Page 2 of 3 A war guaranteed to damage a
superpower By Patrick Cockburn
day - at least until after the
presidential election in 2008 - when it had to
admit that the US had failed in Iraq.
A
security plan lacking security I was in
Baghdad soon after Bush had spoken. I had never
known it to be so bad. My driver had to take a
serpentine route from the airport, driving along
the main highway, then suddenly doing a U-turn to
dart down an alleyway. He was trying to avoid checkpoints
that
might be manned by police commandos in their
mottled uniforms who often acted as Shi'ite death
squads. The journey to Al-Hamra Hotel in Jadriyah,
a district built in a loop of the Tigris river,
took three times as long as normal. In the
following days, I could see Mehdi Army
checkpoints, civilians with guns and a car slewed
across the road, operating almost within sight of
the heavily guarded July 14 Bridge that leads to
the Green Zone.
The extent of the military
failure over the previous three and a half years
was extraordinary. The foreign media never quite
made clear how little territory the US and the
Iraqi Army fully controlled - even in the heart of
Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007, to
look out from the north-facing windows in the
Hamra and see columns of black smoke billowing up
from Haifa Street on the other side of the Tigris
River. This is a 3-kilometer militant Sunni
corridor only about 1.5km from the northern end of
the Green Zone. Since the early days of the
fighting, the US Army, supported by Iraqi army
troops, had been unsuccessfully trying to drive
out the insurgents who ruled it.
Sometimes, US commanders persuaded
themselves (and embedded journalists) that they
were making progress. On this occasion, I looked
up and read a long, optimistic article about Haifa
Street in a US paper, claiming there were signs
that "the tide was turning on Iraq's street of
fear". It was no longer an arrow pointing at the
heart of the Green Zone; rebel leaders had been
arrested or killed; large weapons caches had been
discovered; insurgent attacks were less intense
and less frequent; Iraqi troops were at last being
effectively deployed. Having finished reading the
piece, I was reflecting on whether or not the US
military and its local allies were at last
achieving something on Haifa Street when I glanced
at the piece and realized, with a groan, that it
was dated March 2005, almost two years earlier.
American commanders often genuinely
believed that they were in command of towns and
cities that Iraqis, including the local police,
told me were dominated by Sunni insurgents or
Shi'ite militia. On one occasion early this year,
senior US and Iraqi officers were giving a video
press conference from Diyala, a much-fought-over
province northeast of Baghdad, confidently
claiming that they were winning the fight against
the Sunni rebels.
Even as they were
speaking, an insurgent squad attacked and captured
the mayor's office in Baquba, the capital of
Diyala. It only withdrew after blowing up the
building and kidnapping the mayor. The government
announced that it was dismissing 1,500 policemen
in Diyala because of their repeated failure to
resist the insurgents. When I checked with a
police commander a few months later, he threw up
his hands in disgust and said that not a single
policeman had been fired.
The addition,
promised by Bush, of five extra brigades to the US
forces in Baghdad made, at least at first, some
difference to security in the capital. The number
of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head and
dumped in the street went down from the horrific
levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings
were mostly of Sunnis and were the work of the
Mehdi Army or of army and police units
collaborating with it.
A few days before
the security plan began, Muqtada stood down his
militiamen, telling them to dump their arms and
move out of Baghdad. He was intent on avoiding
direct military confrontation with the US
reinforcements. But while the Shi'ites were
killing fewer Sunnis, the Sunni insurgents were
still slaughtering Shi'ite civilians with massive
suicide bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting
crowded marketplaces.
These did not stop,
and improved security measures made little
difference. On February 3, a truck delivering
vegetables blew up in the Shi'ite-Kurdish Sadriya
quarter in central Baghdad, killing 135 people and
wounding 305. Ten weeks later, long after the
security plan had been launched, another vehicle
bomb blew up in the same market, killing 127
people and wounding 148. Not surprisingly, local
people jeered and threw stones at American and
Iraqi soldiers who turned up after the explosion.
The main failing of the security plan for ordinary
Iraqis, many of whom had initially welcomed it,
was simply that it did not deliver security for
them or their families.
Who rules Iraq?
There was a central lesson of four years
of war that Bush and British Prime Minister Tony
Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was
obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation
was unpopular and becoming more so by the day.
Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had
enough water to swim in. The only community in
Iraq that fully supported the US presence was the
Kurds - and Kurdistan was not occupied.
It
is this lack of political support that has so far
doomed all US political and military actions in
Iraq. It makes the country very different from
Afghanistan, where foreign troops are far more
welcome. Opinion polls consistently show this
trend. A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been
conducted by ABC (American Broadcasting Co) News,
USAToday, the British Broadcasting Corp and ARD
annually over the past three years. Its findings
illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi
politics. They show that by this March, no fewer
than 78% of Iraqis opposed the presence of US
forces, compared with 65% in November 2005 and 51%
in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17% of
the population thought that violence against US
forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure
had risen to 51%. This pool of people sympathetic
to Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias was so
large as to make it difficult to control and
impossible to eliminate them.
Again and
again, assassinations and bombs showed that the
Iraqi Army and police were thoroughly infiltrated
by militants from all sides. Nowhere was safe.
Some incidents are well known. Last month, a
suicide bomber blew himself up in the cafe of the
Iraqi Parliament in its heavily defended building
in the Green Zone. The bomber had somehow
circumvented seven or eight layers of security.
Earlier, on March 23, the deputy prime minister,
Salam al-Zubaie, was badly injured by a bomber who
got close to him with the connivance of Zubaie's
bodyguards.
There were less known
incidents indicative of the divided loyalties of
the security forces. On March 6, militants from
the Islamic Emirate of Iraq movement - of which
al-Qaeda in Iraq is part - stormed Badoush prison
northwest of Mosul. In the biggest jailbreak since
2003, they freed 68 prisoners, of whom 57 were
foreign. Of the 1,200 guards at the prison,
400-500 were on duty at the time, but did nothing
to stop the Islamic militants breaking in or the
prisoners breaking out. Some American soldiers see
that
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