The Great War for Civilisation (205 page)

Each morning in Baghdad, I would visit the city morgue. There would be twenty—sometimes thirty—fresh bodies arriving each day, sometimes whole families shot down or torn apart by suicide bombers or knifed to death or killed at American checkpoints. When the Americans brought bodies to the morgue, the staff were told not to perform autopsies. What did this mean? Outside, the relatives of the dead would shriek and weep and swoon with sorrow and curse the Americans, even if their loved ones were killed in family feuds or revenge attacks. The Americans and British keep no lists of the Iraqi dead, only of their own much-mourned soldiers—well over 1,700 Americans by the summer of 2005—so we can talk about “our” sacrifice and ignore the fate of those tens of thousands we came to “liberate.”

How did it start, the beginning of the end? In Fallujah, only days after the occupation began, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi Sunni demonstrators, killing seventeen of them. They said they had come under fire. But reporters who reached the school in which the troops were billeted could find no bullet holes. Fallujah never forgave them. The insurgency started within hours. The city would later be taken over by Iraq's ferocious resistance, along with Ramadi. Whole provinces of Iraq would fall under their control. So the Americans invaded Fallujah again—and then a second time—and fought their way over the rubble of the ruined city. We have won. Victory. After Paul Bremer arrived as America's first proconsul—he it was who was to appoint the former CIA agent Iyad Allawi as “interim” prime minister—he would call the insurgents “deadenders,” “diehards,” Saddam's “remnants.” All it would need was the capture of Saddam himself and the rebellion would end.

He was wrong. I remember a young, angry Iraqi in Ramadi whose family had just been shot at an American checkpoint. “I won't join the resistance as long as Saddam and his family are free because if we drive the Americans out, we'll get Saddam back again. But if they eliminate Uday and Qusay and Saddam, I will kill Americans myself.” And the Americans did kill Saddam's awful sons Uday and Qusay—along with Qusay's own fourteen-year-old son, about whom they didn't talk very much—in a pseudo-Palladian villa in Mosul, shot down by Task Force 20, a mix of Special Forces and CIA operatives who didn't bother to try and capture them when they resisted. And then, inevitably, they found Saddam.

In a hole in the ground. “Ladies and gentlemen—we got him!” Bremer crowed. “This is a great day in Iraq's history.” The 13th of December 2003 was supposed to be the end of the insurrection. After this, why would anyone bother to fight the occupiers of Iraq? Unkempt, Saddam's tired eyes betraying defeat; even the $750,000 in cash found in his hole in the ground demeaned him. Soon Saddam would be produced in a secret court in chains. He looked in that first extraordinary videotape which the Americans produced like a prisoner of ancient Rome, the barbarian cornered at last, the hand caressing the scraggy beard. All those ghosts—of gassed Iranians and Kurds, of Shiites shot and dumped in the mass graves of Kerbala, of the prisoners dying under excruciating torture in the villas of Saddam's secret police—must surely have witnessed something of this.

It took just 600 American soldiers to capture the man who was for twelve years one of the West's best friends in the Middle East and for twelve more years the West's greatest enemy in the Middle East. In a miserable 8-foot hole in the mud of a Tigris farm near the village of Al-Dawr, the president of the Iraqi Arab Republic, leader of the Arab Socialist Baath party, ex-guerrilla fighter, invader of two nations, a former friend of Jacques Chirac and a man once courted by President Reagan, was found. And it was difficult, looking at those pictures of the Lion of Iraq—for so he called himself—to remember how royally he had been toasted in the past. This was the man who was the honoured guest of the city of Paris when Chirac was mayor and when the French could see the Jacobins in his bloody regime. This was the man who negotiated with UN Secretary Generals Perez de Cuellar and Kofi Annan, who chatted over coffee to none other than the man who was to become U.S. secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, who met Ted Heath and Tony Benn and a host of European statesmen.

And there was a kind of satisfaction, driving up to al-Dawr on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, to arrive at the orange orchard where he was discovered and climb into his very hole in the ground. I lay down inside it. Seven months earlier, I had sat on his red velvet presidential throne in the greatest of all his marble palaces. Now here I was, lowering myself into the damp, dark and grey concrete interior of his final retreat, the midget bunker buried beside the Tigris—all of 8 feet by 5— and as near to an underground prison as any of his victims might imagine. Instead of chandeliers, there was just a cheap plastic fan attached to an air vent. Ozymandias came to mind. This, after all, was where his hopes finally crumbled to dust. And it was cold.

