"It is making up its policy as it goes along," Patrick Cockburn, a British commentator said in his article "So Why Did the US Fight the War in Iraq?"

The article said it was probably too late for Paul Bremer, the new US civilian administrator in Iraq, to take actions against lawlessness, such as detaining all the looters.

With at least 60 percent of the Iraqi population destitute, according to the United Nations' statistics before the war, brief detention by US troops was not going to end the looting, the article said.

It said the US seemed to have fought the war against Iraq because it wanted a war.

"It did so because the political fuel on which the present US administration runs is to emphasize the external threat," the article said. "Through this means it has won control of the (US) Senate and may well win the next presidential election (in 2004)."

The civilian leadership of the Pentagon, notably US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, are "uniquely reckless, arrogant and ill-informed" about Iraq, the article said.

It also pointed out that some US oil companies, which may have wanted to get a share of Iraq's oil wealth, need a measure of security to exploit Iraq oilfields.

"They are also nervous that it is becoming more and more dangerous to be an American, or indeed any other type of westerner, anywhere in the Middle East," the article said.

Supposed links between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda network, heavily publicized by the White House before the US-led war, were largely journalistic concoctions, the article said.

Nevertheless, it argued, in the present anarchy in Iraq, "where people are suffering all the disadvantage of occupation but without civil order," Iraq would become a fertile recruiting ground for the al-Qaeda network.

(Xinhua News Agency May 21, 2003)