A year on from ’Mission Accomplished’...

A year on from ’Mission Accomplished’, an Army in Disgrace,
a Policy in Tatters and the Real Prospect of Defeat

Against the odds, America has earned the hatred of ordinary
Iraqis. In Baghdad Patrick Cockburn sees the battle for
hearts and minds comprehensively lost.

By Patrick Cockburn

Wisps of gray smoke were still rising from the wreckage of
four Humvees caught by the blast of a bomb which had just
killed two US soldiers and wounded another five. It seemed
they had been caught in a trap.

When the soldiers smashed their way into an old brick house
in the Waziriya district of Baghdad last week, they were
raiding what they had been told was an insurgent bomb
factory, only for it to erupt as they came through the door.
The reaction of local people, as soon as the surviving
American soldiers had departed, was to start a spontaneous
street party.

A small boy climbed on top of a blackened and smoldering
Humvee and triumphantly waved a white flag with an Islamic
slogan hastily written on it. Some other young men were
showing with fascinated pride a blood-soaked US uniform.
Another group had found an abandoned military helmet, and had
derisively placed it on the head of an elderly carthorse.

Iraqi women react as they wait outside the prison in Abu
Ghraib, near Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, May 2, 2004. Hundreds of
Iraqis who have relatives being held in the prison of Abu
Ghraib demanded to see their loved ones after the release of
pictures allegedly showing prisoners being humiliated by
their U.S. captors. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

A year after President George Bush famously declared "major
combat" in Iraq over, how is it that so many Iraqis now have
such a visceral hatred of Americans? One reason is that the
photographs of brutality and humiliation of Iraqi detainees
by British and American troops, which have so shocked the
rest of the world and angered Arab countries, have come as
little surprise to Iraqis. For months it has been clear to
them that the occupation is very brutal; for weeks they have
been watching pictures of the dead and injured in Fallujah on
al-Jazeera satellite television which CNN did not broadcast.

Iraqis, who are cynical about their rulers, may also suspect
that real as well as simulated torture is going on in Abu
Ghraib prison, where US intelligence calls the shots. They
may suspect that, as under Saddam Hussein, the humiliation
and ill-treatment were quite deliberately inflicted to soften
up prisoners before they were interrogated. More graphic
pictures of real torture are said to have been taken as well
those shown on US television last week.

Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis knew
that he had ruined their lives through his disastrous wars
against Iran and Kuwait, and were glad to be rid of him. Even
the supposed beneficiaries of his rule, the Sunni Arabs of
cities such as Tikrit and Fallujah, could not see why they
were so much poorer than the people of other oil states such
as Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.

Watching the dancing, jeering crowd in Waziriya was Nada
Abdullah Aboud, a middle-aged woman, dressed in black. She
had a reason for hating Americans, though she claimed she did
not do so. "I do feel sorry for the young soldiers, though
they killed my son," she said quietly. "They came such a long
distance to die here." It turned out that her son, Saad
Mohammed, had been the translator for a senior Italian
diplomat working for the ruling Coalition Provisional
Authority. She said: "My son was driving with the Italian
ambassador last September near Tikrit when an American
soldier fired at the car and shot him through the heart."

Saad Mohammed was one of a large but unknown number of Iraqis
shot down by US troops over the past year. There seems to
have been no rational reason why he had been killed. But the
high toll of Iraqi civilians shot down after ambushes or at
checkpoints has given Iraqis the sense that, at bottom,
American soldiers regard them as an inferior people whose
lives are not worth very much.

Iraqis make very plain what they think about the occupation
in private conversation, but Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in
Iraq, and the US military command, shut away in their
headquarters in Saddam’s old Republican Palace, had no idea
of the growing hostility towards them until April. Then, when
they started the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, they
discovered that aside from the Kurdish minority, Iraqis had
turned decisively against the occupation.

Another simple reason for disillusionment with the US is
simply the Americans’ failure to restore normal life. Iraqis
in Baghdad continually say that Iraq recovered more quickly
from the damage inflicted by the first Gulf War under Saddam
in 1991 than it did after the second war in 2003.

Baghdad is a city on edge. Shopkeepers keep their stock at
home in case there is another outbreak of looting. The police
are back on the streets and there is less casual crime than
last year, but it is still more dangerous than it was under
the old regime.

Abu Amir, a shopkeeper in the middle-class Jadriyah district
of the capital, said: "Under Saddam I sometimes did not make
money in my store, but I could go home in the evening without
worrying if my son had got back safely. Now there is looting
everywhere. If you walk in the streets maybe you will be shot
by the Americans or by criminal gangs fighting each other."

A curious achievement of the US over the past year has been
to revive Iraqi nationalism in Iraq. This had been largely
discredited by Saddam. But Fallujah and the pursuit of
Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric, has meant that
nationalism is once more respectable.

The extraordinary political weakness of the US in Iraq became
evident as never before last week. Despite having an
overwhelming military force available to take Fallujah and
Najaf, the US did not dare do so. It had become evident even
in Washington that to crush the resistance in either city -
not a difficult task against a few thousand lightly armed
gunmen - would spread rather than end the rebellion.

Even so, it was extraordinary to see Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a
general in Saddam’s Republican Guard - disbanded like so much
else in Iraq last May - being driven into Fallujah on Friday
in full uniform past cheering crowds. The old Iraqi flag, now
dropped by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, was
being waved from his car window.

It is a measure of how far the Governing Council is out of
touch with ordinary Iraqi opinion that they should have voted
to change the flag in the first place. Mohammed, an engineer
trying to patch up a broken sewage pipe in Baghdad, still had
time to express his fury at the change. "Of course the
occupation is a disaster," he said. "We understand the
Governing Council are American agents. But a man has to be
the worst of collaborators to change his country’s flag."

On 30 June the US will be handing over very little to Iraqis.
Security remains firmly in US hands; so does control of
money. One of the biggest US mistakes was not to hold
elections earlier, something British and US officials admit
in private could have been done. This would have produced a
legitimate Iraqi authority to which Iraqi security forces
could have given real loyalty. Dr Mahmoud Othman, a member of
the Governing Council, says: "Iraqis are never going to fight
other Iraqis under the orders of an American." This was amply
borne out when half of the US-trained security forces
deserted or mutinied in early April.

The tide is going out for the US in Iraq. They were not able
to use their military strength against Fallujah and Najaf.
They have very little political support outside Kurdistan.
They can no longer win. It may be one of the most
extraordinary defeats in history.

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