After The Fall: Baghdad Shattered

It was the week Baghdad shattered. The changes were seismic, and the mood kept shifting -- from unbridled joy to unmasked greed. The city once ruled with an iron fist by Saddam Hussein plunged into anarchy. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.

"The minute you depose a government, there's anarchy, there's chaos. It's a given," says Anne Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

"I think the administration is right to say this notion that you can't have democracy in the Middle East or you can't have a Muslim democracy, that's clearly not true. There's absolutely no reason why the Iraqi people can't govern themselves,” Slaughter says.

But which is stronger -- the Arab urge for freedom and democracy, or their hatred of America?

Slaughter says that's the big question: "It's going to depend on whether we both keep our promises and turn this government over to the Iraqi people as fast as we can. But also, do we turn back to the United Nations?"

The Bush administration may hate the idea of going back to the U.N. given the battles of the past. But despite that, Slaughter says we need the U.N. because we really can't do it all by ourselves.

"This is their only hope of continuing to work with the United States in a way that they have any influence," says Slaughter.

"When we choose to take other nations seriously and listen, we get 80 to 90 percent of what we want. And we get the legitimacy of approval by a global body, which we need."

Slaughter thinks the U.N. is needed for several reasons: to provide peacekeepers to help police the streets, to distribute humanitarian aid and to oversee war crimes tribunals.

"If we try these people and we claim they've committed these crimes, the world's not going to believe us and they're going to think we planted evidence,” she says.

And the same is true for our search for weapons of mass destruction.

"If the U.N. inspectors could come back with us, that would help a lot, because if it's just us, the world's going to think we planted it. And we do need to make our case here. We really do," adds Slaughter.

With Tikrit standing as the final battleground, public opinion in the Arab world about the U.S. remains hostile. The Bush administration concedes it has a lot of repair work to do.

"There will always be some who hate us, but not all,” says Slaughter, “and that's a very important difference."