High-level Washington infighting over the role in an interim authority of the Iraqi National Congress leader, Ahmad Chalabi, is one such own goal. It risks derailing attempts to assert control over a currently lawless Iraq. Dr Chalabi, recently described as a "tassel-loafered, London-based Shia aristocrat" is a man with a controversial past and no present powerbase in Iraq. But the patronage of Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks propelled him to Nassiriya this week where he plans to help host the first post-Saddam leadership council. Never mind that the state department warns against a "coronation". Never mind that the main Shia opposition has announced a boycott and other factions jostle fatally. Dr Chalabi and his backers seem intent on a preemptive strike that may turn Iraq's political reformation into the mother of all battles even before the corpses of the Ba'athist gauleiters grow cold.

Washington's insistence on retaining ultimate control of all significant aspects of Iraq's postwar affairs, for as long as it chooses, is another preventable own goal. Its agenda includes overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid, to the dismay of NGO's; the processing of PoWs and the conduct of future war crimes trials; a US-directed hunt for Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction; the awarding of reconstruction contracts; the administration of Iraq's ministries and the vetting of former officials; the rehabilitation (prior to possible privatisation) of Iraq's oil and gas industry; the remodelling of Iraq's remaining army; the parameters of Iraq's future foreign policy, including possible recognition of Israel; and, last but not least, the creation of a "consultative group" of agreeable Iraqis which will, eventually, translate into an interim authority still under US auspices. . . .

It is not too late to stop this foolishness. Britain's proposal for a postwar conference should be expanded to include all interested parties, inside Iraq and beyond, and set in train without delay. It should be chaired by the UN's Kofi Annan. And its aim should be to agree a road map for the new Iraq, under UN auspices, which all can support.

[N]othing George Bush says on the subject of Geneva Conventions and international legal standards is likely to convince anyone. He has unleashed the greatest onslaught against international law of any U.S. president in living memory. He has torn up arms-control agreements and worked to sabotage the International Criminal Court. In his campaign against terrorism, he has not only flouted the venerable Geneva accords but sought to deny suspects the benefits of the law he is sworn to uphold.

Extensive U.S. press reports -- challenged only in the most general terms by the Bush administration -- have revealed that U.S. interrogators are using borderline torture techniques against suspected terrorists. The toughest methods are used at Bagram air force base in Afghanistan and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. There, "stress and duress" tactics include sleep deprivation, questioning under pain and subjecting the suspects to extremes of cold or heat.

More disturbingly, U.S. officials acknowledge that some terror suspects have been turned over to countries such as Pakistan and Jordan, which Washington's own annual human-rights reports accuse of practising torture. "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them," one official told The Washington Post. "We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." This despite the fact that the U.S. is a party, along with 131 other countries, to the 1987 convention against torture.

Mr. Bush insists on calling his counterterrorism campaign a war -- yet the hundreds of prisoners rounded up since September of 2001 are not accorded the status of prisoners of war under the Conventions. Hundreds have been held, incognito and without charge, for more than a year. The U.S. government says they are "unlawful combatants," subject to no laws whatsoever because they are neither U.S. citizens nor held on U.S. soil. It says it can hold them for as long as it wants, with no access to lawyers or judicial oversight. Shamefully, U.S. courts appear to agree.

US and British forces in Iraq are breaching the Geneva convention by failing to protect hospitals in Baghdad from looters, the United Nations has claimed.

The UN office of the humanitarian coordinator for Iraq (UNOHCI) said one of Baghdad's biggest hospitals, al-Kindi, had been ransacked and access to medical centres was almost impossible because of the "breakdown of law and order". . . .

"The coalition forces seem to be unable to restrain the looters or impose any sort of controls on the mobs that now govern the streets," the UNOHCI said in a statement.

"This inaction by the occupying powers is in violation of the Geneva conventions, which explicitly state that medical establishments must be protected, that the wounded and sick must be the object of particular protection and respect, and that hospital personnel must be protected and must be free to carry on their duties."

[T]he past month has been like a round-the-clock, slickly produced infomercial for acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. Can't you just picture the North Korean leader, well-lit in a TV armchair, saying: "Hi, my name's Kim Jong-Il. My friend Saddam didn't have nuclear weapons, and look at the price he paid. I do have nukes -- and America backed off. If you're a rogue state, call one of our operators now -- and get nuked-up. The US won't touch you. I guarantee it."

That logic -- what one former Clinton official calls "pre-empting the pre-emption" -- might appeal to Iran and the newest member of the axis club, Syria. Both countries can now feel America's hot breath on their necks, with US forces right on their borders. Iran in particular has reason to feel jumpy: it's all but encircled, with a US presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and all along the Persian Gulf waterway.

So will Tehran take the Pyongyang remedy, seeking a nuclear buffer to protect it from US might? There are grounds for that suspicion. Iran has shown an unusually active interest in nuclear energy for a country with the second largest natural gas reserves in the world. Since gas is cheaper and more efficient than nuclear power, it is rather suspicious that Tehran is so keen on building nuclear generators. And it has hardly been open about its plans.

What is this war then, which politicians like, which politicians in so many countries favour, and which only the poor bloody people in nearly every country in the world dislike and distrust? Who knows? Who truly can tell? Somebody explain to me: not just the feebleness of the rationale, the evident lies needed to be told by the Americans in order to try -- and fail -- to persuade international opinion that they had a right to invade. But on the other side, also, explain to me: perhaps 2 million people in Hyde Park, the march inspiring, the solidarity inspiring. And the only disappointment? The speeches. One speaker after another offering feeble jokes about regime change in the White House and Downing Street. Not one single speaker with an analysis that struck to the heart, that made any sense.

And note -- no leader. A popular movement of visceral dissent -- and no leader. Usually great movements throw up great speakers, people like EP Thompson or Emily Pankhurst whose identity crystallises the common outrage. This time -- who? Michael Moore, yes. On the battleground, Robert Fisk, yes. In the columns, Paul Krugman and Julian Barnes, yes. But the great voice, the voice that will tell us "This is what's happening. And this is why." For the first time in my lifetime, a movement with mass, but no tongue. Jacques Chirac? Please. . . .

[A]t some level I believe this administration does not even know why it chose Iraq. I believe it cannot even remember the reasons. The reasons have changed so many times -- at least in public -- and make so little palpable sense that it is, of course, tempting to believe, as conspiracy theorists will always believe, that there is some hidden reason which is being kept from us. But to me, the more frightening possibility is this: what if no such reason exists? If there is indeed, no casus belli?

If that were the case, then there would be, at least, an explanation for our own inarticulacy, for the failure of our speechmaking. It appears that something so profound is happening in the world that none of us is yet able to grasp it. How can we consider and speak to the possibility that America is deliberately declaring that the only criterion of power shall now be power itself? The introduction of the doctrine of the right to the pre-emptive strike is an event in international history of infinitely more consequence and importance than anything that happened on September 11. Even the transgression of a territorial border and the murder of innocent citizens cannot compare to what is being claimed here: the right to go in and destroy a regime, at whatever cost and without any clear plan for its future, not because of what anyone has done, but because of what you cannot prove they might do.

"Iraq is a black box because of the secretive nature of the regime," says the Israeli scholar Amatzia Baram. An American official calls the country's vital oil revenues a "black hole", and a British government economist complains of a "huge quantitative vacuum". Institutions that normally pride themselves on supplying precise answers admit they are stumped, and at odds with each other. James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, was asked this week how much cash would be needed to rebuild Iraq. "I don't have the slightest idea," he answered bluntly. "It's pretty hard to come to an assessment as to what is needed."

The economy section of the CIA's factbook on Iraq contains more "not available" entries than any other country, with the possible exception of North Korea. "Per capita output and living standards are still well below the prewar level," it notes, "but any estimates have a wide range of error." No figures are available for mobile phone usage, except in Kurdistan in the north of the country.

It gets worse. The IMF has not set foot in Baghdad since 1983. Without international loans, the government has not had to submit any reports on its finances. Less may be known about employment, industrial output, inflation, budgetary policy and wages and prices than about the Republican Guard or chemical weapons. . . .

Another crucial unanswered question is the size of the country's external debt, which will have to be dealt with once sanctions are lifted. Protecting the records was one reason the US treasury lobbied the Pentagon to exclude the Bank of Iraq from its target lists.

Estimates of the debt range from $60bn-$200bn (£38bn- £127bn). With the subject already on the agenda for a G7 finance ministers' meeting in Washington this weekend, this is no mere detail.

I have not so much a comment or a question for you, but rather a request: Please tell me it will all be OK.

Joe Cararie,
Pittsburgh

Dear Joe, Welcome to Earth, young man. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind!

Kurt

Dr Al-Ali is a cancer specialist at Basra's hospital and a member of Britain's Royal College of Physicians. He has a neat moustache and a kindly, furrowed face. His starched white coat, like the collar of his shirt, is frayed.

"Before the Gulf War, we had only three or four deaths in a month from cancer," he said. "Now it's 30 to 35 patients dying every month, and that's just in my department. That is a 12-fold increase in cancer mortality. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards. That's almost half the population. . . .

Professor Doug Rokke, the US Army physicist responsible for cleaning up Kuwait, told me: "I am like many people in southern Iraq. I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my team are now dead.

"We face an issue to be confronted by people in the West, those with a sense of right and wrong: first, the decision by the US and Britain to use a weapon of mass destruction: depeleted uranium. When a tank fired its shells, each round carried over 4,500g of solid uranium. What happened in the Gulf was a form of nuclear warfare."

Last month the U.S. Justice Department administratively discharged the FBI of its statutory duty to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. This database is enormous. It contains over 39 million criminal records. It contains information on wanted persons, missing persons, and gang members, as well as information about stolen cars, boats, and other information. Over 80,000 law enforcement agencies have access to this database. On average, there are 2.8 million transactions processed each day.

The Privacy Act of 1974 requires the FBI to make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the records in this database. Last month, the Justice Department exempted the system from the law's accuracy requirements.

This isn't just bad social practice, it's bad security. A database with more errors is much less useful than a database with more errors, and an error-filled security database is much more likely to target innocents than it is to let the guilty go free.

I've embedded myself in the million-dollar press center at General Tommy Franks's Central Command (centcom) forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar. . . .

It takes about 48 hours to understand that information is probably more freely available at any other place in the world than it is here. At the end of the 48 hours you realize that you know significantly less than when you arrived, and that you're losing more sense of the larger picture by the hour. Eventually you'll know nothing. . . .

It is not just that the general and his staff and the military-communications people seem secretive or averse to supplying information, it's that they don't seem to know what information is. The press office wouldn't even provide the Newsweek correspondent with the first name of one of the generals. And everywhere the admonition is, We don't discuss military operations -- which obviously prompts the question, "Then why are we here?" Two days into the war, without even a press briefing yet, the Australian-military spokesmen (identifiable by a slightly different camouflage pattern from that of the Americans) took the Australian press outside of the press center for their own briefing (in which they basically said they couldn't brief because the Americans weren't briefing yet), and everybody else rushed to the perimeter, like internment-camp prisoners, standing on cement slabs and peering through the barbed wire at an actual information exchange.

President Bush the First . . . [justified] Gulf War I primarily on the basis that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was a violation of international law. Grandiose talk from the previous decade about how petty considerations such as international borders should not be allowed to impede the spread of democracy and the flowering of human rights were put aside for the duration. Kuwait is not a democracy. So our justification for driving the invaders out was that international law honors borders no matter what kind of government they protect.

At the beginning of Gulf War II, we forgot . . . we forgot . . . we forgot . . . oh, yes: international law. We forgot international law once again. When the U.N. Security Council would not play ball, we declared that our own invasion of Iraq was justified as a sovereign act of long-term self-defense against potential weapons of mass destruction, by the human rights situation in Iraq and by the hope that removing Saddam Hussein will start a chain reaction of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. Don't bother us with your petty i-dotting and t-crossing: We're thinking big here.

The United States was fiercely criticized around the world yesterday for its failure to protect Baghdad's Iraq National Museum where, under the noses of US troops, looters stole or destroyed priceless artifacts up to 7,000 years old.

Not a single pot or display case remained intact, according to witnesses, after a 48-hour rampage at the museum -- perhaps the world's greatest repository of Mesopotamian culture. US forces intervened only once, for half an hour, before leaving and allowing the looters to continue.

Archaeologists, poets, cultural historians and international legal experts, including many in America itself, accused Washington of violating the 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of artistic treasures in wartime. . . .

A Chicago law professor, Patty Gerstenblith of the DePaul School, said the rampage was "completely inexcusable and avoidable".

In Iraq itself, art experts and ordinary demonstrators made clear they were far angrier at President George Bush than they were at the looters, noting that the only building US forces seemed genuinely interested in protecting was the Ministry of Oil.

One Iraqi archaeologist, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, told The New York Times: "If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation."

It is not difficult to imagine how the case for the prosecution against the coalition might be constructed. An indictment would have three main elements. In the first place, Britain and the US have waged an illegal war, without the sanction of a UN resolution (in itself of dubious legality when it comes to a war launched in violation of the UN charter and fought on this scale). Any argument that Saddam's failure to disarm fast enough justified the invasion of his state, the destruction of Iraq's major cities and the killing of thousands of Iraqis fails on the legal concept of proportionality. In British law, a householder may not cut an intruder to shreds with an axe on suspicion of burglary; if he does so, he becomes the object of prosecution. The suspected -- but as yet unproven -- violations of disarmament resolutions should not justify in international law the massive destruction and dislocation of the entire Iraqi state. . . .

The second and third elements of any prosecution derive not only from the initial presumption that the coalition has waged an illegal war. As at Nuremberg, the subsequent killing of civilians and mistreatment of prisoners in a war of aggression also constitute war crimes in their own right. No legal niceties are needed to see that the American and British killing of thousands of Iraqi civilians could be approached in this way. The mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war dwarfs the brief appearance of US servicemen on Iraqi television. Pictures of stripped and bound prisoners have already been released. The camps constructed early in the campaign were closed to the Red Cross in defiance of the Geneva convention. If prisoners are subsequently taken to the US and subjected to the same treatment as the Afghan soldiers held at Guantanamo Bay, this too would be a violation of international law.

The sad truth is that prosecution has always been a function of power. No one seriously believes that Bush and Blair will be indicted. International law works only against weaker states. Big powers have an unmerited, but unassailable, immunity. Even if anyone were brave or rash enough to try to indict coalition leaders, the US has refused to ratify the statute establishing the international criminal court, which came into force on July 2 2002.

While Arabs all over the Middle East now routinely talk of the deal that saved Baghdad, they also speculate that the same deal may have saved Saddam. Unlike the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, which preoccupied U.S. forces for months, the hunt for the dictator no longer appears to be the top priority for U.S. forces in the wake of Baghdad's fall.

Where could Saddam be if he is still alive? Some Arab media experts speculate he may have sought refuge in Mecca, the most sacred Islamic place in the world. No non-Muslims ever lived in and very few have even set foot in this holiest of Muslim cities.

If it turns out that Saddam is indeed in Mecca, it would be one further clue that the architect of the "safqua" or deal between the Baath and the United States was Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah -- a trusted intermediary of the Bush family and the only Arab leader invited to President Bush's Crawford ranch.

The US-led war on Iraq could cost as much as $1,000 billion in lost production in Arab countries, a UN economic seminar in Beirut warned on Monday. "A dark cloud is covering the whole world and the Arab region in particular," said Mervat Tallawi, Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA).

She estimated the cost of the war at a trillion dollars in lost gross domestic product, on top of the $600 billion lost due to the 1991 Gulf War, at the start of a four-day session.

Tallawi added that between four and five million jobs had been lost following the previous Gulf War and the figure was expected to rise between six and seven million as a result of the current conflict. . . .

ESCWA member states are Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

The downfall of Saddam Hussein has exacerbated, to a degree never seen before, the ethnic and religious tensions between Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs, the three great communities to which almost all Iraqis belong. But, deep though differences were between them in the past, there is little history of communal violence in the country on the scale of Protestants and Roman Catholics in Belfast or Muslims and Christians in Beirut.

This may now be changing. Much of the looting in Baghdad has been by impoverished Shias from great slums like Saddam City attacking the homes of wealthier Sunnis, who have traditionally made up the establishment. . . .

The history of the past 30 years has exacerbated ethnic differences. For instance, Kurds in the northern three provinces, which have had de facto independence for 12 years, seldom now speak Arabic. Six weeks ago I was speaking to about 100 peshmerga, as Kurdish soldiers are known. (This started off as a private interview with their commanders, but in true democratic spirit their men gathered round to shout agreement or disagreement). When I asked how many spoke Arabic as well as Kurdish only three put up their hands.

In 1991 the Shias and Kurds rose against President Saddam but the Sunni heartland did not. In the following years, Shia religious leaders within Iraq were systematically assassinated and their followers persecuted. I used to think that Sunni or Christian friends in Baghdad were exaggerating when they expressed terror at what would happen if the Shias of Saddam City in east Baghdad or in the south ever revolted, but it turns out that they were right.

The invasion of Iraq was strongly opposed by the main centers of corporate globalization. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, opposition was so strong that Powell was practically shouted down when he tried to present a case for the war -- announcing, pretty clearly, that the US would "lead" even if no one followed, except for the pathetic Blair. The global justice and peace movements are so closely linked in their objectives that there is nothing much to say. We should, however, recall that the planners do draw these links, as we should too, in our own different way. They predict that their version of "globalization" will proceed on course, leading to "chronic financial volatility" (meaning still slower growth, harming mostly the poor) "and a widening economic divide" (meaning less globalization in the technical sense of convergence). They predict further that "deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation will foster ethnic, ideological and religious extremism, along with violence," much of it directed against the US -- that is, more terror.

It could still be that, as American forces advance on Tikrit, Saddam's home town, chemical or biological weapons may be discovered, or even deployed by diehard Iraqi troops. But if the casus belli pleaded by George Bush and Tony Blair turns out to be entirely hollow -- and it should be stressed that we can't yet know that -- what does it say about their motivations for going to war in the first place? How much deception was involved in talking up the Iraqi threat, and how much self-deception?

As Susan Wright, a disarmament expert at the University of Michigan, said last week: "This could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion." Even The Wall Street Journal, one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders, has warned of the "widespread skepticism" the White House can expect if it does not make significant, and undisputed, discoveries of forbidden weapons. . . .

In his State of the Union address in early February, President Bush was quite specific about the materials he believed Saddam was hiding: 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas. These days, he does not mention weapons of mass destruction at all, focusing instead on the liberation of the Iraqi people -- as if liberation, not disarmament, had been the project all along.

The administration has shown its embarrassment in other ways. On day two of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction was the invading force's number two priority after toppling Saddam Hussein -- itself a reversal of the argument presented at the UN Security Council.

A week later, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, pushed the issue further down the list, behind capturing and evicting "terrorists sheltered in Iraq" and collecting intelligence on "terrorist networks". Now we are told that hunting for weapons is something we can expect once the fighting is over, and that it might go on for months before yielding significant results. "It's hard work," a plaintive Ms Clarke said last week.

We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.

JODHPUR, India (AFP) -- Defence Minister George Fernandes reiterated Indian warnings that Pakistan was a prime case for pre-emptive strikes.

"There are enough reasons to launch such strikes against Pakistan, but I cannot make public statements on whatever action that may be taken," Fernandes told a meeting of ex-soldiers in this northern Indian desert city on Friday.

Fernandes said he endorsed Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha's recent comments that India had "a much better case to go for pre-emptive action against Pakistan than the United States has in Iraq . . .

Former US president Bill Clinton today blasted US foreign policy adopted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, arguing the United States cannot kill, jail or occupy all of its adversaries.

"Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us," said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organised by Conference Board.

"And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."

In the days before the fall of Baghdad, and the explosion of looting on the streets of the capital, a far more damaging form of looting was already under way as Iraqi bank accounts were ransacked and millions of dollars were transferred into private accounts abroad, Middle Eastern banking sources said yesterday.

The flurry of transfers that have been spotted, going mainly through Europe to accounts in Jordanian and Palestinian banks, are thought to be the tip of a vast financial iceberg, kept afloat by Saddam Hussein, his family and his regime for more than two decades.

US investigators are scrambling to track down the missing money, estimated at between $5bn and $40bn (£3.2m and £25.bn), but some financial experts believe much of it has gone for good, and may have slipped into the hands of extremist groups such as al-Qaida. . . .

Officials in Washington are worried that Iraq's highly centralised economy makes it particularly vulnerable to asset-stripping.

One Middle Eastern banking expert, who did not want to be named, criticised the Bush administration for failing to set up an interim fund that would have formally taken ownership of Iraqi state banks and other institutions, stemming the haemorrhage of funds.

At a bleak and barren airbase in southern Iraq yesterday, the US and British governments began the process of forging a post-Saddam government in their own image: a liberal democracy, preferably headed by a western-educated elite.

But only 10 miles from the Talil air base, where US and British representatives met selected Iraqis, thousands of Iraqis took to the streets to enjoy their new-found freedom and to demonstrate that the US-British image of government is not necessarily theirs.

About 5,000 Shia Muslims -- 20,000, according to one Arab television station -- marched through Nassiriya, one of the bigger towns on the banks of the Euphrates, shouting: "No to America, No to Saddam".

Like many Iraqis, they are ecstatic that Saddam Hussein has gone but they do not want the US either. They do not refer to "liberation" but to "aggression".

One Nassiriya resident said the demonstrators wanted not western-style freedom but government by their ayatollahs.

That demonstration is the clearest manifestation yet of Shia opinion, and comes after outbursts elsewhere in southern Iraq. It will alarm Washington, which faces its nightmare scenario in the Middle East: an alliance between a Shia-dominated Iraq and its co-religionists in Iran.

UR, Iraq, April 15 -- Protected by barbed wire and armed Marines, about 100 U.S.-chosen Iraqi community leaders and exile activists gathered today under a tent at an abandoned military air base to take the first step in planning a new government for Iraq. Outside the air base, near the biblical birthplace of Abraham, dozens of uninvited political figures denounced the gathering as illegitimate and unrepresentative of long-established Iraqi groups that had opposed the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Thousands of Iraqi Shiites shouting "No to occupation!" staged a noisy protest against the U.S.-sponsored talks in the nearby town of Nasiriyah. They said they were upset because key Shiite groups and their leaders were not in on the U.S.-sponsored meeting at Ur. . . .

A statement issued in the name of the delegates proposed 13 principles for a future Iraqi government, including federalism, democracy, nonviolence and respect for diversity, including a role for women. . . .

As Iraq begins trying to find its political future, further splits appear to be developing between those who remained inside the country for the past 30 years -- and who say they suffered the most under Hussein's rule -- and the Iraqi exile leaders returning from abroad, many of whom are viewed with suspicion by the internal opposition.

Many of those factions converged outside the entrance to the Tallil air base. Without official invitations, they engaged in an impromptu, disorganized and noisy version of street democracy outside as U.S. Marines and military police kept a close watch.

"I came here at 8 in the morning, and nobody will let me in," said Mohammed Yasser, 49, a member of the outlawed Communist Party for the past 27 years. Criticizing the U.S.-sponsored meeting, he said, "It can't represent the political and social parties and movements inside the country, and I can prove it because nobody from the inside opposition is attending this conference."

The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday.

In the past few weeks, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons programme. Mr Feith and Mr Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq.

Mr Feith and other conservatives now playing important roles in the Bush administration, advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could "shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria".

However, President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of taking the "war on terror" to Syria.

