In the flat semi-desert outside Nassiriyeh we saw the water thieves from at least a mile away. The heat haze made them, their goats and trucks, loom through the mirage as in funfair mirrors, impossibly tall. Our car was following one of central southern Iraq's most important water mains, part of a supply line for 2.4m people. It runs underground but rises, every few miles, at maintenance points housed in concrete boxes.
Around each valve box there was a large puddle. At one, men were filling a container with a pipe; at another a group of nomads were watering their goats. Their children splashed in the mud, waving at us. "They break the valves or shoot holes in the pipe. There's no one to stop them," explained John Cosgrave, a water engineer for Oxfam. Water theft might sound low on the list of antisocial crimes committed in Iraq these last months. But according to Cosgrave, breakages in the distribution net may account for 25 per cent of the water shortage in the region, where people are getting less than a quarter of their normal supply. Further, these broken pipes can suck contaminants from the puddles back into what had been an unusually good water purification system-paid for under the oil for food programme.
The water thieves of the desert-unpoliced and probably unpoliceable in the present Iraq-were getting more water than they had seen since Saddam Hussein drained their marshes ten years ago. But bad water is killing others. Among the people of Nassiriyeh, and across central and southern Iraq, diarrhoeal disease and the resulting malnutrition are at levels far higher than they were a year ago.
It is not only water thieves who are undermining the country's infrastructure. A month after the end of fighting, lack of electricity-owing first to war damage and then the subsequent looting of the power stations (near Basra, Cosgrave had seen one repaired and re-looted three times)-accounted for perhaps 50 per cent of the loss of water supply around Nassiriyeh.
In the town of Samawa, we picked up Mahassein Jarr, a water engineer from the local authority, and toured the pumping stations with him to discuss what assistance Oxfam might provide. What, we asked, is the answer to the problem of pipe-breaking? "Simple," said Jarr. "Under the old regime anyone who did that would be shot on sight. These people need someone tough, or they'll never be good."
This is a familiar tune in postwar Iraq, and you hear it particularly from the middle classes, who have come to regret losing some of the advantages of Saddam's dictatorship. Before March 2003, Iraq was one of the safest places to live in the world-if, of course, you were lucky enough to have a salary and didn't fall foul of the secret police. The deterrents were horrible and thus street crime was nonexistent. When the coalition swept the regime away, with it went the order that is a concomitant of absolute power. Now there isn't one big tough guy-indeed, across much of Iraq there is still no authority visible on the streets or in the countryside at all.
Many people, not least the US soldiers who now attempt to police Baghdad, express their amazement that the Iraqis should loot and destroy their own museums and hospitals. But it was surely foolish to expect all the Iraqis swiftly to become socially responsible citizens. Looting happens. The most momentary breakdown in law and order in any country, however orderly, sees shop windows smashed as soon as the water cannon or tear gas fires-I have seen it during "anarchist" demonstrations in London, anti-globalisation riots in Prague, and in the old town of Marseilles, when English football fans did what they do at the 1998 World Cup. We are all capable of it.
It seems to follow that, the more rigid and cruel the rules, the more likely people are to take advantage of their disappearance. "Ordinary Iraqis' brains aren't wired for good citizenship," one observer of the country told me. How do you instil a sense of social responsibility in people who have never been allowed to think for themselves? How can this battered population adapt from rule by fear to rule by consensus, which they have never known? The social instinct atrophies under dictatorship, because the government takes on the role of social regulator.
Looting hospitals seems extraordinary from outside. Much of it has indeed been crazed and pointless-stealing incubators from maternity units, for example. Baghdad in May had no adequate facilities to test whether there was a cholera outbreak in the suburbs because the mob had smashed every piece of kit in the laboratories. But it is not surprising that the released thieves and poor rampaged through the city, as they did. For the most part, those hospitals would not have admitted them anyway. It has to be said, too, that there is ample evidence from the weeks of mayhem in April that US troops did more than just stand by when looters attacked ministries or palaces-a common Baghdad assumption is that they encouraged them to go in first as unofficial mine clearers.
Moreover, the looting of public buildings was not as ubiquitous as has been reported. In the Shi'i al-Sadr district, formerly Saddam City, I visited Tchuwada Hospital, where doctors and nurses said no looting had taken place. The main threat to their safety is the commute to work. Tchuwada is protected by the militias of the local mosque. In Iraq today, the safest, most orderly places, where electricity is on and refuse is collected, are almost all under the control of Shi'i militias.
