The New Middle East (45 page)

The invasion of Iraq was a military success. The occupation of Iraq was a disaster.

The young men fell on his image like a pack of wolves. They had known nothing but the iron grip of Saddam Hussein’s regime and so were venting a lifetime of rage. They swarmed over his statue stamping, spitting and smashing the iron figure that lay on the ground in front of an American armoured personnel carrier. Within minutes it was decapitated. A group of men began to drag their prize onto the street. The head of the man who was omnipresent in their lives bounced down the steps under the weight of kicks and hammer blows. Finally, it was dragged unceremoniously through the city he dominated by the people he had oppressed for so many years. The scene was being watched by hundreds of millions of people across the world. It became the iconic image of the end of Saddam’s rule in Iraq, and the start of America’s.

Saddam Hussein had looked down on his subjects from almost every corner, street and government building. Everywhere I went in the country during the last year of his rule his image was a constant and deliberate reminder of who was in control. Those tearing his image from the concrete pedestal in Firdos Square were the men who Saddam Hussein had promised would defend him with their blood.

Things would go so badly wrong in Iraq because his regime was not toppled by these young Arabs, as would happen elsewhere in the region a decade later, but by young Americans. The US troops, perched on their tanks, chewed gum and watched the spectacle before them. Neither they nor the people that led them knew very much about the population or the country they had just invaded. ‘People have been pretty nice, they know we are here to stop terrorists,’ one of them told me as he stood on his Humvee. ‘They seem happy to have us here. It’s sure better than being shot at.’

Neither of those two things would last.

‘I wish we could have waited and done our Iraqi spring with the others,’ said Shirouk Abayachi as we drank coffee in her home in a Baghdad suburb exactly nine years later in 2012. By now the American troops had all gone home. Shirouk had no love for the old regime. She had been driven into exile by it, but returned as soon as it fell to help rebuild the country. She now works as an adviser to the water ministry and runs a human rights group. ‘Saddam would have been the first and it would have been done with our own hands,’ she said. ‘It would have been better than what the US did to us.’

‘It is incredible that the Americans could walk out and not leave the lights on. That seems to me to be reprehensible,’ said a Western diplomat as we sat in his fortified embassy in the Green Zone.

The partnership behind the 2003 operation does have a lot to be ashamed of. The Americans came in with great plans for improving infrastructure, but there has been a failure to put the country back together again. And electricity is by far the most obvious example of that. There were plans to build power stations and re-establish power lines, but then they fell foul of the two thousand and six, seven and eight insurgency. Everybody just panicked and it all became too difficult.

The same was true of other core needs like clean water, sanitation and health care. All fouled up is the new normal in Iraq.

‘I have never seen anything that looked as set for failure from almost the beginning as Iraq,’ said Ambassador Barbara Bodine. The first act of the Bush administration when it took control was to divide post-invasion Iraq into three sectors. There was a northern and a southern sector, which were to be administered by two retired US army generals. The central sector, including Baghdad, was to be run by Ambassador Bodine. Her boss was another retired army man, Jay Garner.

The idea, and I heard this from Jay Garner directly and personally, was that we were going to go in the middle of April with 120 civilians, that we would get the ministries up and running, which presumed that the ministries were there. Convene a constitutional convention, write a constitution, get a constitution ratified, have parliamentary elections, establish a cabinet and have a fully functioning government by August. You know that’s insane!

The Americans invaded in March with the expectation that their troops would be going home by September. No one at the US Department of Defense made any plans for an occupation. So what happened instead was described by a US government report, published on the tenth anniversary of the invasion, as ‘nation (re)building by adhocracy’. The Bush administration embarked on America’s most politically ambitious project for a generation, regime change in the Middle East, by military invasion, and found themselves making it up as they went along.
²

Iraq was where everything in the region began to change, but it is also where America may have to eventually concede that it toppled one military strong man only to see him replaced by another. ‘What you have in Iraq in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a new Saddam emerging using the forces of the Defence Ministry and the Interior Ministry to create a new praetorian guard around him,’ says Professor Bernard Haykel. ‘What they are trying to do is to reconstitute the power of the centralised Iraqi state with a very strong central army which, again with the population the Iraqis have, could pose a very formidable challenge to the Sunni Gulf Arab states.’

When George W. Bush gave a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy in 2003, in which he first articulated his ‘forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East’, he praised that body for its work in Iraq ‘promoting women’s rights, and training Iraqi journalists, and teaching the skills of political participation’.
³
Adnan Hussein, editor-in-chief of the
Al Mada
newspaper, was the kind of man George W. Bush would have been proud of. He was among the dwindling number of Iraqi journalists still brave enough to weather death threats and intimidation from all sides to shine a light on the workings of the country’s opaque and corrupt institutions. Less comfortable for the former president was the fact that these dysfunctional institutions had been allowed to form in this way because of the US occupation. Mr Hussein was not impressed by the Iraq he had been bequeathed. ‘There is no democracy here,’ he told me. ‘Technically, we have freedom because we have no law to limit freedom. But, practically, we have no freedom. Every month or so a journalist is killed; every week a journalist is tortured.’

