From triumph has sprung murderous fiasco

From triumph has sprung murderous fiasco. Ignoring Iraqis comes with a terrible price
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
10 October 2003

Six months after US tanks roared triumphantly into the centre of Baghdad and the statue of Saddam Hussein was famously toppled, the US has turned military victory into political defeat in Iraq.

The US might have expected yesterday to be a day on which Iraqis would celebrate the overthrow of a despot. Instead it brought more bloodshed and death to foreigners and Iraqis allied to the US, including the assassination of a senior European intelligence agent.

Consensus is growing that the US has failed because it ignored Iraqis, allowed the state to dissolve and disbanded the army.

A defiant Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, put the best gloss on the work of the occupying powers over the last six months yesterday. He trumpeted the fact that the electricity supply is better than before the war and that the police force has gone from zero to 40,000.

"I am optimistic," he said. "We have made an enormous amount of progress in six months, more than I think anyone could have safely predicted."

But in fact the US has not given people a better life than the one they enjoyed under Saddam. An Iraqi businessman said acidly: "They claimed that we were smart enough to build weapons of mass destruction capable of threatening the world, but now they treat us like Red Indians on a reservation at the end of the 19th century.''

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