Patrick Cockburn: Operation Deepening Nightmare

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http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick03192007.html

Operation Deepening Nightmare

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Irbil, Iraq.

Four years ago, in the middle of the US invasion, I drove safely from Arbil in northern Iraq to Baghdad. There were heaps of discarded weapons beside the road, and long lines of former Iraqi soldiers walking home. Signs of battle were few, aside from the hulks of burned-out tanks, but they all seemed to have been hit by US aircraft after their crews had fled.

If I tried to make the same journey today, I would be killed or kidnapped long before I reached Baghdad. Kurdish ministers in the Iraqi government dare not travel by road between the capital and their homeland. Three bodyguards of the Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, were ambushed and killed when they tried to do so a month ago.

Tony Blair and George Bush still occasionally imply that the picture of Iraq as a war-torn hell is an exaggeration by the media. They suggest, though not as forcibly as they did a couple of years ago, that parts of the country are relatively peaceful. Nothing could be more untrue.

In reality, the violence is grossly understated. The Baker-Hamilton report by senior Republicans and Democrats, led by James Baker, took a single day last summer, when the US army reported 93 acts of violence in Iraq, and asked American intelligence to re-examine the evidence. They found the real figure was 1,100--the US military had deliberately understated the violence by factor of over 10.

Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was not going to be the main problem when the US and Britain invaded four years ago. His army would fall apart, as it had done in 1991 when he was expelled from Kuwait, because Iraqis simply would not fight for him. But the outcome of the invasion of 2003 was predictably different from the war in 1991, and not just because there is now a large American army in the heart of the Middle East, destabilizing the whole region. US forces had not pressed on to Baghdad 16 years ago, partly because Washington did not want to see Saddam replaced by Shia religious parties with possible links to Iran. That is exactly what has happened now, because 60 per cent of the Iraqi population is Shia.

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