I FOUND SADDAM'S LAST BOOKS in a hut nearby: the philosophical works of Ibn Khaldun, the religious—and pro-Shiite—doctrines of the Abbasid theorist Imam al-Shafei and a heap of volumes of Arab poetry. There were cassettes of Arabic songs and some tatty pictures, of sheep at sunset and Noah's Ark crowded with animals. But this was no resistance headquarters, no place from which to run a war or start an insurgency, no Führer-bunker with SS guards and switchboards and secretaries taking down last words for posterity.

To climb inside this most famous of all bolt-holes, I had to sit on the wooden entrance ledge and swing my legs into a narrow aperture and find my footing on four stairs made of earth. You used your arms to lower yourself into this last remnant of Iraqi Baathist history. Then you were sitting on the floor. There was no light, no water, only the concrete walls, the vent and a ceiling of wooden boards. Above the boards was earth and then a thick concrete floor which—up above— was covered by the equally thick concrete yard of a dilapidated farm hut. Yet above this sullen underground cell was a kind of paradise, of thick palm fronds and orange trees dripping gold with mandarins, of thickets of tall reeds, the sound of birds buried in the treetops. There was even an old blue-painted boat tucked away behind a wall of fronds, the last chance of escape across the silver Tigris if the Americans closed in.

Of course, they closed in from two directions, both from the river and down the muddy laneway along which soldiers of the American 4th Infantry Division led me. Saddam must have rushed from the hut where he ate his food—spilling a plate of beans and Turkish Delight onto the mud floor, I noticed—and squirrelled his portly self down the hole. When the Americans searched the hut, they found nothing suspicious—except a pot plant oddly positioned on top of some dried palm fronds, placed there presumably by two men who were later seized while trying to escape. Underneath, they found the entrance to the hole.

The soldiers mooching around the “site”—their word, as if it was a Sumerian city rather than a fraudulent, muddy Baathist playpen—were indifferent to the point of tiredness. They asked me to translate the Arabic inscription over Saddam's bedroom—it began with the Koranic words “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful . . .”—and they lent me their torches to prowl round the Saddam kitchen.

So what could we learn of Saddam in this, his very last private residence in Iraq? Well, he had chosen to hide only 200 metres from a shrine marking his own famous retreat across the Tigris River in 1959, on the run as a wounded young guerrilla after trying to assassinate an earlier president of Iraq. Here it was that he dug the bullet out of his body, and on a low hill within eyesight of this palm-grove is the mosque that marks the spot where, in a coffee shop, Saddam vainly pleaded with his fellow Iraqi tribesmen to help him escape. Saddam, in his last days as a free man, had retreated into his past, back to the days of glory that preceded his butcheries.

He had the use of a tiny generator, which I found wired up to a miniature fridge. There were two old beds and some filthy blankets. In the little kitchen constructed next door, there were sausages hanging to dry, bananas, oranges and— near a washing-up bowl—tins of Jordanian chicken and beef luncheon meat, heaps of “Happy Tuna.” Only the Mars Bars looked fresh.

So what did Saddam discover here in the last days? Peace of mind after the years of madness and barbarity? A place to reflect on his awesome sins, how he took his country from prosperity through foreign invasion and isolation and years of torture and suppression into a world of humiliation and occupation? The birds must have sung in the evening, the palm fronds above him must have clustered against each other in the night. But then there must have been the fear, the constant knowledge that betrayal was only an orchard away. It must have been cold in that hole. And no colder than when the hands of Washington-the-all-Powerful reached out across oceans and continents and came to rest on that odd-looking pot plant and hauled the would-be caliph from his tiny cell.

But there was one other conclusion upon which every Iraqi I spoke to agreed. This bedraggled, pathetic man with his matted, dirty hair, living in a hole in the ground with three guns and cash as his cave-companions—this man was not leading the Iraqi insurgency against the Americans. If more and more Iraqis were saying before Saddam's capture, like the man in Ramadi, that the one reason they would not join the resistance to U.S. occupation was the fear that—if the Americans withdrew—Saddam would return to power, well, that fear had now been removed. So the nightmare was over—and the nightmare was about to begin. Both for the Iraqis and for us.

