Patrick Cockburn: All this military triumphalism ignored the disastrous reality of post-war Iraq

As Tony Blair lauded the achievements of British troops in southern Iraq with all the military triumphalism of Henry V at Agincourt, the disastrous reality of post-war Iraq seemed to have escaped him. Iraqis are generally glad that Saddam Hussein is gone, but few doubt that they are living under imperial foreign occupation.

It was curious that Mr Blair found it necessary to remind troops that the war "wasn't the pretend stuff that happens in films. It was real war with real bloodshed and real casualties". No Iraqi needs reminding of this.

It has taken longer for the US and Britain to get supplies of water and electricity operating again than it took Saddam in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.

As military conflicts go, it was not much of a war. Despite having 375,000 under arms, Saddam was only able to kill about 150 American and British soldiers. The reason was much the same as in the Gulf War. Iraqi soldiers knew who was going to win the war and had no intention of dying for the Iraqi leader and his family.

Saddam himself, and his demonisers, united in giving the impression that he was more powerful and menacing than he was. In fact, for all his savagery there was also an element of Gilbert and Sullivan about the Iraqi leader, as shown by his failure to defend Baghdad.

He fell easily because Iraqis did not identify with him or his regime. But by the same token, they do not feel like Germans or Japanese in 1945 - that they have been defeated and must accept the rule of their conquerors. In the 1980s and 1990s Iraqi friends, recalling the Iran-Iraq war, often whispered that they considered Saddam an agent of the US.

There was a brief moment at the time of the fall of Baghdad on 9 April when the US and Britain could have persuaded Iraqis that they were not facing a foreign occupation. But in the weeks since, looting has continued, plans for a representative government have been put on the back burner and the US has tried to rule by fiat.

The result is that any political capital gained by the Anglo-American alliance in the war has ebbed away in the eyes of Iraqis. At the beginning of war, Britain and America dropped leaflets on the Iraqi regular army saying that they were not the target and the war was only against Saddam in Baghdad. But last week Paul Bremer, the American envoy, simply dissolved the Iraqi armed forces which means that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and above all the largely Sunni-Muslim officer corps, are now out of a job so long as the occupation continues.

It is an ominous development if Iraq is ever to return to civil peace. After all, the political and military reasoning behind the invasion was that was the regime could be decapitated because its real support among Iraqis was limited. But the US and Britain have stood by as the Iraqi state machinery - traditionally quite efficient - dissolved. Or they have actively closed it down.

Mr Bremer's decision on dissolving the army means that Iraq will be full of soldiers who have every interest in fighting the occupation. Given the unpopularity of the previous regime, the US and Britain today have astonishingly few friends. If they are going to stay, they are going to have to fight.