Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The ghosts of our imperial past haunt Iraq

Britain left the subcontinent bleeding. Some wounds, like Kashmir, remain unhealed today

The end game in Iraq is nigh. Britain, the US and the Iraqi government, all now beleaguered in different ways, are scared witless by the diabolical violence in the "liberated" country. When withdrawal happens it will be both too late and too soon. More of Iraq, I fear, will turn into a killing field. Its oil resources will fall to even more bandits (commercial ones from the West and guerrillas with arms from around the entire region) and once more, a legacy of perpetual instability, dependency and desolation will have been left by colonial powers who have never given a damn about the people whose lands they grab to run and ruin.

It happened in India. In 1942, the quit India agitation was gaining momentum. Militant nationalists attacked public buildings, post offices and police stations. Trains were derailed and havoc was seen across the country. The British shot dead about 1,100 "insurgents" and arrested 72,000 others. Gandhi and Nehru wanted a united India with all races and faiths living under a free state. Other Indian politicians began plotting for a divided nation. The imperialists and a handful of self-serving indigenous leaders saw to it that independence burned on a pyre as Partition took its dreadful toll. The Muslim League was encouraged by the British to demand the creation of Pakistan, which duly happened.

Divide, antagonise and leave now followed the divide and rule policy which for centuries had given Britain illegitimate power over the subcontinent. The British left India ripped and bleeding profusely. Some wounds, like Kashmir were to remain unhealed to this day.

Today the colonialists are preparing to leave behind the same mess and misery in Iraq while still claiming virtuous purpose and high morality. We, who were against the war, warned till we were hoarse that this was a corrupt enterprise which would lead to needless deaths, perilous mistrust and hatreds within Iraq and beyond. We were accused of opposing democracy, dismissed as supporters of Saddam who cared nothing about the poor victims of the chemical weapons in Halabja.

So how does the Bush and Blair war brigade feel now? Still convinced they are on the side of angels? Some of them are idealists, individuals I respect, in spite of their gullibility. They meant well and are now in some turmoil as hell descends on Iraq. Others though are dangerous ideologues who produce increasingly demented justifications for a lost cause. What will it take for them to beat a retreat from their previous positions? The loudest drummers - from right to left - are deaf themselves and want to march on with this sick venture.

How very moving was the sight of Labour MP Anne Clwyd as she shed real tears for the tortured victims of Saddam and his gang. Is she weeping afresh today as we take collective responsibility for the hitherto concealed allied "punishment" of innocents and combatants in Fallujah? Our allies tamed the town with White Phosphorus (WP).

A year ago when the Black Watch were returning home in time for Christmas, some in body bags, I wrote in this column that I didn't want to hug the soldiers but to ask them what horrors were perpetrated in Fallujah. Now we know a little more. Jeff Englehart, former soldier of the US first Infantry Division in Iraq says there were "burned bodies, burned children, burned women; white phosphorus kills indiscriminately". And to the bone.

Figures of other casualties are beginning to emerge - thousands, admits the Pentagon, in the past 18 months. According to the website Iraq Occupation Focus, countless people have fled from the western towns of Husaybah and al-Qaim, near the borders of Syria, since Fallujah-style assaults were launched there in November. Hospitals have been destroyed and the nearest ones are now 200 miles away. In October in the town of Haditah, there was an 18-day bombardment. Hospitals were occupied, doctors beaten up and schools destroyed. A hundred thousand refugees are left in that region without homes or food and water.

John Reid conveniently decouples our government from the worst of these (known) excesses. Not so fast John. This is your war, one you chose to go in to. One day an international court should try you and your masters for war crimes and for what you have done in our name and in the name of human rights and democracy. Reid claims the British army only used WP to lay smoke screens. Don't fall for that. This is just another verbal smoke screen to exculpate this rotten government. The actions of our troops in Basra and their cluster bombs will be known one day.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government, the shining example of imposed democracy, has been found to be torturing its own people inside Baghdad in secret dungeons. The interior minister has warned he will punish troublemakers: "demolish their houses on their women's and children's heads as we did before". Was it all for this then?

As Saddam's trial gets under way, at what point does our intervention prove to be as bad as the dictator's regime? The allies still won't give us the total figures but every single day that goes by the numbers of dead Iraqi civilians mount - victims of insurgents, allied forces and armed Iraqi militiamen who see themselves as legitimate freedom fighters at war with colonial occupiers and their puppets in the current Iraqi government.

The slaying last week of the WPC Sharon Beshenivsky made me think of her inconsolable children, but also of how this happens every day to men and women in Iraq who have joined the police forces there to create a stable country. The allies cannot be blamed for the murderous insurgents but they cannot avoid the fact that there is more violence in this country since we went in than there was before.

America's name today is mud across the world. With what moral authority can Bush lecture the Chinese on human rights? The US has legitimated the use of torture in Iraq and cells around the world - to help gather essential information, we are told. In Guantanamo Bay, things have got worse, if such a thing can be imagined. Minimal legal rights are about to be taken away from inmates; some are dying as a result of hunger strikes.

The "war against terror" is terrorising the world, and with impunity. If you want to know why so many intelligent young men are blowing themselves up you have to look at their anger, which is just, although their actions are unforgivably brutal. Many of their parents must recall perfidious Albion in India and other places where conflicts were set off as the rulers retreated. Now they witness the same perfidy in Iraq.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk