Something happened in Baghdad on Monday, but what exactly? What we know is that somewhere in Saddam Hussein’s sprawling former cantonment on the banks of the Tigris, behind silver miles of new razor wire, behind high concrete barriers stronger than most medieval fortifications, behind sandbags, five security checks, US armoured vehicles, US armoured soldiers, special forces of various countries and private security guards, behind secrecy and a fear of killing so intense that none save a handful of people knew it had happened until after it was over, an American bureaucrat handed a piece of paper to an Iraqi judge, jumped on a helicopter, and left the country.
Paul Bremer’s departure and the handover of a limited form of sovereignty to an unelected Iraqi government was to be the end of military occupation and the beginning of independence.
From London and Washington it may look that way and Iraqis, too, seem eager to believe that Monday was the beginning of the end of chaos and fear. But the Bremer who waved from the steps of his departing C-130 didn’t only leave sovereignty, in the form of a terse two-paragraph letter, with the Iraqis. He left 160 000 foreign troops, a broken economy and a land beset by ruthless, reckless armed bands.
The first thing reporters saw as they came into the sunshine from the banal auditorium where the newly sworn-in Iraqi government hailed the new era was two US Apache helicopter gunships, pirouetting low in the furnace sky.
The journey out of the fortified cantonment, previously known as the Green Zone, now renamed the International Zone, still winds through ramparts and fortifications, past jumpy US soldiers threatening to confiscate mobile phones. In the streets beyond, menacing signs in English and Arabic still hang beneath US watchtowers. ”Keep Away, Deadly Force Authorised.” ”Tactical Military Vehicles ONLY.” ”Do Not Enter Or You Will Be Shot.”
The handover was held in a single-storey former Saddam-era guesthouse in the zone which has been given to the new prime minister, Ayad Allawi. Fear of the bombers gave the occasion all the pomp of an office leaving do. It lasted only 20 minutes.
Allawi’s residence and a similar building provided for the president, Sheikh Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar look out on pleasant lawned gardens, studded with pools and orange trees.
It is a delightful setting from which to reinvent independent Iraq, except Allawi and Yawar are sandwiched by the enormous weight of American enthusiasm, there to make sure they get the independence thing right.
On one side, the huge new US embassy. On the other side, Saddam Hussein’s lavish principal former palace or, as it is known since yesterday, the annex to the US embassy.
Yawar had hoped to be waking up in that palace this morning but was told the Americans needed it too badly; in that sense, as in so many others, today will be just another day in the zone.
The first many people around the zone knew of yesterday’s events was an Iraqi flag billowing in the hairdryer-hot breeze from the Zone’s tallest building. Inside the Zone, logos of the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority which Bremer headed, emblems which had started to look permanent, disappeared.
There was a curious ceremony in the Zone’s convention centre which, apart from the odd Saddamish mural, could be a convention centre anywhere, intended to mark the handover of military authority from the coalition to the Iraqi military. A column of US cavalrymen, dressed in the blue shirts, kerchiefs, gauntlets and black broad-brimmed hats of the Custer era, marched out across the industrial carpeting, bearing their departing standards.
It was as if they were leaving. But they were not, any more than Bremer’s departure is America leaving.
It was hard to get away from the reality of the beleaguered, hunkered-down US military behemoth. Before the ceremony a pleasant, anxious, motherly Virginian woman began to chat. She’d only just arrived, for a six-month tour. She was a Pentagon civilian, but they had put her in camouflage fatigues. They hadn’t given her a gun. She had never used one before. She was worried she might find herself under attack and unable to help her comrades out. She lives next to the US military cemetery at Arlington. ”They’re doing 26 funerals a day,” she said. ”People go jogging there, but they show respect.”
There were other, more transient visitors in the Zone. There was Gregg Andrew, a Pentagon contractee who described himself as an ”advance man”, hired to choreograph the handover so it would look decent on TV.
He said of the ceremonies: ”There is a pageantry involved.” Yet there wasn’t. The swearing-in of the president, prime minister and government could not have been more simple.
The principals sat on an auditorium stage adorned by nothing more than 18 Iraqi flags, and swore plain oaths under God to Iraq, democracy and the people with their hands on a big red Koran. It was appropriate to the occasion. The advent of what is supposed to be the opposite of dictatorship looked suitably modest.
Just before the swearing-in began the Iraqi leadership waved to the people watching. As they did, they looked like middle-aged people look when the restraining bar locks into place on an extreme funfair ride about to lurch into the air.
For despite the constraints the US and Britain will keep on them, they have power and responsibility, and they know that in trying to invent a new narrative for Iraq, they are only doing what their Arab and Kurd predecessors did in learning the strange art of politics under the Ottomans and the British, likewise times of violence, revolt, occupation and compromise.
We will have to wait for Bremer’s memoirs to know what he thought, looking down as his Chinook banked over the parched date groves, yellow cubescape and sluggish brown river of summer Baghdad for the last time.
Yet between the disastrous spell of looting which began the US occupation, the disbanding of the army and police which enabled crime to flourish, the failure to rebuild the country, the continued presence of a vast US force and the uncertainty surrounding future elections, the creation of a transitional government seems a thin achievement, particularly when that government is showing authoritarian tendencies.
But an Iraqi government, any Iraqi government, seems to many like the overdue fulfilment of what they wanted from the Americans all along, which was to painlessly extract Saddam and his family from their lives, like a bad tooth, and immediately vanish. Instead, the dentist moved in. – Guardian Unlimited Â