However effectively it fought the war, the coalition made virtually no provision for policing the peace. Saddam's police force, if you include his street-level "people's army," was one of the largest, per head, in the world-at one point 750,000 for a population of 24m. Now the country, with the exceptions of the few places where police are slowly being retrained, "de-Ba'athified" and returned to work, has almost no police. Combat troops (numbering 160,000 in Iraq in early June), however well-intentioned, are no policemen. They are bored by the work and very bad at it, as anyone who has been through a Baghdad checkpoint will confirm. The result of this failure to deploy an adequate replacement for the old regime's police force is a corrosive sense among ordinary Iraqis of potential chaos, a belief that mayhem is on the doorstep. In many places this is unfounded. In a comparatively peaceful place like Nassiriyeh, for example, if you ask people why their children aren't going to school, or why women won't leave their homes, they blame rumours they have heard, or stories of drive-by shootings in Baghdad, over 200 miles away.
This breakdown in public confidence can be traced back to Donald Rumsfeld's reported refusal in February to allow the military command time to bring in two further divisions, among whom would have been the crucial battalions of military police. It isn't as if there was no precedent. UN peacekeeping enterprises, though often inept in their own way, have always seen civil policing as a front-line duty. When Nato troops entered Kosovo in 1999, convoys of policemen recruited from across Europe followed in the tracks of the tanks from Albania and Macedonia. Belatedly, and principally because of pressure from Britain, pleas have now gone out for nations to provide policemen.
The water thieves of Iraq reminded me of other countries where, once the social fabric tears, it seems impossible to sew it together again. Albania has never recovered from the social meltdown after the demise of its dictatorship in 1991, which was followed by the economic collapse in 1997. Back then, Albanians too destroyed their schools, hospitals and factories. Fruit trees in the orchards of what had been a productive, if state-run, export industry were cut down and burned. In Albania now, street signs are habitually stolen for their steel and roads are hardly usable because no traffic rules are observed. While Albanian houses are scrupulously clean, all refuse is dumped in the street.
There, as in Somalia and other failed states, the only ties that bind are those of blood. The remnants of the state are a rubbish dump to be picked over for whatever can be salvaged and taken home. Despite billions in aid money and hordes of professional nation-builders from the good works organisations of the rich world, Albania, over a decade after its state died, remains essentially tribal.
It is easy to be too pessimistic about Iraq's prospects. For one thing, as everyone points out, it has the potential to be rich-there's the oil. And Iraq's new government is certainly trying. One day at the end of May, shortly before I left, BBC World broadcast a piece filmed in a small town near Basra. It showed a file of British fusiliers wobbling down a street on mountain bikes, feathered berets askew on perspiring faces, rifles bumping on their backs. "It's a new initiative to make Iraqi people feel British soldiers are approachable," chirped the reporter. The military PR machine in Baghdad and Basra seems to come up with a similar stunt every day-a press facility to see a traffic cop at a road junction, plans for a Baghdad Symphony Orchestra concert (due in September), a US Aid-funded "community clean-up." They are supposed to show, in the mantra of the US liaison officers, that "normalcy is returning."
But it is not, yet. I was in Basra the day the BBC's cycling report was filmed, watching a demonstration of doctors and nurses threatening to go on strike unless the military provided proper security to their hospitals. They were fed up, they said, of armed gangs appearing in the emergency room, ordering the staff at gunpoint to treat their friends' injuries. The same day I watched several hundred Iraqi navy and army officers, representing 10,000 military personnel in the city, demonstrating outside a UN hotel for their salaries, unpaid since February. Later, Major David Gibb, a British liaison officer, addressed a worried meeting of NGOs and UN staff-discussions with the unpaid soldiers were ongoing, he said. They had been offering themselves as a volunteer police force. Now those offers had turned to threats.
The following day, the British in Basra dissolved the city council, the one whose members they had nominated only a few weeks earlier, and which had been held up as a showcase (along with the equivalent in the northern city of Mosul) of smooth transition to joint civilian-military rule. The Basra city council was too full of former Ba'athists, said the British, which was undoubtedly true-although this is a bit like saying that the foreign office is too full of people who have been to Oxbridge. If you held an official post of any note, you had to be a Ba'ath party member. The real reason was that the council and the British army were not able to agree on anything. The new council will be chaired by a British brigadier, and contain "western experts" too.
