It is just four days since Baghdad started to fall to the Americans; even now, the city is still not completely in US hands. Given that reality, the comments from parts of the international media, echoed by humanitarian agencies and the UN, that US forces should have re-established law and order by now seems like a step into the surreal.
As far as Iraq’s streets go, the world seems to have slid back into the notion that war is a simple, touch-of-the-button affair thanks to technology. The idea should have been dispelled a couple of weeks ago with the instant images from Iraq of death and destruction. War is not only nasty and bloody; it is bullet-ridden chaos much of the time, despite all the planning.
The humanitarian agencies are, of course, right to complain about the anarchy in Basra, Baghdad and now, the very latest, Mosul. They have a job to do. Without a degree of law and order they cannot operate. But reporters should have known better. During World War II, the falls of Paris, Athens, Rome, Berlin were far more chaotic than has been the case of Baghdad. In Paris, there was looting, people were attacked and beaten, and in many cases summarily executed.
But if some reporters have been naive in their expectations, US and British army spokesmen were a thousand times more so with their outrageous, even contemptuous excuse that they are an army, not a police force for Baghdad and Basra. They have invaded Iraq; they are now responsible for everything that goes on in the country. They cannot pick and choose where that responsibility ends. It is total.
Perhaps self-interest will be a greater motivation. Quite apart from the Geneva Convention with its requirement that an invading force ensure the safety of civilians under occupation, there is the matter of winning Iraqi hearts and minds. Iraqis are not going to feel anything other than bitter resentment toward an occupying army that tolerates killing and looting.
One may sympathize with looters stripping bare Baath Party and government offices that were symbols of their oppression; as one US officer commented, the regime robbed the people for years, “now it’s their turn.” But when it comes to hospitals, schools and private property, with gangs and entire families — fathers, mothers and small children — roaming the streets stealing everything in sight, it’s a different matter. It may demonstrate how mired in poverty, downtrodda en, alienated and oppressed the Iraqi people have become over the years of Saddam’s dictatorship; it may be proof of how the moral fabric of Iraqi society has been battered and fractured by three-and-a-half decades of state terror, made inestimably worse by 12 years of international sanctions; but it has to stop.
That has not been lost on either the Americans in Baghdad or the British in Basra. In the Iraqi capital yesterday, the callous excuse that an army is not a police force seems to have been ditched in favor of restoring the civil infrastructure, with radio appeals to engineers, professionals and policemen to go back to work. In Basra, the appeal went out some days ago.
The anarchy has to be halted. If it is not, the Americans and British can forget about the campaign for Iraqi hearts and minds. It will have been lost before it got started.
