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Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than twenty years. His twice-weekly column on international affairs is published by 175 papers in some forty-five countries and is translated into more than a dozen languages.

The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. It would be nice if Iraq doesn't lose too, but that is a lesser consideration. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong.

The temptation to take charge of the world was bound to be great when the United States emerged from the Cold War as the only superpower, for it seemed like a goal within easy reach. It was nevertheless resisted, by Republican and Democratic administrations alike, for almost a decade. Then a random event — for 9/11 might easily not have happened — unleashed forces in Washington that were itching to make a takeover bid, and now we live in the middle of a train wreck.

The idea that the United States can remain "the world's sole military superpower until the end of time" is comically over-ambitious, but there it is, embedded in a thirty-four-page document submitted to Congress in September 2002 entitled The National Security Strategy of the United States. "The United States will not hesitate to strike preemptively against its enemies, and will never again allow its military supremacy to be challenged." Never again allow its military supremacy to be challenged? The United States has 4 per cent of the world's population and a larger but declining share (currently about 20 per cent) of the world's economy. It had a budget deficit of more than half a trillion dollars in 2004, and a foreign trade deficit of about the same size. How is it going to do that?

Obviously, it can't. As it becomes clear what the project to turn the United States into the world's policeman (or, more precisely, its judge, jury, and executioner) will cost in American lives and in higher taxes, American voters themselves will pull the plug on it sooner or later. Or maybe the world will pull the plug on the project first, by refusing to go on holding dollars as the gradual collapse in the value of the U.S. currency deepens. The risk is that it will all take too long. If an American defeat in Iraq takes another four or five years, huge and maybe irreparable damage will have been done to the international institutions that are our fragile first line of defence against a return to the great-power wars that could destroy us all. We need the United States back as a leading architect of global order, not a hyperactive vigilante, and we need it back now.

"The French plan, which would somehow transfer sovereignty to an unelected group of people, just isn't workable."

— U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, September 2003

In September 2003, when French president Jacques Chirac urged a high-speed handover of power to Iraqis as the best way of clearing up the huge mess created by the illegal American invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government rejected the idea out of hand. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that ran the occupation regime under pro-consul Paul Bremer would stay in power as long as necessary to ensure the creation of an Iraqi constitution and the election of an Iraqi government that was (a) democratic and (b) pro-American.

Coming up with an Iraqi government that matched both of those criteria was a very tall order, given U.S. closeness to Israel and Washington's determination to open the entire Iraqi economy up to foreign companies. In fact, Bremer's predecessor, retired general Jay Garner, had been fired in April 2003 after only a month in the job because he had publicly called for early elections in Iraq; his superiors wanted to privatize the Iraqi economy first, in accordance with a plan that had been drawn up in late 2001. It was a crucial opportunity squandered, but it didn't seem urgent to the new rulers of Iraq at the time.

There had been scattered outbreaks of guerilla resistance ever since the war officially ended in May, but Bremer's initial response was bluster: "We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture them or, if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country. . . . We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will upon this country." Nobody in Washington panicked, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, ever the unconcious ironist, declared: "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." Even the big car bombs in Baghdad in August didn't shake the Bush administration's confidence that the CPA was firmly in the saddle and there was no need to rush.

"I think we have to recognize that as time goes on, being occupied becomes a problem."

— Paul Bremer, October 2003

Two months later, there was a rush. By mid-November 2003, the Iraqi resistance had grown from small beginnings — "Bring 'em on," President Bush had confidently said when its attacks began to build up in July — to the point where it was killing an average of three American soldiers a day. Bremer was hastily summoned back to Washington and the policy switched to high-speed "Iraqization": getting Iraqi soldiers and policemen out front as sandbags to protect American troops, which in turn required coming up with a more or less credible Iraqi government that they would be willing to die for. So all of a sudden, handing over "sovereignty" to an unelected group of people stopped being a problem: then Washington announced that sovereignty would be handed over to just such a group on June 30, 2004.

They could have been an elected group, of course. Six months was ample time to organize elections in Iraq, and the problem of an out-of-date voters' roll could have been mostly solved by using identity cards and rationing cards. Lots of post-conflict elections have been held in far worse circumstances, and the security situation in Iraq was still manageable in early 2004. But democracy is a messy and unpredictable business. An Iraqi government with a genuine popular mandate would be an unmanageable entity: it certainly would be no friend of Israel, it would probably reverse the privatization process, and it might just order U.S. troops to leave. So it would have to be an appointed government, at least until after the U.S. election in November 2004 was safely past.

Excerpted from Future: Tense by Gwynne Dyer Copyright © 2004 by Gwynne Dyer. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.