IRAQ: FREEDOM

Guardian: The failed occupation

A TV station ban, 160,000 foreign troops, trumped up charges: is this the free society Iraqis were promised?

They are falling like skittles in a bowling alley. One by one, the arguments for the 2003 invasion of Iraq keep tumbling. First to go was the big one. War was necessary because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It turned out there were none. Next was the insistent promise that a US-led conquest of Baghdad would end completely and forever human rights abuses committed in hell-holes such as Abu Ghraib jail. Except we saw the pictures and realised that abuses had continued even in Abu Ghraib itself - albeit under new management.

The last week has sent one more Iraqi ninepin wobbling. It is the hope on which Tony Blair has had to rest his case for war, the hope that Iraq is on its way to becoming a unique entity in the Arab world: an open, democratic society. There may be no WMD and the occupation may be a mess, Blair seems to say, but Iraq will be a democracy - and that alone will make all the pain and bloodshed worthwhile.

Now this justification is looking as shaky as the others. Of course, Iraq wasn't built in a day - and rooting a democracy in soil dried and hardened by decades of dictatorship will be no easy, instant task. The most one can expect are gradual, baby steps in the right direction. But even those are not coming.