Escape from Baghdad
Page 6
What I could see through the armoured windows was the usual stock-car race along the BIAP highway, six lanes of cars and trucks squeezing into every space, kamikaze drivers speeding the wrong way, donkey carts, abandoned vehicles stripped of tyres, seats, engine parts; anything removable was removed. There were blown up, burned-out and bullet-riddled wrecks, piles of garbage, plastic bags like kites drifting on the wind, women with children standing on the side of the road, and you weren’t sure if they wanted to cross or were lookouts warning bombers hidden on bridges and flyovers that the Great Satan was passing in his mobile fortress.
IEDs were getting more elaborate as the insurgents learned how to utilize pressure plates and explosively formed penetrators (EFPs). I had been keeping up to date on the counter-measures as well, which ranged from jammers operating at different frequencies to metal poles extending from the front of vehicles, sometimes with heated elements at the tip, to pre-detonate wire- or infra-red-triggered devices before the vehicle was in the target area.
It was a constantly changing game, and as soon as one set of counter-measures came in, the enemy was developing another technique to try to get around them. Rumour and intelligence both claimed that the more sophisticated explosives were being supplied over the border from Iran, the other main oil producer, which I could well believe.
Oil and war were the opposite of oil and water. They went together. This was the oil war, the juice offensive, the gas campaign. One day, Iraq would be as rich as Saudi Arabia, and the big oil companies were already positioning themselves to get a piece of the action. A day spent Googling combinations of war-oil-iraq-bush will give you nightmares and enough conspiracy theories to fill a library.
According to the Pentagon, EFPs were crossing the border from Iran and had been responsible for killing 170 US servicemen in Iraq since 2004. No one appeared to have told Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld that ‘democracy’ in Iraq with its 60 per cent Shia population would deliver the country into an alliance with Iran, virtually 100 per cent Shia, and America’s ideological enemy since Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979.
The dynamics of the region had not been considered, and it had been clear to me the first time I was in Iraq that no post-war reconstruction and nation-building strategy had been developed before the invasion in March 2003. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his inner circle at the Pentagon didn’t even seem to be bothered to pretend that they were not making it up as they went along.
There were many errors in the early months, allowing the sacking of the museum containing some of the world’s most ancient and important Mesopotamian artefacts for one; allowing the local population to loot and burn themselves back into the Stone Age was another; and thirdly the lack of any immediate and effective reconstruction effort to win over the local population and keep them busy. I mean this was Occupation 1.01, basic stuff. In addition, there were two dire, stand-out decisions that made the situation worse, if anyone could believe that possible, and, like the aftershocks of a volcano, would continue to carry a human and social cost for years to come.
The first of those ill-judged decisions was the sacking of everyone who had been a member of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, which meant the entire stratum of management that administered the ministries, local-government councils, universities, hospitals, the post office, public transport, registration of births, deaths and marriages, all the minutiae of civil life, including the management of every bank and corporation in Iraq. In one stroke, Paul Bremer, under orders from his boss Donald Rumsfeld, removed what little organization remained in an already chaotic nightmare.
Secondly, Bremer disbanded the police force and the armed forces, resulting in the consequent rise in crime across the board: revenge killings, kidnap, burglary – you name it, it increased. Slightly puzzling as well, since any prior thoughts of what the Coalition was going to do after dethroning Saddam and his regime had vaguely mentioned handing the responsibility for security straight to the Iraqi Police and Army. From a military standpoint, it was madness disbanding the army and sending one and a half million armed men home with no prospects of income to support their families except for crime or the insurgency.
Opening up the economy to market forces and genuine foreign exchange rates had already had a catastrophic effect on unemployment and recruitment into the insurgency. This was throwing petrol on to a fire.
Before the war, al-Qaeda did not operate in Iraq. Saddam had banned any entity that might compete with his own autocratic rule, and he and Osama bin Laden had been fierce enemies since bin Laden had offered to fight the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. However, within months of the war ending in 2003, foreign fighters were slipping over the completely porous border from impoverished Yemen, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Chechnya and God knows where else, lured by the incentive of a $1,000 reward for shooting an American soldier, the cash funnelled through militant groups reportedly bankrolled in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
It had been assumed by the architects of war that, when it was all over, the 26 million Iraqis would rush from their homes, those not flattened in the blitzkrieg, and cast flowers before the marching boots and rolling tank tracks. Old men would weep. Girls would cast off their veils and dance. After thirty years of Saddam despotism they would gratefully accept an imposed democracy and vote for the US-friendly exiles flocking home in their Western-style suits with entourages of men in dark glasses.
It didn’t happen and no one in the White House, or in Whitehall for that matter, seemed to have spared a moment to consider how many Coalition troops were going to be needed to hold this three-ring circus together after victory. The generals had estimated half a million. Rumsfeld had reckoned thirty thousand, and allegedly fired anyone who didn’t agree. No plan or orders had been disseminated to those on the ground to guide them after Saddam’s government fell. Coalition combat units reached their military objectives, dug in, and then watched while the local population pillaged and burned their own cities, out of control for weeks.
