Around the time of Saddam Husseins detention in December 2003, there were positive signals from the Coalition Provisional Authority suggesting that the insurgency was beginning to diminish. It was believed that much of the insurgency was centred on the organising activities of a small number of extended families in the so-called Sunni triangle north and west of Baghdad. Many members of these families were being detained, others were being observed and a number of their villages and neighbourhoods were surrounded by security fences and guarded round the clock, with entry and exit heavily restricted.
In the event, there was a decrease in but no cessation of attacks on US troops. Some particularly damaging attacks occurred around the turn of the year. Furthermore, there were indications that insurgent tactics were increasingly directed against the Iraqi police and security forces as well as public servants deemed to be collaborating with the US forces.
A waterfall of violence
Early in January, talk of an end to the insurgency diminished, although the Bush administration seemed as keen as ever to downplay the extent of the problem. As the same time, it worked with renewed enthusiasm towards a partial handover of power to sympathetic Iraqi elements, comfortably in time for the United States presidential election in November 2004.
Later in January, there were renewed reports from the US armed forces that progress against the insurgency was substantial, much of it emanating from people close to General John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command (Centcom), during his week-long tour of south-west Asia, including Iraq.
Abizaid himself was cautiously upbeat, while a number of his subordinates were quoted in remarkably positive terms (see Thomas E Ricks and Liz Spayd, A Measure of Success, Washington Post, 23 January 2004). According to an unnamed senior military official: What weve done in the last 60 days is really taken them down. Weve dismantled the Baghdad piece. Weve dismantled the Mosul piece. Im not saying weve taken down the Fallujah-Ramadi piece, but weve hammered it.
According to a battalion commander in Tikrit, (the) enemy doesnt have much left. They are desperate and flailing. The commander of the 4th Infantry Division, Major-General Raymond Odiero, echoes this view. According to the same report in the Washington Post, Odiero said that Husseins capture last month marked a major operational and psychological defeat for the enemy and produced a rise in accurate tips from Iraqis about insurgent activity. He said that insurgents had been brought to their knees and reduced to a fractured, sporadic threat.
Even as these comments were being published, a series of events in Iraq seemed to scorn them. On 21 January, two US soldiers were killed and one critically wounded in an attack near Baquba, two Iraqi police officers and a civilian were killed and five police wounded near Fallujah, and four women who worked at a US army base nearby were killed and six injured when their minibus was attacked.
On 24 January, five more US soldiers and four Iraqis were killed and six Americans and eight Iraqis were injured in a car bomb attack in Khaldiya and a roadside bombing near Fallujah. On the same day, yet another bomb exploded outside the council chambers and courthouse in Samarra during council elections, killing four Iraqis and injuring forty people, including seven US soldiers.
On 25 January, a US soldier, two Iraqi police officers and an interpreter were all lost when their patrol boat capsized in the Tigris river in Mosul, and a Kiowa rescue helicopter then crashed with the loss of its two crew. A day later, six more US soldiers and two CNN staff died in three separate attacks, and there was a rocket attack near the coalition headquarters in Baghdad. One day on, and seven days after this spate of attacks commenced, the Shaheen Hotel in Baghdad, popular with western visitors, was severely damaged in a car bomb attack killing three people and injuring many.
This pattern of attacks seems directly to contradict earlier expressions of optimism from the US military in Iraq. It will most likely serve to encourage further the Bush administration in seeking UN involvement in political transitions in Iraq.
It is also significant that the political impact of these attacks coincides with comments from the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, expressing doubts about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kay went so far as to say that his team had actually uncovered direct evidence that the Saddam Hussein regime had been destroying chemical and biological weapon stocks during the mid-1990s.
One effect of this combination of events will be to reinforce the attempts of the United States and its British ally to reframe the public justification for the decision to wage war on Iraq.
Human rights and Realpolitik
While the Blair government in Britain downplayed all this, saying that there was much searching still to do, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was far more forthcoming in agreeing that the Saddam Hussein regime may no longer have had such munitions at the time of the war.
Perhaps most significant is the US decision to replace David Kay with Charles Duelfer, a former senior UN inspector who had previously been dubious about Iraqs possession of chemical and biological weapons. Duelfers mission will be fundamentally different from that of Kay, in that it is to be directed at finding out when and how Iraq dismantled its weapons stocks. This very emphasis supports the idea that the Bush administration has now accepted that the existence of these weapons in Iraq can no longer be used to justify the war.
This is a more severe problem for the British government but it is still not easy for the Bush administration in an election year as US soldiers continue to suffer death and injury in Iraq. What we are therefore likely to see on both sides of the Atlantic is a substantially greater emphasis on the appalling human rights record of the Saddam Hussein regime as being the primary reason for its termination.
