John Roughan: Having stirred the ferment, can they live with the brew?

An American gunnery sergeant told Sunday Times reporter Mark Franchett, "I was shooting down a street when suddenly a woman came out and began to cross the street with a child no older than 10. At first I froze ...

"She crossed back again with the child and went behind a wall. Within less than a minute a guy with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] came out and fired at us from behind the same wall.

"This happened a second time, so I thought, 'Okay, I get it. Let her come out again'. She did and this time I took her out with my M-16."

This time next year the presidential primaries will be under way in the United States and already the Democrats have a likely looking candidate in Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Kerry has been hedging his bets on Iraq, but at least he knows war at close quarters. He was decorated for service on a gunboat in the Mekong Delta while George Bush jnr was safely at home in the Texas air national guard and young Dick Cheney was getting five deferments.

When Kerry returned from Vietnam he became a spokesman for Veterans Against the War. Declaring his presidential candidacy, he says, "The United States should never go to war because it wants to go to war; it should only go to war because it has to."

If there is anything to cheer in this contemptible exercise in Iraq it is the quality of reporting from the front. Not everybody agrees. From his lofty London turret this week the Daily Telegraph defence editor, John Keegan, condemned the "headless chickens whose cluckings and splutterings fill the media (about military miscalculations and a prolonged campaign)".

He is right, probably. Saddam Hussein's forces have put up a braver fight than anyone expected but there is no way an impoverished state without nuclear weapons can meet a full-scale invasion by the United States. That's why Iraq was chosen.

Nevertheless, the ground-level accounts we have been getting from reporters at the front tell us far more than any military overview about the probable consequences of this war.

Take that little vignette of urban warfare above. We could wonder, I suppose, whether that woman was a willing decoy or a captive "caught in the crossfire" as they say.

We read that the regime has terrorised the population into fighting the liberators, though I always wonder what ratio of cadres it takes to stop armed people turning their guns around. By now the US commanders are wondering the same thing.

The woman gave the gunner no sign that she was unwilling to cross the street. There was no faltering in her step, no fearful glance in his direction, or at least he didn't mention it.

If he'd had the slightest inkling, he surely would have ignored her and waited for the guy with the grenade launcher to put his head around that wall again. But he judged the woman to be a willing participant and he would be right.

The US has stepped into a conflict far more confusing than it realised. The detestable regime seems to have deeper roots than anybody knew. Elements of the enemy are barely distinguishable from the civilian population.

Sympathisers from surrounding countries are slipping into Iraq to help the resistance. The expected flood of refugees to Jordan has not materialised. At the border Iraqis are instead trying to go home to join the resistance.

Guerrilla fedayeen in black pyjamas are infiltrating territory US forces had secured and holding up the inevitable victory. That suggests they will make life miserable for an occupying force and any puppet government it installs. Does this sound familiar?

The war is now beyond the stage that it can bear critical examination. As in every needless conflict, from bar brawls to industrial strife, the cause is quickly subordinated to the struggle and loyalty becomes all that matters.

A US network fires a veteran reporter in Baghdad, New Zealander Peter Arnett, for stating the obvious on Iraqi television. Our Prime Minister is rebuked by the US Embassy for expressing, as she put it, the "bleedingly obvious".

Britain's former Foreign Minister Robin Cook, who resigned from the Blair Cabinet over the war, called for British troops to be brought home and was challenged with the question, "Who do you wish to win?" Limply, he replied: "I am not in favour of abandoning the battlefield ... Having started this war it's important to win it."

Foreign Minister Phil Goff has been similarly put on the spot in Parliament here. Only an ill-conceived war needs to oppress criticism in this way.

Ultimately the US cannot win this war. It might succeed in making a martyr of Saddam Hussein but some of the men who wield influence in Washington at present hope for much more.

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel last week, German's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer recalled a meeting he had with Deputy US Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz a few days after September 11, 2001.

"He outlined to me in Washington how he believed the response to international terrorism should look," said Fischer. "He felt that the US would have to liberate a number of countries from their terrorist governments, by force if necessary.

"This (Wolfowitz believed) would ultimately open the way for a new world order with more democracy, peace, stability and security for the people."

These people believe a popular uprising in Arabic countries spells peace, prosperity and goodwill towards Israel and the West. One wonders whether they have ever met a real (as distinct from diplomatic) citizen of Cairo, Amman, Damascus or Baghdad.

The region is in ferment now and the US is in danger of getting some democracy there. I hope it happens.

Herald Feature: Iraq war