The
Link to London
The
True, Terrible State of Iraq
By
Patrick Cockburn
07/21/05 - Baghdad.
Shall we only threaten and
be angry for an hour?
When the storm has ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?
Their lives cannot repay us - their death could not undo -
The shame that they have laid upon our race.
But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,
Shall we leave it unabated in its place?
Rudyard Kipling,
"Mesopotamia"
Rudyard Kipling's poem
Mesopotamia denouncing those responsible for Britain's disastrous
expedition in the First World War to what became Iraq, was written
in 1917. By the time the war ended at least 31,000 British and
Indians were buried somewhere in the country.
The difference between Britain's
disastrous foray into Iraq then and the results of the invasion 88
years later is that those responsible have no need "to sidle
back to power". They never lost it either in Britain or the
US. It is nevertheless extraordinary to see Donald Rumsfeld,
author of so many American failures here in Iraq, still holding
his job as Secretary of Defence.
But there is a price to be paid
in blood for keeping in power those responsible for past
disastrous decisions in Iraq. It makes it much more difficult to
seek a way out of the savage war that is now engulfing that
country.
This is because past policies
have to be portrayed as successful when they were dismal failures.
The true terrible state of Iraq is glossed over. Just before the
presidential election last year the White House imported Iyad
Allawi, the Iraqi interim Prime Minister, to stand beside
President Bush and say that only three or four out of 18 Iraqi
provinces were dangerous. I ran  this
comforting thought past a group of Iraqi lorry drivers, none of
them shrinking violets, who laughed sourly and said that the real
figures were the exact opposite. Only the three Kurdish provinces
in the far north were safe.
A current slogan of the
powers-that-be in Washington and London is that we should
"stay the course in Iraq". Perhaps one needs to live in
Baghdad to know that there is no course. "The Americans are
making it up from day to day," a senior Iraqi official told
me. "They make a mistake and then try to correct it by making
a bigger mistake."
The only real continuity in US
policy in Iraq over the past two years has been the need to
present what is happening here as a success to the American voter.
After the invasion in 2003 there was an attempt at full occupation
under the Coalition Provisional Authority. This imperial takeover
provoked armed resistance by the five million Sunni Arabs. At this
time the US did not want elections as demanded by Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani, the Shia religious leader. It was only when it
became clear that the US could not withstand a Shia uprising that
elections turned out to have been an immediate American goal all
along.
Zigzags in policy have been
interspersed with spurious "turning points" . In
December 2003 there was the capture of Saddam Hussein. The
guerrilla war continued to escalate. Six months later there was
the much-trumpeted handover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi
government. This had equally little effect. This January, there
was the election, sold as the moment the tide would turn. Half a
year later, Baghdad has turned into a slaughterhouse.
The need to produce a rosy and
quite false picture of Iraq makes it difficult for the US - with
Britain trotting along behind - to produce effective policies.
Washington has never admitted to itself that since the summer of
2003 Sunni and Shia Iraqis have both loathed the US occupation.
The much-resented presence of US troops in Iraq has helped fuel
the insurgency and tainted Iraqi governments as puppets of the US.
In the short term it should be a priority to get American soldiers
out of the cities and towns in order to reduce daily friction.
The London bombings are already
making it more difficult to have a sane discussion about what
course to pursue in Iraq. President Bush is able to deflect
criticism of his catastrophic misjudgements by suggesting his
critics are soft on terrorism. Now the same thing is happening in
Britain with Tony Blair and Jack Straw denouncing Chatham House
for suggesting that events in Iraq boosted terrorism.
It obviously has. Immediately
around my hotel, eight suicide bombers, probably non-Iraqis, have
blown themselves up in the past 18 months. It always seemed to me
horribly likely that some, at least, of these pious and fanatical
young Muslims radicalised by events in Iraq would, instead of
perpetrating atrocities here, turn their attention to Britain.
Patrick Cockburn was
awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting in
recognition of his writing on Iraq over the past year. His new
memoir, The
Broken Boy, has just been published in the UK.
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