We
are bid to celebrate the fourth birthday of a lie. In 2003, they lied
about Iraq's weapons arsenal. They lied about Saddam Hussein's
"imminent threat" to Britain. Some of them lied that he was involved in
9/11. Today, steeped in the psychology of denial, they lie that things
are really fine, are getting better, are better than before, are on the
turn. There might have been mistakes, but there was no Great Mistake.
What of those who pretended not to lie, who slunk to the back of the
room, said it was not their department, "trusted Tony", did what they
were told, kept their heads down? This was the Downing Street set that
covered their lies by jeering at critics and boasting they were so
clever they could "write their own narrative". They hired Hutton and
Butler to "handle the truth", which they carefully "did not kill but
did not strive, officiously to keep alive".
Britons
should not celebrate the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Celebration is for those lucky Iraqis entitled to feel genuinely better
for four years of freedom from Saddam, the salutary boon to the
otherwise calamitous affliction visited on their country. The important
anniversary is not that of the past but of the future. Can March 2008
see five years of western intervention finally reversed and a silver
lining appear on the black cloud of Mesopotamia?
The "surge"
programme initiated last month by General Petraeus in Baghdad is the
first intelligent thing the Americans have done in four years. By
swamping neighbourhoods, monitoring entry, patrolling streets and
giving personal protection to residents and tradesmen, troops are able
to restore some order to portions of the city. Petraeus is replacing
vigilantes, militias and corrupt police with his own soldiers. He
cannot reverse the ethnic cleansing that is fast partitioning Baghdad
into Sunni and Shia quarters, but he can stabilise what has occurred.
He can fortify the ghettos.
After four years of disorder there
can be little hope that such security might last. On Day 1 it might
have reassured and stabilised Baghdad. On Day 1,460 it is too late.
Iraq is gripped by the most rudimentary street-based gang warfare, in
which security lies not in soldiers but in families, guns, walls,
streets, barricades and only faces you can recognise. To call this a
"civil war" is pointless, a misnomer. It is Guelphs and Ghibellines out
of the Corleone mafia.
The Americans cannot possibly find tens of
thousands of troops needed to police every block in Baghdad for months,
let alone years. That Petraeus had to bring Kurdish peshmergas down
from the north to support his surge speaks volumes of the uselessness
of the Iraqi army and police. Embedded journalists visiting bases in
Sadr City and elsewhere report that militias are simply waiting for the
Americans to leave. It makes a change for Americans to be protecting
Iraqis, after two years of pretending to train the Iraqi army. But the
most the surge can do is give some Iraqi neighbourhoods a breathing
space and Washington a few nice pictures. The Iraq police, that fine
flower of Pentagon nation-building, is beyond parody as a plausible
force of law and order.
Turning the armed gangs into some sort of
disciplined corps over the next year holds the key to civil security in
Iraq. For the 2 million Iraqis in internal and external exile to return
to active economic life requires them to feel safe in their homes and
streets. Foreigners cannot guarantee that, nor can any national army or
police. They are not trusted. The coming year must see parleys between
local commanders, sheikhs and religious leaders, neighbourhood
alliances, deals and treaties. Such crude life-and-death negotiations
will be the only shreds of civil autonomy left to the Iraqis after four
years of occupation, all that is left to them with which to rebuild
their civic institutions.
The greatest fallacy of the coming year
is that America or Britain might have any role to play in making March
2008 happier than 2007. While American search-and-destroy patrols roam
Anbar province, al-Qaida cells will continue to recruit insurgents from
abroad and foment sectarian hatred. While American tanks crash down
streets and shoot up villages, they brutalise all they touch. The
arrogance that only by staying can we ensure that "things get better"
or that "civil war is averted" is now beyond obscenity. There may be an
embassy to protect or an airport to defend. But the presence of foreign
troops on Iraq's streets and Iraq's soil is a humiliation and a
provocation alike. They are in occupation but not in power.
Whether
or not Iraq is now progressively "partitioned" is largely a matter of
terms. It has not been a unitary state for 10 years and is certainly
not so today. It is a nation of a thousand neighbourhoods, each with
degrees of anarchic sovereignty. The 2005 constitution, recently
refashioned, divided up Iraq's oil wealth on reasonably fair terms.
Different
legal codes are likely to be introduced for Kurdish, Sunni and Shia
regions, with women repressed in the south. But even then some vague
confederacy may survive the Iraqi craving for nationhood.
Economies
recover, the more quickly the sooner they are left in peace. The
hoodlums and gangsters now rich on American aid will harness the oil
exports and eventually find a vested interest in protecting
infrastructure and utilities. Religious segregation will enable the
ghettos to feel more secure. Business will emerge from the bottom up,
and doctors, teachers and merchants will start to move back from Amman
and Damascus, once they hear that their old homes are safe and the
Mahdists and Badrists are confined to barracks. Economic activity will
return to the streets, as it has done to Beirut.
The one thing
that would speed this day is for everyone just to leave Iraq alone.
Last week, the opposite happened. A nightmare convocation of 13
nations, including Americans, Britons, Russians, French, Syrians,
Iranians, Chinese, Saudis, Jordanians and Egyptians, piled into Baghdad
to congratulate each other on their courage in descending amid the
carnage and declare their eagerness to help Iraq. They talked trade,
security, borders, aid, oil, refugees and working groups galore. They
patted each other on the back and went home. Poor Iraq, I thought.
First the lies and now, even worse, they must suffer more help.
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