I failed to find anyone in Baghdad after the US troops had left who thought the democratic gains had been worth the bloodshed. But then even the architect-in-chief of the plan seems to accept that Iraq is at least a generation away from stability. ‘If?,?’ wrote George W. Bush, ‘Iraq is a functioning democracy fifty years from now, those four hard years [of the insurgency] might look a lot different.’
⁴
And they might not. That ‘If’ cost the lives of at least 116,903 Iraqi civilians and 4,409 US soldiers. Modern medicine kept the US death toll relatively low, but 31,000 had to live with their injuries.
⁵
In financial terms it cost the American taxpayer almost one trillion dollars. But President Bush may be right that until the invasion, the occupation and sectarian brutality it provoked recedes from living memory, Iraq will remain a broken nation, if it remains a nation at all.

The 19th of March 2003 was the day the people of Baghdad started getting used to huddling in their homes trying to protect their children as the windows blew in. That is because it was the day President George W. Bush told his country:

My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger . . . To all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces now in the Middle East . . . the people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military . . . We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.
⁶

The people of Iraq had heard that word ‘liberate’ before. Things had ended up in a similar fashion. There was a long and violent occupation.

The 19th of March 1917 was the day the inhabitants of Baghdad were told: ‘our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’
⁷
At that time the promise, known as ‘The Proclamation of Baghdad’, was being made by Britain’s Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude shortly after his forces occupied the city. His address turned out to be just as accurate as the one given by George W. Bush eighty-six years later to the day.

Four years after Maude made his promise there was still no sign of self-rule, and so the British were confronted with an insurgency that is known in Iraq as the ‘Revolution of 1920’.
⁸
It began with peaceful protests, which were brutally put down, and so the uprising turned violent. The occupying forces responded with what the British historian Derek Hopwood described as ‘methods that do not bear close scrutiny’. These included indiscriminate bombing of civilians from the air and the contemplation of the use of poison gas.
⁹

Having quelled the revolt, the British took formal control of the country for twelve years until they nominally handed it over to their proxies in the Hashemite Sunni monarchy which they had earlier established in 1921. The monarchy was then overthrown in 1958. It was Nasser who was the inspiration for Iraq’s anti-imperialist revolution, though this one turned out to be a much nastier affair than the one he had instigated in Egypt.

The coup leaders in Iraq also called themselves the ‘Free Officers’. Some historians argue that it was this event, not Suez, that marked the full stop on British power in the region.

‘Iraq’ was a British invention formed out of three thoroughly disparate provinces of the Ottoman Empire: Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. They had nothing in common apart from, eventually, a loathing of the British. The Kurds in Mosul hated being ruled by Sunnis in Baghdad as much as the Shias in Basra in the south did. Iraq is an artificial construct, which has only ever been held together by force.

During Egypt’s coup, after some discussion, the king was put on the royal yacht and packed off to exile in Italy. In Baghdad there was less debate. The king and his family were shot. The bodies of their government ministers were dragged through the streets. Baghdad descended into bloodlust.
¹⁰
It set the tone for the regime that would eventually emerge and rule the nation until the Americans took over.

The coup and the new Iraq were led by Brigadier General Abdel-Karim Qassem. He was as despotic as everyone who would follow him. Though his coup was inspired by Nasser, Qassem decided, once he had taken power, that he was not willing to be subservient to the cause of Arab nationalism.
¹¹
He refused to join Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic, which was a major blow for those seeking to pull together the three powers of the great Arab capitals Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. That brought Qassem into conflict with Iraq’s Ba’ath Party. In 1959 the Ba’athists hatched a plot to kill him. Among the would-be assassins was a young party member called Saddam Hussein. They failed. Saddam fled and lived in exile for three years, at first in Damascus and then for a longer period in Cairo under Nasser’s protection.
¹²

In 1961, after Kuwait gained independence from Britain, Qassem claimed it as part of Iraq. But before he could do anything about it, he himself was overthrown and shot in 1963 by a coup involving the Ba’athists, though they didn’t end up running the country at that time. They did though eventually lead another successful coup in 1968, and they remained in charge until the Ba’ath Party was fatefully disbanded in 2003. The 1968 coup remains remarkable by the standards of Iraqi political life because it was bloodless and the man who was overthrown, Abdel-Rahman Arif, was only sent into exile and eventually lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one.

Usual service though was promptly resumed with various brutal power plays that eventually led in 1979 to Saddam Hussein seizing power within the party in a bloodbath of murder and torture that would be the signature of his rule. At this stage there were no diplomatic relations between the US and Iraq, but the trauma of the US embassy hostage crisis in Tehran put Iran in the top five least favourite states, and that led to a warming of US relations with Iraq. The US eventually began passing on military intelligence to Baghdad to help them during the Iran–Iraq war. The diplomatic overtures also led to the famous meeting in Baghdad in December 1983 between US Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein. The video of that was played over and over again in the run-up to the US invasion as Mr Rumsfeld and others in the administration made the case that dealing with Saddam was pointless.

In the year leading up to the 2003 war, as the people of Iraq became convinced they were going to be invaded there was a growing concern about what would happen after the regime fell, as they had no doubt it would. What the Americans failed to understand was that colonial rule was still within living memory in Iraq. Even if the Americans had forgotten what it looked like, the Iraqis had not.