United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week claimed that the political and security situation in Iraq was improving, in spite of attacks on United States soldiers and sabotage of electricity and oil supplies.
The upbeat assessment by the foreign secretary — the highest-ranking politician of the US-UK coalition to enter the centre of Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein — contrasted with views expressed by coalition officials on the ground.
One senior official said the reality was that ”it feels worse” and that the ambushes would slow reconstruction because US soldiers would ”bunker down”.
He added that Washington and London had an unrealistic expectation of what could be achieved in a short time.
Paul Bremer, the US special envoy to Iraq, admitted in talks with Straw held in Saddam’s former presidential palace that the US, crucially, had been slow in getting going in the immediate aftermath of the war. He also volunteered that the US had not put as much effort into post-war planning as into preparing for the conflict.
The spate of attacks over the past week has forced President George W Bush and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, on to the back foot.
Straw, at a press conference in the former British embassy on Wednesday, denied that Iraq was becoming a political and military quagmire. He blamed the lack of law and order on ”the remnants of the Ba’athist regime, along with some of the petty and serious criminals that were let out of prison by Saddam before the conflict began.
”The message from Bremer and the military commanders is that these actions against the coalition forces will be dealt with.”
His optimism was undercut by the fact that US forces were unable to guarantee his security on the road from the airport into Baghdad, the scene of several ambushes. Instead, Straw was ferried around in a US Black Hawk helicopter.
And in contrast to Straw, the senior coalition official said: ”Things have not got better in the [past] week. It is difficult to get an accurate graph of shooting incidents. It is certainly not better and, possibly, a little worse. I think the coalition provisional authority is pretty unpopular. I think it is misunderstood. There is no [Iraqi] media to get our message across.”
The coalition did not have the answers yet, but, he said, it had better find them soon — certainly within two years.
The official blamed Iraqi resentment on impatience with the speed of political change and unhappiness with services, such as the disruption of electricity in Baghdad, hit by sabotage more than a week ago.
This attack underlined the ease with which the Ba’ath Party and Fedayeen militia can disrupt restoration of services and pose a huge problem: if they can wreck power supplies once, they can do it repeatedly.
John Sawyer, the British special envoy to Iraq, said that it was the success of the US crackdown on Ba’athists that had forced them to switch to soft targets. ”Yes, we can’t go round guarding every pylon,” Sawyer said. ”But we can make clear who is responsible and isolate them.”
Straw, visiting an Iraqi police academy, promised to consider a request to send more British police to help with training.
Before flying to Baghdad, Straw visited Basra to meet the British commander in Iraq, Major General Peter Hall, members of the Parachute Regiment and military police. He promised the police that Britain was not turning a blind eye to the deaths last week of six of their number; the hunt for their killers would continue.
The most senior US politician to visit Baghdad is Rumsfeld, but he did not go beyond the airport perimeter because of the risk.
Straw flew back to London on Wednesday night at the end of a four-day trip that took him to Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. — Â