Seeking liberation from the 'liberators': A war without end-II

What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to ask. Then a new myth was created. The Iraqi army had melted away, abandoned Baghdad, changed into jeans and T-shirts and slunk off in cowardly disgrace.

Baghdad was no Stalingrad. Yet that was to alter, dangerously, the narrative of Baghdad's last days. There was a fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank of the Tigris where Saddam's guerrillas fought off an American tank column for 36 hours, the US tanks spraying shellfire down a motorway until every vehicle - military and civilian - was a smouldering wreck.

I walked the highway as the last shots were still being fired by snipers, peering into cars packed with the blackened corpses of men, women, children. Carpets and blankets had been thrown over several piles of the dead.

In the back of one car lay a young, naked woman, her perfect features blackened by fire, her husband or father still sitting at the steering wheel, his legs severed below the knees. Sure, the Iraqi military had mixed themselves up amid the civilians; so in the end the Americans had fired at all of them. It was a massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?

What do we remember most now about those few terrible weeks a year ago? In war, all day you try to stay alive and all night you lie awake because the roar and explosion of aircraft and bombs are too loud for sleep.

And then you have to stay awake and alive all next day. Is it any surprise that there comes a moment - when a man holds out to you what you think is half a loaf of bread and which turns out to be half a baby - that anger is the only integrity left? Cluster bombs are our creation.

And I recall with a kind of raw amazement how, as American gunfire was swishing across the Tigris, I somehow reached the emergency room of Baghdad's biggest hospital and had to slosh through lakes of blood amid beds of screaming men, one of whom was on fire, another shrieking for his mother.

Upstairs was a man on a soaked hospital trolley with a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor.

For days, we in the city had seen the news tapes of Basra and Nasiriyah after "liberation". We had seen the looting and pillage there, benignly watched over by the British and Americans.

We knew what would happen when the fighting stopped in Baghdad. And sure enough, a mediaeval army of looters followed the Americans into the city, burning offices, banks, archives, museums, Quranic libraries, destroying not just the structure of government but the identity of Iraq.

The looters were disorganized but thorough, venal but poor. The arsonists came in buses with obvious pre-arranged targets, did not touch the contents of that which they destroyed. They were paid.

By whom? If by Saddam, then why - once the Americans were in Baghdad - did they not just pocket the money and go home? If they were paid post-burning, who paid them?

Of course, we found the mass graves, the hecatombs of Saddam's years of internal viciousness - for many of which the western powers were his allies - and we photographed the tens of thousands of corpses, most of whom had been buried in the desert sand after the West failed to support the Kurdish and Shia uprisings.

The "liberation" had come, as their grieving relatives never stopped telling us, a little late. About 20 years late, to be precise. Into this chaos and lawlessness, we arrived.

Dissent was not to be tolerated among the victors. When I pointed out in The Independent that the "liberators" were "a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq", I was denounced by one of the BBC's commentators. See how the people love us, the westerners cried - much as Saddam used to say when he took his fawning acolytes on visits to the people of Baghdad.

There would be elections, constitutions, governing councils, money ... there was no end to the promises made to this tribal society called Iraq. Then in came the big American contractors and the conglomerates and the thousands of mercenaries, British, American, South African, Chilean - many of the last were soldiers under Pinochet - Nepalese and Filipino.

And when the inevitable war against the occupiers began, we the occupying powers and, alas, most of the journalists invented a new narrative to escape punishment for our invasion. Our enemies were Saddam's "diehards", Baathist "remnants", regime "dead-enders".

Then the occupation forces killed Uday and Qusay and pulled Saddam from his hole in the ground and the resistance grew fiercer. So our enemies were now both "remnants" and "foreign fighters" - Al Qaeda - since ordinary Iraqis could not be in the resistance. We had to believe this. For had Iraqis joined the guerrillas, how could we explain that they didn't love their "liberators"?

At first, journalists were encouraged to explain that the insurgents came only from a few Sunni cities, "previously loyal to Saddam". Then the resistance was supposedly confined to Iraq's "Sunni triangle", but as the attacks leached north and south to Nasiriyah, Karbala, Mosul and Kirkuk, it turned into an octagon. Again, journalists were told about "foreign fighters," a failure to grasp the fact that 120,000 of the foreign fighters in Iraq were wearing American uniform.

Still there was no end to the mendacity of the occupation's "success". True, schools were rebuilt - and, shame upon the Iraqis involved, often looted a second time - and hospitals restored and students returned to college. But oil output figures were massaged and exaggerated and attacks on the Americans falsified.

At first, the occupying power only reported guerrilla attacks in which soldiers were killed or wounded. Then, when no one could hide the 60 or so assaults every night, the troops themselves were ordered not to make formal reports on bombings or attacks which caused no casualties. But by the war's first anniversary, every foreigner was a target.

In the meantime, the suicide bomber came into his own. The Turkish embassy, the Jordanian embassy, the United Nations, police stations across the land - 600 new Iraqi cops slaughtered in less than four months - and then the great shrines of Najaf and Karbala.

The Americans and British warned of the dangers of civil war - so did the journalists, of course - although no Iraqi had ever been heard to utter any demand for conflict with their fellow citizens.

Who actually wanted this "civil war"? Why would the Sunnis, a minority in the country, allow Al Qaeda to bring this about when they could not defeat the occupying power without at least passive Shia support?

While I was writing this report, my phone rang and a voice asked me if I would meet a man downstairs, a middle-aged Iraqi and a teacher at Cardiff College who had recently returned to Iraq, only to realize the state of fear and pain in which his country now existed.

His mother, he said, had just raised a million Iraqi dinars to pay a ransom for a local woman whose daughter and daughter-in-law were kidnapped by armed men in Baghdad in January.

The two girls had just called from Yemen where they had been sold into slavery. Another of his neighbours had just received her 17-year-old son after paying $5,000 to gunmen in the Karada area of Baghdad.

Two days ago, the kidnappers grabbed another child, this time in Mansour, and are now demanding $200,000 for his life. A close relative of my visitor - and remember this is just one man's experience out of a population of 26 million Iraqis - had also just survived a bloody attack on his car outside Karbala.

Driving south after winning a contract to run a garage in the city, he and his 11 companions in their AKEA vehicle were last week overtaken by men firing pistols at the car. One man died - he had 30 bullets in his body - and the relative, swamped in the blood of his friends, was the only man unwounded.

Not surprisingly, the occupation authorities decline to keep statistics on the number of Iraqis who have died since the "liberation," or during the invasion, for that matter, and prefer to talk about the "handover of sovereignty" from one American-appointed group of Iraqis to another, and to the constitution which is only temporary and may well fall apart before real elections are held - if they are held - next year.

If we could have foreseen all this - if we could have been patient and waited for the UN arms inspectors to finish their job rather than go to war and plead for patience later, when our own inspectors couldn't find those, oh so terrible weapons - would we have gone so blithely to war a year ago?

For that war has not ended. There has been no "end of major combat operations", just an invasion and an occupation that merged seamlessly into a long and ferocious war for liberation from the "liberators".

Just as the British invaded Iraq in 1917, proclaiming their determination to bring Iraqis liberation from their tyrants - General Maude used those very words - so we have repeated this grim narrative today.

The British who died in the subsequent Iraqi war of resistance lie now in the North Gate Cemetery on the edge of Baghdad, an enduring if largely neglected symbol of the folly of our occupation. - (c) The Independent

Concluded