- It was almost year ago, on March 20, when the first bombs
struck 30km from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon.
They came for Baghdad the next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over
our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very
pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed "expert" on terrorism,
now works, resides and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American
Raj.
-
- The illusions with which the Americans and British went
to war are more awesome now than they were at the time. Saddam Hussein,
the man we loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait
(our dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked)
had already degenerated into late middle-age senility, writing epic novels
in his many palaces while his crippled son Oudai drank and whored and tortured
his way around Baghdad; hardly the target for the world's only superpower.
-
- As the American 101st Infantry Division approached Baghdad,
one of the last editions of the Ba'athist newspapers carried a telling
photograph on its back page. A uniformed, tired, fat Hussein stood in the
centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusai but on his right Oudai,
his eyes dilated, shirt out of his trousers, a pistol butt above his belt.
Who would ever fight to the death for these triple pillars of the Arab
world?
-
- Yet Hussein thought he could win, that destiny - a dangerous
ally for all "strongmen" - would somehow lay low the Americans.
It was always fascinating to listen to Mohamed al-Sahaf, the information
minister, predicting America's doom. It was not just Iraqi patriots who
would destroy the great armies invading Iraq; the heat would burn them,
the desert would consume them, the snakes and rabid dogs would eat their
bodies. Not since the Caliphate had such curses been called down upon an
invader. Was it not Tariq Aziz, Iraq's former deputy prime minister, who
warned Washington in 1990 that 18 million Iraqis could not be defeated
by a computer? And then the computer won.
-
- United States President George Bush and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, of course, had a remarkably parallel set of nightmares
and dreams, encouraged all the while by the right-wing neo-conservative
pro-Israeli American Vulcans. Hussein was the all-powerful, evil state
terrorist whose non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally non-existent
connections to the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington
must be laid low. Liberation, democracy, a New Middle East. There was no
end to the ambitions of the conquerors.
-
- I remember how anyone who attempted to debunk this dangerous
nonsense would be set upon. Try to explain the crimes against humanity
of September 11, 2001 and we were anti-American. Warn readers about the
crazed alliance of right-wingers behind Bush, and we were anti-Semites.
Report on the savagery visited upon Iraqi civilians during the Anglo-American
air bombardment, and we were anti-British, pro-Hussein, sleeping with the
enemy.
-
- When Blair's first "dossier" was published
- most of it, anyway, was tired old material on Hussein's human rights
abuses, not weapons of mass destruction - the beast's weapons capability
was already hedged around with "mights" and "coulds"
and "possiblys". When a day after Baghdad's "liberation"
I wrote in The Independent that the "war of resistance" was about
to begin, I could paper my bathroom wall with the letters of abuse I received.
-
- But such venom usually accompanies broken dreams. Hussein
thought he was fighting the Crusaders. Bush and Blair played equally childish
games, dressing themselves up as Churchill, abusing their domestic enemies
as Chamberlains and fitting Hussein into Hitler's uniform. I remember the
sense of shock when I was watching Iraq's literally fading television screen
and heard the first news of an Iraqi suicide bomber attacking US troops
- during the invasion. It was a young soldier, a married man, who had driven
his car bomb at the Americans near Nasseriyah. Never before had an Iraqi
committed suicide in battle like this - not even in the Somme-like eight-year
Iran-Iraq war.
-
- Then two women drove their car into the Americans in
southern Iraq. This was astonishing. The Americans dismissed it all. They
were cowardly attacks which only showed the desperation of the regime.
But these three Iraqis were not working for the regime. Even the Ba'athists
were forced to admit that these attacks were unique and solely instigated
by the soldier and the two women.
-
- What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to ask.
Then we created a new myth. The Iraqi army had melted away, abandoned Baghdad,
changed into jeans and t-shirts and slunk off in cowardly disgrace. Baghdad
was no Stalingrad.
-
- Yet we have dangerously altered the narrative of Baghdad's
last days. There was a fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank
of the Tigris river in which Hussein's guerrillas fought off an American
tank column for 36 hours, the US tanks spraying shellfire down a motorway
until every vehicle - military and civilian - was a smouldering wreck.
I walked the highway as the last shots were still being fired by snipers,
peering into cars packed with the blackened corpses of men, women, children.
-
- Carpets and blankets had been thrown over several piles
of the dead. In the back of one car lay a young, naked woman, her perfect
features blackened by fire, her husband or father still sitting at the
steering wheel, his legs severed below the knees.
-
- It was a massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget
it?
-
- And cluster bombs are our creation. And I recall with
a kind of raw amazement how, as American gunfire was swishing across the
Tigris, I somehow reached the emergency room of Baghdad's biggest hospital
and had to slosh through lakes of blood amid beds of screaming men, one
of whom was on fire, another shrieking for his mother. Upstairs was a middle-aged
man on a blood-soaked hospital trolley with a head wound that was almost
indescribable. From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming
blood onto the floor.
-
- For days we had seen the news tapes of Basra and Nasseriyah
after "liberation". We had seen the looting and pillage there,
benignly watched over by the British and Americans.
-
- We knew what would happen when the fighting stopped in
Baghdad. And sure enough, a medieval army of looters followed the Americans
into the city, burning offices, banks, archives, museums, Koranic libraries,
destroying not just the structure of government but the identity of Iraq.
-
- The looters were disorganised but thorough, venal but
poor. The arsonists came in buses with obvious pre-arranged targets and
did not touch the contents of that which they destroyed. They were paid.
