The New Middle East (46 page)

One of my Iraqi colleagues, Mohammed Darwish, who was a doctor of literature and whose greatest pride was that he had translated James Joyce into Arabic, expressed the prevailing sentiment of the people to me in the weeks before the war began. ‘Saddam is a bastard,’ Mohammed told me, ‘but he is our bastard.’ Mohammed was a brilliant man who had always refused to be a party man, and so his life and the opportunity it should have promised had been stunted.

In the fog of what has happened since it is easy to forget that as the American ground forces approached Baghdad, the people of Iraq had already been through thirteen years of conflict and sanctions. You could see the exhaustion on their faces. The sanctions were imposed on Saddam’s regime after the invasion of Kuwait, and didn’t end until Baghdad fell to the Americans. Almost everyone below the very top of the regime had, during those years, sold off possessions to buy food or watched their sick children suffer from a lack of medicine. The sanctions were imposed largely to stop Saddam’s attempt to build weapons of mass destruction. In 1999 UNICEF estimated that hunger, disease and a lack of medicines due to the sanctions had led to the death of half a million Iraqi children.
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The world didn’t know it then, because Saddam didn’t want to look weak in his neighbourhood, but by this time Iraq did not have a functioning nuclear, chemical and biological programme.

Mohammed had watched the sanctions impoverish his people but do nothing to hasten the collapse of the regime, which was clearly one of the sanctions’ other undeclared aims. For the sanctions and the devastating impact they had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, Mohammed blamed the West. And so did all the people I met back then, even when the government-appointed minder wasn’t listening. Dr Mohammed, like millions of his countrymen, wanted the Americans to depose Saddam, help the country get back on its feet and get out. The lack of post-war planning meant that only the first and the third of those would happen.

It was clear to those of us in Baghdad in the months leading up to the invasion that the Iraqi people shared one very strong trait with ordinary Americans. Even if they wanted the end of the regime, they were still deeply proud of their culture and history. ‘We are an ancient country,’ the Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri told those of us in Baghdad after the invasion was under way. ‘We were producing literature, art and architecture when Bush’s grandfathers were living in caves like animals.’
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The US administration made a fundamental misjudgement: being anti-Saddam did not mean you were pro-America. ‘We are coming,’ George W. Bush told the Iraqi people, ‘with a mighty force to end the reign of your oppressor. We are coming and we will not stop and we will not relent until your country is free.’
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‘If they come, I will take up my gun and shoot them myself?,?’ an old retired civil servant told me in Baghdad’s Shorja spice market. He was dressed in a jacket and tie, his shirt collar had been repaired too many times and was a patchwork of white stitching. I asked him his name. ‘I’m an Iraqi,’ he said. ‘That’s all you need to know. I’m not a party man. I’m an independent man, but this war is against the Iraqi people and I will fight the invaders.’ He then set off through the bustling crowd that choked the narrow lanes of the market stalls.

Most people in Iraq would have disagreed with the old man’s words but they would have understood the sentiment. Like him they had once been among the generations of schoolchildren who were taught about the fight for freedom against foreign invaders in places like Fallujah and Najaf in the 1920 revolt.
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They did not want to be re-colonised, but the ‘Freedom Agenda’ was implemented in such a cack-handed fashion that colonised was exactly how they ended up feeling. So a new generation of Iraqi children would live through, not learn about, battles against foreign armies in these historic Iraqi cities.

The son of the first American president to invade Iraq had entirely different motivations from those of his father. George Bush Senior had an international mandate after Iraq invaded Kuwait largely in a dispute over the output and the price of oil. Saddam Hussein wanted the Kuwaitis to slow the pumps down. Kuwait’s overproduction caused a slump in prices from eighteen to ten dollars a barrel, which was hitting Saddam hard. He needed more money for his own oil because he was trying to rebuild the country and the army after the long, disastrous and ultimately futile war he fought against Iran from 1980 to 1988. Much of his debt was also owed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and they refused to write it off.

Saddam was therefore doubly furious. He resurrected the old claim that Kuwait only existed apart from modern-day Iraq because of British imperialism after the First World War, which he said carved this creation from his territory. So he invaded to get it back. After a month of cruise missile strikes the Iraq army was routed in a land war that lasted under a hundred hours. It fled, bruised and bloodied, but with enough fight left in it to put down an insurrection by Shias in the south who were encouraged to rise up by the US and then abandoned to Saddam’s retribution when they did. This perceived betrayal by the father still lives on in the minds of the country’s Shia majority, and it meant that when US forces returned under the son their motives were never going to be trusted.

The British assumed that their own colonial experience and more particularly their experience of violent militancy in Northern Ireland would mean they would do a better job at managing the Shia in the south after the invasion. In fact the Iraq war was an embarrassment for the British army. It failed to quell the violence and it was perceived to have been dragged through a humiliating withdrawal from Basra by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s successor Gordon Brown. ‘I don’t know that you could see the British withdrawal from Basra in 2007 in any light other than a defeat,’ said Colonel Peter Mansoor, who was executive officer to General David Petraeus, the man George W. Bush eventually sent in to lead the US troops out of the terrible mess they had been dumped in by Rumsfeld’s now discredited military strategy.
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In 2013, ten years after he sent the British troops in, former British prime minister Tony Blair was still having to defend the war, though he said: ‘I have long since given up trying to persuade people that it was the right decision.’
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When the whole enterprise began though there was no talk of defeat because there was no thought of a protracted war. The Forty-Third President of the United States expected all Iraqis to welcome the Western troops as heroes. He sent them in promising to light a beacon of hope for the rest of the region to follow. Hours after I saw the famous statue, which I had watched being built just the year before, topple to the ground, I saw people enjoy their first taste of their new freedom by trying to break into a vault of the Iraqi central bank with a hammer and chisel. They were just a few hundred metres from the checkpoint set up by the US soldiers around the Palestine Hotel. When I walked further down the street I saw a government building being set on fire by a group of youths. Suddenly there was a roar behind me and a US army Humvee screamed down the road. The crowd instantly scattered. The Humvee sped up to the building, and then kept on driving. I could see the surprise on the young men’s faces. They had lived their entire lives under the total control of the state. Now American troops had told them there was no one in charge any more. And they made clear their priorities by the only two things they did protect: the Interior Ministry and the Oil Ministry.

