One Year On - War Without End

Saddam may be gone but peace has not come. Robert Fisk
was in Baghdad when the tyrant was in his pomp and when
the first bombs fell on 19 March 2003. His acclaimed
reports revealed the suffering of the Iraqi people.
Now, as the anniversary of the war approaches, he
returns to a land riven by chaos, where liberation is a
myth.

The Independent (UK)
March 14, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=501026

The surviving Iraqi employees of the United Nations
fearfully changed the plates on their white, unmarked
vehicles last week. From now on, there will be no "UN"
next to the registration number. When I visited the
headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk
to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at
the desk fingered my business card and looked into my
eyes with palpable fear — as if an Englishman was a
potential suicide bomber.

At night, in my grubby hotel, I listen for gunfire and
fear the attack which so many of the guests have been
predicting for weeks. Will the bombers arrive at
dinner-time when the South African and British
mercenaries come clanking back from their "security
duties," all Heckler and Koch automatics, silver
pistols and black flak jackets, ready for their beers
and cheap French vin rouge? Or at 6am, just after the
fajr dawn prayers, their Islamic souls cleansed for
self-immolation amid the infidels and crusaders? I
count the minutes between 6am and 8am, the hours when
they most often strike. I’ve lost count of the number
of times my bedroom windows have rattled at breakfast-
time.

When Haidar and Mohamed arrive to take me off to Mosul
or Basra or Najaf, I feel relief. On the road south,
we all wear kuffiah scarves round our heads now, two
Iraqis and an Englishmen pretending to be tribal toughs
to avoid the killers on Highway 8. We were driving
down there at first light last week — ah, the relief
to be away from my hotel at that hour of the morning —
when the US presidential envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer,
came on the car radio. We were just approaching the
spot where two American civilians working for the
occupation authorities had been shot dead by men in
Iraqi police uniform. The car radio crackled away.
Things are improving in Iraq, Bremer told us. Haidar
and Mohamed and I exchanged glances, eyes crinkling
beneath our scarves. Then our car was filled with
hollow laughter.

A year ago, there were no problems on Highway 8. The
monstrous old tyrant Saddam had seen to that. If
robbers had been looting and raping north of Basra
since the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad was law-and-order
land. There the looting and raping was done by the
government, not the people. Now it’s the other way
round. I still have a souvenir of my last pre-war
flight into Baghdad, my baggage tag on the last Royal
Jordanian aircraft into pre-invasion Iraq, the very
final airliner to touch down in the dictatorship.
"Saddam Hussein International Airport," it says. We
passengers were fleeced as usual at the terminal. Ten
dollars to immigration, $20 to the man who checked my
computer, $40 to the guy who accepted the paper from
the man who had taken the $20, and another $20 to the
soldiers at the gate.

It was raining outside and our tyres hissed on the
highway, but Baghdad was illuminated like a Christmas
tree. The mosques were floodlit, the Iraqi police cars
dozing beneath the palm trees, the foliage rich and
sweet-smelling under the street lamps. Didn’t they
know, I kept asking myself? Didn’t they realise what
was coming?

I remember the last night before war. I had gone to
buy toilet rolls and bandages, observing a soldier in
uniform carrying his young son on his shoulders. Last
leave, I thought. Did Iraqi soldiers write poems like
Sassoon and Owen? Or was it just Saddam’s infantile
novels that they read on their way to the front? In
the pharmacy, I joked with the chemist that he was kind
to sell me bandages when the RAF might be bombing him
within hours.

"Yes," he said. "I rather think they will."

We all had our "minders" then, Saddam’s lads from the
corrupt old ministry of information whose job was to
steer us away from the paths of political
unrighteousness and towards the sclerotic anti-American
street demonstrations and the interminable press
conferences of junior ministers. But after a while,
once their own bosses had been paid off, we paid the
minders too, bought them from their government
allegiance until they were taking us where we wanted to
go, even into the firestorm of America’s armour, the
Iraqi army dead bouncing in the back of the pick-ups in
front of us.

The first bombs struck 20 miles from Baghdad, orange
glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for
Baghdad 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 and hides as
occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.

The illusions with which the Americans and British went
to war seem more awesome now than they did at the time.
Saddam, the man the British and Americans loved when he
invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (pet
dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can
be attacked), had already degenerated into senility,
writing epic novels in his many palaces while his
crippled son Uday drank and whored and tortured his way
around Baghdad; a classic Middle East tale from the
city of a thousand and one nights but hardly the target
for the world’s only superpower.

As the American 101st Infantry Division approached
Baghdad, one of the last editions of the Baathist
newspapers carried a telling photograph on its back
page. A uniformed, tired, fat Saddam stood in the
centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusay but
on his right Uday, his eyes dilated, shirt out of his
trousers, a pistol butt above his belt, the beloved son
gone to seed and drugs. Who would ever fight to the
death for these triple pillars of the Arab world?

