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Wednesday, Jun 30, 2004

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Iraq handover: a new dawn?

By James Meek

The creation of a transitional government seems a thin achievement, particularly when that government is showing authoritarian tendencies.

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, U.S. armoured vehicles, U.S. 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 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.

Mr. 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 Mr. Allawi and Mr. 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 U.S. embassy. On the other side, Saddam Hussein's lavish principal former palace or, as it is known since Monday, the annex to the U.S. Embassy.

Mr. 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 Monday'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 Mr. Bremer headed, emblems that 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 U.S. 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 Mr. Bremer's departure is America leaving.

It was hard to get away from the reality of the beleaguered, hunkered-down U.S. military behemoth. 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 U.S. 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 Mr. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Newspapers Limited 2004

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