Britain must now ensure that there is no US puppet government in Iraq

When American politicians talk, as they continually do, about Iraq run by Iraqis, the question arises of 'whose Iraqis?'

There could scarcely be a more banal term to describe the extraordinary scenes you saw in Baghdad on your television screens yesterday. But in military and diplomatic parlance, this was merely the beginning of the end of "Phase Three." Phase One was the slow and painful process of agreeing UN Resolution 1441, the only legal basis for the war. Phase Two was the process of UN weapons inspections. And Phase Three, of course was the war itself.

The terms, used a lot more now than they once were, are suggestive of an inevitability about the process that wasn't often admitted at its beginning. But that's history now. What isn't is that Phase Four is now about to begin. Or rather has begun. Two days ago, the retired US General FJ "Buck" Watkins slipped into the south Iraq port of Umm Qasr with a small American staff to establish the first toehold in the country for ORHA, the benignly named Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. And it's a truism to say that Phase Four is almost as fraught with hazard and controversy as Phase Three was.

It's a paradox, not perhaps fully anticipated at the outset, that the continued security presence of the US and British military for a period is perhaps the least controversial aspect of all. For all the outrage the war has generated in much of the Middle East, not to mention western Europe, few seriously now question the need for a substantial troop presence through the country to maintain security in the Iraqi interest. Ideally, of course, it would be more multinational than it is, but that, too is history. If anything, the fear is that the forces may start coming home too soon.

But it's when you get to the daunting task of reconstruction, practical and political, that the controversy intensifies. The words that President Bush used in Belfast on Tuesday about the UN's role in post-war in Iraq were warm enough. How far they will be realised in practice remains to be seen. For all the admirable words in the Belfast statement about ensuring that the "patrimony" of Iraq's natural resources should be used "only for the [Iraqis'] benefit, the details have still to be worked out now that notion of a UN Trust Fund, which Tony Blair rightly pressed on the President in the Azores last month, appears to be in abeyance. There has been little if any contact so far between ORHA and the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, Ramiro Lopes da Silva And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist about ORHA's boss, ex-General Jay Garner, a missile defence contractor with close ties to Israel, to realise that his is largely a Pentagon operation.

Whitehall, notably wary of ORHA, wants to see it balanced in a quadripartite structure which includes the UN, the US and British military, and a genuinely representative spectrum of Iraqis, especially those inside the country – not to mention a loose enough remit for the British to run south-eastern Iraq in their own rather more multilateralist way. And this matters a lot. For when US politicians talk, as they continually do, about Iraq run by the Iraqis, the question arises of "whose Iraqis?"

The British don't for example, believe that you can purge every Baathist, however lowly, from the vital administrative and technical jobs they have done in the past. But they are a good deal more open-minded about the future than some Americans. No one has denied that the US military flew Ahmed Chalabi and 700 of his men, in what can only be seen as a politically pre-emptive move ordered by the Pentagon, down from northern Iraq to Nasiriyah last week. Many in the Pentagon, such as Paul Wolfowitz, see Mr Chalabi, a long-time London-based exile, as their guy, a man ideally placed to lead a pro-American Iraq. The British – and the State Department – have deep doubts about whether he has the credibility to emerge as a popular leader in Iraq.

Whether the US will agree to the Baghdad conference proposed by Jack Straw on the model of the one in Bonn on Afghanistan remains to be seen. But chillingly, a Washington official close to the ORHA planning process was quoted in The New York Times yesterday saying: "To the victor, the spoils, and in this case the spoils are choosing who governs." This is about as far removed from the idea of letting – in some cases unknown – Iraqi leadership figures emerging from a genuinely broad-based interim administration to contest eventual elections – if and when they finally happen – as it's possible to be.

For all the harmony in Belfast, in other words, real differences are emerging between the British and the US about the post-war settlement. You could see a little symbol of it at US Central Command yesterday, when British officials – as excited as everyone else by the television pictures of a hauling cable round the massive statue of Saddam in Shahid Square – held their heads in their hands in despair as overenthusiastic US Marines planted the Stars and Stripes over the statue's head.

In some ways these differences mirror those over whether to involve the UN before the war, reflecting in turn divisions within Washington, which according to Western diplomats are much bitterer and more ferocious now than they were then. But this time the usual story that it will be all right on the night, that the US President will come down on the side of the angels, won 't work. Events are moving too fast for that. And the stakes are too high. For many in the Middle East – including inside Iraq itself – are now looking directly to Britain as their one hope of moderating what they fear could so easily turn in to a US proconsulate followed by the establishment of a puppet regime. "The foresee an occupation, and they say, if that's not what you're about, you'd better prove it," says one diplomat.

Having watched on television some the scenes he predicted when others doubted they would happen, Blair now has two opportunities to be true to this goal – vital to British as well as Iraqi interests. One is to set out publicly the kind of evolution he wants in Iraq in open defiance of those US interests who want something utterly different. And the other is to ensure the British establish Basra and the south-east, where London's military writ will run, as an administrative model for the rest of the country.

No doubt British security services identified the tribal leader the British military plans to use to help them establish the beginnings of a civil administration in the Basra province. But it is still an important start, as speedy as, and a great deal more culturally sensitive than, the Chalabi airlift. To bow, however unwillingly, to the hegemony of the Pentagon, bolstered by its great military victory, will be to let down the British Army as well, of course, as to betray the Iraqi people.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk