Once the shooting is over, the job of rebuilding Iraq will begin. STEPHEN LEWIS talked to York experts Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell about the way forward

THE news report was brutally brief. Eleven civilians - seven men and four women - were killed when a bomb dropped by a US aircraft landed on a house by mistake. Amid all the headlines about the "melting away" of Saddam's regime, it went almost unnoticed. So much human misery despatched in so few clinical words.

But there was one thing that made it stand out. The victims were not Iraqis, but Afghans. The house destroyed was not in Iraq but on the outskirts of the Afghan town of Shkin. And the target wasn't Saddam's Republican Guard but Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

But hold on. Surely the war in Afghanistan is over?

No, says Gareth Wardell of the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit at York University. "There is still a war going on there outside Kabul," he insists. "We are seeing incidents there every week."

The tragedy serves as a grim reminder of just what the US and Britain have got themselves into in Iraq - and of how long the chaos and violence there could continue once the media are no longer around to report it.

The US has proved in the past to be very good at rushing in with a big stick, says Dr Sultan Barakat, the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit's director. But its record on finishing what it has started is not so good.

What worries him about the immediate post-war prospects for Iraq is that while months of meticulous planning went into preparing for war, there is little evidence of similar planning for peace.

"The most obvious failure has been the absence of any recognised Iraqi Government in exile, waiting in the wings and ready to assume responsibility for the country's governance after the war is over," he says.

Iraq is a country impoverished by 20 years of war and sanctions. There was the Iran-Iraq war: then the first Gulf War, followed by 12 years of crippling sanctions that only had the effect of tightening Saddam's grip. Now there is this second war, in which much of the infrastructure - roads, bridges, public buildings - rebuilt after the first war has been destroyed again.

Yet it remains in one respect very different from other countries devastated by war: it is potentially very rich. The revenue from its oil reserves will run into the billions; and the land is capable of providing more than enough food to support its people, if its farmers are given the chance.

That very wealth itself poses problems, however. "In contrast to the usual international indifference over the reconstruction of other impoverished post-conflict countries, the present level of interest is indicative of the lucrative profits that many are hoping to make out of this war," says Dr Barakat. "One is tempted to ask whether it is Iraq oil, rather than the Iraqi population, that is about to be liberated."

He is not the only one asking that: the eyes of the world will be upon Iraq in the next few weeks, and the prospects for any hope of stability in the Middle East could hang in the balance.

What happens next is vital.

A short period of military occupation is inevitable. The immediate risk, once the war is over, is that Iraq will be plunged into chaos as the vacuum of power leads to the breakdown of law and order, Dr Barakat says. Witness the looting already in Basra and Baghdad.

So the first priority will be to establish and maintain order. Then will come the business of dealing with the country's urgent humanitarian needs.

The humanitarian effort must be handled by the professionals - the UN and aid agencies - rather than the military, says Gareth Wardell, research fellow at Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit. Coalition forces in Iraq, he says, have been trying to win hearts and minds by handing out humanitarian aid themselves. It doesn't work.

"The military doesn't have the experience," he says. "There are young soldiers who really don't know what they are doing. You see on TV, it is able-bodied men at the front of the queue who are getting the lion's share of everything, not the vulnerable people who really need it - women and children."

In the longer term it is important the country is not swamped with US wheat and other food aid, Dr Barakat adds. Afghanistan and Bosnia, he says, were 'relieved to death' to the point they became totally dependent on food aid and stopped producing their own food. "That risk is real now in Iraq," he says.

Then there is the matter of a post-war government. Noises have come from George Bush that the UN will have a vital role in "suggesting" candidates for an authority that will run the country following a few months of military rule and before the formation of an elected government, and that is good news, says Dr Barakat, but now the US has to act on its commitments.

He says there is an urgent need for consultation on the nature of any future government - a consultation that should include Iraqis inside and outside the country, as well as Iraq's neighbours.

"Coalition rhetoric has spoken in terms of 'liberation' and the desire to build 'a strong, stable and democratic Iraq'," he says.

"But what sort of state are we after? A socialist democracy, along the lines of what they already have? A federal state? The Kurds would like to govern themselves more than they do already, but Turkey would not accept that. A Liberal democracy? A monarchy?"

These are questions that need to be answered quickly, otherwise there is a real danger, says Dr Barakat, that with the natural feelings of grievance on the part of the Iraqi people towards the West there could be a lurch towards Islamic fundamentalism once the occupying troops pull out.

In the meantime, one of the main tasks of military rule must be to restore the civil administration, he says.

The Iraqi civil administration is actually very sophisticated - and it's achievement in rebuilding the country's infrastructure after the first Gulf War was remarkable, says Dr Barakat.

The occupying military forces will have to work with the existing administration. And since membership of the Ba'ath Party was almost a precondition for getting a job in Government, that will mean working with them too.

The biggest test for the US, however, may be the way the large-scale reconstruction of the country is handled.

It should be done for the benefit of the Iraqi people, says Dr Barakat, but the signs are not good. "Sadly, with US firms jockeying for position for reconstruction contracts, the evidence thus far would seem to point to decision-making guided more by strategic and economic self-interest masquerading as compassion than by any informed knowledge of the needs on the ground," he says.

The danger is that if the war on Saddam proves to have been about greed all along, the US and Britain may never be forgiven - certainly not by the people of Iraq or their Arab neighbours.

What price a stable world order then?

Updated: 10:40 Friday, April 11, 2003