Editorial: Iraq outcome won't endorse US intrusion

Two years on from the United States invasion of Iraq, critics of the war have been returning to the subject with new anxiety. Particularly in Europe, they have been noting signs of nascent democracy in the Middle East since the Iraqi election in January and asking themselves: Could George W. Bush be right after all?

Most of the critics are reluctant to concede that any good could come of the unilateral US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some console themselves with the fact that it is very early to be drawing any conclusions from the hopeful steps taken lately in Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Others have decided that democratic tendencies were starting to infiltrate the Middle East anyway and that recent developments have little, if anything, to do with the Bush Administration's toppling of Saddam Hussein.

This column strongly opposed the US action and does not recant that view now. The war was wrong on principles of law and the fact that good may come of it cannot change that. Ends do not always justify means. There is much good the world's most powerful nation might do by invading any and every country where an undemocratic, cruel or corrupt regime subjects its citizens to poverty and fear. But unless the United States is prepared to become a fair and impartial enforcer of liberal democracy everywhere - and even the US has not the military resources to take on that mission - it will be highly selective and inevitably self-interested in the countries it decides to "liberate". The issue raised by the Iraq war remains as it was in the beginning: Do we want a world ruled by the arbitrary decisions of its dominant power, or do we want to uphold a semblance of international law? Technically, international law is a limited and elusive code, but we can apply principles of law to international conduct. One of those principles is the idea that punishment should be reasonably immediate. A statute of limitations applies for many crimes. Criminal law does countenance violent retaliation for an offence committed long before.

Insiders testified that President Bush and his team came to power determined to deal with Saddam Hussein. When his immediate reasons for war - suspected weapons of mass destruction, suspected links to the terror network responsible for September 11 - were shown to be hollow, Bush reverted to his primary reason: Saddam Hussein was a dictator who tyrannised his country. So he was, and had been for a long while. The United Nations Security Council could see no particular justification for military action against him in 2003.

The Security Council majority was applying general principles of law. The US and its few allies went ahead regardless, invading a much weaker country without provocation. The war was an arbitrary act by the world's sole superpower. It was ill-considered and it has left the US occupying a country at greater cost in American lives than it suffered in the invasion. It is not an escapade the White House probably wants to repeat.

But for the Middle East, the US invasion of a heartland Arab state has been a shock. For good or ill, things will not remain the same. The war brought not only Western soldiers and constructions companies to Iraq, it brought civil servants and journalists in large number, and gave further impetus to a free Arabian news service, Al Jazeera. Iraq's election suggests, tentatively, that while Arabs might prefer to have liberated themselves, they will take the opportunity the US has presented to them. And the fortuitous death of Yasser Arafat has created opportunities in Palestine that make this a season of hope.

If the war turns out to be a catalyst of change for the better, history will record the fact. But it will also observe the clumsiness and cost of the whole operation, its arbitrary conception and defiance of international conventions. And however it turns out in the end, history will probably record that the US was not in a hurry to repeat its bitter experience.