Keeping peace in Iraq not just a job for the US

Winning the war in Iraq was the easy part for the United States-led coalition. Now, it has to win the hearts and minds of Iraqi citizens to ensure faith in the nation-building process now under way.

That will not be possible with the US at the helm of efforts to create an interim government and co-ordinate reconstruction work. A broad-based international effort is the only way to ensure Iraqis are given their promised liberation.

Fighting between civilians and American soldiers in the town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, highlights the difficulties ahead. Anti-Americanism is rife in some sections of society. Although thankful for being freed from Saddam Hussein's regime, the Iraqi people's suspicions persist about US intentions.

American support for Mr Hussein in the 1980s, despite the killing of his own people with chemical and biological weapons, cannot be easily forgotten. The memory of American and British soldiers turning their backs on an uprising against the dictator in 1991 - with devastating consequences for thousands of families - does not engender support.

The coalition has returned and accomplished what many Iraqis believe should have happened 12 years ago. In that time, they have suffered under American-orchestrated United Nations economic sanctions. They have experienced the collapse of their country from comfortable affluence to poverty and bomb-cratered ruins.

The American soldiers who, saying they were responding to gunfire, killed 15 civilians in Fallujah this week and injured dozens more were the face of the US government. They were in the firing line of the questions Iraqis want answered.