I don't think this is a problem [eg. the inabilty to succeed rebuilding Afghanistan] exclusive to the US. While in the aftermath of World War II, the victorious powers made sure that Japan and Germany were rebuilt, since then the record for turning countries around is really pretty spotty. I don't think the US is worse than anyone else at babysitting ravaged countries until they can stand on their own two feet. I just don't think anyone is really good at it. We have a lot of domestic problems in this country, and we have an administration that is clearly more interested in destabilizing the world rather than stabilizing it. So I don't think that rebuilding Afghanistan or Iraq is really their agenda, and I don't think it will hold the attention of most of our citizens. In the meantime, there are powerful people in this country who'd like to see regime change in bunches of other countries as well. Personally, I'd like to see us actually fix a country, any old country, first.

The up close action video of the statue being destroyed is broadcast around the world as proof of a massive uprising. Still photos grabbed off of Reuters show a long-shot view of Fardus Square... it's empty save for the U.S. Marines, the International Press, and a small handful of Iraqis. There are no more than 200 people in the square at best. The Marines have the square sealed off and guarded by tanks. A U.S. mechanized vehicle is used to pull the statue of Saddam from it's base. The entire event is being hailed as an equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling... but even a quick glance of the long-shot photo shows something more akin to a carefully constructed media event tailored for the television cameras.

Marines say that the US flag draped over Saddam Hussein's statue was the flag that was flying over the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

America's triumphalism is delusional for two reasons. First, its armed forces have managed, between Afghanistan and Iraq, to rout the rag-tag armies of two of the world's poorest countries, the latter ravaged by eight years of war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait, the Gulf War, and especially the economic sanctions that put the country in a stranglehold for 12 long years. That Iraqis were willing to fight at all against so much greater a military force should be a warning sign of the resentments America is unleashing.

The second delusion is the war itself. The war Americans witnessed -- clean, antiseptic, with only minor delays along the supply lines to counter rear- guard attacks -- is not the war witnessed by much of the rest of the world. From Morocco to Mindinao, and Sydney to Stockholm, the images of American soldiers wrapping the head of Saddam's statue in a flag, or sitting in Saddam's chair in the rubble of a presidential palace, are not the actions of a liberator; they are the actions of an imperial power, boasting to the world of its fearsome might. ...

Far beyond the predictable glory of the moment, George Bush has put the United States in an impossible bind. Virtually every dictatorship in the Arab world has been installed or supported by the United States, including, for the first decade of his rule, Saddam himself. The notion that a hand-picked Iraqi government would behave any differently is at best highly optimistic. ...

Violence begets violence, and war begets war. No imbalance of power is too great to enforce the peace. Witness, for example, Palestine -- rocks against tanks, suicide bombers against the world's fourth largest army, a people brutalized by 35 years of military occupation, yet still refusing to acquiesce. It is a pan-Islamic heroic myth, as potent as America's notion of offering liberation.

Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files, computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted? And what is one to make of the scene on the Hillah road yesterday where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate and armed attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks – doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown are 200 metres from a US Marine checkpoint.

And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army of occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers – in front of other civilians, including women – to prove they were not suicide bombers.

After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt – then shot and killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place.

Meanwhile, in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians – many of them killed by US troops in battle earlier in the week – lay rotting in their still-smouldering cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the "liberation" of Baghdad.