After Iraq: Anarchy and Renewal in the Middle East - Hardcover

After Iraq
CHAPTER ITHE HEART OF THE MESS"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neo-conservatives predict."" ... Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon, ... We have started up the road to and over the next hill we will meet those who went before." 
- Pat Buchanan, The American Conservatrice, October 7, 2002 
In early May 2003, a flight-suited President Bush flew out to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in order to have an appropriately military background, complete with "Mission Accomplished" banners, for his announcement of an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq. At that point, the Pentagon's expectation was that by the end of the year no more than thirty thousand U.S. troops would still be deployed in Iraq. Five years later, the number is still more than five times that many.The resistance to the U.S. occupation really got underway a week before Bush's photo-op, in the dusty city of Fallujah, some fifty kilometres west of Baghdad. About a hundred U.S. troops from the 82nd Airborne Division had been deployed to Fallujah, and had taken up residence in the al-Kaat primary and secondary school, a pale yellow two-storey concrete building. Fallujah was a Sunni city where most people had backed the Ba'ath Party and some had benefited directly from its rule, and the American occupation was never going to be popular there. Rumours began to circulate, probably spread by former Baathist officials, that the Americans were peering into people's homes and ogling Muslim women with their night-vision goggles. Around nine o'clock on the evening of Monday, April 28, a crowd of between one hundred and two hundredyoung men marched to the school to demand that the Americans leave and the school be reopened.What happened next will always be disputed. The commander of the American force, Lieut.-Colonel Eric Nantz, insists that his soldiers were shot at and that stones were thrown before they opened fire. However, the side of the building facing the street was completely unmarked by bulletholes, and witnesses unanimously said that they had seen no guns in the crowd. At any rate, thirteen young men were killed by the Americans, firing from the upper floor and the roof of the school, and many more were injured; no Americans were hurt. One Arab survivor of the confrontation, a nineteen-year-old student called Hassan who refused to give his last name, told British journalist Phil Reeves of the Independent: "We had one picture of Saddam, only one. There were quite a lot of us - about 200. We were not armed and nothing was thrown. There had been some shooting in the air, but that was a long way off. I don't know why the Americans started shooting. When they began to fire, we just ran." As Reeves was leaving the hospital the following day, he ran into the headmaster of the school, many of whose students had been among the victims, and the man calmly told him that he was willing to die as a "martyr" to take revenge against the Americans.But it doesn't matter who was really responsible for the killing in Fallujah that night. If it hadn't happened there and then, something like it would have happened somewhere else in Iraq a little later. 
"We didn't have enough troops on the ground. We didn't impose our will. And as a result, an insurgency got started and ... it got out of control."- Colin Powell, former U.S. secretary of state, former chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 2006 
There has been endless debate in the United States about whether a different approach in the early days after the invasion could have avoided the rise of the insurgency. What if there had been twice as many troops in Iraq from the start? What if proconsul Paul Bremer had not disbanded the Iraqi army and banned all Ba'ath Party members (including tens of thousands of school teachers, hospital doctors, and middle-rank civil servants who had been obliged to join the Party) from government employment? What if there had been an early transfer of power to an elected Iraqi government, as Jay Garner, the retired U.S. general originally chosen to run occupied Iraq, had been planning before he was abruptly replaced by Bremer? What if the occupation forces had managed to fix the electricity and water supply and protect the oil pipelines? But the might-have-beens are probably irrelevant. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was almost bound to produce a resistance movement. 
"There were approximately ten demonstrators near a tank [outside an Iraqi military compound eight kilometres from Baghdad airport]. We heard a shot in the distance and we started shooting at them. They all died except for one. We left the bodies there ... . The survivor was hiding behind a column about 150 metres away from us. I pointed at him and waved my weapon to tell him to get away. Half of his foot had been cut off. He went away dragging his foot. We were all laughing and cheering."Then an 18-wheeler [truck] came speeding around. We shot at it. One of the guys jumped out. He was on fire. The driver was dead. Then a Toyota Corolla came. We killed the driver, the other guy came out with his hands up. We shot him too."A gunny [gunnery sergeant] from Lima Company came running and said to us: 'Hey, you just shot that guy, but he had his hands up.' My unit, my commander and me were relieved of our command for the rest of the day. Not more than five minutes later, Lima Company took up our position and shot a car with one woman and two children. They all died ... . In a month and a half, my platoon and I killed more than thirty civilians ... ."[Iraqis] would see us debase their dead all the time. We would be messing around with charred bodies, kicking them out of the vehicles and sticking cigarette in their mouths. I also saw vehicles drive over them. It was our job to look into the pockets of dead Iraqis to gather intelligence. However, time and time again I saw Marines steal gold chains, watches and wallets full of money."- Staff Sergeant (Ret'd) Jimmy Massey, USMC, about the actions of the 7th Marines in early April 2003. Quoted by Natashia Saulnier in "The Marine's Tale," The Independent, May 5, 2004 
 
Any combat operation amidst a civilian population causes innocent casualties, and the U.S. military style, which is heavy on firepower and obsessed with "force protection" (shoot first and ask questions later), was bound to cause more civilian casualties than most. The fact that American troops were told that Iraqis were turning vehicles into suicide bombs (although there is only one documented case of that happening during the entire invasion) and dressing soldiers up as civilians made them doubly trigger-happy. They were young, they were frightened,and in most cases it was their first time in a really foreign country. They were bound to frighten and humiliate Iraqis, frequently out of sheer ignorance, and sometimes out of fear and hatred. On occasion, they were likely to panic and shoot indiscriminately - and it remains true that ordinary U.S. soldiers can shoot any Iraqi by whom they feel threatened without fear of the consequences. (Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Iraqi farmers have been killed because they answered a knock on the door at night with a weapon in their hands in case of robbers, and were immediately shot by U.S. troops as suspected resistance fighters.) Iraqi culture is