There are many problems with such an apparent change of motive, not least the long history of western support for repressive and brutal regimes across the world, including Somozas Nicaragua, Pinochets Chile, Suhartos Indonesia and Mobutus Zaire - to name only a few.
The tacit US support for the October 2003 presidential election in Azerbaijan is a more recent example. Washington initially congratulated President Ilham Aliev on his victory, expressed mild concern about human rights abuses, but again went quiet during Donald Rumsfelds recent visit to the Caucasus.
According to Human Rights Watch, Azerbaijan is experiencing its gravest human rights crisis of the past ten years, and its recent report, Crushing Dissent: Repression, Violence and Azerbaijans Elections, documents hundreds of arbitrary arrests, widespread beatings and torture.
Embracing genocide
If the putative US concern for human rights in the international arena poses problems of consistency and principle, a more narrow focus on the Saddam Hussein regimes record of repression carries its own risks. Such concern is likely to raise a hollow laugh in much of the region where there are long memories of strong support for the old regime from western countries - especially when, in the late 1980s, it was conducting its worst human rights abuses in its 25-year history.
Indeed, this very fact presents serious problems for an open and complete trial of Saddam Hussein, so much so that it is difficult to see how a trial can take place without serious embarrassment for the French, British and American governments in particular.
Saddam Husseins period of power had many brutalities, and it has long been pointed out that George Bush senior failed to aid the Kurdish and Shi'a communities when they rebelled against the Baghdad regime after the 1991 war. Even this, however, is exceeded by the carnage the regime visited on the Kurds in the early months of 1988.
At that time the Anfal campaign against the Kurds was reaching its peak, with a series of eight military offensives undertaken between February and October (see the report on the Anfal by Indict). The campaign, begun in 1987, reached a pitch of brutality that amounted almost to attempted genocide - involving mass arrests and executions the destruction of thousands of villages, the killing of tens of thousands of people and the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations.
The worst incident involving chemical warfare was the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988, killing some 5,000 people; yet this, and all the other atrocities of the Anfal took place at a time of strong foreign support for Iraq. Most of its weaponry was being supplied from France and the Soviet Union, but other countries were implicated, not least Britain, some of whose specialist factories provided materials for the supergun.
A problem of credibility
Perhaps most significant, given current attitudes in Washington, was the manner in which the Reagan administration saw Iraq as a solid buffer against Iran in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that had started in 1980. In all that period, the strongest support from Washington came precisely at the time of the Anfal campaign, and extended to direct military action against Iran.
This helped Iraq end the war later in 1988 on terms much more acceptable than had been predicted. This caused some surprise, especially in the light of the capture by Iranian ground forces of Iraqs Faw peninsula earlier in the year.
Throughout the Iran-Iraq war there had been attacks by both countries on tankers and other shipping in the Persian Gulf. Before 1988, most of them were launched by Iraqi forces, but the United States put much greater emphasis on Iran as the threat. This was even the case in the wake of an Iraqi attack in March 1987 on one of their own frigates, the USS Stark, which was hit by two French-made Exocet missiles fired from Iraqi aircraft, killing 37 US sailors and injuring 21. The Iraqis apologised, claiming pilot error.
Extraordinarily, the United States used this to escalate its involvement in a crisis with Iran, not Iraq, and increased its forces substantially in the Gulf in the following months. Early in 1988, the US blamed Iraq for mining and other forms of harassment and the crisis escalated still further when another frigate, the USS Samuel B. Roberts, hit a mine and nearly sank.
On 18 April 1988, the US launched Operation Praying Mantis, a major naval and special forces action against Iranian oil facilities in the Gulf. Oil production platforms in the Sirri and Sassan fields were hit, an Iranian patrol boat and Boghammer speedboats were sunk and a major action was fought against the two modern frigates of the Iranian navy, the Sahalan and the Sahand. The Sahalan was sunk and the Sahand severely damaged. The Iranians thus lost the key units of their small navy, with substantial loss of life.
In essence, although this is now quietly forgotten, the Reagan administration contrived to take the side of the Iraqis at a key stage in the Iran-Iraq war at the very time when Saddam Husseins brutal campaign against his own Kurdish population was at its height.
Such circumstances are almost unknown now in the United States or, for that matter, in Britain and France, but they may well come to the surface if Saddam Hussein faces open trial in the coming months. They are, though, much better known in the Middle East. If the United States and Britain increasingly insist that the prime motive for destroying the Saddam regime a concern for human rights, rather than weapons of mass destruction, they are unlikely to be believed.