Small scenes like this were happening all over the city. The message was clear: the invading troops did not see it as their job to police the streets. So by nightfall communities across the capital were barricading their roads against looters. As rumours swept the city about violence and mayhem, the first signs of sectarian division began. Having released Saddam’s hold on the country’s latent communalism, the American troops did nothing to police and contain it.

The Sunni Muslims in Iraq had always had the power and money under Saddam, even though they were only 20 per cent of the population. The Shia Muslims, who made up around 60 per cent of the people, were persecuted and often left in poverty. The first looting and destruction of the institutions of the state began in the Shia areas. When nobody stopped it the Sunni population grew worried that their homes might be next. They feared revenge from the men of the sprawling slums of what was then Saddam City but would soon be renamed Sadr City after a Shia cleric assassinated by the old regime and whose son, Muqtada al-Sadr, would soon play a key role in the insurgency against the occupation. It was this man and men like him on both sides of the sectarian divide who would fill the power vacuum that the US forces created. From the start, it was the chaos that created the insurgency, and not the other way around. That was a direct consequence of American inaction on day one.

‘The damage done in those early days created problems that would linger for years,’ wrote President Bush. ‘The Iraqis were looking for someone to protect them. By failing to secure Baghdad, we missed our first chance to show that we could.’
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The American forces lost control right at the start and they never got it back. The reverberations of that failure rippled out from the capital. They stretched even beyond Iraq’s borders. That was because while the US government made no post-war plans, everyone else in the region did. The invasion had been telegraphed for over a year. No one expected Saddam to survive, so the Shia and Sunni forces inside Iraq, along with the Sunni and Shia nations in the wider Middle East, were all getting ready for a power grab in the country when he fell. This was the beginning of the reordering of the old Middle East.

The West got it wrong in Iraq because it didn’t know, or didn’t want to believe, what it was really getting into. The professor of military history Geoffrey Wawro argues that every American president ‘from Truman to Clinton felt certain that inserting Western Forces into the Muslim Middle East was asking for trouble’, and so ‘George W Bush and his neocons’ were taking a ‘great conceptual leap’ after they ‘startlingly decided that the Middle East
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ready for U.S. military activism – and fertile ground for a “freedom agenda” ’. ‘What was perhaps so striking about the George W Bush administration,’ Wawro wrote, ‘was its willed ignorance of history.’
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You didn’t have to look too far back in history to see how the best of American intentions in the Middle East could go badly wrong. Twenty years earlier America had put its troops within Iran’s sphere of influence, and it also led to catastrophic results.

On 23 October 1983 two bombs went off in Beirut. By then US and European forces were attempting to keep the peace in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to drive out the PLO and Syria, which had led to the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. One truck bomb was driven into the US Marine Barracks, the other aimed at the headquarters of the French paratroopers. The latter bomb was so big it literally lifted the huge building into the air and dumped it next to the bomb crater.
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In all more than three hundred people died. Two hundred and forty-one of them were US servicemen.

Who carried out the bombings has never been discovered, but they were blamed on Islamist groups supported by Iran. President Ronald Reagan pulled his troops out of Lebanon. Westerners including academics, aid workers and journalists who were left in the city became the prey of kidnappers who were again said to be linked to Iran. Some were held for years. The CIA station chief William Buckley was kidnapped and tortured to death. A year after his kidnap four Soviets were kidnapped. One was killed within weeks.

American attempts to get their hostages back led to the Iran–Contra scandal in which senior US officials sold arms to Iran, despite an embargo, to try to get their people released. The Soviets, according to information obtained by the journalist Bob Woodward, used a different approach to get their three people freed within a month of capture.

The KGB in Lebanon . . . seized a relative of a leader of the radical Muslim Hezbollah, had castrated him, stuffed his testicles in his mouth, shot him in the head and sent the body back to Hezbollah. The KGB included a message that other members of the Party of God would die in a similar manner if the three Soviets were not released. Shortly afterwards the three . . . were let out a few blocks from their embassy.
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Every journey made by every Westerner in Lebanon in the mid-Eighties became a potential death trap. The same would happen in Iraq once the occupation began, and with the same consequences if people were caught, though instead of hanging it was beheading. These murders were done by Sunni groups linked to al-Qaeda rather than Shia groups linked to Iran. Either way, it made covering the war in Iraq from all sides virtually impossible for Western journalists and incredibly dangerous for their Iraqi colleagues.

The Bush administration may have been wilfully ‘ignorant of history’ but its ignorance of Iraqi society, if not wilful, was equally striking. If there was one thing the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was good at, it was running a police state. The foreign secret services never successfully penetrated it for any length of time. Instead the administration relied on a bunch of out-of-touch self-serving exiles for their intelligence on Iraq, and because the exiles were out of touch and self-serving the ‘intelligence’ they gave was wrong.