War. A moment of neo-con madness. After the annihilation of the Twin Towers in New York President Bush had seemed weak and at a loss. He had to make a show of strength to punish al-Qaeda. Afghanistan fitted the bill. Fair enough, it was and still is a haven for the al-Qaeda leadership, their cells and training camps.
But as for Iraq, no one outside of the White House or the Pentagon really knew why they had invaded the place. We had spent many evenings debating all the most likely rumours and conspiracy theories – many of them quite believable – but at the end of the day none of us really knew.
Oil seemed the most likely answer, but even I was swinging around to the belief that even that may have been just another red herring. The fact that Bush and most of his team in the White House were oil men and Iraq was sitting on the world’s second-largest deposits of oil after Saudi Arabia, may have played a part in their decision to punish Iraq for 9/11. But just as Iraq’s armed forces weren’t fit to stand up to a First World army for more than a couple of weeks, the basic infrastructure of the Iraqi oil industry had been in a steady state of collapse since the British had built it nearly fifty years previously. Billions of dollars would have to be spent over at least a decade to uncap even a fraction of its potential.
The justification for war was Saddam Hussein’s build-up of weapons of mass destruction. It was discussed at the UN. Many times. The UK produced a study later found to be some student’s PhD thesis taken off the Internet; and in the US, General Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, provided the UN Security Council with a montage of aerial images showing what looked like mobile homes modelled by five-year-olds. The anti-war alliance laughed, and even the general didn’t look as if he believed what he was saying. It didn’t matter. Bush, Rumsfeld, the neo-cons and thus America were going to war. You’re either with us or against us.
Just before Christmas, I had read in the press that a British diplomat in the UN who had spent four and half years reading through the US and UK
intelligence every day confirmed that the British government knew full well that Iraq’s WMD capability did not pose any threat to the UK. It was effectively agreed between the US and UK that any threat had been contained already.
This information had been suppressed at the time of the invasion, under threat of breaking the Official Secrets Act. The diplomat also confirmed that a constant topic of discussion between US and UK officials was that Iraq would dissolve into chaos if invaded and regime change occurred. Interestingly, he also pointed out that the argument for UN sanctions against Iraq at the time was not because they believed Iraq had an effective WMD capability, but because they were failing to show properly documented proof of their destruction.
The elusive WMDs were never found and were no longer mentioned. There were no dirty bombs filled with anthrax and plague, no nuclear programme, no long-range missiles capable of being launched and reaching ‘British interests’ within 45 minutes, as Prime Minister Tony Blair had told the House of Commons.
Iraq was, and remains, a Third World country where, outside the cities, most people live in mud-brick houses without water or electricity and scratch out a living from the small arable areas around the great rivers that pass through the unforgiving desert, using the same tools as their ancestors used in biblical times.
It was shocking to me arriving in Iraq in the autumn of 2003, six months after victory, that most CF soldiers didn’t know why they were there. Many thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11. They were there in this desert hell to subdue an imaginary al-Qaeda that was in fact unwelcome in Iraq and outlawed by Saddam.
I never pretended to know the answer myself, although it was a frequent topic of conversation amongst Westerners and Iraqis both. It seemed to me that the announcement of the ‘War on Terror’ was the very flame that had ignited Islamists on a global scale, and now even the War on Terror was being re-branded. The PR managers had tried calling it the ‘Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism’, but that had the same suspect resonance as illegal combatant or extraordinary rendition. In the Pentagon they had settled on ‘The Long War’ – four years so far at a cost in the spring of 2007 already rising above half a trillion dollars.
In the meantime that was half a trillion dollars of free advertising budget to every Islamist terror group in the world. From Pakistan to Indonesia, from Chechnya to Iran, from Syria to the Gaza Strip and literally dozens of other countries from Asia to Africa, it was clear to every Muslim that a Christian coalition had invaded a Muslim country and that the Muslim population was suffering as a result of it. The word ‘crusade’ carries extremely negative associations in the Muslim historical memory, and it was unfortunate that George W. Bush used it to describe his war on terror, and specifically the terror being espoused by Islamist militants. Small details such as the fact that the vast majority of the Iraqis were being killed by other Iraqis were beside the point. Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global jihad had never enjoyed more support.
It is also shocking to me that few of those eager to rush to war in 2003 had ever seen war – Blair, Bush and many of the neo-cons, for example.
CHAPTER 7
IT WAS HOT and stuffy inside the body of the Humvee, noisy too. I wanted to hear more about Sammy, his family, Colonel McQueen’s plans, but I wasn’t going to shout over the noise and Cobus seemed content to gaze into space while he stroked his moustache.
It took us twenty minutes to drive down Route Irish. There were no dramas. The convoy slowed as we rolled through the chicanes approaching the West Gate. Civilian vehicles were lined up, waiting to be checked. We shot past them. The guards nodded to our gunners, and I was back in the Green Zone, the ‘bubble’, the International Zone, twenty square blocks of relative safety in a land still ripping itself apart.
