Few of the Americans running Iraq are as frank about their ”mission” to bring freedom to the world as the barrel-chested former New York police chief Bernard Kerik.
On the morning of the September 11 attacks Kerik, then the city’s respected police commissioner, was in his office at 1 Police Plaza when the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Centre.
He ran into the street in time to watch the second plane plunge into the south tower.
These are the memories he brought with him to Baghdad when he was sent here three weeks ago to run the interior ministry: in effect, to bring back law and order to a country ravaged by looting and postwar chaos.
”Personally, I lost 23 police officers from the NYPD and I guess I owe it to them because they were responding on that day in defence of our freedom,” he said.
”Iraq is a country that was a threat to that freedom and this is a country in which we now have the opportunity to show the Iraqi people why freedom is so great, why the United States is so great, why the UK is so great.
”It’s going to take a while before the Iraqis understand that freedom, and what it’s really all about.”
Despite the rhetoric, it is not the most glamorous of assignments. He works in a palace but, like all the senior staff in the coalition provisional authority in Baghdad, he lives in a caravan in the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace. Life in a caravan park in Baghdad’s sweltering summer heat is not luxurious. ”It’s OK,” he said tactfully.
He wakes at 5am for a briefing at 6.15 to prepare himself for the first main meeting of the day, at 7am, with Paul Bremer, the US diplomat in charge of Iraq. Under his safari jacket he wears a pistol in a holster on his belt and rarely steps outside the palace complex without his black bullet-proof vest and armoured four-wheel drive.
But if Iraqis have one common complaint about the two months since the war, it is that a wave of lawlessness has gripped their country.
Kerik insists that peace is around the next corner. ”It’s only been two months,” he said in the unflappable style of a high-school dropout who went on to run the biggest police force in the US and then write a bestselling autobiography.
The number of US troops in Baghdad has been significantly increased in the past fortnight and the number of military police has been doubled.
Ba’athists have been largely weeded out of the top echelons of the police force and patrols are starting again.
Yet most Iraqis in the city still complain of carjackings, late-night shootings, lynchings and robberies. Human rights organisations accuse Britain and the US of failing to comply with their obligations under the Geneva conventions to assure peace and security.
”Do I feel frustrated? No. What I will say is that people have to understand these things do not happen overnight,” he said. He insists that what Baghdad needs is not more troops and police on the streets but the approach to tackling crime that he brought to New York City.
”We don’t need a lot more people. If we can put together a coordinated effort to know where the crime and the violence is we can deploy our people into those areas and knock that stuff out of there. That’s what we are going to do.”
Some of the trouble has come from criminals. More worrying are the signs of locally organised resistance to the US military presence, particularly in conservative towns like Falluja, from people who under Saddam Hussein enjoyed considerable power and wealth.
”It’s an enormous loss for them and they are never going to get it back. Never,” he said. ”They are never going to overpower the coalition. Never.”
True to his missionary zeal, Kerik is startlingly dismissive of the growing international concern about the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction.
”This is my personal opinion: I don’t care,” he said.
What we should care about, he insisted, are the mass graves, the torture cells and the regime’s countless human rights violations.
These are questions that ”nobody seems to be focused on, because they are all talking about the big-ticket item of weapons of mass destruction”.
”The one weapon of mass destruction in this country was Saddam Hussein. He is no longer in power. I think that’s the victory here.” – Guardian Unlimited Â