Paul Buchanan: New World Order now in disorder

Like most armchair pundits, I have been keeping a scorecard on the war: number of bombs dropped, number of troops, tanks, aeroplanes and chemical weapons on either side, number of battlefield and civilian casualties.

However, it seems that these are just the statistics, and that the scorecard should be about who is winning and losing. Winning and losing wars is a matter of achieving political objectives through the use of force, in the short term and in the longer term.

This is my assessment after one week of conflict.

The biggest winner is Osama bin Laden. Wherever he is, living on the run, and even if he is a long-term loser who will pay with his life for his transgressions, he can take comfort that the sequels to his September 11 war pronouncement have played largely as planned.

The Muslim world is increasingly agitated and united against what they see as American-led imperialist aggression. Even Iran, Iraq's bitter enemy, has joined sides with Syria in defending Saddam Hussein's regime. Support for the Palestinian cause rises in parallel to the loathing of the Israel-US axis.

Several moderate Arab governments are increasingly pressured by populations galvanised into hatred by the war. Many have been forced to pull back from their pro-Western stances.

For its part, the West is increasingly divided to the point that some of the strongest alliances and institutions of the Cold War risk collapsing. Among the largest members of the "coalition of the willing", domestic opposition and disenchantment has risen along with the progress of the war and its body count.

What were thought of as new and old partners in peace for the US, such as Russia and Turkey, have broken ranks and complicated the war plans (with repercussions that are uncertain but likely to be negative).

Anti-war and anti-US sentiment is on the rise throughout Asia and Latin America. The terrorist threat continues unabated amid "orange alerts", police raids, ricin, cyanide and anthrax threats, and the growing curtailment of civil liberties in a number of the world's most mature democracies.

Regime change is in the air, and not of a voluntary or peaceful sort. The New World Order that ostensibly heralded the end of the Cold War is more akin to a Hobbesian state of nature, or at least a state of disorder. Bin Laden must be smiling.

The losers are clearly the House of Saud, which, already deeply divided among itself, will fall as a result of the Iraq conflict. Unable to turn on its fundamentalist bases, and unable to wrench free from the economic domination of its Western masters, the Saudi elite has sealed its fate by backing a loser with the denial of any military aid - including use of its airspace - in the effort to remove Saddam from power.

Regardless of the outcome of the war, the Saudis lose either way, as both their control of Opec and political influence will be significantly diminished, and regime change will also be their fate. Yet the casualties extend further than Iraq's neighbours.

Tony Blair will lose as a result of this. He will be beholden to the Tories rather than his own party for his political survival, and eventually his former comrades will turn on him in a party coup more akin to what was envisioned for Saddam and his Baath Party minions.

Should there be a post-war rise in terrorist attacks in Britain - and there most surely will be - he will shoulder the blame.

Another loser will be George W. Bush. Like his father, he will be a one-term president. He has 18 months to finish the war with a categorical victory; rebuild Iraq and reconstruct a pro-Western elected (were that it were democratic) regime in Iraq; continue to prosecute the war on terror with some tangible success in finding bin Laden and dismantling the al Qaeda network while preventing further attacks on US interests at home and abroad; revitalise the US economy on the back of the war; and restore some semblance of diplomacy to his relations with the United Nations, "old" Europe, and most of the rest of the world.

He will have to have contained the North Korean threat without seeming to be weak yet avoiding a regional holocaust. He will have to do all of this while holding to his programme of huge tax cuts for wealthier Americans coupled with more defence spending and an increased military presence abroad that invites a trickle flow of returning dead soldiers.

With the presidential campaign under way in less than six months, that will be a tall order, and he will be able to meet the challenge only if the Democrats continue to parade clowns rather than viable candidates in the build-up to the party nomination.

John Howard may be a loser, but given his ability to snatch victory from defeat and the strong conservative streak among the Australian electorate, he will suffer lightly compared to his larger coalition partners.

But if the war drags on and the body count rises, he, too, will find himself swimming against the tide of public opinion.

General Musharaf, of Pakistan, will be a loser, because he has alienated his people through his submission to the US and its anti-terror campaign within the country, and because he has been unable to quell the fundamentalist extremism that keeps tensions with India simmering over the conflict in Kashmir.

The bottom line is that it will take a remarkable and seemingly impossible rally to prevent bin Laden and his teammates in terror from escaping with a monumental victory even as they meet their maker.

* Paul Buchanan is a former US Defence Department analyst who lectures at the University of Auckland.

Herald Feature: Iraq war