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Economists may say that the world need not fear another oil shock, but they have forgotten the geo-political realities. In this Dr Strangelove-like vision, once Saddam had been removed and Iraq remodelled as a Western-style democracy, the oil would start flowing. The war would be self-financing, and the world economy would move smoothly into the sunlit uplands.Things have not turned out quite like that. Oil prices have risen, not fallen, and they could easily rise further. Partly this is a result of the increasingly desperate security situation in Iraq.

The Americans did more than overthrow Saddam’s despotic regime; they also destroyed the Iraqi state, with the result that the country is now in a condition of semi-anarchy.Given the ill-judged attack by US forces on the Shia holy city of Najaf and the likelihood that the beheading of Nicholas Berg by Islamist militants will be followed by more such atrocities, the level of violence in the country will almost certainly escalate In that case, Iraq will be the scene of a mass exodus. In the Middle East today, as in Algeria in the past, democracy means Islamist rule.In part, the attack on Iraq was simply another exercise in the type of neo-Wilsonian fantasy that is a recurring feature of US foreign policy, but it was also an exercise in realpolitik – and a resource war. Only Iraq has it in sufficient quantities – hence the drive for regime change. A key part of the rationale for the invasion was to enable the US to withdraw from Saudi Arabia, which had come to be seen as complicit with terror and inherently unstable.If it was to pull out from Saudi Arabia, the US needed another source of oil. For them, that meant overthrowing many, if not most, of the area’s regimes and replacing them with secular liberal democracies. They appear not to have noticed that the region’s secular regimes were authoritarian states such as Syria and Iraq.

At a global level, the principal beneficiary is al-Qa’ida, which is now a more serious threat than it has ever been.The Bush administration’s self-defeating approach to terrorism is symptomatic of a dangerous unrealism running right through its thinking. For Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defense Secretary, and other neo-conservatives, the solution to terrorism was to “modernise” the Middle East. Not so long ago, the clash of civilisations was just a crass and erroneous theory, but after the recent revelations it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. In toppling Saddam, the Americans destroyed an essentially Western regime, not unlike the Stalinist Soviet Union in its militant secularism. In doing so, they empowered radical Islam as the single most important political force in the country.The immediate beneficiary of the torture revelations is likely to be Iran – a fact that seems to have been grasped by Ahmed Chalabi (the Iraqi ?gr?hat the neo-conservatives believed would take the country to American-style democracy), who appears to be forging links with the Iranian regime. The torture of Iraqis by US personnel is an application of the Bush administration’s strategy in the war on terror.Tossing aside international law and the norms of civilised behaviour in this way is self-defeating. Maybe so, but it was made possible by policies emanating from the highest levels of American leadership.