BAGHDAD, 10 April 2004 — A war founded on illusions, lies and right-wing ideology was bound to founder in blood and fire. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He was in contact with Al-Qaeda, he was involved with the crimes against humanity of Sept. 11, 2001. The people of Iraq would greet us with flowers and music. There would be a democracy. Even the pulling-down of Saddam’s statue was a fraud. An American military vehicle tugged the wretched thing down while a crowd of only a few hundred Iraqis watched. Where were the tens of thousands who should have pulled it down themselves, who should have been celebrating their “liberation”?
On the night of April 9 last year, the BBC even managed to find a “commentator” to heap abuse on me — and my paper The Independent — for using quotation marks around the word ‘liberation”. In fact, freedom from Saddam’s dictatorship in those early days and weeks meant freedom to loot, freedom to burn, freedom to kidnap, freedom to murder. The initial American and British blunder — to allow the mobs to take over Baghdad and other cities — was followed by the arrival of the far more sinister squads of arsonists who systematically destroyed every archive, every government ministry (save for Oil and Interior which were, of course, secured by US troops), Islamic manuscripts, national archives and irreplaceable antiquities. The very cultural identity of Iraq was being annihilated.
Yet still the Iraqis were supposed to rejoice in their “liberation”. The occupying power sneered at reports that women were being kidnapped and violated — in fact, the abductions of men as well as women were at the rate of 20 a day and may now be as high as 100-a-day — and steadfastly refused to calculate the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed each day by gunmen, thieves and American troops. Even this week, as the promises and lies and obfuscations fell apart, the American military spokesman was still only able to give military casualties — this when more than 200 Iraqis are reported to have been killed in the US Marine attack on Fallujah.
Over the month, the isolation of the occupation authorities from the Iraq people they were supposed to care for was only paralleled by the vast distance in false hope and self-deceit between the occupying powers in Baghdad and their masters back in Washington. All, however, agreed that the resistance to the US presence was caused only by old regimists. Indeed, Paul Bremer, America’s proconsul in Iraq, started off by calling them Baath “party remnants” — which is exactly what the Russians used to call their Afghan opponents after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Then Bremer called them “diehards”. Then he called them “dead-enders”. And as the attacks against US forces increased around Fallujah and other Sunni Muslim cities, we were told this area was the “Sunni triangle”, even though it is much larger than this implies and has no triangular shape at all. So when President Bush made his notorious trip to the Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of all “major military operations”— beneath a banner claiming “Mission Accomplished” and when the attacks against US troops continued to escalate, it was time to rewrite the chapter on postwar Iraq. “Foreign fighters”, Al-Qaeda, were now in the battle, according to US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. The US media went along with this nonsense, even though not a single Al-Qaeda operative has been arrested in Iraq and of the 8,500 “security detainees” in American hands, only 150 appear to be from outside Iraq. That is just 2 percent.
Then as winter approached and Saddam was caught — and the anti-American resistance continued — the occupying powers and their favorite journalists began to warn of civil war, something which no Iraqi has ever indulged in and which no Iraqi has ever been heard discussing. Iraq was now to be frightened into submission. What would happen if the Americans and British left? Civil war, of course. And we don’t want civil war, do we? The Shiites remained quiescent, their leadership divided between the scholarly and pro-Western Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the impetuous but intelligent Muqtada Sadr. They opened their mass graves and mourned those thousands who were tortured and executed by Saddam’s butchers — and then asked why we used to support Saddam, why it took us 20 years to discover the need to stage our humanitarian invasion. Those of us who condemned Saddam for 20 years — for his use of chemical weapons, for his prison barbarities — had been condemned by Washington and London for attacking Saddam. He was “our man” in the war against Iran.
It was in late autumn when those who worked for this war in Washington went to ground. What was this so-called neoconservative lobby behind Bush and Cheney, a New York Times columnist demanded to know, these so-called former Likudist suuporters of Israel? When one of them, Richard Perle, turned up on a radio show with me, he tried to prove that life in Iraq was moving forward and accused me of being “a reporter who favored the maintenance of the Baathist regime”. I got the message. All who condemned this bloody mess were secret Baathists, lovers of the dictator and his torturers. To that depth have the falcons of Washington fallen. In fact, if the occupation authorities had bothered to study the results of a conference on Iraq held by the Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut recently, they might be forced to acknowledge what they cannot admit — that their opponents are Iraqis and that this is an Iraqi resistance. An Iraqi academic, Sulieman Jumeili — who actually lives in the city of Fallujah — told how he discovered that 80 percent of all rebels killed were Iraqi Islamist activists. Only 13 percent of the dead men were primarily nationalists and only 2 percent had been Baathists.
But we cannot accept these statistics. Because if this is an Iraqi revolt against us, how come they aren’t grateful for their liberation? So after the atrocities in Fallujah just over a week ago when four US mercenaries were killed, mutilated and dragged through the streets, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq sanctioned what is preposterously called “Operation Vigilant Resolve.” And now that Sadr’s thousands of Shiite militiamen had joined in the battle against the Americans, Sanchez had to change the narrative yet again. No longer were his enemies Saddam “remnants” or even Al-Qaeda; they were now “a small (sic) group of criminals and thugs”. The Iraqi people would not be allowed to fall under their sway, Sanchez said. There was “no place for a renegade militia”. So the Marines smashed their way into Fallujah, killing more than 200 Iraqis, including women and children, while using tank fire and helicopter gun ships against gunmen in the Baghdad slums of Sadr city. It took a day or two to understand what new self-delusion had taken over the US military command. They were not facing a countrywide insurgency. They were liberating the Iraqis all over again! So of course, this will mean a few more “major military operations”. Sadr goes on the wanted list for a murder after an arrest warrent which no one told us about when it was mysteriously issued months ago — supposedly by an Iraqi judge — and Gen. Mark Kimmit, Sanchez’s No. 2, told us that Sadr’s militia will be “destroyed”. And so the bloodbath spreads ever further across Iraq. Kut and Najaf are now outside the control of the occupying powers. And with each new collapse, we are told of new hope. The other day, Sanchez was still talking about his “total confidence” in his troops who were “clear in their purpose”, how they were making “progress” in Fallujah and how — these are his actual words— “a new dawn is approaching”. Which is exactly what US commanders were saying exactly a year ago yesterday — when US troops drove into the Iraqi capital and when Washington boasted of victory against the Beast of Baghdad.
