And anyone who believes the creation of a stable government will be the proverbial

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And anyone who believes the creation of a stable government will be the proverbial cakewalk should consider the murder of two Shia clerics at the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, and the political uproar when the British unveiled a "sheik" designated to take a semblance of charge in Basra (not least because he was a former brigadier general in President Saddam's army).Many of us who opposed the war did so not out of any fondness for the Iraqi leader nor even the belief that the threat posed by his weapons of mass destruction was absurdly overblown. We did so because we believed the risks to regional stability outweighed the potential gains. Nothing so far has changed that judgement; indeed Turkey's behaviour, the current chaos in Iraq and the American sabre-rattling against Syria only confirm it.And while the war has come and almost gone, the shambles of what is optimistically called the "international community" persist. Can the UN regain a semblance of authority, after the paralysing divisions on the Security Council before the conflict? Will those divisions spill over into trade wars and financial quarrels, complicating global economic recovery? Can the EU heal its wounds? Can the US on the one hand, and France, Germany and Russia on the other, mend fences – or will Gulliver say "to hell with it", less inclined than ever to permit the Lilliputians to tie him down in treaties and multilateral organisations?Reconciliation is a two-way street. Ultimately it all depends on how America chooses to conduct itself. Among the journalists who were victims of the war was Michael Kelly, an outstanding columnist and writer, killed when the military vehicle in which he was travelling came under attack in central Iraq.

But it is more than simple homage to a colleague to quote the closing lines of his final column in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, published after he died.The real question, Kelly argued, is "whether the employment of [America's] almost unfathomable power will be largely for good, leading to the liberation of a tyrannised people and the spread of freedom; or largely for bad, leading to a corruption of America's own values and freedoms. Probably the next hundred years hinges on the answer." That is no exaggeration It was true before the war, and is still truer today. The past 25 days have changed everything, in the Middle East and beyond Yet, in a deeper sense, they have changed nothing.. Only the placards had changed: "Stop the War" had almost seamlessly become "End the Occupation".

The war in Iraq may be all but over, but that did not stop the third major protest in less than two months bringing central London to a standstill again yesterday. Police estimated 20,000 people were on the march – organisers put the figure at 200,000. Either way it was down on the more than one million who had protested on 15 February when there was still a chance of avertingwar.If anything, attitudes had hardened since then "It's a complete shambles," a man in his sixties said. "What does Blair think he's up to?'' His wife, a retired nurse, added: "All my life I've spent trying to put people back together Here we are blowing innocent people to pieces I've stopped watching the TV news.