The Iranian president Mohammad Khatami yesterday lashed out at America for its aggressive stance, stating that Tehran would not recognise a US-installed administration in Iraq and warning Iran would support Syria were it attacked. . . .

The UN International Atomic Energy Agency has demanded unfettered access to Iran's nuclear programme to investigate declared and undeclared sites that would indicate whether Iran is attempting to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

But Iran has refused to sign up to the non-proliferation treaty's "additional protocol", drafted after the 1991 Gulf war.

Iranian officials have said they would be willing to agree to the "go anywhere" inspections regime only if trade sanctions were lifted, allowing access to technical assistance for the nuclear programme.

The administration went into Iraq at war with itself over its role in the world, and there are abundant signs that conflict has not been settled with the fall of Saddam Hussein. Inter-agency squabbles have broken out, for example, over the shape of the Interim Iraqi Authority and the Pentagon's role in promoting its own favourite, Ahmed Chalabi.

A proxy war in the state department versus the Pentagon conflict is being fought on the ground in Iraq. The state department tried to sideline Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader, portraying him as both unreliable and unpopular inside Iraq. But the Pentagon dropped him into the heart of the country along with a few hundred "freedom fighters". The state department hit back by insisting the US seize back control of Tuesday's political conference in Ur, and blocked Mr Chalabi from attending.

Congress has weighed in by insisting that reconstruction money be channelled through the state department, not the Pentagon, despite the White House's entreaties.

Mr Blair's attempt to give the UN a leading political role in the transition period has gone nowhere so far, but that might change if the occupation lasts far longer than the Pentagon envisages and begins to sap the army's morale and resources. In that case, it may not be the UN that fills the gap, but another neglected forum for multilateral action, Nato.

[Q]uite apart from the numerous political, economic, diplomatic, and humanitarian reasons for not plunging into a war on Syria, there is one military caveat as well -- Syria really does have weapons of mass destruction, probably more than Iraq ever had, and its whole military strategy is geared to using them if necessary.

After the Israelis stripped bare the myth of Syrian defenses in 1982, Hafez Assad abandoned his goal of achieving "strategic parity" with Israel and instead aimed for "strategic deterrence." To that end, he built up huge stockpiles of biological and especially chemical weapons -- including an arsenal of missiles with sufficient range to reach Israeli cities, as well as bombs and artillery shells to kill enemy troops on the battlefield. (This shift of doctrine and the resulting chemical buildup might be a source of solace for Bashar right now, but they also provide evidence that he knows how weak his conventional forces are; he knows that Dad pretty much stopped competing in that arena.)

Hafez Assad received his first batch of chemical artillery shells as a gift from Egypt just before the Yom Kippur War in 1973. After that, he started buying them in quantity from the USSR and Czechoslovakia, though it's generally believed that the Soviets refused to help him set up his own production facilities. For that, he went shopping in China and North Korea. Until the early '90s, before export controls started tightening, he also bought chemical precursors from companies in France, Germany, Austria, Holland, and Switzerland (from the same firms that supplied Iraq). He started producing nerve gas in 1984 and was able to pack chemical weapons into missile warheads by the following year. The CIA estimates that Assad started deploying missiles with VX nerve gas in 1997. He is thought to possess 500 to 1,000 tons of chemical agents, including VX and sarin.

Syria is now believed to have several thousand chemical bombs, packed mainly with sarin, as well as 50-100 chemically tipped ballistic missiles, mainly Soviet-built SS-21s and Scuds. Assad bought Scud-B's, as well as the longer-range Scud-C's and -D's, from North Korea, which also provided the means for Syria to manufacture them.

There are reportedly four chemical-weapons production sites in Syria, though there may be more, since the Assads integrated this effort with the country's extensive commercial pharmaceutical industry. Intelligence analysts and their think-tank associates have written of underground bunkers and tunnels where chemical weapons are churned out and stored. It is hard to tell how much of this claim is true and how much is "threat-inflation," fostered by the Israelis, the Syrians, or both. (Each country has reason to exaggerate: Israel, to make the case for additional military aid; Syria, to deter a pre-emptive attack.)