Blair's
Departure:The View
From Baghdad
By Patrick Cockburn
12 May, 2007
Counterpunch
Baghdad.
Iraq may be seen in Britain
as Tony Blair's nemesis but Iraqis yesterday greeted his departure with
utter indifference. Asked what they thought about it, most simply shrugged
their shoulders and looked surprised at being asked the question. Others
said they saw him as a surrogate for President Bush.
It is easy to see why Mr
Blair is not regarded with more affection in Iraq. On 8 April 2003,
just before the fall of Saddam Hussein, British troops distributed a
leaflet in Arabic containing a message from him to Iraqis. It promised
"a peaceful, prosperous Iraq which will run by and for the Iraqi
people".
Iraqis are all too aware
this never happened. Four years after the letter, Iraq is perhaps the
least peaceful country in the world. Baghdad is gripped by terror. On
a quiet day yesterday police picked up 21 bodies of murdered men. Nobody
knows how many corpses lie at the bottom of the river or in shallow
graves in the desert.
It is not just the economy
that is in turmoil. Much of the population is close to malnutrition
with 54 per cent of the population living on less than one dollar a
day, of whom 15 per cent seek to survive on just 5 cents.
Some 60 per cent of people
are unemployed. Of the 34,000 doctors in Iraq in 2003, 12,000 have fled
the country and 2,000 have been killed, according to the United Nations.
Mr Blair has also failed
in Iraqi eyes to fulfil his other promise that the country would be
run by Iraqis. A poll this spring showed that 59 per cent of them believe
that Iraq is controlled by the US and only 34 per cent think it is being
run by the Iraqi government.
In Britain criticism of Mr
Blair has mainly revolved around the decision to go to war, the "dodgy"
dossier and the absence of the weapons of mass destruction. This has
been to his advantage. He has repeatedly said that Saddam Hussein was
an evil dictator and does not regret removing him.
Many Iraqis would agree.
They did not fight for Saddam - not even the supposedly super-loyal
Special Republican Guards - and most were glad to see the end of his
disastrous rule. But within a month of the supposed end of the war,
Blair went along with what was essentially a US decision to remain in
occupation of the country and remake Iraq as it wanted. It was from
this decision that all the present disasters flowed.
Mr Blair never gave a sense
of knowing much about Iraq when he invaded it or learning anything over
the past four years. His speeches and statements about it were often
puerile.
The first year after the
fall of Saddam saw a thorough-going occupation. The second offered nominal
Iraqi independence under unelected pro-Western Iraqis.
The elections of 2005 saw
the triumph of the Shia religious parties to the dismay of the American
and British embassies. Ever since they have sought to neuter their influence.
It has always been difficult
to know how much of his own propaganda Mr Blair actually believed. Again
and again he would say that much of Iraq was at peace, the press was
exaggerating its miseries and progress was being made.
He had the great advantage
that these placid provinces were in reality so dangerous that no reporter
could go there to refute the Prime Minister's claims.
No successful political or
military policy could be based on the nonsense that Mr Blair repeatedly
spoke about Iraq.
He said that the insurgency
was isolated when from an early stage in the war it had wide support
among the Sunni community. By March this year, 78 per cent of Iraqis
opposed the presence of US and British forces according to a wide-ranging
poll.
There was a further ugly
consequence to this. In Afghanistan al-Qa'ida had little support. Its
numbers were so small that, for its promotional videos showing its fighters
in action, it had to hire local tribesmen by the day. In the first months
of the occupation of Iraq, al-Qa'ida for the first time found a sympathetic
environment in which to grow.
The "terrorism"
that Mr Blair was so regularly to denounce incubated and flourished
in conditions that he helped create.
Iraq exposed not only Mr
Blair's weaknesses but Britain's. It has been strange over the past
four years for me to return to London from Baghdad wondering if people
really knew what was happening in Iraq.
I found almost immediately
that, from taxi driver to general and senior civil servant, they knew
all about the mistakes made in Iraq but they were also resigned to the
fact that they could do nothing about them.
Mr Blair is not unique among
prime ministers in making catastrophic errors in the Middle East.
It was said that Lloyd George
could remain prime minister for life as the architect of victory in
1918 but four years later he was forced to resign after trying to go
to war with Turkey.
In 1956, Anthony Eden disastrously
invaded Egypt claiming, in words echoed by Blair almost half a century
later, that Nasser was a threat to the Middle East.
Lloyd George and Eden were
swiftly evicted from Downing Street. Mr Blair clung on. It is this that
makes his legacy in Iraq so poisonous.
For four years he has nailed
British colours to a failed US policy over which Britain has no significant
influence. He has advertised a humiliating British dependency on Washington
without gaining any advantages.
As for Iraqis, despite all
his rhetoric about rescuing them from Saddam, he has been surprisingly
indifferent to their fate.
Patrick Cockburn is the author
of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist
for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book
of 2006.
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