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The market is in one of its nutty phases, twitching up and down with each news report suggesting the war might be shorter or longer than the conventional wisdom believed thirty seconds ago. A scrap of new evidence that Saddam just might be dead? The Dow Jones Industrial Average rallies. A skirmish in which the coalition forces take a casualty? It tumbles.

There's just no way I can see the precise length of the war making a big difference in next year's earnings for the big companies in the Dow. But I can see a number of other war-related developments making a heck of a difference for certain companies. These are developments that could take months or in some cases years to play out, and I'm afraid that compared with bombs on Baghdad they fail abjectly as reality television. But for a great many stocks, they'll be way more important than anything we see through a tank-mounted night vision camera:

Who was trading with the enemy? Perhaps even before the war ends, we'll see documents showing which companies violated United Nations sanctions on selling to Iraq; special units of American troops are already scouring Iraqi offices for the evidence. It's safe to bet some of these companies will be French, Russian, and Chinese, but brace for the possibility that some will be American. All will try to claim innocence, of course. They will have taken the precaution of selling through some third country. But based on U.S. knowledge of companies that have done business with Iran, authorities are confident they'll find some American firms that have sold goods to Iraq. Punishment can range widely. The harshest is reserved for firms that sold military goods; they could be forbidden to export anything to anyone, ever, and their executives could be prosecuted on criminal charges.

Icons under attack. As the war stirs up anti-Americanism around the world, the most identifiably American businesses could become targets of boycotts and violence. The problem will be most severe in Europe, the Middle East, and the Muslim parts of Asia. It's hard to see a more obvious target than McDonald's: famously American through and through, and there's one every few blocks in every major city. In recent months McDonald's restaurants have been attacked by anti-American mobs in France, India, and Indonesia. So far such attacks aren't financially significant; after all, there are 30,000 McDonald's restaurants worldwide. The danger is that customers could become afraid to go to them, and employees could become afraid to work at them.

Another danger, perhaps even greater, is cultural. Much of the success of U.S. brands globally has come from the status and coolness they confer. It's quite realistic to think that in some countries it could suddenly become very uncool to buy Coke, Marlboros, Budweiser, Levis, Starbucks coffee, and other iconic American products.

Political purchasing. Less visible than the consumer economy, but huge in volume, is the purchasing done by governments. After the latest international contretemps, if I may still use that term, it's easy to imagine the contracting process becoming even more political than usual. We've already seen it happening with controvery over the U.S. military's use of French firms to provide satellite communications and food service. We'll see exactly the same thing in reverse. Imagine you're a German government minister considering bids from three companies. In this environment, is there any way you could give the contract to the American firm? Multiply that scenario by a thousand, and the phenomenon becomes significant.

A protectionist spiral. Not a certainty, but a big possibility is that the good work of trade liberalization over the past decade could start to unravel. Such liberalization, under the name of globalization, had begun to look like an unstoppable trend. But in fact such a trend never advances on its own. Countries get rid of trade barriers only slowly and hesitantly, continually afraid they'll get the short end of the deal. Negotiators have to fight for every inch of gain, and the process is like pushing a boulder up a mountain. As that metaphor implies, it's only too easy for the boulder to start rolling down, for countries angrily to slap on tariffs and quotas and other trade barriers, ever more so as they see others doing the same. If U.S. relations with France, Germany, Russia, and China don't start to improve quickly, the barriers could start to rise again, to the detriment of exporters, not to mention consumers worldwide.

Watching the war coverage on television is gripping for sure. But for investors, what's going on behind the scenes -- the subtler, less immediate, and less visual effects of the fighting -- will prove to be more important than anything we see live from Baghdad.