The merry-go-round of officials appointed and then relieved of their posts has been turning for weeks. The first Iraqi minister of health, Ali Shnan al-Janabi, lasted just a few days before his resignation was forced. He had been number three in the ministry under Saddam and as soon as his appointment was announced, hundreds of doctors and nurses protested, saying he was corrupt. Shortly after, Stephen Browning, the smooth technocrat who is the occupying powers' head of health, communications and transport, introduced the NGOs to a new "special adviser" on health-a man who lasted such a short time that no one can recall his name. A few days later, a notorious Ba'athist police major-general appeared at a ceremony to reopen a Baghdad police station, resulting in angry protests from the policemen lined up to have their hands shaken. A press release was then issued stating that the major-general was banned from holding any post, due to his Ba'athist past.
Are these the teething troubles of an administration gamely trying to do something untried on such a scale in modern history-the fast-track construction of a liberal democracy from the ruins of an absolute dictatorship? Or is this, in effect, an impossible task, at least with so few people on the ground to achieve it? In early May, a colleague and I toured the offices of a number of key expatriates in the new Baghdad-returning ambassadors, senior figures in the office of reconstruction and humanitarian affairs (the civil service of the occupying powers) and the heads of the significant aid agencies. Not one was anything better than gloomy, and for several the outlook was catastrophic. The Americans' failure to get a grip on law and order in Baghdad was a "bloody disaster," said one very senior figure from the coalition.
If the US troops in the city were unable to get a grip on the looters and thieves, how would they deal with a violent demonstration of tens of thousands on the streets-perhaps in response to the announcement of the advisory interim council? As we were doing our rounds, the amiable but ineffective Jay Garner was replaced by the reportedly tougher Paul Bremer, and the announcement of the interim council was postponed to mid-July at the earliest. We also began to see US army trucks touring the city, crammed full of Iraqi youths with their wrists cable-tied behind their backs. At NGO/military liaison meetings, briefings on the cubic metres of rubbish collected came second to the figures on looters and "terrorists" arrested. Night patrols began.
Zero tolerance had arrived in Iraq, we were told. But that same day, I drove from Basra to Baghdad and saw not a single military patrol on those 450 miles of road. What I did see was that the few petrol stations open were all now being run by militia men, dozens at each of them, pushing their Kalashnikovs through the windows of the queueing cars and turning away anyone they did not like the look of. And two days later, fighting in Falluja-a town on the main road into Baghdad from Jordan, and a major aid convoy route-left two US soldiers dead and 11 wounded.
Everyone was relieved to see the end of May-the death toll lower, I suspect, than the military must have feared. But the blows to morale seemed endless, some of them inflicted by naivete on the coalition's part. Since early May, the administration has been handing out $1m a day to municipal workers, the money taken from Iraqi state funds sequestered in the US. The payments took the form of $20 in cash, given without regard to rank or responsibility, which predictably caused annoyance. But then something much worse happened. This deluge of dollars caused its value to fall from 2,400 Iraqi dinars to 950 in just three days. Suddenly those payments were much less attractive, and at a time when the price of basic foodstuffs was double what it was a month ago.
It is not fair, perhaps, to blame the coalition administrators for failing to get control of an economy that currently lacks not only a central bank, but almost any existing bank buildings or a working finance ministry. But it is fair to ask just who they are, these people who are now the government of Iraq, with powers hitherto unknown in international law and as limitless as those of the dictator they have replaced. UN resolution 1483 grants the coalition provisional authority (CPA)-the US and British governments' representatives-unlimited control of Iraq's resources, overseen merely by an advisory board with representatives from the World Bank, the UN and others. The resolution stresses "the right of the Iraqi people to freely determine their own political future and to control their own natural resources," but only after some unspecified date. For now, the Iraqi people will be represented by that advisory interim council, whose members will be nominated by the authority.
Authority-watching has become a spectator sport for diplomats and aid agencies in Baghdad. The British are determined that the CPA should be "demilitarised" as soon as possible and in early May sent in John Sawers, a capable diplomat from the Cairo embassy, as Britain's chief representative to Iraq. Another 24 British civil servants arrived in the CPA's office after Clare Short had moved on (she had apparently stopped deployment of this sort). These include a representative from the DTI, a legal team and, bizarrely, an observer from John Prescott's office.
