20 Years Ago I Swam in Saddam's Pool - it was a brief respite while reporting as Iraq descended into chaos
From outset obvious US-UK occupation going badly wrong
We have to start with some numbers. Some numbers and names.
One of the many tragedies of the invasion of Iraq - launched 20 years ago this month - is that even now we don’t know how many people were killed or injured.
The British military keeps a tally; among the 179 is a schoolfriend who joined the Royal Navy, Lt Anthony King. He was among six Brits killed when two Sea King helicopters collided days into the invasion. So does the Pentagon, along with other Western nations who were part of what was termed “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.
Despite the West’s official records, when it comes to the Iraqi dead, we are just guessing. A year before the invasion, US general Tommy Franks, commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), infamously said: “We don't do body counts.”
There were several imperfect attempts a measuring the dead, the Iraq Body Count among them. And an estimate by the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health published in The Lancet in 2006, based on an extrapolation of data, suggested up to 650,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives.
And so, amid this month’s various reports, either looking back to the lies told about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, or else detailing what life is like for Iraqis now, it feels obscene not to place front and centre of our reflections, those who suffered the most.
The likelihood the invasion was going to turn into a disaster became clear very early on. On my first day on assignment in the country, a week after the March 20th invasion, I filed a report (see below) from the villages in southern Iraq, close to the Rumaila oilfields.
The villagers had no water, electricity or food, and were angry with the allied forces, who with great skill and efficiency were putting out blazing wells that retreating Iraqi troops had set on fire. The piece was headlined “The priority here is clear: Oil comes before people.”
There were hundreds of journalists in Iraq at that stage. Many were what were called “embeds”, who were attached to a particular unit or division and granted access to coalition troops in a way not seen for generations.
Lots of these embedded reporters - there were up to 750 - did excellent work. They detailed what daily life was like for soldiers, and the best managed to keep their journalistic instincts intact, despite becoming very close to these troops, who they relied on for their safety.
Many felt the “embedded process” helped the military control the narrative over events, be it journalists covering the scrapes and travails of a local unit, or the chief military writer of The New York Times, someone who had contributed to false stories about WMD and who was personally embedded with Franks. Some said his early reports contained an overly rosy view of events.
Embeds also had to agree their work could be censored if the military deemed it was giving away critical information.
In addition to the embeds, were the “unilaterals”. Most registered with the US military and were given a press card, but who received no other help. Often they received hindrance.
I was one of the “unilaterals”, and entered Iraq and drove to Baghdad, with a rental car from Kuwait International Airport. Together with a journalist from the Financial Times, we were able to cross from Kuwait by suggesting we worked for Halliburton, the massive American corporation, contracted to put out those oil well fires.
In those very first days it appeared clear while Washington had been planning to handle the oil - Iraq possessed the world’s second largest proven reserves - it had not done a lot of thinking about the Iraqi people, who Bush and Tony Blair had promised to help.
In the village of Sawfan, a schoolteacher told us what many were complaining about - soldiers shooting from roadblocks, soldiers “roughly treating” the people, Americans saying “bad things” about Iraqis. Also, they had no water, food or electricity.
A spokesman for the British military told a correspondent from Sky News that part of his job was to make things difficult for the unembedded reporters.
The job was already perilously difficult; on March 20 three members of an ITV team - Terry Lloyd, Hussein Osman and Fred Nerac - were killed after being caught in crossfire. The body of Nerac, a Frenchman, was never recovered and he is officially listed as missing presumed dead.
(This the so-called spider hole where Saddam Hussein had been hiding near Tikrit before his capture on Dec 13 2003.)
Our own car, along with that of a reporter from The Times, was riddled with bullets fired by a so-called “fedayeen” militia on the outskirts of Basra.
As it was, as we headed north, we found American soldiers hugely hospitable as we made our journey towards Baghdad, where colleagues Robert Fisk and Kim Sengupta had reported throughout the invasion.
With a Union Jack flag taped to our window, we cautiously approached the makeshift bases the troops had set up. After checking our credentials, they not only let us park our SUV within their protective perimeter but let us fill up on military rations, the indestructible MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat.
If we were lucky, we were able to beg for a tank of petrol/gasoline. The bulk of the US military drives on diesel, so getting hold of the fuel we needed - what the military called MOGAS - was harder. Sometimes, we bartered a tank of fuel for two minutes on our SatPhone so the soldiers could call home.
