Trying to see the bigger picture on Iraq

Are you brave enough to set up a new television station in Baghdad for MBC? Would you be willing to tackle oil fires on the Kirkuk pipeline caused by sabotage? Could you live under the fear of constant attack, day and night?

Not everyone in the Middle East is up for an assignment in Iraq. But there are already rich pickings for the brave and perhaps a little foolish.

The lucrative nature business opportunities in post-Saddam Iraq was evident at the donors' conference in Abu Dhabi last week. The figure of $53 billion to be spent by 2008 was typical of the large sums that fell readily from the lips of those involved.

However, since the start of the year the security position in Iraq has deteriorated into near anarchy at times with US soldiers dying daily in bloody attacks, and the re-formed Iraqi police a particular target for insurgents.

What seems to be happening is that Baghdad is becoming the Beirut of the 21st century. Those with longer memories will re-call the end of the 17-year civil war in Lebanon in the early 1990s, a conflict in which the ethnic and religious tensions of the entire region clashed repeatedly in the capital of the unfortunate Lebanese.

The arrival of troops from many nations in Iraq, most recently the Japanese who have not been outside their own backyard since the Second World War, is ominous. As more and more military units arrive this may prove to be a harbinger of more war rather than genuine peace keeping activity.

By creating an armed camp of allies, the US-led provisional administration hopes to gain the security it has been unable to establish by itself. That could prove to be a tall order. Certainly a major success - such as the capture of Osama bin Laden - is needed to break the moral of the foreign element among those engaged in Iraq.

In the meantime, the supply train will still be left waiting at the station; or in this case the ports of Dubai and Kuwait.

Once security is established in Iraq, preferably with some kind of a transfer of sovereignty, then business can start, until then all we have is talk against the sound of gunfire.