"Whos
Next"
By Robert Fisk
The Independent,
UK
28 July, 2003
The
convoys were humming down the highway from Amman to Baghdad all last
week, trucks groaning under the weight of hundreds of tons of pre-stressed
concrete, giant blocks and heaps of cement on the trailers, each one
higher than the average lorry. I understood what they meant: protection
from car bombs.
I had seen them
so often in Beirut when the US Marines first came under fire in 1983.
The liberators of Beirut were becoming the occupiers. Now
the same is happening in Iraq. The liberators are turning
into aggressive raiders, kicking down doors and screaming at disobedient
Iraqis, shooting dead drivers who dont stop at their checkpoints.
When they kill the
former Iraqi leadership, the sons of Saddam, they parade their cadavers
before Arab television audiences, just like any other Middle East regime.
Welcome to the New
Iraq. The vast miles of concrete are to be placed around US bases
in Iraq, protection from the car bombs which have yet to be used against
them.
At Al-Ghoraib, northwest
of Baghdad, the US base has an even more symbolic wall. Installed in
a former Soviet armored personnel carrier factory, the Americans have
assembled 30 Russian BMP armored vehicles rust-covered but as
sturdy as those which were once intended to plunge through the Fulda
Gap and used them to form a semi-circle of steel around the main
gate.
Hiding behind this
semi-circle is a US Bradley fighting vehicle, a single soldier in the
turret. An American has painted No Entry on one of the Russian
vehicles. Thus does the ghost of the Warsaw Pact now protect the worlds
only superpower from those it supposedly liberated.
Into all this exploded
the villa on the Mosul road, devastated by the 101st Airbornes
TOW missiles and Kiowa helicopter rockets last Tuesday. Gotcha,
as we said about the Belgrano. Within hours, Uday and Qusay Husseins
corpses were the center of a macabre television show. The American authorities
so morally upright when they wish to castigate journalists for
publishing photographs of coalition dead became purveyors
of low-class pornography. Uday with blood on his face. Qusay still bearded
(and thus unrecognizable to the great Iraqi masses).
No problem. An American
military mortician washes the blood off Udays face and stitches
up his nose and mouth inconveniently entered by a bullet that
is later described as a blow to the head while Qusay,
with two bullets behind an ear, is given the best shave of any tonsorial
artist to make him look more like the original product. And the Iraqis
wait for it are therefore supposed to be persuaded that
the New Iraq is just around the corner. The Baathists are gone. Only
Saddam is left.
Everyone, of course,
tells us that this is the turning point, or to use the favorite
new term, the tipping point. Its a great day
for the New Iraq, according to Tony Blair. Its a landmark
day for the people and the future of Iraq, according to US commander
Ricardo Sanchez.
Every day,
he announced last week, we get closer to a stable environment.
Every day, his army defeats what he calls the non-compliant forces,
helping to break the vicious, dictatorial grip of Saddam
Hussein on the Iraqi people. Only Saddams remnants
stand between Iraq and the bright future we have ordained for it.
There is no talk
of the growing mass of Sunni Islamists joining the resistance to the
Americans men who had no love for the ghastly Saddam nor
of the increasingly brutal raids by American troops around Mosul and
Tikrit and Falluja.
Gen. Sanchez now
brazenly talks about the rot in central authority created
by decades of Saddams misrule, because Iraqi ministries were not
up and running when the Americans arrived. Erased are the 158 government
offices looted and burned under the eyes of US occupation troops in
April.
Yet everywhere are
signs of collapse. Americas tanks and armor protect Baghdads
banks but only from behind barbed wire and gabions
of steel and stone. US soldiers patrol the streets of Baghdad Israeli-style,
one vehicle in front with a heavy machine gun trained on the road, one
vehicle behind with a heavy machine gun to prevent anyone approaching
at speed.
Lesson No. 1: Slow
down and let the convoy pass.
Lesson No. 2: Dont
get entangled in an American convoy because the new roadside bombs usually
explode between the fifth and sixth vehicles. Civilian drivers have
no immunity.
Every Iraqi police
station is piled high with sandbags and barbed wire, American soldiers
peering through the loopholes and over palisades. For this is not an
army of liberation but an army of occupation, already deeply mired in
a wilderness of ideology dreamt up by the sinister friends of the US
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld those who would liberate
Iraq and create democracy as America changed the map of the Middle East,
and help Israel into the bargain. In the sweltering heat of Baghdad,
American soldiers are ready to elicit sympathy. All I want to
do is go home, a Third Infantry Division man lamented to me last
week when his patrol stopped to buy juice at a shop near Hourriya Square.
