The Iraq War is All Right Then

by Robert Fisk

Lord Butler told us Wednesday that Tony Blair acted in good faith. So
that’s all right then.

At the al-Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad on the same morning, there was
blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the doctors, blood on
the stretchers. In the dangerous oven of Baghdad, 10 more lives had just
ended. So what was it Tony Blair said in the Commons? "We are not
killing civilians in Iraq; terrorists are killing civilians in Iraq." So
that’s all right then.

Question: Are Baghdad and London on the same planet?

The suicide bomber blew up his 1,000 pounds of explosives at 10 minutes
to 9.

Between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. are the most dangerous hours in Baghdad —
after prayers at dawn, which the killers attend — and my window rattled
in its frame several times, an Iraqi heartbeat that signals death.

A great cloud of gray-black smoke drifted up from the walled-off,
Tigris-side compound where the Americans and the British and the new
U.S.-chosen Iraqi government have their headquarters. By the time I
crossed the river, it was the same old story; body parts, blood
congealing on the hot road — Iraqi blood, of course — smoldering cars
and smashed concrete, and policemen and soldiers shooting wildly into
the air.

"I saw the suicide bomber," a driver told me in a bland, disinterested
sort of way. "He was driving an old Land Cruiser and weaving through the
cars at the checkpoint and people thought he was line-jumping, trying to
get to the checkpoint in front of them. No one fired at him; the
shooting came after the explosion, and then it was too late."

Most of those who died were Iraqis seeking work from the Iraqi authorities.

Two were Iraqi policemen (salary: about $220 a month). And one, of
course, was the bomber. So whose severed hand lay on the road beside the
blasted concrete walls?

"The forces of evil," was how Iraq’s prime minister, the former CIA
operative Iyad Allawi, described the murderer. He visited the scene,
though he was mercifully spared a visit to the Yarmouk hospital where
one Iraqi arrived with his arm a mangled stump (was it his hand on the
road?) and another with blood seeping from a fearful gash in his neck.

There were more than 50 wounded.

Col. Robert Campbell, of the U.S. Army’s "Task Force 3/8" said the
blast-proof barriers — where his men were "protecting Iraq’s young
government" — saved other lives. He may have been right.

But the real reason for this week’s little bloodbath was about the
isolation of Iraq’s new government. This is the fourth checkpoint
bombing around the same compound and the purpose is obvious. Iraqi
officials cannot leave their Crusader-style fortress with its massive
ramparts and walls.

Ordinary Iraqis must go to them. And line up. And wait. And walking up
to those checkpoints is becoming a macabre, frightening experience.

If the insurgents cannot get inside the walls, they can at least
imprison those inside by attacking the perimeter, cut them off from the
rest of Iraq, make the government’s presence irrelevant to the millions
of Iraqis who, so Blair was assuring us Wednesday, are going to enjoy
"democracy."

But in truth, the authorities here are already cut off from the rest of
Iraq. Baquba is run by armed men. Insurgents control Samara and Fallujah
and Ramadi, and Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia control the center of Najaf.

The Philippine army’s humanitarian unit is withdrawing under the threat
of insurgents, who threatened to cut off a Filipino hostage’s head, just
as the Spanish contingent withdrew this year. And the Honduran contingent.

And after the beheading on Tuesday night of a Bulgarian hostage — the
videotape quickly made available by his killers for those who want to
know what it looks like when a man has his head sliced off with a knife
— perhaps the Bulgarian army will go.

There is a second Bulgarian hostage left, whose fate is in doubt. And
two more Iraqi officials were murdered this week: an industry ministry
official, Sabir Karim and, reportedly, the governor of Mosul, Yusef
Qashmullah.

But we acted in good faith. Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. And
over and over again, in London Wednesday, officials and ministers
referred to the Iraqi war in the past tense. About the only thing Iraqis
could have agreed with was Lord Butler’s remark about the search for
Saddam’s weapons, that "Iraq is a very big place and there is lots of
sand. ..." The al-Yarmouk hospital, needless to say, was the one place
not to quote Blair’s assertion that although terrorists were killing
Iraqis today, "people were being killed in Iraq, thousands of them,
under Saddam."

Forgetting that up to 11,000 Iraqis appear to have been killed since our
invasion, it seems that it’s better to be killed post-Saddam than
pre-Saddam. So that’s all right then.

Robert Fisk writes for The Independent in Britain.

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