Should John McCain win, the war will allegedly continue "as long as necessary". So, five years after President George W Bush declared an end to combat operations in Iraq, it is time to ask the question: can Iraq emerge from this ordeal as a place where people lead reasonably safe and happy lives?

Despite all the predictions of disaster, the departure of
American troops is unlikely to be followed by an orgy of violence.
The civil war has already happened, and most formerly mixed neighbourhoods and villages are now exclusively Shia or Sunni. That, as much as the "surge" in American troop numbers, is why the civilian death toll has dropped significantly over the past year.

Between four and five million Iraqis have fled their homes, and most of them will never be able to return to those homes. Half of them are still in Iraq, and most of the rest are in neighbouring countries and will ultimately return. They will find somewhere safe to live, in some now ethnically cleansed neighbourhood or village, and they will start to rebuild their lives.

With oil at more than $100 a barrel, Iraq certainly has the money to rebuild, even if oil production has not yet recovered to the pre-invasion level. And there is now a kind of democracy in Iraq, although it is heavily distorted by sectarian and ethnic rivalries.

There is little chance of another strongman like Saddam seizing power in Iraq, because power is now so widely distributed among the different factions and militias. Iraqi democracy may even survive the departure of the foreign troops.

So was it all worthwhile, in the end? That is a different question, because the implicit comparison is between the future of the country as it is now, and the conditions that reigned five years ago when Saddam Hussein was still in charge.

Even that comparison yields an ambiguous answer. For Saddam's
Iraq was a secular society where people were safe unless they trespassed into politics, and women enjoyed an unusual degree of personal freedom. But it is also the wrong comparison.

This was the trick that the old Soviet Union played endlessly, comparing the wonders achieved under Communism with the
horrors of poverty and oppression under the Tsars – as if Russia would have stayed forever frozen in 1917 if the Bolshevik revolution had not happened. The Chinese Communist regime plays the same game now, pretending that it would still be 1948 in the country if they had not seized power. It's utter nonsense, and that applies to Iraq, too.

Saddam would probably still be in power today if the United States and Britain had not invaded Iraq five years ago, but he was not going to live forever. Nobody knows what would have followed him had he stayed in power and died a natural death, but would it have involved hundreds of thousands of Iraqis being tortured, shot or blown up? Would it have led to the permanent alienation of Sunnis and Shias? Probably not.

In the meantime, Saddam posed no serious threat to his neighbours, as his army was largely destroyed in the first Gulf war of 1991 and never rebuilt (due to sanctions). He posed no danger at all to the United States, since he had absolutely nothing to do with al-Qaida (as was confirmed by a recently released Pentagon study of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the US invasion).

The number of Iraqis who were tortured and murdered by
Saddam's security forces in the average year was in the thousands,
no more than the monthly civilian death toll from sectarian violence in recent years.

Occasionally, when there were uprisings against his rule, Saddam killed far more people, but the last time that happened was in 1991. Nine-tenths or more of the Iraqis who have been killed in the horrors
of the past five years would probably still be alive if Saddam was still in power.

We cannot know what Iraq would have been like 20 years from now if the United States and Britain had not invaded, but the future it
actually gets will probably be a good deal better than the one predicted both by those who opposed the invasion and by those who now oppose a pull-out.

As for the rest of the Arab world, the impact of the Iraq tragedy has been remarkably small. Bad things may happen there in years to come, but the pessimists were predicting those bad things even before the invasion of Iraq.

The invasion was both a crime and a mistake, but some things that loom very large in the present dwindle rapidly in the rear-view mirror.

Iraq is probably one of them – and that is the strongest argument for pulling the troops out and getting the misery over as quickly as possible.


Gwynne Dyer is an international correspondent. His new book, After Iraq, has just been published in London by Yale University Press.