The 9/11 Wars (21 page)

Much of the post-invasion criticism focused on this blithe optimism. Several members of the Bush administration have defended their record, saying that they in fact spent a significant amount of time pondering possible outcomes post-invasion and planning for them. President Bush himself has said that he spent ‘hours’ talking over a possible humanitarian crisis.
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However, it is clear that any planning that did occur was based on assumptions about the post-invasion situation that were entirely wrong. The Pentagon, charged by the president with managing the post-war phase, worked on the basis that following the deposition of Saddam Hussein there would be large numbers of Iraqi security personnel willing and able to support the occupation, that ‘significant support’ from the ‘other nations, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations’ would be forthcoming and that an Iraqi government would rapidly emerge, allowing a ‘quick hand off to [an] Iraqi interim administration with [a] UN mandate’.
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The latter would, it was imagined by officials such as Feith and Wolfowitz, be largely composed of the Iraqi exiles who had spent the last decade or so in the UK, US and elsewhere. These central assumptions were shared by more in the vast apparatus of the US government than was later admitted.
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Another key principle was that the invaders would be greeted broadly as liberators. Senior administration figures quoted American professor Fouad Ajami, who foresaw that the streets of Baghdad and Basra were ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans’.
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Dick Cheney, the vice president, explained that there was ‘no question’ but that the Iraqi people would see the United States as ‘liberators’.
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Such views were echoed by many exiles too. Kanan Makiya, author of the much-read and harrowing denunciation of Saddam’s regime
The Republic of Fear
, spoke of a welcome with ‘flowers and sweets’.
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THE WAR AND EARLY DRIFT

The war of March and April 2003 was over quickly and, as journalist Thomas Ricks has astutely commented, is now chiefly of interest for the problems it bequeathed. It had started earlier than had been planned as last-minute intelligence suggested that Saddam Hussein was at a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad. A hastily programmed missile strike missed him, however. The next day the 145,000 troops massed in Kuwait over previous months crossed the border prepared for a campaign of three months.
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A British armoured division advanced to secure the crucial oil infrastructure on the Fao Peninsula and to surround Basra while the American forces pushed rapidly north. Resistance did not come from conventional Iraqi army forces – even from the 70,000 elite Republican Guard and the 20,000 strong Special Republican Guard – but was offered in key cities on the invasion route by swarms of irregular
fedayeen
. One of the first American soldiers to die was Platoon Sergeant Anthony Broomhead, riding in a tank in the vanguard of the advancing 3rd Infantry Division. When he waved at a group of Iraqis as his troop drove towards a bridge over the Tigris 60 miles from the city of Nasariyah they did not wave back but launched RPGs instead. ‘For the first but not the last time well-armed paramilitary forces, indistinguishable except by their weapons from civilians, attacked,’ the army’s official history of the invasion said.
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The idea that the attackers might in fact have been civilians does not seem to have occurred to the author.

Notwithstanding sandstorms and logistical hold-ups, Baghdad was reached relatively easily, and the city’s defences, such as they were, collapsed after two American armoured columns pulled off daring raids into the heart of the city and to the airport.
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A supposed 100-day campaign had lasted just over three weeks and had cost the coalition 133 US and 32 British soldiers. Between 3,000 and 11,000 Iraqi soldiers and between 4,000 and 7,000 Iraqi civilians are thought to have lost their lives.
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One element that would be important later was the extremely graphic images of the fighting, casualties and destruction broadcast by Arabic-language satellite channels and to a very much lesser extent their Western counterparts. As Saddam’s regime had crumbled, satellite dishes had proliferated throughout Iraq, and so much of the population was able to watch the invasion of their own country effectively live on TV, a probable historic first.
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For a few weeks after the collapse of the regime, most of Iraq was relatively quiet. Once the spasm of looting, conducted in front of American troops who had no orders to intervene, had subsided Baghdad and other cities were left tense but calm. The expected humanitarian crisis had not occurred, but then nor was there any functioning government. Even if anyone had wanted to try to run the country, most of the ministries were now gutted shells. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), set up under a retired general to oversee transition to a new Iraqi government and deal with millions of refugees, thus found itself largely redundant. Most of the population, as had been the case in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the deposition of the Taliban, fell back on local social mechanisms, particularly tribal or clerical systems of authority, justice and distribution of resources. The occupier was, for the moment, largely ignored.
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The late spring and early summer months also saw febrile political activity. A whole range of groups had emerged to manoeuvre for power. Many had existed in exile in the UK, the US or Iran for decades. There were the revolutionary Iraqi nationalist Islamists of Dawa, the more pro-Iran Islamists of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the relatively secular Iraqi National Congress of the smooth Ahmed Chalabi with his Pentagon connections and the dissident Ba’athists of Ayad Allawi’s Iraqi National Alliance (INA), who had been based in London. Once in ‘liberated’ Baghdad, the various groups jostled and argued, appropriating houses, villas, archives and offices, largely isolated from their own communities and the concerns of the moment. That they would clash with the ‘indigeneous’ groups that had emerged during the 1990s inside Iraq and which profoundly resented the arrival and presumption of the returning exiles was inevitable. One of the earliest such confrontations saw the moderate cleric Sayid Majid al-Khoie killed in Najaf by a mob of supporters of a young and relatively unknown militant cleric called Muqtada al-Sadr who were apparently incensed by al-Khoie’s presence in the city’s main shrine in company of a well-known local official seen as a collaborator with the regime.
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Yet, despite the sudden and largely spontaneous outbreaks of extreme violence, the general atmosphere across most of Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the invasion was not of bloody chaos but of drift and uncertainty mixed with a degree of jubilation that the largely hated regime had gone. In the capital, the restaurants were open in the upmarket neighbourhood of al-Mansour, shops selling satellite dishes and air-conditioners did excellent business in the middle-class Karada, and the famous fish cafés along Abu Nawas street on the banks of the Tigris were full all through the balmy evenings and late into the night. American soldiers lounged on their tanks or patrolled in their armoured Bradley fighting vehicles leaving a trail of empty Gatorade sports drink bottles in the dust and potholes behind them. With electricity very limited – the acute pre-war lack of power had been exacerbated by the disruption and destruction of the fighting – millions of people simply spent much of their time trying to avoid the searing heat of the Iraqi summer. No power meant not just no fans or fridges in temperatures above 45 centigrade but often no sanitation or irrigation pumps either. The temperatures were a significant disincentive to any activity, insurgency included. Basra and the south were also relatively quiet. An apparently impressive number of wanted members of the old regime were being found and arrested. Saddam’s sons Qusay and Uday had been killed in the northern city of Mosul. As in Afghanistan, something of a honeymoon period had followed the actual invasion. In Iraq, however, it was to be very short.
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THE COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY

