...via a U.S. source, but not, needless to say, the U.S. mass media:
"Inside the heavily protected Green Zone [last year], the US enclave in the heart of Baghdad, Bremer and the uniformed American military were cut off from what was happening on the ground. US generals claimed at briefings that the number of hostile incidents was falling. I began to wonder why, if there were only sixteen or so attacks on American soldiers a day, I seemed regularly to witness a quarter of these whenever I drove out of Baghdad. American soldiers in the field told me that they no longer reported guerrilla attacks unless there had been US casualties. It was a bureaucratic hassle to make out the reports and their commanders were keen to hear that resistance was petering out.
"By November it was impossible to conceal the bad news any longer. I was in the dusty truck-stop city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, when we heard that a giant Chinook helicopter had been shot down. We drove across an old iron bridge over the Euphrates to look at the wreckage. On the way we saw a burned out vehicle that had been hit by a rocket; the American contractors inside had been killed. On the far side of the river, farmers were handing round twisted pieces of metal from the helicopter’s fuselage: 16 soldiers had died. Shortly after that incident, the White House began making its plans to dilute full imperial control by installing the interim government....
"Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority weren’t able to see that their political strength was diminishing by the month. In April the US took two disastrous decisions which led to simultaneous confrontations with both Sunni and Shiite communities. Four American private security contractors had been killed, their bodies burned and hung up from the bridge at Falluja; US marines quickly besieged the city. Six hundred people were killed. With ludicrously bad timing, Bremer had also decided to pursue Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose father had been martyred by Saddam Hussein in 1999. Both ventures failed. The marines dared not storm Falluja for fear of a general Sunni uprising. Sadr had retreated to the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf but the US army could not send its tanks into Shiite shrines. In both Falluja and Najaf American soldiers were forced to withdraw.
"Power was already seeping away from the US before it was nominally handed over to Allawi. A year after Bush famously declared major combat in Iraq over, insurgents have their own capital in Falluja, thirty miles from Baghdad. In April, I was caught in an ambush of US petrol tankers at Abu Ghraib. The US military, unprepared to recognise that they had lost control of the road, were still sending convoys down it. By early June the road to the airport, the main US base near Baghdad, was no longer safe. Four security men who had been staying two floors above me in the Hamra Hotel were killed as they drove to the airport by men armed with machine-guns and grenade launchers....
"Suicide bombers, car bombs and rocket attacks have paralysed Baghdad; the US army are building increasingly elaborate fortifications to defend their bases. At the entrance to the 14 July Bridge over the Tigris, which leads into the Green Zone, the road is blocked by sandbags and razor wire. A notice hanging from the wire reads: ‘Do not enter or you will be shot.’ US soldiers in Baghdad are trigger happy and they like Iraqis to know it....
"Neither the suicide bombers nor the US army care very much how many ordinary Iraqis get killed. The entrances to the Green Zone provide no protection for Iraqis queuing for jobs or to have their documents checked. They are frequently caught in bomb blasts; there are many casualties. On 17 May a suicide bomber assassinated Izzedin Salim, the head of the Iraqi Governing Council: his fleet of cars was waiting to enter the Green Zone. An Iraqi minister told me that Salim might have been safe if US soldiers at the gate had not delayed the convoy by declaring that some of the documents were not complete. There is an Iraqi conspiracy theory which sees foreign suicide bombers and the US acting in unison to prevent Iraq regaining its independence....
"Iraqis are desperate for the return of some sort of security. Among the better off there is a pervasive fear of kidnapping. Over the last year this has become a local industry, now so common that new words have been added to Iraqi thieves’ slang: a kidnap victim is al-tali, or the sheep; the person who identifies the potential target is al-alaas....
"Last year a rumour went round the city that Kuwaitis were seizing Iraqi girls and taking them back to Kuwait. This year the kidnapping is real. A businessman friend living in Jordan has just paid $60,000 to have his brother-in-law returned. Doctors are a favourite target. Operations are postponed in hospitals because specialist surgeons have fled the country....
"It’s not only the well-off who feel threatened. Gangs of thieves hop on and off buses in Rashid Street in the city centre and rob passengers at gun and knife-point. Ali Abdul Jabber, a driver at the al-Nasser bus station, has been robbed three times. ‘On the last occasion,’ he said, ‘the thieves jumped on board because the doors have to be open in this hot weather. Two of them stood guard at the back while two others walked down the bus looking in people’s handbags and stealing money and jewellery.’ Jabber didn’t dare glance back: he thought that if the thieves suspected he could identify them they would kill him. After the robbery nobody went to the police. ‘The passengers didn’t even discuss it among themselves because this sort of thing is so much part of daily life in Baghdad.’ Most of them thought that he was in league with the gang.
"After the disasters of the past year the Americans know they cannot, even in the short term, occupy Iraq without the support of local allies. The problem for the US is that most Iraqis would like Allawi and the interim government to get rid of the suicide bombers and kidnappers -- and of the US occupation as well. But the US shows no sign of abandoning its plans to keep Iraq as a client state. It would have a weak army, devoted entirely to counter-insurgency. It would have no tanks, aircraft, missiles or artillery. The Iraq of the future would resemble a Latin American state of the 1960s with an army and security forces controlled largely by Washington. This was the message brought by Paul Wolfowitz in June when he turned up in Baghdad -- accompanied by Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence -- just before the supposed handover of power. The US will allow Iraq to rearm, but only against its own people....
"The struggle for Iraq is only beginning. The Shia want elections and real power. The Sunni want the US out and will not accept being marginalised. The Kurds want a greater measure of autonomy, very close to independence, than the Iraqi Arabs will give. The Islamic resistance think the US is vulnerable in Iraq as the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan. The nationalist guerrillas will not stop killing American troops. Above all the US is still not convinced that it has lost its great gamble to keep control of Iraq, a country it made the test-case of its power as the world’s single imperial overlord."
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