The Osterley Times: Patrick Cockburn: Iraq is a country no more. Like much else, that was not the plan

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Patrick Cockburn: Iraq is a country no more. Like much else, that was not the plan

It's always worth reading whatever Patrick Cockburn has to say about Iraq as he is the only journalist still operating outside of the green zone in Baghdad.

Today he says that Iraq is no longer even a country:

Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.

And he highlights the lengths that Maliki's government will go to in it's insistence that violence is down in today's Iraq:

When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel, killing 70 people, the police beat and drove away a television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left.

And he argues that one of the reasons for the breakup of Iraq as a nation was down to the arrogance of the US/UK invaders and their belief that they would be greeted as liberators and that this assumption was reinforced by the fact that the Iraqi Army dissolved and refused to fight them in a conventional way.

The war was too easy. Consciously or subconsciously, Americans came to believe it did not matter what Iraqis said or did. They were expected to behave like Germans or Japanese in 1945, though most of Iraqis did not think of themselves as having been defeated. There was later to be much bitter dispute about who was responsible for the critical error of dissolving the Iraqi army. But at the time the Americans were in a mood of exaggerated imperial arrogance and did not care what Iraqis, whether in the army or out of it, were doing. "They simply thought we were wogs," says Ahmad Chalabi, the opposition leader, brutally. "We didn't matter."
In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn.

And he argues that, although many Iraqis - especially the Shia's and the Kurds - were relieved to see Saddam removed, that no Iraqi of any description wanted to see their country occupied.

In that first year of the occupation it was easy to tell which way the wind was blowing. Whenever there was an American soldier killed or wounded in Baghdad, I would drive there immediately. Always there were cheering crowds standing by the smoking remains of a Humvee or a dark bloodstain on the road. After one shooting of a soldier, a man told me: "I am a poor man but my family is going to celebrate what happened by cooking chicken.

And, of course, most famously, when civil war broke out both Bush and Blair denied what was apparent to all and watched as Iraqis ethnically cleansed huge areas and divided themselves into the ethnic ghettos which the US have now erected concrete walls around and proclaimed peace.

It's a disaster. And as Cockburn states:

Five years after the American and British armies crossed into Iraq, the country has become a geographical expression.

Even Henry Kissinger is now admitting that holding Iraq together as country might not be possible.

"If you mean by clear military victory an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he said.

But in a BBC interview Sunday morning, Kissinger said the U.S. course needs to be redefined -- and the breakup of Iraq could be the eventual outcome.