Yet Saddam 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 who
warned Washington in 1990 that 18 million Iraqis could
not be defeated by a computer? And then the computer
won. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had a
remarkably parallel set of nightmares and dreams,
encouraged by the right-wing, neo-conservative, pro-
Israeli American Vulcans, who did so much to bring
about this catastrophe and who — now that everything
is falling to pieces — are working so hard to minimise
their pre-war ideological importance. To them Saddam
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 11 September 2001, and you were anti-
American. Warn readers about the crazed alliance of
right-wingers behind President Bush and you were anti-
Semites. Report on the savagery visited upon Iraqi
civilians during the Anglo-American air bombardment and
you were anti-British, pro-Saddam, sleeping with the
enemy. When Blair’s first "dossier" was published —
most of it, anyway, was old material on Saddam’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 have papered my bathroom wall with the letters of
abuse I received. Letters like those no longer arrive.

But such venom usually accompanies broken dreams.
Saddam thought he was fighting the Crusaders. Bush and
Blair played equally childish games, dressing
themselves up as Churchill, abusing their domestic
enemies as Chamberlain and fitting Saddam 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 Nasiriyah. Never before had
an Iraqi committed suicide in battle like this — not
even in the Somme-like mud of the 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, journalists were told. But those three Iraqis
were not working for the regime. Even the Baathists
were forced to admit that these attacks were unique and
solely instigated by the soldier and the two women
themselves.

What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to
ask. Then a new myth was created. 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 that was to alter, dangerously,
the narrative of Baghdad’s last days. There was a
fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank of
the Tigris where Saddam’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. Sure, the Iraqi military had
mixed themselves up amid the civilians; so in the end
the Americans had fired at all of them. It was a
massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?

What do we remember most now about those few terrible
weeks a year ago? In war, all day you try to stay
alive and all night you lie awake because the roar and
explosion of aircraft and bombs are too loud for sleep.
And then you have to stay awake and alive all next day.
Is it any surprise that there comes a moment — when a
man holds out to you what you think is half a loaf of
bread and which turns out to be half a baby — that
anger is the only integrity left? 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 man on a soaked hospital trolley with a head
wound that was almost indescribable. From his right
eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood
on to the floor.

For days, we in the city had seen the news tapes of
Basra and Nasiriyah 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, did not touch the contents of that which they
destroyed. They were paid.

By whom? If by Saddam, 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
Saddam’s years of internal viciousness — for many of
which the Western powers were his allies — and we
photographed the tens of thousands of corpses, most of
whom had been buried in the desert sand after the West
failed to support the Kurdish and Shia uprisings. The
"liberation" had come, as their grieving relatives
never stopped telling us, a little late. About 20
years late, to be precise. Into this chaos and
lawlessness, we arrived. Dissent was not to be
tolerated among the victors. When I pointed out in The
Independent 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, the
Westerners cried — much as Saddam 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 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 last were soldiers under 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 Saddam’s
"diehards," Baathist "remnants," regime "dead-enders."
Then the occupation forces killed Uday and Qusay and
pulled Saddam from his hole in the ground and the
resistance grew fiercer. So our enemies were now both
"remnants" and "foreign fighters" — al-Qa’ida — since
ordinary Iraqis could not be in the resistance. We had
to believe this. For had Iraqis joined the guerrillas,
how could we explain that they didn’t love their
"liberators"?

At first, journalists were encouraged to explain that
the insurgents came only from a few Sunni cities,
"previously loyal to Saddam." Then the resistance was
supposedly confined to Iraq’s "Sunni triangle," but as
the attacks leached north and south to Nasiriyah,
Karbala, Mosul and Kirkuk, it turned into an octagon.
Again, journalists were told about "foreign fighters"
— a failure to grasp the fact that 120,000 of the
foreign fighters in Iraq were wearing American uniform.

Still there was no end to the mendacity of the
occupation’s "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 only reported
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 which caused no casualties. But by the war’s
first anniversary, every foreigner was a target.

In the meantime, the suicide bomber came into his own.
The Turkish embassy, the Jordanian embassy, the United
Nations, police stations across the land — 600 new
Iraqi cops slaughtered in less than four months — and
then the great shrines of Najaf and Karbala. 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-Qa’ida 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 a
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 of his neighbours had just received
her 17-year-old son after paying $5,000 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 of
my visitor — and remember this is just one man’s
experience out of a population of 26 million Iraqis —
had also just survived a bloody attack on his car
outside Karbala. Driving south after winning a
contract to run a garage in the city, he and his 11
companions in their AKEA vehicle were last week
overtaken by men firing pistols at the car. One man
died — he had 30 bullets in his body — and the
relative, swamped in the blood of his friends, was the
only man unwounded.

Not surprisingly, 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 which 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 oh so terrible 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 our occupation.