The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  9

  The War’s Aftermath

  The toll of coalition fatalities was nevertheless surprisingly light, 122 American, 33 British. Of the British dead, six had been killed in action, the others in accidents or by ‘friendly fire’. A higher proportion of Americans were killed in combat but, again, most were victims of accident and some of attack by their own aircraft. Almost all were young, under thirty, some very young. War is a young man’s – now also a young woman’s – business; one American who died was Army PFC Lori Ann Piestewa, aged twenty-three. Almost all the British dead bore identifiably traditional British names, Stratford, Allbut, McCue, Evans, Ballard, Tweedie. One, however, was a citizen of the Irish Republic, Ian Malone, serving in the Irish Guards, another a black Zimbabwean, Christopher Muzvuru, an Irish Guards piper. A high proportion were senior NCOs or junior officers, evidence of the dangers always attaching to leadership in combat.

  Among the American dead, too, many were NCOs or junior officers, marine gunnery sergeants, army warrant officers, captains, second lieutenants. The names testify to the kaleidoscopic origins of the American nation. Many were Hispanic or Slav, from recent immigrations, others Teutonic or Scandinavian from the great North European influx of the nineteenth century. A considerable number were as British as those of the 1st (UK) Armoured Division’s dead, Tristan Aitken, Nicolas Hodson, George Mitchell, Wilfred Bellard, names that might have been found among the emigrants on the Mayflower. The American armed forces are truly representative of the American people, who so devotedly support their soldiers, sailors and airmen.

  The number of Iraqi dead has not yet been counted. Since there were no great battles in the war, it is unlikely that casualties in the Iraqi armed forces were high. Most of the conscripts of the regular army drifted away before the fighting began. Casualties may have been higher among the Republican Guard but it, too, avoided heavy combat. Such serious fighting as was done was by ‘fighters’ – not uniformed soldiers but Saddam’s political militiamen, devotees of the Ba’ath party and foreigners, Islamicist volunteers from Syria, Algeria and other Muslim countries seeking the opportunity to give their lives for the faith. The total of their dead will probably never be known but must have amounted to several thousand. The number of civilian dead was much lower, thanks to the careful precision of coalition air attack on populated areas.

  Prisoners there were none. In the heat of combat such small groups as offered their surrender were made captive but they were not long detained. One of the first acts of the occupiers was to decree the disbandment of the Iraqi army and the battlefield detainees were released to their homes, whither most of their comrades-in-arms had already made their own way. The only Iraqis the victors sought to apprehend were leaders of the régime and identifiable violators of human rights.

  In retrospect the disbandment of the army was a serious mistake, one of several made by the American interim administration in the immediate aftermath of the Saddam régime’s collapse. It released several hundred thousand young men onto the unemployment market, leaving them unpaid and discontented, at precisely the moment when the need became apparent to rebuild Iraq’s security forces. The mistake was repeated when the national police force was not kept in being. The occupiers had defensible grounds for both acts, since they feared that retention of the army might perpetuate the power of a major Ba’athist institution, while the police force was tainted by violations of human rights. The occupiers argued, persuasively, that the police force would have to be recreated, from freshly recruited entrants trained by Westerners.

  The disappearance of the police – which could probably not have been averted in the immediate aftermath – had regrettable effects in the days following Saddam’s downfall. Looters appeared in thousands and began to pillage. At first their targets were the office buildings of the régime in the government quarter of Baghdad; seventeen out of twenty-three ministries were ransacked. American troops managed to protect the Ministry for Oil, the resumption of oil production being judged essential to the country’s reconstruction, but there were too few troops to save the others. Then the looters turned to nongovernmental facilities, including hospitals and schools. The looters, some ex-prisoners released from the city gaols, others simply the poor of the back streets, stole anything portable. Computers were a favourite piece of booty, and air-conditioning units, but eventually completely worthless items were carried or wheeled away. In the process enormous quantities of documents, essential to reorganization and reconstruction, were destroyed or irretrievably dispersed. Looting spread wider. The looters began systematically to strip copper wire out of the telephone networks and electrical distribution systems, making communication and power, interrupted by the war and the damage war had caused, impossible to restore without elaborate and expensive repair. There was also cultural damage. Iraq, home to the world’s oldest civilizations, was a treasure trove of antiquities, originally collected by European scholars, later piously preserved by dedicated Iraqi scholars and conservationists. For some weeks it was believed that the Iraqi National Museum had been emptied of its treasures, a story that led to wild denunciation of the invasion in the Western press. Later, fortunately, it was discovered that the museum staffs had been able to hide almost all the exhibits in the vaults.