shaped by deeply held notions of honour and revenge, and individual Iraqis were bound to retaliate by attacking U.S. occupation troops. These factors alone would probably have produced a serious Iraqi resistance movement in time, but there was more.First, there was the deep hostility to the United States felt by many people in every Arab country as a result of thirty-five years of reflex American support for Israel, and the additional hostility that accrued to the U.S. government in countries where it was seen as a supporter of the local dictator. Although nobody in Washington seems to have realized it, many Iraqis who hated Saddam Hussein, especially among the Shia majority, also saw him as an American puppet. He had co-operated with the CIA in exterminating the senior ranks of the Iraqi Communist Party (then largely Shia in membership) in the 1960s. Then, in 1980, he had attacked Shia Iran with U.S. support.At the beginning of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, all he had from Washington (so far as we know) was America's prayers that he could destroy the Islamic revolution in Iran. But by 1983, when Iraq was clearly losing the war, President Ronald Reagan sent a special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, toBaghdad to offer Saddam U.S. support in getting weapons, both conventional and unconventional. During the so-called "tanker war" in 1984 - 87, American warships protected oil-tanker convoys from Arab states from Iranian attacks, while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers sailing from Iranian ports. One Iraqi aircraft even struck a U.S. warship by mistake in 1986, killing thirty-seven American sailors, but as a de facto ally Baghdad was forgiven for its error. In 1988, an American warship accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians, under the mistaken impression that it was an Iranian combat aircraft (it was in Iranian territorial waters at the time), but the American captain was forgiven, too.Thanks to all the American help to Baghdad, the Iraq - Iran war ended in a draw in 1988, but Saddam Hussein abruptly terminated his de facto alliance with the United States, probably inadvertently, when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990. He should have known better, but there is evidence to suggest that he actually believed he had Washington's tacit assent to this invasion, and was taken aback when the United States reacted as it was bound to do. In the first Gulf War in 1991, the United States and a broad coalition of Western and Arab countries, operating under a UN mandate, liberated Kuwait and destroyed much of Saddam's army, but they did not overthrow him: the first President Bush, in office since 1989, obeyed his UN mandate and stopped short of driving north to Baghdad. What he did do, unfortunately, was urge the Shias of southern Iraq to rise in revolt at the end of the war - and then stand by while tens of thousands of them were massacred by Saddam's troops. So what many Iraqi Shias thought as they watched the 2003 war unfold was that America was sweeping its puppet aside at last and taking over Iraq directly. They were glad to see the end ofSaddam, but they didn't like or trust the replacement one bit.The Sunni Arabs were an even trickier proposition, because the overthrow of the Ba'ath Party, their instrument of political domination, effectively meant the end of the centuries-long rule of the Sunni minority in Iraq. They were very unhappy about that, and they would be even more so when they discovered that they actually accounted for only about 20 per cent of Iraq's population (a fact not realized by most Sunnis in a country where statistics about the sectarian division were never published or openly discussed). To make matters immeasurably worse, in May 2003, the first head of the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), retired American diplomat L. Paul Bremer III, disbanded the entire Iraqi army and police force and banned all senior Ba'ath Party members - and anybody in the top three management layers of government ministries, government-run corporations, universities, and hospitals who was a Party member at all - from future government employment. Bremer paid no heed to arguments that, until his arrival, conversations had been underway with Iraqi generals for the reconstitution of the army, purged of its Saddam loyalists, and that in all the former ruling parties of post-Communist states in the early 1990s the majority of the "senior" members had been innocent professionals who had been compelled to join in order to do their jobs.So far as it can be discerned these were Bremer's own decisions, not imposed on him by the White House, and they had catastrophic effects. With a couple of decrees he effectively gutted the Iraqi state apparatus and abolished the only other national institutions, the army and police, that at least in theory rose above mere sectarian, ethnic, and local concerns. He also abruptly threw half a million people, most of them withweapons training, serious organizational abilities, or both, onto the street in the most humiliating way. The Sunni insurgency began at once, led initially by ex-army officers and Ba'ath officials and publicly justified by incidents like the killings at Fallujah. These "dead-enders," as they were explained away in Washington, were soon joined in the insurgency by homegrown Islamist extremists who had previously been terrorized into submission by Saddam's regime, and by some foreign Islamists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, who made themselves useful by offering to carry out suicide attacks. By the autumn of 2004, only a year and a half after the invasion, the U.S. authorities were recording between two thousand and three thousand insurgent attacks per month. The shocking pictures taken by the American torturers at Abu Ghraib had a big impact elsewhere in the Muslim world, but in Iraq they caused no particular upsurge in the violence: most people had already chosen their side.Perhaps most damning of all, there was the astounding inability of the U.S. occupation forces to fix the infrastructures that had been broken in Iraq during the invasion and the subsequent orgy of looting, and the other things that had been broken long before that, so that Iraqis would at least experience some material improvement in their lives. Five months after the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein had managed to restore the supply of electricity in Iraq to the pre-war level despite the devastation and crushing sanctions; fifty months after the invasion of March 2003, the United States had failed to do as well: in late 2006, Baghdad was receiving an average of less than six hours' electricity a day. By any material measure, Iraqis today are worse off than they were under Saddam. 
"Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money. We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced."- Frank Willis, former senior official, Coalition Provisional Authority 
"American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone. In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did."- Alan Grayson, Florida-based attorney prosecuting CPA corruption, both men quoted in Dispatches; Iraq's Missing Billions, a Guardian Films production broadcast on Britain's Channel Four on March 20, 2006 
The first year was vital if popular satisfaction at the changes brought to Iraq by the invaders was to o...