The Independent on Sunday, London, 13 April 2003, page 15

An unjust, one-sided war is almost over. Now the difficult phase begins. The collapse of a statue in Baghdad last Wednesday was a potent symbolic event, hypnotically replayed on television. For some of the more ardent advocates of war, the toppling was more or less the end of the matter, justifying all that had happened and all that is happening in Iraq. For them the war has been won after a brief military campaign. In Britain the pro-war newspapers especially have been taunting opponents of the war, claiming a victory of their own – as if they had just won a war themselves.

Yet nearly all those who opposed the war did not do so because they feared a lengthy conflict. They assumed it would be short. The Independent on Sunday has argued from the beginning that a battle between the world's only superpower and Iraq – weaker now than in 1991 – was always going to be overwhelmingly one-sided and brief. The US was bound to win. The regime was doomed to fall.

"Walid Abdul Hamid, resident of Baghdad: 'What freedom, when we have robberies and murders going on? I did not have to carry this [Kalashnikov] until the American soldiers arrived'."

The Independent, London, 13 April 2003, page 12

The arguments against the war have always related to what happened before the conflict and what happens now: the terrible damage inflicted on international institutions in advance of, and the chaos in the wake of, an uninvited liberation carried out for an ambiguous cause. We have written about the origins, but it is worth underlining what Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, said at the end of last week. He concluded that the US planned this war long ago. There was nothing he could have done to prevent it. Mr Blix implies that the diplomatic efforts instigated largely by Tony Blair were aimed solely at securing UN legitimacy for the war.

We must not forget what Mr Blix and the UN inspectors were doing during the brief diplomatic charade in the build-up to war. They were searching for weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's supposed possession of these weapons was the original cause of war. For several months Mr Blair said that the single objective was to remove weapons of mass destruction. The UN inspectors did not find them; nor have the US and British troops; and Saddam did not use them.

Now some British ministers are shifting their ground, saying that they are delighted that the regime has fallen. It is quite possible that before too long Mr Blair will wear an impatient expression of pained sincerity and declare: "You liberals are never satisfied. We removed Saddam. What more do you want?" We want to know that we were not fooled deliberately or through ineptitude into starting an unjustified war.

We have also consistently raised concerns about the aftermath of war. Lawlessness is a predictable early consequence. Ministers blame the BBC's correspondents for reporting what they witness in Baghdad, as if the Government cannot bring itself to accept what is happening – that Saddam's statue has fallen and there is still, in the short term at least, fearful, anarchic violence. Our concerns, however, are more to do with the medium term, and specifically with how internal tensions, as well as relations between the Kurds and Turkey, are managed.

Of course, the fall of a tyrant should be a matter for celebration. But the context of a tyrant's fall matters hugely. Wars by uninvited liberators rarely make matters better and quite often make them worse. To take the most recent example, parts of Afghanistan are at least as unstable now as they were before its "liberation". The US claimed a victory after the fall of the Taliban and soon moved on. The challenge of policing Iraq and building viable political structures will demand a sensitivity and attention-span that the US does not seem to possess. Already parts of President Bush's divided administration are targeting Syria and Iran, suggesting they have little sense of the task of building a post-war Iraq.

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