By Antonis Karakousis

All the evidence, the information and the events themselves support the view that the Iraqi regime will retreat relatively quickly under the force of superior American firepower and British troops. Whatever the complications in the desert, within a few days, Tommy Franks’s mechanized divisions will be outside Baghdad, exerting huge pressure on the regime, in the hope of activating internal forces capable of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

This is evident from the military tactics of the American and British forces which so far have confined themselves to selective bombardment of the Iraqi regime’s organizational and administrative structures.

One might claim with reasonable certainty that the war will have a specific outcome. The Iraqi leadership will be annihilated or forced to relinquish power and the country will be occupied by American and British forces, with the US imposing its terms on the area.

The question which arises now is not that of the war itself, but its consequences, on the broader strategy toward the Middle East and on international politics. The day after the war, the geopolitical and strategic interests will have changed in the Middle and Near East, and American hegemony will have been confirmed completely; Europe will be damaged and deeply divided; the UN, one of the pillars of postwar stability, will have been irretrievably harmed; Turkey will be confronting the establishment of a Kurdish state to its east; and the injustice of war will have multiplied the sources of so-called asymmetrical threats, having at the same time generated an international opposition movement the length and breadth of the earth. This new situation will establish the balance of the new world, which will probably be very different from the one that has prevailed for the past 50 years.