A year on from 'Mission Accomplished', an Army in Disgrace, a Policy in
Tatters and the Real Prospect of Defeat

Against the odds, America has earned the hatred of ordinary Iraqis. In
Baghdad Patrick Cockburn sees the battle for hearts and minds
comprehensively lost.

by Patrick Cockburn
Sunday, May 2, 2004
Independent/UK

Wisps of gray smoke were still rising from the wreckage of four
Humvees caught by the blast of a bomb which had just killed two US
soldiers and wounded another five. It seemed they had been caught in a
trap.

When the soldiers smashed their way into an old brick house in the
Waziriya district of Baghdad last week, they were raiding what they
had been told was an insurgent bomb factory, only for it to erupt as
they came through the door. The reaction of local people, as soon as
the surviving American soldiers had departed, was to start a
spontaneous street party.

A small boy climbed on top of a blackened and smoldering Humvee and
triumphantly waved a white flag with an Islamic slogan hastily written
on it. Some other young men were showing with fascinated pride a
blood-soaked US uniform. Another group had found an abandoned
military helmet, and had derisively placed it on the head of an
elderly carthorse.

Iraqi women react as they wait outside the prison in Abu Ghraib, near
Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, May 2, 2004. Hundreds of Iraqis who have
relatives being held in the prison of Abu Ghraib demanded to see their
loved ones after the release of pictures allegedly showing prisoners
being humiliated by their U.S. captors. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

A year after President George Bush famously declared "major combat" in
Iraq over, how is it that so many Iraqis now have such a visceral
hatred of Americans? One reason is that the photographs of brutality
and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by British and American troops,
which have so shocked the rest ofthe world and angered Arab countries,
have come as little surprise to Iraqis. For months it has been clear
to them that the occupation is very brutal; for weeks they have been
watching pictures of the dead and injured in Fallujah on al-Jazeera
satellite television which CNN did not broadcast.

Iraqis, who are cynical about their rulers, may also suspect that real
as well as simulated torture is going on in Abu Ghraib prison, where
US intelligence calls the shots. They may suspect that, as under
Saddam Hussein, the humiliation and ill-treatment were quite
deliberately inflicted to soften up prisoners before they were
interrogated. More graphic pictures of real torture are said to have
been taken as well those shown on US television last week.

Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis knew that he
had ruined their lives through his disastrous wars against Iran and
Kuwait, andwere glad to be rid of him. Even the supposed beneficiaries
of his rule, the Sunni Arabs of cities such as Tikrit and Fallujah,
could not see why they were so much poorer than the people of other
oil states such as Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.

Watching the dancing, jeering crowd in Waziriya was Nada Abdullah
Aboud, a middle-aged woman, dressed in black. She had a reason for
hating Americans, though she claimed she did not do so. "I do feel
sorry for the young soldiers, though they killed my son," she said
quietly. "They came such a long distance to die here." It turned out
that her son, Saad Mohammed, had been the translator for a senior
Italian diplomat working for the ruling Coalition Provisional
Authority. She said: "My son was driving with the Italian ambassador
last September near Tikrit when an American soldier fired at the car
and shot him through the heart."

Saad Mohammed was one of a large but unknown number of Iraqis shot
down by US troops over the past year. There seems to have been no
rational reason why he had been killed. But the high toll of Iraqi
civilians shot down after ambushes or at checkpoints has given Iraqis
the sense that, at bottom, American soldiers regard them as an
inferior people whose lives are not worth very much.

Iraqis make very plain what they think about the occupation in private
conversation, but Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq, and the US
military command, shut away in their headquarters in Saddam's old
Republican Palace, had no idea of the growing hostility towards them
until April. Then, when they started the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf,
they discovered that aside from the Kurdish minority, Iraqis had
turned decisively against the occupation.

Another simple reason for disillusionment with the US is simply the
Americans' failure to restore normal life. Iraqis in Baghdad
continually say that Iraq recovered more quickly from the damage
inflicted by the first Gulf War under Saddam in 1991 than it did after
the second war in 2003.

Baghdad is a city on edge. Shopkeepers keep their stock at home in
case there is another outbreak of looting. The police are back on the
streets and there is less casual crime than last year, but it is still
more dangerous than it was under the old regime.

Abu Amir, a shopkeeper in the middle-class Jadriyah district of the
capital, said: "Under Saddam I sometimes did not make money in my
store, but I couldgo home in the evening without worrying if my son
had got back safely. Now there is looting everywhere. If you walk in
the streets maybe you will be shot by the Americans or by criminal
gangs fighting each other."

A curious achievement of the US over the past year has been to revive
Iraqi nationalism in Iraq. This had been largely discredited by
Saddam. But Fallujah and the pursuit of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical
Shia cleric, has meant that nationalism is once more respectable.

The extraordinary political weakness of the US in Iraq became evident
as never before last week. Despite having an overwhelming military
force available to take Fallujah and Najaf, the US did not dare do
so. It had become evident even in Washington that to crush the
resistance in either city - not a difficult task against a few
thousand lightly armed gunmen - would spread rather than end the
rebellion.

Even so, it was extraordinary to see Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a general
in Saddam's Republican Guard - disbanded like so much else in Iraq
last May - being driven into Fallujah on Friday in full uniform past
cheering crowds. The old Iraqi flag, now dropped by the US-appointed
Iraqi Governing Council, was being waved from his car window.

It is a measure of how far the Governing Council is out of touch with
ordinary Iraqi opinion that they should have voted to change the flag
in the first place. Mohammed, an engineer trying to patch up a broken
sewage pipe in Baghdad, still had time to express his fury at the
change. "Of course the occupation is a disaster," he said. "We
understand the Governing Council are American agents. But a man has to
be the worst of collaborators to change his country's flag."

On 30 June the US will be handing over very little to Iraqis. Security
remains firmly in US hands; so does control of money. One of the
biggest USmistakes was not to hold elections earlier, something
British and US officials admit in private could have been done. This
would have produced a legitimate Iraqi authority to which Iraqi
security forces could have given real loyalty. Dr Mahmoud Othman, a
member of the Governing Council, says: "Iraqis are never going to
fight other Iraqis under the orders of an American." This was amply
borne out when half of the US-trained security forces deserted or
mutinied in early April.

The tide is going out for the US in Iraq. They were not able to use
their military strength against Fallujah and Najaf. They have very
little political support outside Kurdistan. They can no longer win. It
may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in history.