Global Prestige At Stake For USA.

Dr. Henry Kissinger, the former Republican secretary of state, in February told Der Spiegel: "A rapid [US] withdrawal [from Iraq] would be a demonstration in the region of the impotence of Western power. Hamas, Hizbullah and al-Qaeda would achieve a more dominant role and the ability of Western nations to shape events would be sharply reduced". But Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College in London, says as long as more than 100,000 troops remain in Iraq, the US military will remain stretched, adding: "In the short term, there is not a lot of spare capacity".

Bush administration officials disagree. The FT on March 19 quoted a top Bush official as saying: "We are confident that we have the forces to deal with whatever threats on a global basis may or are likely to arise; we are capable of dealing with Iraq and with the global situation as it presents [itself]".

Yet Sir Lawrence says the US has also ceded influence in places where military power would not be contemplated, adding: "I think they have lost a lot of ground in other parts of the world, certainly in Asia and in Latin America, both of which are as important if not more so than the Middle East". He says Washington's focus on Iraq has allowed others, including China, Russia and Iran, America's main strategic adversary in the region, to step into the vacuum - although Russia would have been more assertive and China more influential anyway, even without the Iraq war.

In a 2007 assessment, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) concluded that "the restoration of American strategic authority" lost in the Iraq war and its aftermath would take "much longer than the mere installation of a new [US] president". Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state under Bill Clinton, says: "The global consequences [of the war] certainly include a significant diminution of the trust and confidence and support for US foreign policy around the world and that, I think, is going to take quite some time to repair".

Talbott argues that earlier US presidents had, like Bush, used unilateral American power in dealing with foreign policy challenges but had been "more prudent" in doing so, and had "leveraged" that power by working more extensively with international institutions and generating goodwill for the US. He adds: "And this administration failed to do that big time".

The financial burden of the Iraq war will also constrain foreign policy. Talbott says: "There has always been a correlation between the strength of the American economy and the strength of the US, and that strength has diminished". The war has worsened US relations with Turkey, so far failed to "remake" the Middle East in the positive way some proponents imagined, and contributed to higher world oil prices.

What About Iraq? In 2003, then US Deputy US Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz outlined three reasons for the invasion: "One is weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people".

US forces found Iraq possessed no WMD, apart from a few containers of chemical agent - though US officials still argue that Saddam had the capacity to develop such weapons and would have done so, given the chance. On terrorism, an unclassified summary of a recent study of classified Iraqi documents by the US Institute for Defence Analyses "found no 'smoking gun' (direct link) between...[Saddam's] Iraq and al-Qaeda", saying: the "regime's use of terrorism was standard practice", but that Iraqi citizens were its chief target. And while Saddam is no longer around to repress his people, the invasion and its aftermath have extracted a heavy human cost. The violence which followed has taken, by conservative estimates, over 100,000 lives.

The FT on March 19 quoted a senior US official as saying: "The cost has been very high, has been high to Iraqis above all, has been high to US and coalition forces...but we believe that the cost of not taking this step had been and would continue to be very high as well. The country is on the path to greater stability, greater security, and ultimately [to becoming] an Iraq that does not pose a threat to its neighbours".

This is an assessment which meets less than universal agreement. Talbott says Iraq has "gone from being a unitary state, a grotesque and brutal dictatorship, to teetering on the brink of being a failed state...or a power vacuum masquerading as a state or a cluster of would-be states".