Saddam Hussein is usually portrayed as the villain of the piece. It would be near impossible to defend the man. It would, however, be more than useful to understand what helped him attain the position that he so brutally controlled until the most recent United States and British invasion.

During the Reagan years, 1980-88, Saddam was encouraged by the United States to go to war with Iran. He received American government patronage in no uncertain terms. He was provided both with guns, as well as chemicals, to make weapons of mass destruction. In the process, he used these weapons on the Iranians, not without some encouragement from outside. He later turned them on his own population of Kurds in the North, without equal approval.

The Kurds had challenged his leadership in the country. In the process of his war against Iran, his young men learnt to be warriors as did the peaceful young men of Cambodia and Laos towards the end of the Vietnam War, when their countries were willy-nilly drawn into that war.

War is brutish. My Lai in Vietnam, the bombing of a wedding party including women and children in Fallujah, called so absurdly collateral damage, the beheading of hostages, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, the butchery of Kosovo or the continued kidnapping of innocents and the burning of places of worship in Iraq as well as Pakistan, are all ultimately the result of what happens to men who are trained to kill other human beings.

For the rest of us, this is an activity generally unacceptable in normal society. There is a cold brutality that most of us simply cannot recognise in ourselves, but could be there with the requisite military indoctrination. It also invariably means as it now does in Iraq, that one has created a cult of young men prepared to go to war, especially against what they see as an invader, or if there is payment involved.

Supporting Saddam was not the only United States blunder. When Saddam eyed the oilfields of Kuwait as a potential supplement to Iraqi oil, he was not officially discouraged by the United States. This gave Papa Bush the opportunity to attack Saddam. But already things had changed. Although many Iraqi soldiers were killed in the first Gulf war, by the time Bush Jr. had decided, as Maureen Dowd of the NY Times said, to fix the screw-up of his father, a new breed of Iraq soldiers had emerged.

Again, although several were killed in the beginning of the war, more than enough survived to ensure that there could be no easy peace. There will probably now not be any easy peace since the war has become more than a United States-Iraq war and has evidently drawn in other elements who would stop at nothing to harm United States interests, legitimate or otherwise.

The thought of elections this month would be farcical if it were not such a serious issue. It seems that everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. After Bush had declared his mission accomplished from the safety of a battleship, more United States soldiers have died than in any recent war since Vietnam. The oil which Halliburton eyed as a possible source of funding for an operation un-bid for, now seems more of an illusion than a reality, with pipelines being blown up almost as soon as they have been fixed.

So, not only is the oil not there to pay the bill, but the scarcity of it has pushed global prices sky high at a time when, with the northern winter on the doorstep, prices conventionally go higher. Iraq, too, is being further and further destroyed by the bombing from both sides. Rebuilding will be an even more costly operation than was envisaged. It is doubtful if even the vast supplies of oil still in that country will suffice.

In the interim, no one seems to care much for the small ethnic minorities, some of them as ancient as the Assyrians, who will undoubtedly suffer in the heavily charged atmosphere of a Sunni-Shi’te conflict misnamed an election.

If the idea is to back the United States-chosen Allawi to be the new president, one is likely to end up as one has in Afghanistan.

In that country, there has been an election. The chosen one, Mr Karzai, is now formally elected president. But can he leave Kabul? He would be safer roaming the streets of New York at night than travelling to some parts of his own country at mid-day. One has effectively created a Vatican-like state in Kabul, which will need eternal protection to survive.

While most of the opposition to this state will be from the Taliban or Taliban supporters, there will also be the “neutral” warlords who have forever been a part of the make-up of that country. But then, if one maintains adequate troop strength there, the world may shift focus. We simply have too many crises or potential crises in the world for anyone to keep track of what goes on in Afghanistan.

The difference is that Iraq cannot now be ignored. It has become too hot a global issue both in terms of the reasons for the war and the fact that it is already part and parcel of an area of the world that is not without daily bad news in terms of peace. An unsettled Iraq will not be equivalent to an unsettled Afghanistan. Israel is too close and Iran is a neighbour.

All of this leads me back to the caller on the radio. Is he aware of any of this? Does he in his clear knowledge have any plans that could make a serious election take place in Iraq? Or will he, too, learn that democracy cannot be imposed, least of all by a far from perfect democracy. It can be encouraged, and it can be sustained, but only if those prepared to do the helping are not persuaded that they have the right candidate in a country they little understand.

 G