The summer and autumn of 2003 are seen as the time when the White House, having won a short war in Iraq, then lost the peace. It is certainly the case that, if the Bush administration’s project in Iraq had ever been realizable, the errors made in the space of a few short, hot months ended any chance of success. When it became clear that no new government was going to emerge to replace the state that had disintegrated with the deposition of Saddam, the White House decided to replace the ineffective Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) with a much more powerful Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). They thus, with their allies in the ‘coalition of the willing’, effectively accepted the role of occupying power, a situation recognized by the United Nations Security Council in mid May.
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After four other candidates refused the post, a retired diplomat and businessman with no prior experience of Iraq or the region, Paul Bremer, was appointed as the CPA’s head vested with extraordinary plenipotentiary power.
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Bremer swiftly implemented three measures which together made what was already going to be a very hard job almost impossible. The first was the disbanding of the 385,000-strong Iraqi army along with a wide range of other state entities including large chunks of the Ministry of the Interior. The second was a radical ‘de-Ba’athification’ decree designed to make the rupture with the previous regime both irreversible and evident. The third was the postponement of elections until an undefined date in the future. Quite why these measures were taken with such alacrity has been long debated, but one answer may be that senior CPA officials were taking what they believed had worked in post-1945 Germany as a useful template. This was so much the case that a twelve-page draft of orders to be presented to Bremer for signature included the phrase ‘the only currencies that will be used shall be dollars and Reichsmarks’.
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A second reason may have been the simple necessity to be seen to be taking charge of a country already sliding into anarchy. A third was that the true impact of these policies was not fully understood. Officials from CPA said that they expected 70 per cent of soldiers from the old army would join the new army – when it was set up.
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Equally the aim was only to remove the elite – the senior four levels – of the 600,000-strong Ba’ath Party. Officials were therefore surprised when, largely due to the zeal with which de-Ba’athification was pursued by the US allies entrusted with executing the policy, many more were expelled from positions than they had anticipated.
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The problem was exacerbated by Saddam having devalued rank in the party in recent years to bolster support. Bremer later claimed that he had been told by Douglas Feith, the acutely ideological under-secretary at the Pentagon, that de-Ba’athification should be completed ‘even if it causes administrative inconvenience’.
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The British deputy ambassador in Baghdad described the de-Ba’athification decree as prompted by popular opinion after ‘an intense period of listening to Iraqis’.
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Quite whom they had listened to was unclear.

Together, the dissolution of the army and the aggressive de-Ba’athification programme denied jobs, pensions and what remained of an often already very battered sense of personal dignity to several hundred thousand soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats.
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They also eradicated the only institutions that provided a genuine unifying structure to the country and stripped those that remained of their entire management. Even headmasters and senior doctors found themselves unemployed.
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A third of the staff of the Health Ministry simply gave up work.
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The secondary effects of such mass enforced redundancy – the loss of revenue for the main breadwinner in a household for example – affected many millions of people. In writing in a memo that he wanted his arrival in Iraq ‘to be marked by clear, public and decisive steps’ which would ‘reassure Iraqis’ that Saddamism would be eradicated, Bremer was falling into the classic trap of so many senior figures in the 9/11 Wars.
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He could not see the situation in Iraq through any other eyes than his own or those, in very general terms, of his compatriots.

Then there was the decision to postpone elections indefinitely, effectively to allow a suitably pro-American, moderate, pro-free-market, relatively secular Iraqi political class some time to emerge.
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Rumsfeld had already warned that the United States would not allow Iraq to become like Iran, confusing the idea of including
sharia
in Iraq’s new constitution with creating a theocracy.
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A CPA spokesman justified the postponement by the lack of a census and the fact that ‘rejectionist and religious parties’ were the most organized.
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However, delaying the polls simply confirmed the worst suspicions of millions. One of the points missed in the West was the degree to which the nearly forty-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza influenced views in Iraq of the length of time it was believed the Americans might remain there. ‘Why if the US just want to leave have they cancelled the elections? This is a kind of tyranny,’ said Haider Abdul Numin, a money-changer in Najaf.
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A weak ‘Iraqi Governing Council’ was created, packed with pro-American exiles and then largely ignored.