BEIRUT, 22 August 2003 — It was always the same story. If it wasn’t the enemy you were fighting, it was the enemy you knew you’d have to fight in the future.

So when the killers of Baghdad on Tuesday slaughtered 20 UN employees, along with the UN’s local proconsul, Vieira de Mello, the Americans embarked on one of their familiar flights into fancy. If it wasn’t Saddam’s “diehard remnants” who were tormenting them, it must be Al-Qaeda’s “remnants” who are destroying America’s best efforts to produce democracy in Iraq (though not Afghanistan); “foreign Arab” fighters were creeping over the border from Iran or Syria.

This was the line from the “Coalition Provisional Authority” on Tuesday: don’t, for God’s sake, produce proof of home-grown opposition — or the whole “liberation” of Iraq might look rather dodgy. Blame it on Al-Qaeda, on “Ansar El-Islam”, on “terrorists” coming from Gulf or Syria or Afghanistan...

But, during the war against the American invasion of Iraq, weren’t there two suicide bombings in Nassariyah, one by a man, the second by two women? Weren’t they Iraqis? And isn’t it possible that an Iraqi Sunni resistance movement — for let us be frank and accept that the Shiites have not yet joined the resistance war, though they will — destroyed the UN headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday? Only Tuesday did it emerge that the bomber was probably a suicider.

Months ago, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary who in a previous incarnation pleaded with Saddam (circa 1983) to reopen the US Embassy in Baghdad, arrived in the Iraqi capital to address his victorious troops, he warned of “terrorist” organizations at large in Iraq. Some of us wondered what he was talking about. Hadn’t the US just defeated Iraq? But then we realised that he was spinning a narrative for journalists to grasp if the “Saddam remnants” line wore out. There would be other evildoers to blame, other antagonists in the “war on terror” to single out.

And sure enough, the “outside” guerrillas have now been brought center-stage — whether or not they exist — to explain why US rule in Iraq is coming undone. The US can crush Saddam. They can kill his sons.

But still they cannot control Iraq. This, in a sense, is the last heirloom which Saddam has handed to President Bush: You can occupy this country, he is saying, but you can’t rule it.

Saddam created enough pseudo-Wahabist groups to let off steam during his reign. Talk about Islam, they were told, but not about politics. But the moment the regime collapsed, these organizations, which had always been hostile to Saddam, were left to their own devices — and immediately opposed US rule in Iraq. They — not Al-Qaeda, or anyone else — are running this butchery of a war against America and its friends in occupied Iraq.

When the resistance to the Americans began in Lebanon in 1982-3, it started with stone-throwing after six months. Yet the assaults on the Americans in Baghdad are coming at a speed six times as fast. Six months ago, it would have been impossible to imagine such a scenario. Certainly, Al-Qaeda could not have organized their legions so quickly. So even Osama Bin Laden may have something to learn from this debacle.