Roundtable: What Next in Iraq?

April 13 -- As fighting in Iraq winds down, what comes next?

ABCNEWS' George Will said the plundering occurring throughout Iraq would be terrible if it continued, but he noted that the situation is hardly unprecedented.

"We saw this in France when they were liberated just after four years of German occupation," Will said. "Forty thousand Frenchmen were killed by other Frenchmen in acts of vengeance. What you get is a burned-over area, and then order is restored."

For U.S., Early Steps Crucial

Fareed Zakaria, an ABCNEWS analyst and editor of Newsweek International, said there is potential peril in the disorder, reminding viewers of James Madison's point in The Federalist Papers that if you want to create a good government, two things must be done: First, you have to control the governed, and second, you have to control the government.

The U.S. is just beginning to get a handle on the first part of the equation, he said.

"We're in that first phase now, but it's very dangerous because you are simultaneously trying to begin limited government, constitutional government, democracy," Zakaria said. "The decisions we make now — whether to use their police or to use foreign police, whether to use their judges or to use foreign judges — will be very consequential. Because if you look at the last 20 years, how you start has a lot to do with how you end."

ABCNEWS' Michel Martin said the United States is learning is that the military planning and the humanitarian planning must go together, particularly in a situation like this, which is, as George Will has called it, an "optional war."

"If you're a mother about to give birth and there's no hospital because the hospital has been looted … there's no clean water, there's no electricity, no food. It is more than untidy," Martin said, referencing the characterization of the situation that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made.

Even New York Rioted During Blackout

Martin remains mindful of the fact that on the awful day of Sept. 11, "authorities in New York, where I was, put security perimeters around the hospitals."