In November 2002, four months before the war began, The Chronicle asked ten scholars to predict what the world would look like five years after an invasion of Iraq.

This week, five of those scholars have revisited their predictions on a blog known as Middle East Strategy at Harvard, which is based at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

In 2002, Barry Rubin of the Global Research for International Affairs (GLORIA) Center argued that anti-Americanism and terrorist blowback were not serious concerns:

Once people consider their dictators to be vulnerable, they may stop accepting the distraction of anti-Americanism and focus on their real problems and true tormentors. And once the dictatorships fall — as was seen in Russia — the anti-Americanism they fostered dissipates with remarkable speed.

Today, Rubin concedes that anti-Americanism has spiked, but he takes comfort in the notion that the the United States has not lost influence with those same dictatorships:

If one looks at public opinion polls, it would seem the United States is more unpopular in the Arabic-speaking world. But popularity is not the point. It makes us feel better or worse, but is simply not the way Middle East politics work where it counts. And regarding what counts, I am not sure one can say that these events have materially worsened U.S. relations with Arab regimes at all.

Georgetown U.’s John Esposito wrote this in 2002:

Democracy cannot be imposed through military force. The removal and replacement of Saddam with a handpicked American ruler, and the measures necessary to both hold Iraq together and guarantee U.S. influence in Iraq, will mirror and recall the policies of European colonial powers in configuring the modern Middle East and signal a new American imperialism.

Today Esposito feels sadly vindicated. In a new book, Esposito and his colleague Dahlia Mogahed draw on data from the Gallup World Poll to paint a picture of the Iraq war’s effects on Muslim opinion internationally.

(Elsewhere, Martin Kramer takes issue with Esposito’s new post.)

More from our pages:

Just after the Iraq invasion, The Chronicle covered antiwar protests and other responses at home and abroad.

In April 2003, we looked at plans for the rebuilding of Iraq’s universities. In May 2007, Zvika Krieger reported on the near-collapse of Iraqi higher education.

In 2004, we profiled a number of college instructors who deployed to Iraq as military reservists.

In 2005, we looked at the media reception of a study that found tens of thousands of civilian deaths related to the war.

And last month we examined two Iraqi scholars’ struggle over a huge cache of documents from Saddam Hussein’s regime.

(Photo by the Flickr user klika100. Used under a Creative Commons license.)