Three days ago, oil began to move through the pipeline from Iraq’s northern oilfields to Turkey and its export point on the Mediterranean. The reopening of the long-closed and much-deteriorated line was greeted with smiles and backslapping among both Iraqi engineers and the coalition authorities.
The smiles and congratulations have stopped now. And so has the oil. Just north of Tikrit, in Saddam Hussein’s heartland, someone placed an explosive charge beneath the pipeline and blew up a section. You can see the spot from miles away because of the great plume of acrid black smoke that rises above it. The Americans of course are furious. They want Iraq to start earning oil money to pay for its rebuilding, which will of course go largely to US and UK firms. It matters not that the need to rebuild comes about in part because of international sanctions that followed Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and in part because coalition war planes blew many Iraqi installations to bits during the invasion.
Yet in fairness the Americans claim that they did not target bridges and power stations as in the aerial attacks on Iraq that preceded the liberation of Kuwait is largely true. This time the weaponry was a lot more accurate and the Pentagon knew that it was going to have to occupy and run Iraq after Saddam’s ouster. Therefore it made little sense to do serious damage to the country’s power infrastructure.
Thus the idea that Saddam’s own people may have been blowing up and sabotaging power stations and water supplies, even while his regime was still in power, begins to gather credence. For all the bombast of his publicity machine, Saddam knew from the moment the coalition forces crossed his borders that his regime was dead. He had had years to plan for this moment. The fact that Saddam remains at large today shows how thorough that planning was. From the moment the first US boot landed on Iraqi soil, his main concern was to make Iraq as ungovernable as possible.
To terrorize anyone who would work with the coalition authorities, Saddam began a system of sabotage. Not just power plants but factories appear to have been plundered. Sometimes it was just criminal looting, as the coalition at first assumed, but increasingly it looks as if there has been considerable method in this larceny. Saddam and his people did not care that such wrecking tactics would make life hell for ordinary Iraqis. But every act of sabotage and lawlessness now delays the day when the Americans and their allies can find the opportunity to withdraw from Iraq with some sort of honor and dignity. Killing coalition troops and Iraqis who help them and blowing up oil and utility infrastructure is delaying, not hastening, the day the coalition quits and the Iraqis can get on with their own lives.