Saddam must have been creating his own version of heaven among the marble monuments and numerous palaces, the effect lessened these days by the earth berms and T-walls made of blast-proof concrete slabs hung with chain-link fences and coils of razor wire, the zone watched over from checkpoints guarded by M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. It was, as Colonel McQueen once said, the ultimate gated community.
The route to McQueen’s office in an annexe of the US Embassy took us past some sights I remembered – the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and the enormous crossed sabres at the old parade ground, the backdrop for countless group photos of soldiers and contractors like me. I looked at it thoughtfully, remembering the ‘last photo’ we had taken there as a team before I had left Iraq, never expecting to come back.
As we rolled into the embassy car park, a medevac Blackhawk clattered in overhead, no doubt carrying some poor sod whose war had come to a painful end on a lonely desert highway. I could also see a couple of Marine Corps choppers out in the distance, a CH-46 and an escorting Cobra – a busy day in the sky, although the ubiquitous Blackwater ‘Little Birds’ were nowhere to be seen.
On the corner leading down to the river and the ‘CSH’ or ‘cash’, Combat Support Hospital, I could just about make out the shell of the Ba’ath Party HQ where Saddam had built his underground bunker, the dictator knowing in his subconscious that one day he’d be blasted out of office.
The old HQ was now overshadowed by a new recreation centre. The US was good at exporting Americana for its troops abroad. In every theatre I had been in, US bases were popular destinations for iconic brands of burgers and pizza. You could find most things in the PX/AAFES, but this was the first time I had seen a shopping mall built in a war zone. I looked forward to a quick tour through the shops before I left.
The new 100-acre US Embassy rising above the Tigris had the appearance of a prison, the construction cranes on the roof like giant vultures gazing out at the earth-walled houses of the city below. The complex is a fortress within the fortress, like Saddam’s bunker, but so much larger, the largest embassy in the world – in fact, as big as the Vatican City.
I could already imagine the air-conditioned comfort within, the cinemas, restaurants, pools, gyms, hairdressers, parks and schools that would be 500m and an infinity away from the apocalyptic death zone outside, where my friend Sammy and his family were in hiding.
Why the United States needed to build its largest embassy in the world in Baghdad was the subject of endless rumour and argument, although all that untapped oil buried below the desert may have had something to do with it. The cost of construction was getting up to a $1 billion, the money allocated from the emergency Iraq budget agreed in Congress.
I don’t want to seem cynical, but when I got to speak to the Iraqis in the coming days, they saw this architectural monstrosity as the symbol of who actually runs their country and, more important, an indication of how long they intended to stay. Americans have two eyes, an Iraqi friend told me, one on the natural resources and the other on their strategic position.
Iraq is encircled by Iran, Syria, Turkey and Jordan, and is just a short hop to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
On Iraq’s eastern border lies Iran and, beyond Iran, Afghanistan. With its nuclear aspirations, support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and elsewhere globally, and a more cloudy but nonetheless cordial relationship with Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) militants in Gaza and Syria, Iran had been a pain in the dark places of US foreign policy for decades. Maintaining a secure presence in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t merely logical, it almost looked planned.
There was talk of standing down the troops. But standing down in this instance simply meant getting the soldiers off the streets. No one in Baghdad, from the US officers to the gossips in the market place, believed for a moment that those 100 acres of fortified US facilities was anything but a state-of-the-art platform for the US presence in the area.
Most observers consider the post-war phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom a costly, catastrophic disaster. But a lot of Iraqis I have spoken to don’t see it that way at all. They could not believe the most powerful country on earth was governed by a bunch of bungling, disorganized idiots (their words,
not mine). On the contrary, they view the chaos as a punishment, a carefully conceived strategy devised by Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and the Pentagon hawks.
I was amused to hear that the rationale behind this theory was that they believed the ‘punishment’ was in revenge for the ‘massive defeat’ inflicted on the US by Saddam in the first Gulf War, a victory they honestly believed in. After all, this ‘Mother of All Battles’ had lost the elder President Bush and his Republican Party a second term in office. To a nation used to nepotism and the corruption of power, it was no surprise that George Bush Junior was (a) the present President of the United States and (b) determined to wipe the stain of defeat from his family name.
For Iraqis, the war wasn’t a war at all. The combined-arms blitzkrieg with which in only three weeks Coalition Forces inflicted military defeat on a country that had fought the numerically superior Iranians for eight years was, to Iraqis, literally incredible. The subsequent looting was a passionate and hysterical release of euphoria in their newfound ‘freedom’, a barbaric orgy while GIs stood by in their sunglasses watching thieves walk out of ruined hospitals with MRI scanning machines and from the museum with precious 6,000-year-old sculptures.
American and British bombing had taken out infrastructure as required in order to achieve military victory in the field. The mobs were allowed to strip the buildings down even to the doors, windows and wiring, taking Baghdad, and many other cities, back into the Middle Ages. As far as the locals were concerned, that had been the US plan from the beginning.