- Exactly a year after the Anglo-American armies invaded
Iraq, I found five young men yesterday busy smashing up what was left of
a Saddam statue in this little dusty border village. The torso and head
of the dictator had long disappeared from his plinth at the frontier station
but his legs and one arm and a battery of monumental missiles still lay
on the ground in gleaming steel. Two American attack helicopters were racing
up the border - still trying to find Donald Rumsfeld's al-Qa'ida hordes
as they supposedly swarm into Iraq - but what caught my eye were the heads
of the five young men, so assiduously hammering and sawing and hacking
at the remains of the statue. Four of them were wearing black face masks,
the fifth had a black hood over his head. A year after the fall of Saddam,
Iraqis have to hide their identity when they attack his image. What does
that tell us about "new Iraq"?
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- If you are in Iraq, in Baghdad, driving its dangerous
roads, the evidence of collapse and failure is everywhere. The few unarmed
NGOs are marooned in the cities, unable to travel on the highways, which
have become the domain of assassins and bandits. Now even the road south
of Kerbala is the haunt of armed gangs. When I drive these highways, I
now wear a keffiyeh and thobe on my head. My driver wears western trousers
and shirt but I am in Arab clothes to avoid being attacked. Other westerners
are doing the same thing. What does that tell us about Iraq a year after
its "liberation"?
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- Many drivers now refuse to work for western reporters
- and who can blame them? Yesterday, another journalist from the "Arabia"
television station died of wounds after being shot by US troops - no wonder
his colleagues walked out of Colin Powell's boastful Baghdad press conference
yesterday. Three journalists working for the American- funded television
station have been killed by insurgents. An old Iraqi friend of mine - one
of Saddam's most trenchant critics - approached me this week. He had wanted
to work for a "democratic" Iraq. Now he wanted my help in obtaining
a second passport. Could I speak to the Australian embassy, he asked? He
no longer believed that he would live in a stable country. What does this
also tell us about "new Iraq"?
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- For those who spend time in Iraq, it is difficult to
know whether to laugh or to cry when the pro-war chorus bangs its drums
again. Richard Perle, one of the war's American neo-conservative Vulcans
who did more than most to push the Bush administration into this invasion,
was arguing with me on a radio show, praising the resumption of 24-hour
electrical power in the Iraqi capital. Alas, I could hear little of what
he was saying because of the roar of emergency generators around me in
night-time Baghdad.
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- How do we explain now the armies of truculent, often
ill-disciplined mercenaries now roaming Iraq on behalf of the Anglo-American
occupation authorities. Many thousands of them British, some are well trained,
many are not. In my own hotel, dozens of them swagger through the lobby
with rifles and pistols, all talking "security", all working
for private security firms hired by the occupation power or by private
companies. They have no rules of engagement and many of them drink too
much. When I pleaded with one British gunman in sunglasses last week to
at least put a shirt over his gun to conceal it when walking in and out
of our hotel, he pointed a finger at me. "Listen mate," he shouted.
"If I see someone with a gun come to shoot you, I am going to walk
right past and do nothing." But he is the risk to our security. The
Iraqis, of course, watch the coming and going of these young men and draw
their own conclusions. I fear I know what they are.
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- Attacks against US troops and western civilians are daily
increasing in Mosul. Two days ago, three Iraqis were killed in Basra by
a car bomb intended for a British military patrol. Western troops will
now only drive at night north of Najaf in companies 200-strong. What happened
to that nice little neatly defined "Sunni triangle"? No wonder
Spanish troops are so keen to go home. Now that Poland's Prime Minister
says he was "deceived" about weapons of mass destruction, how
soon before the Polish contingent follow the Spanish? Never is it reported
that Polish troops are attacked almost every night around the city of Hilla.
David Kay's astonishing interview in yesterday's Le Figaro - "we must
recognise our mistakes in order to restore our credibility" - is being
widely broadcast in Baghdad. "I don't think there was any serious
chance of proving the existence of weapons of mass destruction," he
said. "Because the best evidence suggests they did not exist."
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- Still, the occupying power, the "Coalition Provisional
Authority", refuses to keep statistics on the dozens of innocent Iraqis
dying each week under their mandate, in massive car bombs and in roadside
killings. The US military searches of Iraqi Sunni villages, the Israeli-style
battering down of doors and houses, the constant American killing of innocents
is embittering a new generation of Iraqis. And soon we will have "democracy"
in Iraq.
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