The Iraq War (29 page)

The seizure of the pedestrian bridgehead simplified the crossing problem. While marine engineers worked to mend the
break in the concrete Baghdad Bridge into Saddam City, another battalion had regained the bridge farther north and pontoon bridges were being laid in other places. The three marine brigades were now jostling for position to lead the charge into central Baghdad. An argument was also in process between commanders about whether to raid or to mount push-and-hold penetration operations. As intelligence accumulated, it was becoming clear that eastern Baghdad was a ‘target rich’ objective. Beside the Rasheed military airport, there was also the Saddam
Fedayeen
training centre, the Atomic Energy Commission, Baghdad University campus, the Directorate of General Security Headquarters, the Ministry of Defence,
Fedayeen
headquarters and one of Saddam’s palaces, the Al Azamiya. Eastern Baghdad was divided by marine staff officers into three regimental zones, while the regiments subdivided zones into battalion sectors, nine altogether. The battalion sectors were farther subdivided into six. Once one sector was secured, the troops were to move on to the next.

The advance of 1st Marine Expeditionary Force into eastern Baghdad during 7–8 April was not heavily opposed. Such resistance as the Marines encountered was disorganized. The abandoned Atomic Energy Commission was secured without meeting resistance. The advance into the university area on 9 April was more strongly opposed; stay-behind
fedayeen
made a stand in the middle of the campus, firing RPG-7s or Kalashnikovs at the advancing marines. There was, however, no real defence. Of the regular army and the Republican Guard there was no sign. The night of 8–9 April was disturbed by sporadic, ineffective firing. On 9 April, with the university campus taken, the Marines pressed on and soon reached Firdos (Paradise) Square, dominated by one of the many statues of Saddam Hussein found by the invaders throughout Iraqi cities. Iraqi opponents of the régime had already attempted to pull the statue down by throwing a loop around its neck and using muscle power. A marine armoured engineer vehicle now amplified their efforts. Its cable loop broke the statue’s supports and Saddam’s image collapsed face-forward
revealing a shoddy framework of metal struts that had held it upright.

The fall of the Saddam statue on 9 April, televised across the world, was taken by its media to mark the fall of the Saddam régime. Yet despite the cinematic sensation of the event, many in the media resisted the impulse to exult. As representatives of the
bien pensants
in Europe and even parts of North America, many television and print journalists declined to celebrate the fall of the dictator the toppling of his statue symbolized. Monster though he clearly was, his humiliation at the hands of the capitalist system – the United States, the world’s largest economy, Britain, the fourth – rankled. In Saddam’s own world, many followed the media lead. Iraqis who had suffered under his selfish autocracy rejoiced. The beneficiaries were downcast, as was ‘the Arab street’ in general. A Jordanian refugee from Palestine told a BBC correspondent in Amman, ‘It’s just too painful. We Arabs were once a great nation. We were in Spain for 700 years. And where are we now? We’re beaten in our own homes.’

To most Europeans and Americans for whom the Arab kingdom of Spain and the Muslim domination of the Balkans, if remembered at all, are footnotes of history, Muslim fellow-feeling for Saddam is inexplicable. They genuinely regard him as a would-be accomplice of Hitler and Stalin who, like them, terrorized his own people and wished to mount a campaign of conquest and revenge against the liberal democracies of the West. Confident in the benevolence of their own societies, to which the Third World apparently wishes to migrate
en masse
, Europeans and Americans fail altogether to understand the hatred felt by the world’s outsiders, particularly fundamentalist Muslims, for their way of life. It is possible for Westerners intellectually to grasp the essentials of Muslim belief, that religious teaching should predominate in public affairs, that women should be modest in manner and dress and outwardly subordinate to men, that the premodern texts of the Koran and
Sharia
law should be accorded the respect due to literal truth; but they do not regard such beliefs as applying outside what they regard as the closed borders of the Muslim
world. They are particularly resistant to the view that Muslim secularists, such as Saddam, should enjoy the liberty to organize a Muslim society as they choose while simultaneously invoking an Islamic right – the basis of the Ba’athist idea – to a special place in regional and ultimately world affairs. Saddam, as dictator of Iraq, was that most dangerous of individuals, a Muslim who could dodge between religious and secularist appeals to authority, personally loyal to neither creed, adept at exploiting the power of both over the minds of his followers.

