WAR STILL deracinates. The bangs and the cries and the blood suspend normal reason and turn means into ends. “We kill and break things,” says a US Marine proudly. He goes into Fallujah and does just that, cameras rolling. But then a soldier is filmed killing an unarmed man in cold blood and we are shocked. Horror movie becomes reality. This is not the moral script. Hey, soldier, you shouldn’t have done that.
There are many things soldiers would be better not doing, including going to Iraq in the first place. They would be better not putting cities to fire and the sword and calling it “building democracy”. But America wants it. Tony Blair and his Labour Party want it. In Vietnam the Americans destroyed the village to save it. In Iraq we destroy the city to save it.
Yesterday’s image from Fallujah of a Marine shooting a wounded prisoner in a mosque was indeed shocking. Yet a camera never tells the whole tale. Mujahidin regularly boobytrap themselves when dying. Any movement in an apparently inert body could be an act of detonation. My own instinct in this lethal context might well be to shoot first and consult the rules later. We put soldiers in this moral swamp and can hardly complain when sometimes the swamp overwhelms them.
The streets of Fallujah are not Kentish Town police station, nor was Abu Ghraib prison Wormwood Scrubs. Yet these awful incidents make an impact for being suddenly so ordinary. We blank out the use of cluster shells against villages and thousand pounders on residential districts because the resulting horror is beyond our ken. It is like a computer game. But we recognise the abuse and killing of unarmed prisoners. Such events turn statistics into human beings. It is the deed not the dead that shocks us.
Nothing in Iraq has so illumined the folly of this occupation as the now completed suppression of Fallujah. When Napoleon entered Moscow in 1812 after the Battle of Borodino, he was mystified. He too found a city emptied of people. He found buildings aflame on all sides. There was no enemy to admit defeat and no one to supply his troops. The Muscovites had simply melted away, taking their food and their pride with them. Napoleon had conquered not an empire but a desert, and that desert eventually consumed his army and forced its retreat.
The assault on Fallujah was billed as the defining battle of the war. The conquest would make possible the January elections, talisman of the entire occupation. This city of 250,000 people, less than an hour west of Baghdad on the main Jordan road, was a base for terror attacks throughout the Sunni triangle. Without Fallujah under control, it was argued, elections would be hopeless.
Yet hopeless too must be the holding of Fallujah. Such cities cannot be subjugated by American troops for any period of time. The new Iraq Army, virtually useless in the assault, cannot take their place. They would desert en masse, as 400 reportedly did during the siege. The only Iraqi troops prepared to fight the Sunnis are their sworn enemies, the Kurdish peshmerga irregulars. To leave them garrisoning Fallujah would be madness. As for the repopulation of the city — from which 90 per cent of citizens are said to have fled — this will bring back the guerrillas and put the Americans under renewed attack.
The Russian general, Kutusov, called Moscow “the sponge that will suck Napoleon dry”. Sunni Iraq is taking on the same function for the Americans. The insurgency has now spread west, north and east, to Ramadi, Mosul and Samarra. Guerrillas supposedly driven from Samarra in a furious battle just two months ago are now back. Aerial bombardment was this week deployed against the small town of Baquba just north of Baghdad, with inevitable civilian casualties. How long before the battle for Baghdad resumes, and its inhabitants again hear the drone of spy planes and the roar of “shock and awe”?
In this part of Iraq there is no Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to call the al-Sadr bandits to order, as in Najaf and Karbala. Fallujah may have been destabilising the Sunni triangle, but the manner of its suppression will not restabilise it. It will merely shift more of the varying geometry of power to the Mujahidin and from the sheikhs and local gangsters grown rich on stealing “reconstruction” money. Iyad Allawi’s aides are talking openly about the elections being impossible. This is the opposite of what Fallujah was supposed to achieve.
Whether the Fallujah assault is more counterproductive than the rest of the neocon strategy for Iraq is moot. Even the most ardent interventionist must find its ineptitude astounding. The Pentagon’s handling of the Sunnis seems designed to ensure that they boycott elections and thus speed the break-up of Iraq.
The Sunnis were stripped of jobs in the army, police and Civil Service. Their pensions were stopped. Local businesses were wrecked in a tidal wave of imports. When I visited Fallujah a year ago Westerners could walk in the market and talk to the shopkeepers. An election was not inconceivable, though the local police had been curiously denied weapons or armour.
Today Sunni Iraq is a no-go area for Westerners. The main party has said it will abandon the democratic process. The Mujahidin may have been driven out of Fallujah, but the place is a ghost town and the cost has been appalling, to the Marines, to the town and to local people. Peace, stability and democracy seem as distant as ever. Forget the invasion. It is the occupation that has failed.
No statement about Iraq is more absurd than that “we must stay to finish the job”. What job? A dozen more Fallujahs? The thesis that leaving Iraq would plunge it into anarchy and warlordism defies the facts on the ground. Iraq south of Kurdistan is in a state of anarchy already, a land of suicide bombings, kidnapping, hijackings and gangland mayhem. There is no law or order, no public administration or police or proper banking. Its streets are Wild West. The occupying force is entombed in bases it can barely defend or supply. Occasional patrols are target practice for terrorists. Iraq is a desert in which the Americans and British rule nothing but their forts, like the French Foreign Legion in the Sahara.
It might sometimes be the case that any country occupied by British troops must, by definition, be better off with them than without them. Not in Iraq. Perhaps Britain alone (or even the excluded US State Department) might have led post-Saddam Iraq to a sort of stability. That hope is gone. Iraq is world capital of terrorism, the creation of two leaders who promised the world that would not be so. They have left their soldiers as targets for every killer in the Middle East and wrecked a nation in the process.
Nobody knows what is going to happen in Iraq, certainly nobody in any government. We can only pray that George Bush will soon tire of the killing and withdraw his troops before his final term of office is blighted by it. Britain can follow meekly in his wake. Only then can Iraq start its painful search for a post-Saddam settlement, initially with bloodshed, then probably with partition. That is what happens when strong men fall, as in Yugoslavia.
Before then the Americans will again have to declare a victory in Fallujah and get out. Otherwise the bloodshed will never stop. Fallujah and the towns round it will be centres of hatred and violence against the West until the West departs. Of course most Iraqis want democracy, like they want security. In 18 months of occupation the West has given them neither. Insofar as anyone can tell, all but those in the pay of the West want the West to go.
The aftermath is not our concern. What Iraqis do next is their business, because we have failed in trying to make it ours. We are not the subject of the Iraqi verb. The subject is they.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
