Between Iraq and a hard place

Here, we deconstructed neutrality. It means what it means. There, it was one smokescreen after another. Remember US Secretary of State Colin Powell telling the United Nations about the many perfidies of Babylon? Truth was the first casualty. A ‘poison factory’ he identified turned out to be a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings used by a small Islamic group called Anwar al Islam.

So what? If the Iraqis weren’t building weapons of mass destruction, they were thinking about it. Same difference. Soldier, pack your bags.
But many voices urged restraint. Dr. Hans Blix, chairman of the Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission, argued for more time and on February 17 there were massive anti-war protests around the world, including over 100,000 in Dublin. The scale unnerved the Irish Government. The PDs led pro-American sentiment and tried to split the opposition to the war by alleging leftist, Stalinist leanings.
In the greater scheme, Bush n’ Blair coalesced, supported by others, like Spain and Hungary. But when Germany and France opposed the war (for rather different reasons, the Germans’ largely honourable, the French less so), Donald Rumsfeld dismissed them as ‘old Europe’, claiming the future belonged with ‘new Europe’…
We knew what was coming, but not when. And then on March 19 we knew that.
But it was far from the predicted cakewalk. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the Iraqis knew they couldn’t beat the Coalition’s overwhelming power, so they hit where they could and hid when they couldn’t.
A lot of people died, frequently by accident, and that includes chopper crashes and ‘friendly fire’. Remember March 28? Over 50 civilians died when a bomb hit a market in the Shawala district of Baghdad. And a few weeks later 18 were killed when the US dropped a bomb on Kurdish allies.
Local militias took control of many areas. Long repressed Shia Muslims began to celebrate their festivals and called for an Islamic state. It soon emerged that, whatever about their preparation for war, the Americans were poorly prepared for the peace.
Oh yes, they won, and they had successes, like the capture of Iraqi leaders, the suicides of others and the killing of Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, for a bounty of $30m.
But there was widespread anarchy – looting, barricades, shootings. Much was destroyed or stolen, often as American troops stood by. Not their business, they said. One hundred and seventy thousand items were taken from the Iraqi national museum including some of the world’s earliest examples of mathematics and the world’s first written words. Iraqis were enraged.
The search for Saddam generated occasional bleak amusement, for example when his love shack was revealed in all its Hugh Hefner glory. But mostly, it was grim. The ugliness and murderous repression of his regime was apparent when in late May Saddam’s killing fields yielded up their secrets – hundreds of corpses of people killed during the Shia uprising after the 1991 Gulf war. No doubt, their betrayal by the same Coalition made the Shias leery of welcoming the invaders as liberators…
And in the outside world there was trouble too. It emerged that the CIA had misgivings about claims in British propaganda that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear material from Niger. The Brits had ignored them. A storm brewed and duly gave us a victim when Dr David Kelly, British weapons expert, indeed world expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, committed suicide. The consequent row threatened Blair’s survival. And it hasn’t gone away, you know.
The invaders declared the war to be over when they thought they had it sewn up. But by now we know it wasn’t. In October Irish Times columnist Lara Marlowe returned to Baghdad to find the Wild West reincarnate with “unspeakable savagery on the streets”, lawlessness and thuggery.
The war may be over, but it’s not yet won. Resistance continues. Monday 27 October was Baghdad’s bloodiest day since Saddam’s overthrow. Over 34 people were killed and 250 injured in a series of suicide car bomb attacks. A fifth attack was foiled outside a police station. One of the attacks was on the International Red Cross.
Other attacks continue daily and more American soldiers have died since the war was declared won than were killed during the war itself. Chillingly, the rate at which Americans are dying is higher than was the case in the early years of the Vietnam war. Much of this is the work of diehards, but Al-Qaeda operators are in there too. The genie is out of the bottle, and the war is spewing out beyond the borders…
Who knows what’s next?