LONDON, 4 April 2003 — “Free Palestine” said the placards held up by some marchers on the anti-war demonstrations. Well, here’s a surprise for them: this bloody mess of a war may result in a free Palestine.

Let me explain, through this extract from the 2020 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary World History:

“Curiously, the Iraq war can be seen as the turning point in progress toward an independent Palestinian state. American forces, with their overwhelming technological superiority, succeeded militarily in defeating Saddam Hussein, but, as one American general ruefully observed, the enemy was ‘a bit different from the one we wargamed against’. The military campaign resulted in civilian casualties and damage to Islamic holy places that inflamed the whole Arab world. One young Egyptian sarcastically remarked to a Western television interviewer: ‘Thank you very much, British and Americans, because you’re waking us up.’

British troops compared their street-by-street struggle against paramilitary groups to Northern Ireland. This proved prescient. For the subsequent occupation of Iraq was like Northern Ireland, only worse. A large majority of Iraqis were delighted to be rid of Saddam Hussein; this did not mean they welcomed a colonial administration imposed by Washington, headed by a retired American general, and which included a minister of finance who was a former head of the CIA. British forces prided themselves on being more subtle in winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of a restless population, but they underestimated the depth of historic resentment directed specifically against Britain, the former colonial power in both Iraq and Palestine.

A relatively small number of Iraqi paramilitaries and suicide bombers compelled the Anglo-American occupying forces to use tactics that, seen throughout the Arab world on Al-Jazeera television, reminded Arabs everywhere of Israeli soldiers’ behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Nor did it help that the American viceroy of Iraq, Gen. Jay Garner, conceded far-reaching autonomy to the Kurds in northern Iraq, who had been valuable allies during the campaign against Saddam, and were the only group in Iraq to remain unambiguously pro-American under the occupation.

Critics of the war had predicted that, in the somber words of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, it would produce a hundred new Osama Bin Ladens. These predictions did not entirely come true. But in the aftermath of the war, there were renewed terror attacks. The November 2003 bombing of a shopping center in central London, which killed 37 people, was a notably horrific incident. There was also growing discontent among Muslim Americans.

As the human, political and financial costs of occupying Iraq mounted while the American economy plunged further into recession, criticism of the Bush administration grew in the United States. Moderate Republicans privately agreed with Democrats that the administration had led the country into a morass in the Middle East, while alienating many of the United States’ friends around the world. This applied particularly to Europe. Even Britain, America’s most stalwart ally, was incensed by the lack of any serious progress along the ‘road map’ to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After George Bush narrowly lost the November 2004 election (following a recount in Florida), the new administration hastened to change course. In an attempt to mend fences with the Arab world and the Europeans, it withdrew its troops from Iraq, handing control to the Iraqis and Kurds, and started exerting serious pressure on the Sharon government in Israel to come back to the negotiating table with the Palestinians. President Smith was helped in this endeavor by the absence of Yasser Arafat, and the advent of a more reasonable Palestinian leadership. The European Union, which had been pressing for such negotiations, was also useful in exerting economic leverage on the Palestinians.

As a result, in 2005 a deal was finally made for a viable Palestinian state in boundaries only slightly more generous than those offered by President Clinton in 2000. The Gaza Strip was connected to the West Bank, as Clinton had proposed, by a futuristic raised road and rail highway — paid for by the Europeans, and jokingly known as the Eurostar.

The deal was violently resisted by both Hamas on the Palestinian side, and Israeli settlers. There were several appalling incidents of violence, which finally resulted in most of the settlers in Palestine fleeing to Israel. A permanent fence was erected between Israel and Palestine; in parts of Jerusalem it looked like the Berlin Wall. The whole process was bloody, unjust and arbitrary — but, as in former Yugoslavia, physical separation turned out to be a lesser evil. In time, and with help from the international community, the two sides started to cooperate, as they needed to for their own economic survival.

From his hideaway, Osama Bin Laden (or someone claiming to be Osama Bin Laden) gloated that “the heroic jihad that began on Sept. 11 2001 has triumphed with the establishment of an independent state for our brothers in Palestine and the withdrawal of infidel forces from Iraq”. On the face of it, this was a crushing defeat for the group of American policymakers, identified particularly with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who had seen the invasion of Iraq as the beginning of a democratic reordering of the Middle East. No one was more outspoken in criticizing President Smith than the former Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Neville Chamberlain’ was his politest epithet.

It’s a measure of the mess we’re in that this might pass for an optimistic history of the future. Of course we never know what will really happen until it does, but two things are clear. First, one of history’s very few universal laws is the law of unintended consequences. By starting this war, Bush and Blair have thrown large parts of the jigsaw puzzle of world politics into the air. They have as little idea as we do where the pieces will fall. Second, if Europe has any sense at all (which recent events also lead one to doubt) it will start now to develop its own ideas for a democratic reconstruction of the Middle East — in readiness for 2005.