Patrick Cockburn: Why the Iraqis are suspicious of their liberators

Saddam has ruined Iraq, but his people do not blame him alone. They have cause to be wary of the US and Britain, and Saddam is appealing to their patriotism

In 1915 a British army led by Major General Charles Townsend advanced north from Basra in what he hoped would be an easy campaign to capture Baghdad. After initial victories he was forced to retreat. After suffering heavy casualties in a battle outside Baghdad the army fell back to Kut, then as now an evil-smelling and tumbledown city on a bend in the Tigris.

After a siege the army surrendered and it was only in 1917 that Baghdad was captured; 40,000 British soldiers died and were buried in the plains of Iraq. I used to visit a sad little cemetery in Kut that had turned into a swamp. The names of the dead on the tombstones were only just visible above the slimy green water.

The analogy with the present war should not be pushed too far. General Townsend's army and the Anglo-American force now fighting south of Baghdad both suffered from overextended communications. But otherwise the military superiority enjoyed by the British and the Americans against Saddam Hussein is far greater than that of the British against the Turks in the First World War.

But there is another, precise parallel between what happened south of Baghdad in 1915 and in 2003. In both cases the invading army and its political masters were grossly overconfident that they would win an easy victory. So far, this has not happened, though the Iraqi army might cave in under the terrible battering from US air power. The difficulties facing London and Washington are not just important in the context of the present campaign, but they are an ominous foretaste of the dangers in establishing any post-war settlement.

Some myths should be disposed of immediately. At one moment it was almost conventional wisdom in Washington that the Iraq post-Saddam would be like Germany and Japan after defeat in 1945, gratefully willing to see their societies remodelled by the US (Britain is not often mentioned here). But Germans and Japanese largely supported their governments' war efforts. Most Iraqis do not identify with Saddam Hussein, as President Bush and Tony Blair never tire of pointing out, and therefore do not see why their future should be determined over their heads by foreign conquerors.

The Iraqi people are not passive spectators in what is happening around them. For instance, a myth that seems impossible to eradicate is that they do not know what is happening minute by minute in the war or the political manoeuvring that preceded it. Iraqis for many years have been obsessive listeners to foreign radio broadcasts such as the BBC in Arabic, Monte Carlo (French Arabic radio), Voice of America and almost every other station. I went to a fruit-growing village on the Diyala river north-east of Baghdad a few years ago where villagers interrogated me closely about a recent change in the stance of Canada in a vote at the United Nations. A few days ago I was in a smugglers' village on the Zaab river just on the Kurdish side of the front line where they had been following every step of talks in Turkey aimed at averting a Turkish invasion.

There is a deeply colonial spirit in which, in the run-up to the war, the US and Britain have treated Iraqis not belonging to the regime, as if they had no thoughts or aims of their own. It is a dangerous stance because, although the majority of Iraqis do not like Saddam – they know that through launching two disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait he has ruined their lives and their country -- they do not blame him alone. They recall that his Baath party first came to power in a bloody coup that the CIA openly claimed credit for. In the 1980s they know he was supported whole-heartedly by the US and much of the rest of the world in the war that he had launched against Iran. It is hardly surprising that Iraqis are suspicious of their liberators' motives.

In the months before the war, Washington did everything to foster these suspicions. If it had got a Security Council resolution supporting war with Iraq, then Iraqis would have been more receptive to an invasion under UN auspices. It would have made it far more difficult for Saddam to portray the invasion as an imperial conquest. Little over a month ago Kurdish leaders were abruptly told at a meeting in Ankara that Iraq would be under a US military government after Saddam in which they and the Iraqi opposition would have only an advisory role. This was later as abruptly dropped. (In private, Kurdish and opposition leaders say that fractious though the Iraqi opposition is, this is as nothing to the divisions in Washington where every part of the bureaucracy has its own policy).

Disliked though Saddam Hussein may be by most of the Iraqi population, he is appealing to Iraqi nationalism and patriotism. This is much bruised after his disastrous years in power, but it can still resonate. One long-standing opponent of his rule told me at the weekend that, much though he approved of the invasion, he still felt a frisson of anger when he saw American soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes near Umm Qasr.

There are other reasons why Saddam Hussein has been able to keep control over much of the Iraqi population as the Anglo-American armies sweep by on their way to Baghdad. He learnt lessons from the great uprisings of the Shia Muslims of south Iraq and the Kurds of the north in 1991. They almost toppled him from power. They did so because the Iraqi army had been defeated in Kuwait and his security forces were caught by surprise. Central control from Baghdad was paralysed.

It has not happened this time. From long before the crisis, the Iraqi leader had set up committees of security men and Baath party members in every village, town and city district. Their orders were to snuff out dissent as soon as it appeared. No uprising was to be allowed to get off the ground.

Saddam decentralised authority to regional commanders so not all commands had to come from him. He also obviously set up an effective alternative communications system. The remarkable thing about the bloodthirsty videos of dead and captured American and British soldiers is that within hours of the ambushes they had been filmed and the video brought back to Baghdad. He was therefore able to publicise small successes at an early and critical stage of the invasion.

A collapse of the regime might still come, but Saddam seems to be succeeding in his primary aim of making the war go on for twenty or more days. If air strikes are used for tactical support in an assault on Baghdad then the civilian casualties will be terrible. At the beginning of the war, if the US had played its cards right, it might have been faced with an Iraqi population that was desperate enough for a return to normality to accept a period of foreign rule. But almost every statement out of Washington has given the impression that its long-term plans are little different from Britain's in 1917. Even the death of Saddam would provoke further bitter resistance.

The author is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, and the co-author, with Andrew Cockburn, of 'Saddam Hussein: an American Obsession'