Announcing the war against Iraq, President Bush had stated a year ago, that the United States and its allies would not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatened the peace with weapons of mass murder. However, after he went ahead with the invasion of Iraq and brought down the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, no such weapons were found. The United States went to war on the basis of erroneous intelligence, taking a unilateral decision and by sidelining the United Nations. One year after the United States invaded Iraq, foreign-policy experts in America and elsewhere are wondering whether the world is any safer.

The US-led war caused bitter divisions among its allies. France and Germany led the opposition to Bush's call for using military force and stayed on the sidelines. Now more than 120,000 US troops are stationed in or near Iraq. Some 570 have died and nearly 3,000 injured. But their sacrifices have brought no advantage to the American people.

Clearly, terrorism has not been wiped out from the world. The French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin believes that the world is a more dangerous place because of the Iraq war, which has unleashed postwar violence and an upswing in terrorism. According to him terrorism never existed in Iraq before, but it is now one of the world's principal sources of world terror.

The US war against terror managed to defeat the Taliban but has clearly not been able to beat the Al-Qaeda into submission. We now know that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were never allies before the war, but the al-Qaeda is currently fighting along side the remnants of the Baathist regime. It has dispatched hundreds, if not thousands, of mujahideen to Iraq to fight the American and allied forces. This reminds one of the mujahideen who had fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda and its allies have also been bombing targets from Istanbul to Madrid. The March 11 train bombings that killed more than 200 people in Spain have been attributed to extremist groups with links to al-Qaida. The killings took place just before Spain's national election, prompting voters to oust a prime minister who had supported the U.S. war in Iraq. Spain's new Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has vowed to withdraw his country's troops from the conflict. If America succeeded in changing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan ironically, Al Qaeda managed to change the regime in Spain.

Some believe that Bush and his advisors attacked Iraq hoping it would help them win the elections. However, this situation is very different from what President Bush might have bargained for. Opinion polls indicate that Iraq has divided the Americans like on every other major issue. Republicans appear to supporting him whereas Democrats do not. Swing voters are split down the middle. Surveys also indicate that the electorate is more concerned with the state of the economy than Iraq or the war against terror. After removing Saddam Hussein from power and capturing him the Americans have only created chaos in Iraq. There is no rule of law and no functioning government. Moreover, the invasion has fed the climate of anti-Americanism and made it very difficult for them to fight the war on terror.

The US government will have to be involved for several years to maintain stability in Iraq. It will take another two or three years before Iraq could reconstruct its infrastructure, including the oil industry. Security will remain the major concern and the world must be prepared to face the occasional bombings. It is hardly surprising consequently that people across the globe have come out on the streets to protest American aggression.

The Iraq war was fought on false premises. There was hardly any reason to suspect a link between the Baath regime the Al Qaeda terrorists. When the United States failed to find any WMDs it tried to justify the war on new grounds. It stated that the people of Iraq needed to be freed from a dictatorial regime but it has yet to establish a credible democratic alternative. But one year after the attack on Iraq, the US war against terror appears to be weakening. Cracks are appearing in the U.S.-led alliance that toppled Saddam Hussein. The transition of Iraq to democracy and sovereignty looks shaky and the prospect of civil war and chaos looms large over the country after the Americans hand over sovereignty. A year of American intervention in Iraq has failed to produce the desired results.