Quagmire In The Desert

Iraq is already a long way down that road. Five months after occupation, the US and UK have not been able to restore even the most basic of infrastructural services. There’s less power available today than on April 10, so there’s no respite from the unending, brutal heat. The shortage of gasoline is so acute that people wait in two-mile-long queues, pushing their cars a few metres at a time in 55°C to buy 40 litres of gasoline. Without electricity it’s not just gas stations that don’t work, water treatment plants, those that are still functional, also stand idle. Without safe drinking water, children continue to die. Worst of all, 10 million Iraqis, virtually the country’s entire adult non-agricultural workforce, is now unemployed. Only the UN-World Food Programme packages stand between them and destitution. Not surprisingly, looting has become endemic; the streets are no longer safe and women don’t go out if they can avoid doing so.

Society, polity and state, all are visibly disintegrating. Resistance is on the rise and is coalescing into a more deadly and purposeful movement to drive the Americans away in disgrace. And it is on the road to success. As of September 3, 152 Americans had died and 740 had been injured after hostilities officially ended. They are now dying at the rate of 40 a month. The list of targets has grown to include any person, organisation or country that collaborates with the occupying powers. Thus, it has widened from Iraqi policemen and civilians who are cooperating with the ‘coalition’ authorities, to the UN and countries deemed to be collaborating with the Americans. That was the message sent by the bombing of the Jordanian embassy on August 7, of the UN on August 19 and of Najaf on July 29.

To ensure that Iraq remains without power, this resistance is blowing up transmission lines and towers; to prevent Iraq from exporting oil, it’s blowing up pipelines. Its efforts have been successful. All over Iraq people are comparing the US’ and UK’s ineptitude with Saddam Hussein’s efficiency. "It took Saddam only one month to bring the power supply back after the first Gulf War and two months to restore gasoline supply from the oilfields and refineries," they mutter to each other and to foreign interlocutors.

As respect for the conquerors plummets, public anger is being stoked by the sight of British and American soldiers living in and working out of Saddam’s palaces and eating in huge air-conditioned mess halls. For them, there is no shortage of power, safe drinking water or food.

But violence has its own logic. The resistance can turn the tap of violence on, but it will not be able to turn it off. That is what the repercussions to the killing of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir-al-Hakim is showing. Shias are blaming Sunni Saddam loyalists and that reliable scapegoat, the Baath party, and demanding revenge. His brother, who has succeeded him, has accused the Americans of being ineffective and demanded the right to re-arm the military wing of his organisation. If he does that, others will follow and civil war will be a whisker away.

Bush’s decision to call in the UN reflects his government’s growing desperation. The US cannot increase its troops in Iraq, because it does not have enough of them in reserve. In any case even 60,000 more troops will make little actual difference if the resistance keeps growing. He also cannot pay the domestic political cost of the rising body count indefinitely. Handing over to the UN is the only honourable way out. But militarily a UN force could become another quagmire of conflicting national loyalties and confused chains of command. Hence the US’ insistence that the operation remain under an American general.

But most Iraqis will perceive that as a continuation of the occupation under a different coloured cap. So the resistance will continue its attacks on the infrastructure to discredit the administration and on the soldiers of countries that join the US-led UN force. In the end, this compromise could end by destroying the UN’s moral authority without restoring peace.

This slide into chaos would not have taken place if, in the first days of occupation, the US had considered maintaining the continuity of government more important than embarking upon a highly publicised witch-hunt and announced elections to choose a constituent assembly to be held this autumn. The first would have ensured that the state continued to function. The second would have aborted, or, at the very least limited, the rise of a resistance movement fuelled by rage. Instead, it chose to create an advisory council of loyalists and destroyed the Iraqi state administration. Today, even that road may be closed. Terrorist violence is becoming embedded in the Iraqi polity and will soon acquire its own structures and institutions. Once that happens, it will become impossible to weed it out.