History has honed Iraqi suspicions of foreign 'liberation'

She is sceptical of US motives, saying if you invest £40bn in a war, it stands to reason that you want a return

Zeinab Latif, an articulate 24-year-old graphic designer, is just the sort of anti-Saddam Iraqi exile you would expect to rejoice at seeing the US 3rd Infantry in the outskirts of Baghdad, her native city. Her family fled to Kuwait after the dictator seized her father's successful management services business when she was an infant. Thanks to her father's intuition, they fled again, to London, just before Saddam's tanks rolled into Kuwait in 1990. She has a degree from Kingston University, but now works in Doha, the Qatar capital, and has been watching every twist and turn of the war on Sky and al-Jazeera. She admits that she longs – "needs" is perhaps a better word – to go back to Iraq for the first time since her childhood "to make myself complete".

And yet had she been in London, she would have joined the big march against the war as most of her family did. She is sceptical of US motives, saying that if you invest £40bn in a war, it stands to reason that you want a return – she is thinking not only of oil but of the huge strategic gains the US stands to make from what she fears could be a puppet post-war administration. She is eloquent on what she sees as the deeply painful choice faced by rank-and-file Iraqi soldiers, let alone civilians, between their fear and hatred of Saddam and their desire to defend a country they love, compounded what she says many Arabs see as the "sin" of surrender.

And she is amazed that anyone could be surprised at how history, from the British colonial mandate to Washington's aid to Saddam for his war against Iran and, freshest of all in the memory, the American betrayal of the uprisings against Saddam in 1991, has honed Iraqi suspicions of foreign "liberation".

"It's like Northern Ireland," she says. "The Irish remember the history much better than the British because they were hurt by it." Zeinab's outlook is particularly relevant now that some US and British commanders have been speculating aloud about the imminence or otherwise of the "tipping point" in Iraqi feelings towards the invading forces. The term was originally coined by the writer Malcolm Gladwell to define the seesaw moment at which an idea gains critical mass or a taboo is lifted. When does a car get left long enough in the road to be vandalised? When does the electoral centre of gravity shift from one political party to another? And when does the Iraqi population as a whole start giving a wholehearted welcome to the invading forces that transcends the requirements of short-term self-preservation?

In this case, the political tipping point could lag behind the military one. This week, one of the most honest and best-informed American commanders gave reporters a frank assessment of some of the cultural/political problems faced by the US in seeking to persuade Iraqis that it was the solution rather than the problem. If he shares any of Zeinab's suspicions about Washington's motives – and there is no evidence that he does – he certainly wouldn't share them with journalists, even unattributably. He would also argue that continuing fear of the regime and its pervasive system of repression has been a key, perhaps the key, factor delaying the tipping point. But he would agree with her about the effect of the betrayal of the 1991 uprisings, especially in the predominantly Shia south. And, given his careful references this week to "emotion" and "nationalistic symbolism", he would probably agree, deep down, that many Iraqis have been torn between their hatred of Saddam and their desire, as they see it, to defend their country.

Even this senior American officer, however, ventured that the US had now largely got its message across to better educated Iraqis. Zeinab's concerns suggest that even this may be premature. She is not speaking out of fear. A modern career woman, she is no leftist ideologue. She wants a liberated post-Saddam Iraq. But she wants it and the country's huge potential assets to be in democratic Iraqi hands, and she remains deeply suspicious that, for all its protestations, Washington isn't really prepared for that, especially if its blithe assumption that a democratic Iraq will be unfailingly pro-American turns out not to be fulfilled.

Zeinab worries about her grandparents all the time. Frail, elderly and alone, they are still in Baghdad, having lived through the Iraq-Iran war, the ferocious bombing in the past Gulf War, and now this. Her Basra-born grandfather, who was stripped of his senior military rank by Saddam when Iraq's leader came to power a generation ago, is looking after his wife, who has had a stroke, as best he can. Before the phone lines and, later, the power lines went down this week, the couple had told their exiled family stoically that their lives were in the hands of God now.

But her fears about the war go beyond even that. For there are so many unresolved questions. Will the UN be in the lead, as it should be in the post-war reconstruction? Will the oil proceeds be disbursed by a UN trust fund? Will Iraq be stable? Will it really be run "by the Iraqi people for the benefit of the Iraqi people", as Tony Blair insisted yesterday it will be, rather than for the benefit of some of the US corporations currently queueing up for a piece of the action?

It's possible to hope that the answer to these questions will be yes. It's easy to fear that it could be no. But whichever it is could determine, more even than events on the battlefield whether and when the true tipping point is reached.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk