When the war has been won, what happens next? Will the US take over, will an Iraqi be installed as a temporary leader, will democracy prevail, or will their be a dash for the country's oil reserves? Chris Lloyd looks at the prospects for post-Saddam Iraq

THE war is not that important. It is what happens afterwards that really counts. And it is what happens afterwards that will show what the war was really about.

Was it simply about "regime change", as the Americans claimed, or was it, as Tony Blair insisted, about liberating the downtrodden Iraqis from a dreadful dictator and introducing them to democracy?

Or was it just about oil?

Once the war is won, Iraq will be controlled by General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US troops. The US will then have an immediate decision to make - whether the military remains in control of Iraq or whether it hands over to a civilian.

The dilemma is that if Iraq remains under US military control, it will become resented throughout the Arab world and trigger another wave of anti-US terrorism - but if Iraq is handed over to a civilian government, the country could fracture into civil war.

The history of Iraq shows that it is not really a country at all: it is three provinces glued unsatisfactorily together after the First World War. Just as in Yugoslavia, only a strongman such as President Tito could hold the races and religions together, so in Iraq only a strongman such as Saddam Hussein can hold together the Shi'as, Sunnis and Kurds.

The first flashpoint will be in the north where, protected by the no-fly zone from Saddam's chemical weapons, the Kurds have grown to enjoy semi-independence from Baghdad.

With Saddam gone, they will lose their autonomy and be lumped back into Iraq. Will they rebel? Will the Kurds in south-east Turkey join them? What agreements have the Americans negotiated with Turkey about allowing Turkish troops into northern Iraq to keep the Kurds subjugated? The second flashpoint will be in the south, where the Shi'a Muslims could join their brothers in fundamentalist Iran and take bloody revenge on the minority Sunnis - Saddam's people - who have repressed them since 1958.

Indeed, even if Iraq avoids full-scale civil war, large-scale changes lie ahead because together the Shi'as and the Kurds account for 80 per cent of the population, yet for more than 40 years they have been governed by the Sunnis.

So a new strongman is needed to keep a lid on these conflicts. It could be General Franks. It could be Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, a 64-year-old who recently retired from the US army but has made a comeback as head of the new Pentagon Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance - an office that would appear to be a government-in-waiting.

There are also murmurings that the ideal candidate to act as the military strongman is General John Abizaid, a Lebanese-American who speaks Arabic. He certainly would not look as Yankee as General Franks.

However, even under General Abizaid, Iraq would still appear to be under US military occupation. To avoid this, the UK has suggested that Iraq be run by a UN-led administration.

The US, though, which has risked its soldiers' lives in the battle to free Iraq, is not keen to hand over its hard-won territory when there are still oilfields to secure and weapons of mass destruction to discover.

To avoid the military appearance, then, it may allow a civilian - albeit a US one - to step in and become governor-general.

David Kay, a former nuclear weapons inspector, and Michael Mobbs, a lawyer close to George Bush, have had their names put forward.

This interim phase is vital, but it should only be short-term. If it drags on longer than a few months, the suspicions will be aroused that the US is staying there only to increase the barrels of oil flowing from the Iraqi wells - especially as Mr Blair has made such a powerful case about freeing the Iraqis from tyranny and turning Iraq into a model of democracy; a troublefree model, hopefully, that the idealistic Mr Blair would like to see replicated throughout the undemocratic Middle East (this new emphasis on democracy is why some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, which were allies in 1991, have been so reluctant in 2003).

The model would be based upon post-Taliban Afghan-istan. Once the country had settled down, perhaps through the action of a military strongman, an interim native leader would be found to supervise the bringing together of all the anti-Saddam factions. These factions, which are listed below, would be the basis for a pluralist election.

In Afghanistan, this gathering of the clans was called a Loya Jirga, and the US chose Hamid Karzai to oversee it. Karzai was then elected as Afghanistan's first proper leader - so whoever is chosen to draw all the strings together in Iraq will be in the front running.

Just as in Afghanistan, there are the remnants of a monarchy to consider. After the Taliban was deposed, former Afghan king Mohammad Zahir Shah was on the verge of leaving his exile in Rome. Once Saddam is deposed, Prince Hussein of Jordan, the first cousin of King Faisal II, who was assassinated during the 1958 coup, may expect a call.

But the Afghan king was rejected in favour of Karzai, and all the indications are that the Iraqi king will be rejected. Indeed, last December, representatives from 50 ethnic, political and religious groups met in London and agreed to set up a 65-member committee to form the basis of future Iraqi government.

The US's preferred choice to bring these groups together is Ahmed Chalabi, a Shi'a Muslim who was born into a wealthy banking family in 1945, but as Iraq disintegrated under the old king he fled in 1956.

Since then, he has lived in London and the US, gaining a mathematics degree from the University of Chicago, founding the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in 1992, and, most importantly, nurturing many friends who are now high in the Bush administration.

Yet Mr Chalabi - who protests, like all good politicians, that he does not want the top job - has many black marks against him.

For instance, there is the collapse of the Petra Bank in Jordan, which he founded in 1977, in 1990. Stories abound about how he was spirited out of the country by the Jordanian royal family (one says he was hidden in the boot of a car driven by Prince Hussein) before, in his absence, being sentenced to 22 years hard labour for corruption by a Jordanian court in 1992.

There are also accusations against him that he has no popular support in Iraq because he is too close to President Bush.

He would just be a puppet with the Americans playing with his strings, a feeling that has led a newspaper in Qatar to label Mr Chalabi and the INC as "failures who are not even qualified to run a grocery shop".

Because of these black marks, four other opposition groups - two Kurdish, two Shi'a - have buried their numerous hatchets in attempt to present themselves as the acceptable replacement for Saddam.

The American choice, as vital as it may be, is far from clear

20/03/2003