I truely believe that the Iraqi people will see us as liberators and will build a successful democracy

Well, I certainly hope so. But I can't help thinking that winning the war was always going to be the easy bit of Operation Iraqi Freedom, compared to the challenge of building a stable country in the place of Saddamite Iraq. And I'm not saying war is particularly easy: I'm sure US and UK forces conducted themselves with skill and heroism all the way. War is hard. But stabilising occupied countries is really, really hard; the British Empire screwed it up literally all over the map, despite having plenty of practice.

(despite France's official stance that the Middle-East is not sofisticated enough for one yet).

Is that actually the way they word it? Or have they just had more experience of the immense difficulty of decolonisation, especially Middle-East decolonisation, than the US?

After all, nobody really liked the Taliban. But the decolonisation of Afghanistan has yet to produce a government with influence reaching much beyond the suburbs of Kabul. If the Kurds, and, say, the Marsh Arabs rise against Baghdad once the garrisoning forces pull out, then sure things will be a different kind of bad in Iraq than they were under Saddam, but they'll still in fact be pretty bad.

Peter