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"What do you think about the possible war?"

It wasn't exactly the easiest place to do vox pop in the dusty and windy streets of Baghdad in the beginning of March. War was looming ahead. Everybody - both Iraqis and foreigners - did know that the U.S. attack would start within weeks.

Foreign reporters had to work with guides from the Ministry of Information. They worked for Saddam Hussein's government and were monitoring every single step outlanders took. Common Iraqis were often afraid to speak out about what they really felt.

It took a lot of work, mostly secret interviews while lurking to avoid officials, to figure out the general mood toward the war. And the result was confusing.

Many Iraqis were waiting for the war to start because they wanted get rid of the dictator. Other Iraqis were waiting for the war because they knew it was inevitable and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.

Many Iraqis opposed the war because they were in the army or had good positions in the federal or local administration. Others opposed the war because they were so afraid of the impending attack.

It was amazing how many different opinions and interpretations Iraqis had about the issue. But all Iraqis I met were ruffled about one thing: allegations of having weapons of mass destruction.

As we know, no WMD's have been found during or after the war in Iraq. None were used against the allied troops.

In general, people in Europe tend to think that the question of WMD's was only a pretext to invade Iraq. Most countries in the European Union would have felt better - including Finland - if Washington would have had approval of the United Nations Security Council for the war. But there were not enough convincing proofs laid on the Security Council table by the U.S. or Britain.

Frustration over the Iraq issue has created a single-issue debate over whether the U.S. should get involved at all in different crises around the world.

This debate is off the rails.

Having worked in various war zones as a reporter I have a strong belief that the world really needs the U.S. military might. But only for vital reasons.

Bombing Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict in 1999 was for a totally different reason than invading Iraq. In Kosovo, genocide was looming. Not in Iraq.

Just a few years earlier the world did not do anything to prevent the massacre of over 4,000 Bosnian Muslims in a small Bosnian town of Srebrenica. The same thing was happening in Kosovo, but this time — luckily — the U.S. and other NATO countries were awake.

The cold war is over. There is no need to export Western values by force to countries which are not willing to adopt them. There is no need to give the world false pretexts about threats that are not real, either.

What the world needs is that the U.S. will use its military might to prevent genocides and massacres that so often are predictable, such as in Rwanda in 1994. Over a million people got killed there during only months of a civil war. Neither the U.S. nor other western countries did anything to interrupt the bloodshed.

As long as the European Union does not have credible common defense forces (we are working on it, slowly), the United States is the only real superpower in the world. The big brother has got a responsibility to take care of the troubled siblings — but to use force only when there is an internationally recognized, humanitarian reason.

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Editor's note: Kaius Niemi is a reporter for Helsingin Sanomat, a daily newspaper in Finland. He has covered numerous conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, Afghanistan and, most recently, Iraq. In 2002, the Swedish publisher Bonnier named him Finland's "journalist of the year" for his reporting from Afghanistan.

Niemi is a 2003 Fellow with the World Press International program, headquartered at Macalester College in St. Paul. As part of 3 1/2 months touring the United States, he was a visiting journalist at the Republican Eagle.