I loved chatting to all the soldiers, from the officers to the new recruits. Without exception, they appeared to believe their mission would do good, even if very few appeared to know much about Iraq, or its culture and ancient 3,000-yr history.
It was clear they felt a long way from home; sometimes you’d unintentionally pick up fragments of their emotion-laden conversations back to their families back “stateside”.
The British troops one encountered on the road north often appeared bewildered, and literally unable to communicate with the people whose country they had occupied. One young British officer showed me a printed “green book” of basic phrases printed in English and with the Arabic word rendered in a phonetically. The word “Hello”, or مرحبا, was printed as “mar-ha-ba”.
I remember asking him whether these helped. I cannot remember his answer.
But it was soon recognised that the inability to do something as basic as speak to citizens now under American martial law, was a major hindrance.
The US invasion force consisted of 160,000 troops. It was reported by the Associated Press that just 1,300 active-duty soldiers could “speak or read some Arabic”. Very soon scenes would be repeated across Iraq of Iraqi families approaching checkpoints or roadblocks, hands in the air, and being repeatedly told to “stop” as troops pointed their guns at them.
Adding to the danger, as the weeks wore on, and opposition to the occupation grew, anti-US forces started attacking check-points guns and bombs.
I spent less than five weeks in Iraq.
In that time we traveled to the Najaf, one of the holy cities of Shia Islam, whose followers had been massacred by Saddam forces in 1979-80. We interviewed a Jewish family, said to be one of the very last of population estimated in 1947 to top 156,000.
We visited Mariam Hamza, then aged 8, a little girl who made headlines after a British MP, George Galloway, arranged for her to travel to the UK for treatment for leukaemia because US-UK sanctions made it impossible to get the drugs needed to treat such illnesses.
“Mr Galloway is like a father to me, a friend,” said her father, Hamza Abid. “He is the finest human being on earth.”
(The former president would be hanged on 30 December 2006, aged 69)
We visited Saddam’s seat of power, the Republican Palace, and took turns with others to sit on his throne-like wooden chair. One day we drove north to witness the capture of Tikrit, Saddam’s home town, and the last location for any resistance. By then, he had gone into hiding.
The next morning, we traipsed through his largely destroyed mansion, stepping over smashed vinyl records that included the musical Oliver! and a recording of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 3 in E major.
The property’s water was still running, and a reporter from the Globe and Mail and I were stunned to find the dictator’s large private pool, complete with a small diving board, completely filled.
Did we take a swim? Of course.
Wherever we could we also spoke to ordinary Iraqis about what they felt.
Almost without exception, the message was a version of this: “It’s ok that America has got rid of Saddam, but please do not stay too long.”
It’s conceivable that even though the invasion was based on lies, the US and UK could have made a success of the occupation.
Yet, Washington rapidly made a series of disastrous decisions. The most disastrous, perhaps, was the attempted “DeBaathifation” of the Iraqi system, namely meaning that no-one who had served under Saddam’s regime could be included in the new set-up.
It may have made sense in a planning room in DC but given that anyone who worked even at a low level in Saddam’s Iraq had to be a member of the Baath Party, it resulted in the decision to dismantle the police and army.
Not only did it mean US and allied soldiers then had to act as police officers - a job they were not trained for - but it resulted in the overnight creation of 500,000 men, with access to weapons, suddenly unemployed and humiliated. The insurgency took hold about six months later.
There were other more basic challenges. In the aftermath of 9/11, George W Bush was looking for revenge, wherever he could find it.
Neither he or his war planners appeared to have any knowledge of Iraq, its history, or the internecine tensions that Saddam had sat on. It was an arrogant, invading army, who often expressed its belief that Iraqis should be grateful for what they had done.
Before I left Iraq, driving south back down the M8 with a colleague, and crossing into Kuwait, I had one more task to complete.
A young man who had worked for one of the Western reporters, had a friend who owned a car repair body shop. He claimed he could mend the bullet holes in my rental car, which I had covered in electrical tape.
I’d had my doubts, but when he turned up with it at my hotel, it looked pristine, repairing the holes with utter professionalism, and finding some paint that matched that of the Nissan Pajero. I paid him what we’d agreed and bid him well.
If only the rest of his country could have been fixed so easily.
'The Independent' March 28 2003 Andrew Buncombe in Safwan - The priority here is clear: Oil comes before people
Larry Flak looked as if he had been born to put out burning oil fires, which was just as well because 30 yards behind him smoke and flames were erupting into the sky from a roaring wellhead. He estimated the temperature of the fire to be 1,700F. “This one's not that hot, actually, because it's not burning cleanly,” he said with a long Texan drawl. “The one you passed back there oil and gas burning together I'd say that's around 3,000F. That's enough to vaporise steel.” Mr Flak, 48, who has been fighting oil fires from Nigeria to the Falkland Islands for 30 years, is part of a team whose job is to tackle the fires and plug the wells, seven of which are burning in southern Iraq after being set ablaze by retreating Iraqi soldiers. The team's motto, said the team leader, Brian Krause, was: “They light 'em, we fight 'em.” But it is not just about putting out fires. The work that Mr Flak and his colleagues, from the Houston-based company Boots and Coots, were doing yesterday in the Rumaila oilfields close to the Kuwaiti border reveals much about the priorities of America and Britain as they seek to oust Saddam Hussein. Oil, it seems, and not people, comes first. Iraq has the world's second-largest reserves of oil, second only to Saudi Arabia. The country has a minimum of 112 billion barrels and with sufficient investment it could be producing six million barrels a day within five years. While this American-led war may not have been driven by oil, it is oil that will pay for Iraq's reconstruction, and Washington and London are taking no chances with the security of this precious commodity. These oilfields were one of the very first parts of southern Iraq secured by Allied troops after they marched across the border from Kuwait. Furthermore, Washington had clearly been planning for this months ago. Mr Flak, dressed in red overalls and a white hard-hat, said his company had been in negotiations with the American government since September over coming to Iraq to douse fires. Setting a wellhead alight was a simple enough trick to achieve, he explained. The oil from the Zubair formation, 9,000ft below the surface, was light crude easy to ignite, especially if the wellhead was packed with explosives. “It would probably light if you threw a match at it,” he said. But putting the fires out is not so easy. The flames have to be doused using water and the wellhead then plugged and fitted with a valve. The team's equipment stood at hand new, shiny mechanised machinery, forklifts and big water tanks that could have held thousands of gallons. Today they are due to get the vital water from the Kuwaitis, said Mr Krause. “They have been very good.” Had they been able to hear them, the people of the nearby town of Safwan would have been delighted by Mr Krause's words. They have not had running water for a week. For while Rumaila contains riches beyond belief, Safwan 10 miles away across a desert littered with burnt-out vehicles and dead dogs simply contains angry, poor Iraqis whose water and power supply was destroyed when the Allied forces advanced. They have been living on handouts and rainwater ever since. Yesterday afternoon, on the outskirts of town, two women were scooping up dirty water from a puddle and pouring it into a bucket fashioned from a cooking oil tin. They did so as naturally as one might toss items into a shopping trolley at the supermarket. In the middle of the town, on a junction close to the mosque, a crowd gathered not entirely aggressive but angry and frustrated and in the mood for answers. A quietly spoken man, the English teacher from the school, translated for some of the others when they learnt they had a British visitor. “They want to know why nothing bad is ever said about America and Britain,” he said, his voice a hush. “Why do the soldiers treat us roughly at the check-points? Why did they shoot two young boys this morning they were 12 or 13 years old. Why is it only bad things said about Iraqis?” Another man, who gave his name as Saad, was equally direct. “Saddam Hussein was good,” he declared without being asked. “Last week there was food, water, electricity. Now there is nothing. I am not happy. America and Britain why this? Last week was good. We could sleep at night, but not now.” What could one tell the Iraqis gathered at a street corner, children persistently asking for water or something to eat? That most people in Britain were opposed to the war, that millions had marched through London to send that message, that all that oil in the desert belonged to them and that the nice Mr Blair and Mr Bush were “protecting it for the Iraqi people”? “People are angry,” said the teacher. “People are scared.” It was a point he did not need to make. On the way out of town a seemingly endless convoy of American and British troops roared passed in their armoured vehicles, weapons drawn. The people of Safwan eyed them as they passed. The children waved and called out for water.
Thanks to David Sheon for a very helpful edit
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