I never thought when I came here that this would happen. I tell
my wife Im OK, but we all ask ourselves Whos next?
Indeed. Two months ago, one American soldier died a week. Three weeks
ago, it was one a day. Now its often two or three a day.
Sniper fire has
changed to rocket-propelled grenade fire, which has turned into grenade
and rifle fire, which has, in turn, changed to more and more sophisticated
land-mines mortars strung together and buried in the central
reservation of the two-lane motorways that are Americas main military
supply routes across Iraq. Paul Bremers Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) a name which just reeks of apologies for its
own existence issues edicts like a Roman emperor with the Goths,
Visigoths and Ostrogoths at the gates of the capital. Tons of razor
wire now surround the marble Saddamite palace from which Bremers
whiz kids and anti-terror advisers try to govern Iraq. The coalition
essentially America and its British ally during the war
seems less and less provisional and equally less an authority as the
weeks go by.
The Interim Council
the parallels between provisional and interim
are ever more painful has earned no points. Its 25 members, all
representing a dutiful balance between Iraqs Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish
and secular population (one cannot but be reminded of all those intensely
fair power-sharing governments in Cyprus and Northern Ireland), is already
the subject of the deepest cynicism. Its first act at the behest
of the Pentagons Shiite acolyte Ahmed Chalabi was to declare a
national holiday for April 9, marking the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
Or at least, that is how it looked in the West. For Iraqis, their first
new national holiday marked the first day of foreign occupation of their
land.
In the days before
the March-April war, the Baathists claimed that one of the first acts
of American occupiers would be the installation of an Israeli embassy
in Baghdad. Now Adnan Pachachi, a former Sunni foreign minister on the
council, has met the former Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in
Rome, who asked for you guessed it an Israeli embassy
in Baghdad. Pachachi dutifully said that this would have to be preceded
by an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories occupied during
the 1967 war essentially compliance with UN Resolution 242
though perhaps he did not realize that Israel does not have to abide
by UN resolutions in the same way as Iraq was supposed to. But the discourse
about an embassy has begun. Many Iraqis now predict increasing American
support for Pachachi as well as for Chalabi. On to all this is grafted
the illusion of global stability. The Poles are here, and the Japanese
are coming. Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, turns
up in Baghdad to announce that tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees will
return next year. There are 204,000 Iraqis in Iran, 300,000 in Jordan,
22,200 in Saudi Arabia, up to 72,000 in Syria, 50,900 in Germany (not
to mention 20,000 asylum-seekers) and 38,500 in the Netherlands. But
is it safe to come back to Iraq, someone asks? Well, we are here,
he smilingly replies.
But even as he leaves
his press conference last week, the UN radios crackle with static and
fear. A convoy has been attacked on the Hilla Road, with one UN Iraqi
employee killed. Hours later, a US colonel tells journalists this only
proves how low Saddams remnants have become.
In the conference
hall that now serves as the press centre for the occupation authorities
in Baghdad, sets of handouts are laid carefully on a table for journalists
to peruse. They lurch from good news to bad.
Al-Saydia
Public Health Clinic Grand Opening says one. Soldier Killed
in Explosion says the next. Iran National Vaccination Day
for Children says a third, just an inch from another flyer recording
the killing of two more US troops. 4th Infantry Division Successful
in Operation Ivy Serpent announces another report from the CJTF-7
Coalition Press Information Center. Only fatal attacks on US troops
are recorded nowadays. Other ambushes, on the men and women of the occupation
authorities, simply do not exist.
And the reality?
Yes, there are good men and true trying to help Iraqis. There are NGOs
aplenty, and universities have all reopened, and Iraqis with outdated
passports will be welcomed back to Iraq, and 9,000 young Iraqi men have
offered to join the new army how scrupulous, one asks oneself,
will their screening be and now theres even talk of an
Iraqi militia as well as an army. Anything anything
to stop the attacks on US troops. Theres an election coming
in the States and Blair needs help, too. Lets get this thing wrapped
up.
What was it Paul
Wolfowitz, one of Rumsfelds pro-Israeli advisers who pushed for
war in Iraq, said last week? Some of our assumptions turned out
to be wrong. Quite so.