By whom? If by Hussein, then why - once the Americans were in Baghdad -
did they not just pocket the money and go home? If they were paid post-burning,
who paid them?
-
- Of course, we found the mass graves, the hecatombs of
Hussein's years of internal viciousness - for many of which he was backed
by the West - and we photographed the tens of thousands of corpses, most
of whom he buried in the desert sand after we failed to support the Kurdish
and Shia uprisings.
-
- Our "liberation", as the grieving relatives
never stopped telling us, had come a little late. About 20 years late,
to be precise. Into this chaos and lawlessness, we arrived. Dissension
was not to be tolerated among the victors. When I pointed out that "the
'liberators' were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with
neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq",
I was denounced by one of the BBC's commentators.
-
- See how the people love us, we cried - which is much
the same as Hussein used to say when he took his fawning acolytes on visits
to the people of Baghdad. There would be elections, constitutions, governing
councils, money - There was no end to the promises we made to this tribal
society called Iraq.
-
- Then in came the big American contractors and the conglomerates
and the thousands of mercenaries, British, American, South African, Chilean
- many of the latter were soldiers under General Augusto Pinochet - Nepalese
and Filipino.
-
- And when the inevitable war against the occupiers began,
we - the occupying powers and, alas, most of the journalists - invented
a new narrative to escape punishment for our invasion. Our enemies were
Hussein's "diehards", Ba'athist "remnants", regime
"dead-enders". Then we killed Oudai and Qusai and pulled Hussein
from his hole in the ground and the resistance grew more fierce. So our
enemies were now both "remnants" and "foreign fighters"
- that is, al-Qaeda - since ordinary Iraqis could not be in the resistance.
We had to believe this. For had Iraqis - religious or otherwise - joined
the guerrillas, how we could explain that they didn't love their "liberators"?
At first, we were encouraged to explain that the insurgents came only from
a few Sunni cities, "previously loyal to Hussein".
-
- Then the resistance was supposedly confined to Iraq's
"Sunni triangle". But as the attacks leached north and south
to Nasseriyah, Kerbala, Mosul and Kirkuk, the triangle turned into an octagon.
Again, we were told about "foreign fighters", failing to grasp
the fact that 120 000 of the foreign fighters in Iraq were wearing American
uniforms.
-
- Still there was no end to the mendacity of our "success".
True, schools were rebuilt - and, shame upon the Iraqis involved, often
looted a second time - and hospitals restored and students returned to
college. But oil output figures were massaged and exaggerated and attacks
on the Americans falsified. At first, the occupying power reported only
guerrilla attacks in which soldiers were killed or wounded. Then, when
no one could hide the 60 or so assaults every night, the troops themselves
were ordered not to make formal reports on bombings or attacks that caused
no casualties. But by the war's first anniversary, every foreigner was
a target.
-
- The suicide bomber came into his own. The Turkish embassy,
the Jordanian embassy, the United Nations, police stations across the land
- 600 of our new Iraqi policemen slaughtered in less than four months -
and then the great shrines of Najaf and Kerbala.
-
- The Americans and British warned of the dangers of civil
war - so did the journalists, of course - although no Iraqi had ever been
heard to utter any demand for conflict with their fellow citizens. Who
actually wanted this "civil war"? Why would the Sunnis - a minority
in the country - allow "al-Qaeda" to bring this about when they
could not defeat the occupying power without at least passive Shia support?
-
- While I was writing this report, my phone rang and a
voice asked me if I would meet a man downstairs, a middle-aged Iraqi and
a teacher at Cardiff College who had recently returned to Iraq, only to
realise the state of fear and pain in which his country now existed. His
mother, he said, had just raised 1 million Iraqi dinars to pay a ransom
for a local woman whose daughter and daughter-in-law were kidnapped by
armed men in Baghdad in January. The two girls had just called from Yemen
where they had been sold into slavery. Another neighbour had just received
back her 17-year-old son after paying $5 000 (about R32 500) to gunmen
in the Karada area of Baghdad. Two days ago - it is Friday as I am writing
this - kidnappers grabbed another child, this time in Mansour, and are
now demanding $200 000 for his life.
-
- A close relative - and remember this is just one man's
experience out of a current population of 26 million Iraqis - had also
just survived a bloody attack on his car outside Kerbala. Driving south
after winning a contract to run a garage in the city, he and his 11 companions
in their vehicle were last week overtaken by men firing machine pistols
at the car. One man died - he had 30 bullets in his body - and the relative,
swamped in his friends' blood, was the only man not wounded.
-
- Unsurprisingly, the occupation authorities decline to
keep statistics on the number of Iraqis who have died since the "liberation"
- or during the invasion, for that matter - and prefer to talk about the
"handover of sovereignty" from one American-appointed group of
Iraqis to another, and to the constitution that is only temporary and may
well fall apart before real elections are held - if they are held - next
year.
-
- If we could have foreseen all this - if we could have
been patient and waited for the UN arms inspectors to finish their job
rather than go to war and plead for patience later, when our own inspectors
couldn't find those weapons - would we have gone so blithely to war a year
ago?
-
- For that war has not ended. There has been no "end
of major combat operations", just an invasion and an occupation that
merged seamlessly into a long and ferocious war for liberation from the
"liberators".
-
- Just as the British invaded Iraq in 1917, proclaiming
their determination to bring Iraqis liberation from their tyrants - General
Maude used those very words - so we have repeated this grim narrative today.
-
- The British who died in the subsequent Iraqi war of resistance
lie now in the North Gate Cemetery on the edge of Baghdad, an enduring
if largely neglected symbol of the folly of occupation.
-
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