US in Iraq: How long?

DAVOS, Switzerland
THAT IRAQ'S election can produce a representative and stable government is probably a forlorn hope, and the lawfulness of whatever it produces will be called into question. That is not simply because of the ongoing violence and the inability of many to vote. It is also because the emerging government will depend on American might, and that in itself saps legitimacy in the eyes of many Iraqis.

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Thus the dilemma for any Iraqi government will be whether to cling to the Americans to stay in power, or risk chaos by kicking them out to gain legitimacy. The American face that most Iraqis see is brute force kicking in the door, and the American presence has become part of the problem, not the solution.

Yet President Bush was right to reject the pleas of those inside and outside Iraq who called for elections to be postponed. First of all the violence isn't going to get better any time soon. Secondly, Iraq's Shi'ite majority wants power now, and if elections are the way to get it so be it. It is clear from conversations here at the World Economic Forum that Jordan's King Abdullah is not the only Sunni Arab to fret about a ''Shi'ite crescent" running from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon. As for the Kurds, they will make sure that Baghdad's writ never extends to their semiautonomous north, even if they do remain in an Iraqi state. Sunni resistance is growing into a nationalist cause. That is why intelligence estimates are almost uniformly gloomy, forecasting tenuous stability at best, and, worst case, civil war.

Bush maintains the optimism that won him reelection and says that the armed resistance is simply a ''handful of folks who fear elections." The party line is that the insurgency is all the fault of Baathists, religious fanatics, foreign fighters, and criminals.

No doubt all of the above are involved in the resistance. But this ignores the growing ranks of Iraqis who may have hated Saddam Hussein, but who now hate the American occupation more. The day that Americans might have been seen as liberators has long gone.

The irony is that the war in Iraq has greatly strengthened Islamic forces in a country that was once brutal but secular. Islamic influence is growing because, as the communists always came to dominate resistance movements in World War II, so are the Islamists better organized and highly motivated.

Both Shi'ite and Sunni religious forces are going to come to the fore. This may not result in an Iran style theocracy, but the Bush administration is going to have to accommodate a lot more of Islam, and Islamic militancy, than it bargained for when it went into the Iraq adventure.

Bush needs this election as part of his exit strategy of propping up some kind of elected government before the American public starts to turn against the war. But so far the building of a credible Iraqi army and police force, the other leg of the exit strategy, has not been successful. Not even America's loyal ambassador in Baghdad, John Negroponte, could support Condoleezza Rice's exaggerated figures for trained Iraqi security forces.

Bush knows, of course, that the situation in Iraq is not as he describes, nor has it ever been. The search for weapons of mass destruction has now been quietly abandoned, and the expansion of freedom has become our reason for going to war. Bush's bold inauguration speech, given what has happened in Iraq, has frightened many who fear the consequences of America's missionary zeal. A political cartoon making the rounds here has Bush dressed as the statue of liberty leaning over the Middle East with his torch igniting the region. ''The Untamed Fire of Freedom," says the caption.

The Bush administration has been remarkably successful in reframing the reason America went to war in Iraq, but perhaps incoming American ground commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General John R. Vines didn't get the message. Among the books he has instructed his staff to read is H.R. McMaster's ''Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam."

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.