[A-List] Iraq: a British tory laments

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Poor Iraq. First the lies and now, even worse: more help

After years of deceit, we are expected to believe things are getting
better. What this country really needs is to be left alone

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday March 21, 2007
The Guardian

We are bid to celebrate the fourth birthday of a lie. In 2003, they lied
about Iraq's weapons arsenal. They lied about Saddam Hussein's "imminent
threat" to Britain. Some of them lied that he was involved in 9/11.
Today, steeped in the psychology of denial, they lie that things are
really fine, are getting better, are better than before, are on the
turn. There might have been mistakes, but there was no Great Mistake.

What of those who pretended not to lie, who slunk to the back of the
room, said it was not their department, "trusted Tony", did what they
were told, kept their heads down? This was the Downing Street set that
covered their lies by jeering at critics and boasting they were so
clever they could "write their own narrative". They hired Hutton and
Butler to "handle the truth", which they carefully "did not kill but did
not strive, officiously to keep alive".

Britons should not celebrate the fourth anniversary of the invasion of
Iraq. Celebration is for those lucky Iraqis entitled to feel genuinely
better for four years of freedom from Saddam, the salutary boon to the
otherwise calamitous affliction visited on their country. The important
anniversary is not that of the past but of the future. Can March 2008
see five years of western intervention finally reversed and a silver
lining appear on the black cloud of Mesopotamia?

The "surge" programme initiated last month by General Petraeus in
Baghdad is the first intelligent thing the Americans have done in four
years. By swamping neighbourhoods, monitoring entry, patrolling streets
and giving personal protection to residents and tradesmen, troops are
able to restore some order to portions of the city. Petraeus is
replacing vigilantes, militias and corrupt police with his own soldiers.
He cannot reverse the ethnic cleansing that is fast partitioning Baghdad
into Sunni and Shia quarters, but he can stabilise what has occurred. He
can fortify the ghettos.

After four years of disorder there can be little hope that such security
might last. On Day 1 it might have reassured and stabilised Baghdad. On
Day 1,460 it is too late. Iraq is gripped by the most rudimentary
street-based gang warfare, in which security lies not in soldiers but in
families, guns, walls, streets, barricades and only faces you can
recognise. To call this a "civil war" is pointless, a misnomer. It is
Guelphs and Ghibellines out of the Corleone mafia.

The Americans cannot possibly find tens of thousands of troops needed to
police every block in Baghdad for months, let alone years. That Petraeus
had to bring Kurdish peshmergas down from the north to support his surge
speaks volumes of the uselessness of the Iraqi army and police. Embedded
journalists visiting bases in Sadr City and elsewhere report that
militias are simply waiting for the Americans to leave. It makes a
change for Americans to be protecting Iraqis, after two years of
pretending to train the Iraqi army. But the most the surge can do is
give some Iraqi neighbourhoods a breathing space and Washington a few
nice pictures. The Iraq police, that fine flower of Pentagon
nation-building, is beyond parody as a plausible force of law and order.

Turning the armed gangs into some sort of disciplined corps over the
next year holds the key to civil security in Iraq. For the 2 million
Iraqis in internal and external exile to return to active economic life
requires them to feel safe in their homes and streets. Foreigners cannot
guarantee that, nor can any national army or police. They are not
trusted. The coming year must see parleys between local commanders,
sheikhs and religious leaders, neighbourhood alliances, deals and
treaties. Such crude life-and-death negotiations will be the only shreds
of civil autonomy left to the Iraqis after four years of occupation, all
that is left to them with which to rebuild their civic institutions.

The greatest fallacy of the coming year is that America or Britain might
have any role to play in making March 2008 happier than 2007. While
American search-and-destroy patrols roam Anbar province, al-Qaida cells
will continue to recruit insurgents from abroad and foment sectarian
hatred. While American tanks crash down streets and shoot up villages,
they brutalise all they touch. The arrogance that only by staying can we
ensure that "things get better" or that "civil war is averted" is now
beyond obscenity. There may be an embassy to protect or an airport to
defend. But the presence of foreign troops on Iraq's streets and Iraq's
soil is a humiliation and a provocation alike. They are in occupation
but not in power.

Whether or not Iraq is now progressively "partitioned" is largely a
matter of terms. It has not been a unitary state for 10 years and is
certainly not so today. It is a nation of a thousand neighbourhoods,
each with degrees of anarchic sovereignty. The 2005 constitution,
recently refashioned, divided up Iraq's oil wealth on reasonably fair
terms.

Different legal codes are likely to be introduced for Kurdish, Sunni and
Shia regions, with women repressed in the south. But even then some
vague confederacy may survive the Iraqi craving for nationhood.

Economies recover, the more quickly the sooner they are left in peace.
The hoodlums and gangsters now rich on American aid will harness the oil
exports and eventually find a vested interest in protecting
infrastructure and utilities. Religious segregation will enable the
ghettos to feel more secure. Business will emerge from the bottom up,
and doctors, teachers and merchants will start to move back from Amman
and Damascus, once they hear that their old homes are safe and the
Mahdists and Badrists are confined to barracks. Economic activity will
return to the streets, as it has done to Beirut.

The one thing that would speed this day is for everyone just to leave
Iraq alone. Last week, the opposite happened. A nightmare convocation of
13 nations, including Americans, Britons, Russians, French, Syrians,
Iranians, Chinese, Saudis, Jordanians and Egyptians, piled into Baghdad
to congratulate each other on their courage in descending amid the
carnage and declare their eagerness to help Iraq. They talked trade,
security, borders, aid, oil, refugees and working groups galore. They
patted each other on the back and went home. Poor Iraq, I thought. First
the lies and now, even worse, they must suffer more help.


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