Assuming for the moment that this is a quick and dirty war with no WMD defensive retaliations and that the mid-East doesn't flare into a conflagration that engulfs and burns all of us, what then?

In the current Time magazine, Joe Klein writes:

There should be no illusions of the difficulty of Mesopotamian nation building. It has been attempted many times before, by many other superpowers, and none - none - has ever succeeded. The last one to try was England. Winston Churchill, a superhawk hero of the 20th centruy, ran the occupation, saw the futility of it and favored retreat. "We are paying 8 millions a year," he wrote his Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in 1922, "for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano."