IRAQ

With the departure of the last U.S. combat brigade from the country, the Iraq War has entered the end-game. 50,000 soldiers will remain until the end of 2011, but they are merely supposed to advise and train the local Iraqi forces. The war, as a war, is supposedly over.

It is easy to see why this has happened. With the war in Afghanistan not going well, Barack Obama was keen, if not desperate, to honour his election campaign promise to have all combat troops out of Iraq by 31 August this year. He will also want to honour his predecessor's agreement with the Iraqi Government to have absolutely everybody out of Iraq by the end of next year.

But is this such a good idea? There are many straws in the wind that suggest that the end of the Iraq War - as understood by foreigners - is merely the beginning of a new, internal conflict.

- the commander of the Iraqi Army, who in 2007 (i.e. before the "surge") had said that he expected that U.S. forces could leave in 2008, now says that the Iraqi Army will not be fully ready to take over security until 2020. What happens between 31 December 2011 and then?

- there are still many cases of extreme violence. Just two days ago, a suicide bomb outside an army recruiting office in Baghdad killed around 60 people. Two weeks ago, a series of explosions in Basra killed at least 43 people and wounded 185. And so on. In a Western country, any one of these incidents would provoke huge amounts of navel-gazing, political discussion, Government initiatives, and press comment; in Iraq, it is, sadly, part of daily life.

- most worryingly of all, the elections in March have still not resulted, five months later, in the formation of an Iraqi Government.

Despite the uncertainties, today is probably not a bad point in time at which to do a rough balance sheet of the war, some 7,5 years after it started. On the plus side, some bad guys (Saddam Hussein, his sons, relatives and cronies) were removed. And a system of democracy was introduced (though, as can be seen above, it is not functioning properly, and may well still collapse over the division of oil revenues and autonomy for the Kurds). On the minus side, around 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died, plus 4,415 U.S. soldiers, and hundreds from other countries. An awful lot of people have been injured, many for life. And the whole thing has cost more than US$1 trillion, of which only a tiny part can remotely considered as productive investment.

The likes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair will doubtless say that it was a price worth paying, indeed that it was necessary in order to preserve the free world's way of life. I disagree; and not just because it is not them who had to pay that price. To my mind, it was a colossal waste of human and financial resources, that demonstrated all that is wrong with the modern world; the lack of true checks and balances in today's states, the invoking of near religious certainty into political decisions, the hubris of leaders, and the corruption of power. The one good thing that might have come out of it was a commitment never to do such a thing again; sadly, that is precisely the one thing that in my view will not come out of it.

Walter Blotscher