The fall of Saddam’s statue on 9 April was swiftly followed by the occupation of the premises from which he and his intimates had exercised their dictatorial regime. The ‘palace’ so-called of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister, was quickly taken. The occupation of the five ‘palaces’ – large, vulgar, recently built villas – allotted to Saddam’s inner family swiftly followed. Not without loss; though a hundred
fedayeen
were killed in the fight for the palaces, twenty-two Marines were wounded, in exchanges of fire with assault rifles and rocket launchers. The capture of Baghdad had been in many respects a model of a modern military operation, cunningly planned with every electronic aid, skilfully executed by highly trained troops. Even the best battles, however, have their price for the victors. The cost had been paid by the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

T
he toll of coalition fatalities was nevertheless surprisingly light, 122 American, 33 British. Of the British dead, six had been killed in action, the others in accidents or by ‘friendly fire’. A higher proportion of Americans were killed in combat but, again, most were victims of accident and some of attack by their own aircraft. Almost all were young, under thirty, some very young. War is a young man’s – now also a young woman’s – business; one American who died was Army PFC Lori Ann Piestewa, aged twenty-three. Almost all the British dead bore identifiably traditional British names, Stratford, Allbut, McCue, Evans, Ballard, Tweedie. One, however, was a citizen of the Irish Republic, Ian Malone, serving in the Irish Guards, another a black Zimbabwean, Christopher Muzvuru, an Irish Guards piper. A high proportion were senior NCOs or junior officers, evidence of the dangers always attaching to leadership in combat.

Among the American dead, too, many were NCOs or junior officers, marine gunnery sergeants, army warrant officers, captains, second lieutenants. The names testify to the kaleidoscopic origins of the American nation. Many were Hispanic or Slav, from recent immigrations, others Teutonic or Scandinavian from the great North European influx of the nineteenth century. A considerable number were as British as those of the 1st (UK) Armoured Division’s dead, Tristan Aitken, Nicolas Hodson, George Mitchell, Wilfred Bellard, names that might have been found among the emigrants on the
Mayflower
. The American armed forces are truly
representative of the American people, who so devotedly support their soldiers, sailors and airmen.

The number of Iraqi dead has not yet been counted. Since there were no great battles in the war, it is unlikely that casualties in the Iraqi armed forces were high. Most of the conscripts of the regular army drifted away before the fighting began. Casualties may have been higher among the Republican Guard but it, too, avoided heavy combat. Such serious fighting as was done was by ‘fighters’ – not uniformed soldiers but Saddam’s political militiamen, devotees of the Ba’ath party and foreigners, Islamicist volunteers from Syria, Algeria and other Muslim countries seeking the opportunity to give their lives for the faith. The total of their dead will probably never be known but must have amounted to several thousand. The number of civilian dead was much lower, thanks to the careful precision of coalition air attack on populated areas.

Prisoners there were none. In the heat of combat such small groups as offered their surrender were made captive but they were not long detained. One of the first acts of the occupiers was to decree the disbandment of the Iraqi army and the battlefield detainees were released to their homes, whither most of their comrades-in-arms had already made their own way. The only Iraqis the victors sought to apprehend were leaders of the régime and identifiable violators of human rights.

In retrospect the disbandment of the army was a serious mistake, one of several made by the American interim administration in the immediate aftermath of the Saddam régime’s collapse. It released several hundred thousand young men onto the unemployment market, leaving them unpaid and discontented, at precisely the moment when the need became apparent to rebuild Iraq’s security forces. The mistake was repeated when the national police force was not kept in being. The occupiers had defensible grounds for both acts, since they feared that retention of the army might perpetuate the power of a major Ba’athist institution, while the police force was tainted by violations of human rights. The occupiers argued, persuasively, that the police
force would have to be recreated, from freshly recruited entrants trained by Westerners.