I remember an American search operation in Baghdad just after Saddam's capture, all door-kicking and screaming and fuck-this and fuck-that and, just a few metres away, finding a message newly spray-painted on a wall. Not by hand but with a stencil, in poor English perhaps, but there were dozens of identical messages stencilled onto the walls for the occupiers. “American Soldiers,” it said. “Run away to your home before you will be a body in [
sic
] black bag, then be dropped in a river or valley.”

While Washington and London were still congratulating themselves on the capture of Saddam Hussein, U.S. troops shot dead at least eighteen Iraqis in the streets of three major cities in the country. Dramatic videotape from the city of Ramadi 75 miles west of Baghdad showed unarmed supporters of Saddam Hussein being shot down in semi-darkness as they fled from American troops. Eleven of the eighteen dead were killed by the Americans in Samara to the north of Baghdad. All the killings occurred during demonstrations by Sunni Muslims against the American seizure of Saddam, protests that started near Samara. The first demonstrators blocked roads north of Baghdad when armed men appeared alongside civilians who believed—initially—that U.S. forces had arrested one of Saddam's doubles rather than the ex-dictator of Iraq. But their jubilation turned to fury when the Americans opened fire in Samara a few hours later. As usual, the American military claimed that all eighteen dead were “insurgents” and that U.S. forces had come under fire in all three cities. But this is what they also claimed in Samara just two weeks earlier when they boasted they had shot fifty-four “terrorists.” Journalists investigating the killings concluded then that while U.S. forces in the city had been ambushed while taking new currency notes to two banks, the only victims of American gunfire that could be confirmed were nine civilians, one of them a child, another an Iranian pilgrim.

A disturbing new phenomenon in this environment of growing military violence was the appearance of hooded and masked Iraqi gunmen—working for the Americans—on road checkpoints north of Baghdad. Five of them now checked cars on the Tigris River bridge outside Samara, apparently fearing that their identities would be discovered if their faces were not concealed. They wore militia uniforms and—although they said they were part of the new American-backed “Iraqi Civil Defence Corps” (ICDC)—they had neither badges of rank nor unit markings. The same hooded men were now appearing on the streets of Baghdad. Just before the Samara killings, several policemen stopped my car outside the city to warn that the Americans were “involved in a big battle with the holy warriors”—ominously for U.S. forces, they used the word “mujahedin”—and soon we were to discover that some—perhaps many—of these men were also insurgents, cops by day, killers by night; which was exactly what happened in Algeria. Families of the dead adopted the tradition of all tribal groups, just as they did at Fallujah: the dead must be avenged. And so their retaliation also turned inexorably into a resistance war that now embraced the entire Sunni Muslim area of Iraq.

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2003. The thump of air pressure on my Baghdad window wakes me up, a blast of sound that gently shakes the walls; the sound of seventeen lives disappearing. The aftermath of bombs in Baghdad is a kind of obscene theatre. I reach the crossroads minutes later. There's a shattered minibus with the pulverised remains of its passengers inside, a screaming fireman, pieces of a lorry—blown apart with such impact that the engine block is shorn in half—and two burning cars, the flames licking at their wheels and something terrible below the driver's seat. The bomb was in the truck. But the bus, why would anyone bomb a busload of Iraqi civilians? There is flesh on the road, and vast shards of iron and metal and sandals and women's handbags around the bus where several of the dead passengers—or what is left of them—are still sitting pitifully in their seats. Shrapnel has cascaded into the slums of Al-Bayaa, a pathetic warren of brick houses and sewage-filled laneways whose broken windows now sparkle in the streets.

A group of U.S. soldiers has just arrived, three of them prowling through the muck and the oil-splattered road for the detonator. Sergeant Joel Henshon of the 11th/65th U.S. military police guards what might have been part of the mechanism, a grenade that glistens grey and sinister on the mud of a traffic island. There must be 1,000 shouting people standing in the dawn of smoke and flames, men, kuffiahed in Arab scarves, many of them in black leather jackets. I find some cops by the burning cars, friendly, American-paid policemen with smart little yellow identification badges and pale blue uniforms. A brand-new fire brigade truck arrives and a torrent of water swamps what's left of the truck and the bus. “New Iraq” responds efficiently to its growing violence. A policeman—for this is the flip side of every constabulary in the world—walks up and, incredibly, asks me if I'd like to know what he's discovered.