  Looting was destructive but merely anarchic. After a few chaotic weeks there was little left to steal, householders in the richer quarters were defending their properties and the American troops had established rough-and-ready order in the streets. Looting, however, merged into and was succeeded by organized attacks by intransigents on the occupying forces. Anarchy, in the Sunni central region, gave way to insurgency, organized and vicious. The attackers were the same people as the ‘fighters’ who had raised most of the resistance to the invasion in March and April. They were ex–Saddam militiamen, fedayeen, Ba’ath party members and foreign fighters, whose numbers were reinforced by an influx of Islamic extremists from other Arab countries, filtering across the unguarded borders. Their methods, familiar to the Israeli troops fighting the Intifada but also to the British with experience in Northern Ireland, were those of terrorism – attacks on patrols by gunmen who disappeared into side streets, roadside car bombs – intensified by the self-sacrifice of suicide bombers. The British in the Shi’a south were spared the worst; an appalling incident, when six military policemen training Iraqi police recruits were massacred, proved to be an isolated event, apparently provoked by a local dispute over possession of weapons. It was the Americans in and around Baghdad, in the ‘Sunni triangle’, who were consistently attacked, leading to a steady drip of deaths. In August the ‘fighters’ extended their reach. On 14 August a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian embassy, killing seventeen. On 19 August a suicide truck bomber drove into the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the Special Representative, Sergio Viera de Mello, and twenty others. On 28 August a leading Shi’a cleric, who advocated co-operation with the Americans, was killed by a car bomb in Najaf, one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest cities. A few days later Akila al-Hashemi, one of the women members of the American-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council, was assassinated outside her house. American military deaths continued almost day by day, to reach 500 by the end of the year.

  The fighters persisted despite the evident approval most Iraqis showed for the overthrow of Saddam. Polls demonstrated that 80 per cent of Iraqis welcomed the dictator’s fall. Support was absolute in the Kurdish north, which had effectively reverted to self-rule, and almost universal in the Shi’a south where, after a brief period of instability, the British had succeeded in restoring order and winning the co-operation of the inhabitants, much assisted by the early restoration of essential services. The Sunni recalcitrants were either Saddam loyalists, whom defeat had deprived of privileges and employment, or foreigners who had entered Iraq to carry on the war against the Great Satan of America. A leading terrorist group was Ansar al-Islam, allied to al-Qaeda, which had briefly occupied a ‘liberated zone’ in the Kurd
ish north, during the period when Kurdistan had escaped from Saddam’s control. Its members fled after the American occupation to Iran, then infiltrated back again. The spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam, the mullah Mustapha Kriekar, in exile in Norway, compared the activities of Ansar al-Islam in Iraq to al-Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan. ‘The resistance’, he told an Arabic language television channel, ‘is not only a reaction to the American invasion, it is part of the continuous Islamic struggle since the collapse of the Caliphate. All Islamic struggles since then are part of one organized effort to bring back the Caliphate.’

  It was anomalous that Saddam’s apparent avengers should have invoked the Caliphate, since his secularist régime was anathema to Islamic fundamentalists. Their appeal to the Caliphate also partook of myth rather than reality. The last Caliphate, which had its seat in the Ottoman capital at Istanbul, had no connection, either by endorsement of the Umma, the Muslim community, or by blood, with the family of the prophet, to justify its status. Endorsement by the Umma was the Sunni orthodoxy, blood descent the Shi’a orthodoxy. The Ottoman Turks had simply assumed the Caliphate, by right of conquest, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Caliphate, moreover, had been abolished by a secular Muslim, Mustapha Kemal, in 1925; no Westerner had been involved. Not even by the most tortuous theological logic could the infidel West be held responsible for the Caliphate’s termination.

  It was most unlikely, in any case, that a dominant constituency for the re-establishment of the Caliphate could have been assembled in post-Saddam Iraq. The surviving Ba’athists were secularist, so were many of the Sunni population. The Shi’a, though a majority in Iraq, were a minority in the Muslim world. Whatever views they advanced about the Caliphate would have been rejected by most of their co-religionists in the wider Muslim lands. Indeed, even among the Shi’a, the beliefs and the methods of the terrorists were an abhorrence. The Western conquerors, uninvolved as they were on one religious side or the other, were therefore pursuing an objectively uncontroversial policy in their efforts to establish an efficient, modernizing post-Saddam regime.

  Unfortunately, the American efforts got off to a bad start. The British in the south, with their long imperial experience, took the pragmatic view that the priority was to establish law and order, working with whoever appeared co-operative, and to restore essential services. By September electricity supplies in Basra had been returned to normal and most other facilities, such as schools and hospitals, were operating efficiently. Crime was under control, the streets were safe and terrorism had been quashed. The Americans adopted an ideological approach. They sought an immediate transformation of Iraq from a tyranny to a functioning democracy, believing that liberation from Saddam would motivate a sufficient number of pro-democratic Iraqis to assume effective governmental functions within a few months. To oversee the democratization of Iraq, the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon, which had assumed the lead function, appointed a retired general, Jay Garner, to lead a team of Pentagon-vetted officials with authority to institute governmental functions. General Garner’s organization, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was answerable to the expeditionary commander, General Tommy Franks. The State Department had, before the war, drawn up an elaborate collection of policy documents, the ‘Future of Iraq Project’, suggesting guidelines for reconstruction and transitional governmental procedures. On the Pentagon’s assumption of responsibility for Iraqi postwar affairs, however, they were set aside. The future of Iraq was to be decided, paradoxically, by the dictates of a military organization committed to idealistic democratic goals. Its brief was to hand over the administration of the country to a group of unpolitical Iraqi leaders within ninety days.

  It became quickly apparent that the Garner transitional régime was inadequate to its task. Its personnel were naïve and under-trained, it lacked a rational plan of procedure. On 12 May Garner was replaced as presidential envoy by Paul Bremer, a former counter-terrorism expert at the State Department. He also had close Pentagon connections. Bremer established better relations with Central Command, which had fallen into quarrels with Garner’s team. He also made it a priority to tackle the problem of terrorism. ORHA became the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), with largely new personnel.

  Bremer began at once to create a new Iraqi police force, with an initial strength of 40,000. Training academies were set up and Western police leaders brought to Iraq to instruct the trainers in Western policing methods. The trainers proved both enthusiastic and brave; bravery was needed, since the terrorists instantly targeted the men in new uniform. Recruitment remained a difficulty. The CPA had set its face against enlisting former servants of the Saddam régime but ex-policemen provided the most obvious enlistees. It was Bremer who also decided ill-advisedly on the complete disbandment of the army. A future Iraq would need a properly trained army and there was no better time to establish one than when large numbers of Western troops, models of what post-Saddam soldiers should be, were present on the territory. Bremer, however, was determined to make a clean sweep. As a result, several hundred thousand ex-soldiers were demobilized and turned onto the employment market which could not absorb them. Discontented and unpaid, they easily yielded recruits to the terrorist campaign.

  Bremer also decided to exclude members of the Ba’ath party from new government employment. He thereby deprived the CPA of the services of most of the country’s most experienced experts and officials. His dilemma repeated that of the Allied Military Government of Germany in 1945. It had originally adopted, for moral and ideological reasons, a policy of de-Nazification, treating all former members of the Nazi party as disqualified to resume the positions they had held under Hitler. Since almost everyone in a position of responsibility had been obliged to join the party, or had found it difficult not to do so, post-1945 Germany was deprived in the crisis of surrender and occupation of the services of those people most urgently needed for the country’s reconstruction. As a result there was a compromise: de-Nazification was accelerated, sometimes dispensed with altogether. Principal beneficiaries of the policy of turning a blind eye were the German secret weapons scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who was transformed from a Nazi favourite to an American citizen at headlong speed. Ironically it was his principal invention, the V-2 rocket, which, in its Iraqi version, formed a principal target of UNSCOM’s and UNMOVIC’s inspections.

  The CPA was eventually obliged to adopt the attitude of the postwar occupiers of Germany, interviewing Ba’ath party members on a pragmatic, person-by-person basis and exempting from penalty almost all those judged necessary to the reconstruction programme.

  De-Ba’athification did not apply in the selection of members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), established in July 2003. Its twenty-five members represented all Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurds, Christians, Assyrians, Turkoman and others; three were women, an unprecedented departure from normalities even in Saddam’s secularist society, where women’s nominal equality had not accorded them political representation. None had been Ba’athists. Their consequent unfamiliarity with the exercise of power at first hampered their ability to launch and direct reconstruction programmes. Shortage of funds, however, was not one of their problems. On 10 June 2003, Paul Bremer announced that $100 million was to be made available for reconstruction, all the money to be spent through Iraqi companies, so as to provide employment and credit to domestic businesses. In the longer term, finance for reconstruction would be supplied by Iraqi oil revenues. The initial funds were a transfer from the American treasury.

  The status of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and of the Iraqi Governing Council, was regularized on 22 May 2003 by the adoption at the UN of Resolution 1483, which declared an end to the régime of sanctions against Iraq, in force since 1990, and gave legal authority to the occupation of Iraq by the coalition forces. The export of oil, destined to pay for the reconstruction, was authorized, the proceeds to be vested in th
e CPA. On 16 October the Security Council extended its approval of postwar arrangements in Iraq by adopting Resolution 1551, which recognized the legitimacy of the Coalition Provisional Authority and urged the establishment of a constitutional conference to assist the Iraqi Governing Council in settling the future government of Iraq.

  The governments which had most stridently opposed the war, France and Germany foremost, continued to express their hostility to the coalition’s actions. Russia, at first an opponent, relented; in October it decided to back the Americans. The French and Germans remained intransigent. Though they both demanded ‘rights’ in the determination of Iraq’s future form of government, basing their claims on ill-defined appeals to ‘international democracy’, they declined to offer money to Iraq’s reconstruction programme. Both declined to provide troops to the international force, which by 2004 included contingents from thirty-five countries, such as Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Romania, the Czech Republic, Norway, Portugal and South Korea.

  Despite the enlargement of the international occupation force, and the creation of a new inspection team, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), in succession to UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, the one front in which the coalition failed to make progress was in the location and identification of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The ISG, which was led by David Kay, the American former UN weapons inspector, published its interim report in October 2003. Its content, and his subsequent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in the last week of January 2004, lent comfort to the opponents of President Bush in the United States and to the many critics of the war in Britain. Both were taken to substantiate the view that there was no reliable intelligence support for Anglo-American allegations of Saddam’s continuing possession and development of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. Dr Kay in fact said no such thing. While admitting that he doubted if large stocks of WMD would be found, an embarrassment to both the American and British governments which had advertised before the invasion their certainty of such discoveries, he qualified his doubts about the WMD threat by stating his belief in the existence of smaller stocks of WMD still hidden on Iraqi territory, Saddam’s sponsorship ‘right up to the end’ of such programmes as the refinement of the deadly poison ricin, his maintenance of a ballistic missile development programme, assisted by the import of foreign technology, and the resumption of nuclear weapons development. He also revealed to The Sunday Telegraph that he had evidence of the transfer by Saddam of WMD to Syrian territory.