Missiles strike the Hotel Rashid. Kurds and Arabs fight over land in northern Iraq. Rebels kill Iraqi policemen. Mosques are blown apart. American soldiers are killed almost daily.

Isn't the war over? Aren't the Iraqis free? Why won't they settle down? Because U.S. plans for post-invasion Iraq were based on a singularly wrongheaded idea.

Since the end of first Bush administration, the neo-Conservative ideologues who now guide American foreign policy in the second Bush administration have operated on the belief that the central problem we faced in Iraq was Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Based on this, they confidently proclaimed that Iraq could be transformed into a peaceful, democratic ally through the simple expedient of "regime change."

The problem is that dictatorships are never solely the products of evil leaders. Dictatorships are manifestations of deeper troubles in a society. Simply removing a dictator, as we are now discovering, does not remove the forces that create the disorder that makes dictators possible - as well as acceptable - to many sectors in a society.

Dictatorships make sense. They may not be moral nor justifiable, but they can be understood. The emergence of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany cannot be explained by the rise of Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. On the contrary, it is the social and political conditions of post-World War I Italy and Germany that explain the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. World War II brought peace to Western Europe, not because it removed Mussolini and Hitler from power, but because it removed the underlying economic and political conditions that made their regimes possible and attractive to many among their respective populations.

This is what the second Bush administration has failed to understand about Iraq. It is why our efforts to forge a peaceful, non-repressive state of Iraqi are doomed to fail. We want to change the leadership, but not the underlying conditions.

Iraq is a legal fiction that was created at the end of the Ottoman empire, not to serve the interests of the people encompassed by its new boundaries, but to ensure the political and eventually the economic - that is, oil - interests of external powers. To compound the problem, this artificially created state structure was imposed on three separate identity groups - Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, who often have more in common with their kin in neighboring countries than with some central Iraqi government.

By committing ourselves to the continuation the Iraq that was imposed on Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds more than 80 years ago, and by using America's security and "foreign interests" as the guidelines for what kind of post-Saddam arrangement we will tolerate in the territory that currently constitutes Iraq, we do nothing to guarantee long-term peace in that part of the world. Instead, we are repeating the errors of the past, but now in a world made more dangerous by global terrorism.

The United States clearly has an obligation to the people who live in Iraq. We brought a deadly and destructive war to those who live there. The United Nations has a parallel obligation. It authorized a decade of punishing economic sanctions that are responsible for much of the deterioration of what remains of Iraq's infrastructure after U.S. and British bombardments. So clearly these outside groups have an economic obligation to help rebuild the place called Iraq.

When it comes to the political framework that will replace the government of Saddam Hussein, however, the United States and Britain should step aside. Among other things, this means that all military forces should be withdrawn in an orderly but expedient fashion.

Military forces should be replaced by civilian advisors and humanitarian assistance workers providing advice and assistance when and where it is sought. Will this result in disorder? Perhaps, for a time. Using the weight of U.S. military presence to ensure that the "new" Iraqi government will be to our particular liking, however, is the greater danger. It will thwart the creation of a genuinely local resolution to the political tensions and divisions that led eventually to the rise of Saddam Hussein. We may buy a little time. Maybe even a generation's worth. But, unless we let the people who live in the land that was forced to be Iraq decide their own fate, we or our children will most assuredly face a future enemy from that land.

Dr. Raymond Michalowski is with the Department of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University

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