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From: Bart (129.171.32.13)
It was five days after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Paradise Square in Baghdad. I stood in an aircraft hangar hundreds of miles away at US central command in Qatar and listened to a suited American envoy speak of the postwar plans for Iraq. There was a raw naivety even then. It was rushed and excited. A bold new political architecture that would shape the lives of millions was being sketched out as we watched. Dozens of notables had been invited to a meeting in the ruins of the ancient city of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, in southern Iraq. It was to be the first in a series of gatherings from which, we were told, would grow the roots of a new, idealistic, democratic Iraqi government. "I don't think we are in the process of anointing anyone or imposing anyone," said the man from Washington. "We are not interested in governing Iraq. We want to turn it over as quickly as possible." They were hollow words. Ur was the last of those meetings and liberation quickly became occupation. America's proconsul, Paul Bremer, did anoint and impose people: in the first year he picked 25 Iraqis for an advisory council, in the second year he picked an entire unelected cabinet of ministers. The US and Britain did find themselves governing Iraq, and at spectacular cost. Brutality For most of the past two years since that pronouncement in the aircraft hangar I have lived as a reporter in Baghdad. I have witnessed lives shaped foremost by a suffocating violence, a violence born out of frustration and resentment, brutality and nihilism. It is not yet a civil war, but it is a burgeoning insurgency and it is crippling Iraq.
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