those who oppose war to do it on the grounds of huge casualties or loss of civilian life. In the desert he who has air superiority is king and if you have the technology as well as the firepower of America, it is difficult to foresee the Iraq army being able to put up much of a fight. We're in the paradoxical situation in which the only weapons Iraq has to fight back with are those it has hidden (no wonder it's reluctant to give them up).

It is perfectly possible, too, to envisage the population of that long oppressed country greeting the invader with cries of joy and garlands on his tanks. We know enough from the fall of Ceausescu and Erich Honecker to understand that tyrannies tend to be like empty egg shells – once cracked, they collapse completely.

And yet it is precisely because the triumph may be so complete and the desire for a different and more democratic future so strong, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, that this war remains not just wrong but deeply dangerous.

There is a general mood of change in the Middle East. On that President Bush and his architect of restructuring in the Middle East, Paul Wolfowitz, are right. You only have to speak to young Iranians, and Gulf Arabs today to feel how powerful is the mood for political reform.

What they will get instead, of course, is a Western army of America and its white allies marching into an Arab capital with the declared intention of occupying the country for three years or more, and all in the name not of democracy but US security. The superiority of Western arms will have been established to the humiliation once more of the Arabs, .

Liberation from tyranny may be a side-effect, but it is not the stated objective, which is the removal of weapons of mass destruction, nor even the more general aim, which is to make the Middle East a more secure world for America to live in. If Washington now talks of occupation, it does so in order to maintain the unitary state of Iraq in answer to Turkish fears of Kurdish nationalism and Saudi worries about Shia independence. Democracy, but not self-determination.

There has been a certain amount of pleading by those liberals in favour of war arguing that the invasion must be followed by a general policy of democratising the area and seeking a settlement on the Palestinian question. And, of course, Washington might hope that conquering Baghdad will have a ripple effect around its neighbours.

It has to be said, however, that there isn't the faintest sign that Washington is planning such a benign world. Security concerns finger Syria and Iran for "regime change". But Bush has no interest in seeing democracy in those countries that are not Israel's enemies – Jordan or Egypt, for example. Nor has he shown any interest, despite Tony Blair's urgings, to restrain Israel. Most Palestinians now genuinely expect that invasion of Iraq will be used by Ariel Sharon to increase his "incursions" into Palestinian territory and even conduct a full takeover of Gaza and Ramalla.

Should Israel do that, or worse follow the wishes of some cabinet ministers and embark on mass expulsions from the West Bank, nobody in the Middle East believes that America will intervene other than with words. As the Arab world has learnt to its cost, there is one law for Washington's enemies and one for its friends where UN resolutions are concerned.

Far from being greeted as a liberation, occupation of Baghdad will be seen throughout the Islamic world as an exercise in American power. Politics will be further radicalised, the pro-Western reformers in places like Egypt and Iran will be marginalised, the anti-American rhetoric in the streets will grow more clamorous. Against America's absolute military might, terror will seem the only way of fighting back, just as it has been in the Occupied Territories. .

Instead of aiding a part of the world towards peace, stability and democracy, we will have betrayed the very cause we claim to be espousing. Instead of increasing security for the West, we will have destroyed it.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk