Suppose the American and British troops had aggressively reasserted order on Liberation Day by firing guns into the air, arresting the suspicious and protecting property rights? What would the “peace” protesters (a dishonest term: there was no peace in Saddam’s Iraq, and peace could only be established by removing him) be saying about that? You don’t need me to write the script.The current disorder is a symptom of the strong desire on the part of the Allied forces to avoid being seen as oppressive. Have they veered too far in the opposite direction? Probably. But – barring a bloody crackdown (wait for the gloating then!) – we must wait for order to reassert itself slowly, as it has in Basra, with the coalition showing a deft policing touch and the Iraqi people seeing the benefits of order.The attempt, however, to interpret the current troubles as a sign that Iraq is about to descend into civil war reveals an absurd negativism on the part of people who always opposed removing Saddam by US force. Some people (and I accept they are a minority among those who opposed the war) would rather the Iraqi people suffered again than be forced to rethink their own prejudices about American power.The TV images from Baghdad over the last few days have aroused a taxi-driver mentality in many people who should know better.

The anarchy is feeding what I think of as the Galloway/Stalin tendency: it is being muttered that perhaps Arabs and peoples in developing countries need a “strong hand”, and that without “control” and “harsh measures” they will simply become a primitive mob. The counter-evidence to this is, as ever, in northern Iraq, where the Kurdish people have shown themselves capable of an exemplary democracy under the rule of law.To spread this to all of Iraq will be tricky, since there are several ethnic groups in the country with a degree of mutual hostility. A federal state is obviously the solution, and that new state will require a great deal of financial support to ensure its internal stability. But it is not impossible, and everybody who is today talking down the possibility of a stable, democratic Iraq is committing a terrible act of malice against the Iraqi people. There were plenty of sneerers in the 1940s who found the idea that Japan – non-Western, primitive Japan, with no reformation, restoration or enlightenment! – could become a democracy. For now, the Iraqi people, I suspect, prefer living with the problem of suddenly losing Saddam to the problem of living – and dying – under his rule.j.hari independent.co.uk
More from Johann Hari. We’re not being told to “Move along now, folks, there’s nothing to see”.

But like the crowd that stubbornly rubbernecks a terrible accident, or a bunch of children who knot themselves around a playground fight, most of us, inevitably, are going to start drifting off from our obsessive study of Iraq pretty soon. Of course, the post-war settlement in Iraq will continue to be reported on, discussed and debated. But gradually it will recede.There’s a salutary lesson, I think, in the fact that the two stories (apart from the Budget) that came closest to punching through the war coverage were the Who Wants to be a Millionaire cheating verdict, and the Zeta Jones/Douglas privacy verdict. Does only life and death, blood and guts, war and chaos on a giant scale, distract us from such fripperies?It would seem so, since the assassination of the Serbian Prime Minister, and fights to the death among militia men in Afghanistan were just two other stories that barely raised a ripple of interest during the invasion of Iraq. It’s no wonder that war grips us so, when we spend so much time immersed in trivia. But it is a wonder, too, that when the battle has ended, its consequences are examined so very much less than the comparatively inconsequential travails of those who entertain us.Yet when we listened, pop-eyed, as Mr Blair told us that history would judge him on Iraq, he claimed that he had already been proved right on Bosnia and Afghanistan.