Global Policy Forum

From Shock and Awe to a Country
Torn between Insurrection and Democracy

By Patrick Cockburn

It has been the strangest war. A thousand days ago, on 20 March 2003, the US and British armies started a campaign which ended a few weeks later with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It seemed so easy. President George Bush announced that the war was over. The American mission had been accomplished. Months passed before Washington and London realized that the war had not finished. In fact it was only just beginning. Of the 18,000 US servicemen killed or wounded in Iraq, 94 per cent have been killed or wounded since the fall of Baghdad.

There is no sign that the election for the 275-member Iraqi parliament this Thursday will end the fighting. The Sunni Arabs, the core of the insurrection, will vote for the first time, but there is no talk of a ceasefire. A leaflet issued by one resistance group in Baghdad yesterday encouraged its followers to vote but warned: "The fighting will continue with the infidels and their followers."

It was such a strange war because the US began a conflict in 2003 to change radically the Middle East, the most volatile and dangerous region in the world. This was in complete contrast to the first Gulf War in 1991, when the main war aim of President George Bush Snr was to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and restore the status quo.

There was a further sharp difference between the two wars. Mr Bush Sr had expended enormous effort in creating an international coalition under the UN to fight Iraq. His son, by way of contrast, seemed to revel in isolation. He made the Iraq war the supreme test of American military and political strength. The US would fight it alone, aside from Britain tagging along behind, and win it alone. It did not need allies outside or even inside Iraq. The insurgents received vital if covert assistance from abroad, but the rebellion against the US occupation was always essentially home-grown. Disillusionment with their liberators set in among Iraqis almost as soon as the American troops captured the capital in April 2003. The poor poured out of the slums of Baghdad in a frenzy of destruction and theft. Everything was looted, even the stuffed animals in the natural history museum.

Iraqis expected much from the fall of Saddam. They had endured 23 years of war and sanctions. The Iraqi armed forces simply packed up and went home. Nobody wanted to die for the old regime. Instead they hoped to enjoy the fruits of their oil wealth for the first time and begin to live like Kuwaitis or Saudis.

Instead the US installed a colonial regime. Iraqis were marginalised and their opinions ignored. Iraqi professionals with PhDs and fluent in several languages found themselves being ordered about by young Americans whose only qualification was links to the Republican Party. The army and security services were dissolved. The five million-strong Sunni community was enraged. The first attacks on US patrols and vehicles began. Whenever I visited the site of an ambush I saw young Iraqi men dancing in jubilation around the blazing vehicles.

By November 2004 a serious guerrilla war was under way. The 140,000-strong US Army was hopelessly ill-equipped for such a conflict. Once I saw an American artillery unit trying to quell a fist fight among Iraqi drivers in a queue at a petrol station. They had brought with them an enormous howitzer designed to fire a shell 30km because they had nowhere to store it.

The face of Baghdad began to change. The symbol of the new regime was the concrete block, enormous obstacles to car bombs looking like gigantic grey tombstones. Walls of them sealed off the Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad where the US and Britain had established their headquarters.

The suicide bombers began to make their terrifying impact. Nobody was safe. The UN headquarters was reduced to a heap of rubble, as was the building housing the Red Cross. Iraqi police stations and US positions were all hastily fortified. On some days there were a dozen attacks. Later they fell in number, but became more sophisticated, with one bomber trying to blast a way through the concrete walls so the second could reach the targeted building.

People in Baghdad and the centre of Iraq lived in perpetual terror of suicide bombers, kidnappers, Iraqi army and US troops. The roads to the capital were all cut by insurgents or bandits. Better-off Iraqis, fearful of kidnappers who preyed on their children, fled to Jordan, Syria and Egypt. In the face of Sunni Arab attack, the US relied more and more on the two other great Iraqi communities. The Shia make up 60 per cent of the population and the Kurds 20 per cent. Some Iraqi leaders had an acute perception of the American dilemma in Iraq. "Let them try to run the country without us and they will see what trouble they will be in," said a Kurdish leader in the summer of 2003. "Then they will come running to us for our help."

Last year the US learnt that it could contain but could not suppress the Sunni insurrection. This year has seen Iraq slowly coming under the control of a Kurdish-Shia alliance whose authority is likely to be reaffirmed by the election on Thursday.

Iraq at the moment is an extraordinary patchwork with conditions varying in every part of the country. Kurdistan is more prosperous than at any time in its history. The skylines of its cities are crowded with cranes. In Baghdad there is hardly any sign of construction, and richer districts are often inhabited only by armed security guards. Their inhabitants have fled.

A BBC poll yesterday showed that half of those questioned say that Iraq needs a strong leader, while only 28 per cent cited democracy as a priority. But it would be a mistake to think that Iraqis could agree on the same strong leader. The Sunni would like a strong man to put the Shia in their place, and the Shia feel likewise that the priority for a powerful leader would be dealing with the Sunni.

Iraqis are cynical about their political leaders. The election results are likely to show that the great majority of Iraqis will vote along ethnic or religious lines as Shia, Sunni or Kurds. The country is turning from a unitary state into a confederation. There is no sign yet of the thousand-day war ending. Every month up to a thousand fresh corpses arrive at the mortuary in Baghdad. A new Iraq is emerging but it is already drenched in blood.