The disappearance of the police – which could probably not have been averted in the immediate aftermath – had regrettable effects in the days following Saddam’s downfall. Looters appeared in thousands and began to pillage. At first their targets were the office buildings of the régime in the government quarter of Baghdad; seventeen out of twenty-three ministries were ransacked. American troops managed to protect the Ministry for Oil, the resumption of oil production being judged essential to the country’s reconstruction, but there were too few troops to save the others. Then the looters turned to nongovernmental facilities, including hospitals and schools. The looters, some ex-prisoners released from the city gaols, others simply the poor of the back streets, stole anything portable. Computers were a favourite piece of booty, and air-conditioning units, but eventually completely worthless items were carried or wheeled away. In the process enormous quantities of documents, essential to reorganization and reconstruction, were destroyed or irretrievably dispersed. Looting spread wider. The looters began systematically to strip copper wire out of the telephone networks and electrical distribution systems, making communication and power, interrupted by the war and the damage war had caused, impossible to restore without elaborate and expensive repair. There was also cultural damage. Iraq, home to the world’s oldest civilizations, was a treasure trove of antiquities, originally collected by European scholars, later piously preserved by dedicated Iraqi scholars and conservationists. For some weeks it was believed that the Iraqi National Museum had been emptied of its treasures, a story that led to wild denunciation of the invasion in the Western press. Later, fortunately, it was discovered that the museum staffs had been able to hide almost all the exhibits in the vaults.

Looting was destructive but merely anarchic. After a few chaotic weeks there was little left to steal, householders in the richer quarters were defending their properties and the American troops had established rough-and-ready order in the streets. Looting,
however, merged into and was succeeded by organized attacks by intransigents on the occupying forces. Anarchy, in the Sunni central region, gave way to insurgency, organized and vicious. The attackers were the same people as the ‘fighters’ who had raised most of the resistance to the invasion in March and April. They were ex–Saddam militiamen,
fedayeen
, Ba’ath party members and foreign fighters, whose numbers were reinforced by an influx of Islamic extremists from other Arab countries, filtering across the unguarded borders. Their methods, familiar to the Israeli troops fighting the
Intifada
but also to the British with experience in Northern Ireland, were those of terrorism – attacks on patrols by gunmen who disappeared into side streets, roadside car bombs – intensified by the self-sacrifice of suicide bombers. The British in the Shi’a south were spared the worst; an appalling incident, when six military policemen training Iraqi police recruits were massacred, proved to be an isolated event, apparently provoked by a local dispute over possession of weapons. It was the Americans in and around Baghdad, in the ‘Sunni triangle’, who were consistently attacked, leading to a steady drip of deaths. In August the ‘fighters’ extended their reach. On 14 August a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian embassy, killing seventeen. On 19 August a suicide truck bomber drove into the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the Special Representative, Sergio Viera de Mello, and twenty others. On 28 August a leading Shi’a cleric, who advocated co-operation with the Americans, was killed by a car bomb in Najaf, one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest cities. A few days later Akila al-Hashemi, one of the women members of the American-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council, was assassinated outside her house. American military deaths continued almost day by day, to reach 500 by the end of the year.

The fighters persisted despite the evident approval most Iraqis showed for the overthrow of Saddam. Polls demonstrated that 80 per cent of Iraqis welcomed the dictator’s fall. Support was absolute in the Kurdish north, which had effectively reverted to self-rule, and almost universal in the Shi’a south where, after a brief period of instability, the British had succeeded in restoring order and
winning the co-operation of the inhabitants, much assisted by the early restoration of essential services. The Sunni recalcitrants were either Saddam loyalists, whom defeat had deprived of privileges and employment, or foreigners who had entered Iraq to carry on the war against the Great Satan of America. A leading terrorist group was Ansar al-Islam, allied to al-Qaeda, which had briefly occupied a ‘liberated zone’ in the Kurdish north, during the period when Kurdistan had escaped from Saddam’s control. Its members fled after the American occupation to Iran, then infiltrated back again. The spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam, the mullah Mustapha Kriekar, in exile in Norway, compared the activities of Ansar al-Islam in Iraq to al-Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan. ‘The resistance’, he told an Arabic language television channel, ‘is not only a reaction to the American invasion, it is part of the continuous Islamic struggle since the collapse of the Caliphate. All Islamic struggles since then are part of one organized effort to bring back the Caliphate.’