The US civilian administrators are more shadowy. One European diplomat, after a bad-tempered introductory meeting, described them as "a kindergarten of neoconservatives." Others said the young men and women of the CPA are good theoreticians on nation-building but few have any Arab experience. It has been reported that Donald Rumsfeld vetoed several candidates who had middle east experience, preferring to draw from the ranks of the Washington think tanks that support him. Sniping of this sort is predictable: Arabist diplomats are notoriously exclusive, believing that theirs is an arcane and exclusive science not to be practised by anyone who has not done years of apprenticeship in the region. But the appointments and subsequent sackings of Iraqi civil servants are an indication, perhaps, of a lack of savvy in the famous complexities of the Levant.
A recent Carnegie Endowment study found that of 16 US efforts at nation-building in the past century, only four have led to sustained democracy: Germany, Japan, Grenada and Panama. Whether Iraq becomes the fifth will depend to a considerable extent on its current head of state-Ambassador L Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, himself no expert on the region. When he quit the US diplomatic service in 1989 after 23 years (his last job was as Ronald Reagan's "ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism") he spent 11 years with Henry Kissinger's consultancy firm. Most recently, he was CEO at Marsh Crisis Consulting, a "risk analysis" consultancy that specialises in advising corporations how to do business in countries recovering from war or natural disaster. A lot of his work in Iraq is about getting big business involved in the reconstruction. This process is producing predictable anguish among other players. In the field, UN workers in water and sanitation are already emerging bruised from "consultations" with Bechtel, which has an initial $680m contract to oversee and subcontract for the infrastructure rebuild. Consulting wasn't really on the agenda, said my UN contact, a man with years of experience in southern Iraq patching up the public utilities with oil for food funds. Bechtel laid out their fast-track plans for swift refurbishment of schools, water plant and so on, and made it clear that anyone who wanted to help could sign up, and anyone who wanted to argue knew where the door was.
Bremer's initial get-tough approach impressed Baghdad residents, although the truck-loads of looters rounded up by the US army coincided with a reduction of the amount of electricity to the city and an end, unaccountably, to night patrols. Some of his other measures caused more surprise. An edict, delivered by way of photocopied A4 sheets in Arabic and English, and stuck to doors across the city, ordered that the image of Saddam or any Ba'ath party notable was now banned from public display. This seemed both unpleasantly dictatorial-what sort of liberation doesn't allow the Iraqis the benefit of the US constitution's first amendment?-and also risible, since the Iraqi dinar still bears Saddam's head.
Bremer's medicine for Iraq is simple: "Let the market do its magic," he told ABC news at the end of May. This did nothing to cheer up grumpy European diplomats. The headline quote from his first speech on the subject was "A free economy and a free people go hand in hand," but it contained no details on how the economy-80 per cent state-run until April-was going to make that transition.
Other declarations are pure fantasy. While Iraqis, particularly in the capital, fumed at petrol queues that stretched for up to a mile, often blocking major roads, Bremer decided to ban the sale of fuel by the freelances who offered petrol by the jug on street corners. Thankfully for anyone who wants to travel across the city, that edict has been ignored. A few days later, the announcement of a gun amnesty and facilities to turn in weapons was greeted by a rise in the street price of a Kalashnikov, which had been as low as $12. Was this because everyone was trying to buy a gun before the crackdown, I wondered? No, I was told-it is because everyone knows that weapons will only be handed in if the Americans offer a bounty per gun, so everyone is buying more while they are cheap.
At about the same time as the free-market fuel order emerged, another diktat was delivered to Baghdad. It caused more consternation than anything prescribed by Bremer or the CPA. Muhammad Fartosi, head of the fundamentalist Shi'i Hikma sect, which has a reported 2m Iraqi adherents, announced that anyone selling alcohol or running a cinema in the city would be shot and their houses burnt down. The alcohol shop run by friendly Christian Iraqis near my Baghdad hotel put up its shutters; it was only after tense negotiations through the grille that I managed to get my Heineken (at $3 a can). This underlined a truth already apparent across the Shi'i suburbs of east Baghdad, and in southern cities like Najaf and Karbala. There is, in these places at least, no more power vacuum: the mosques and their militias are in charge. And in terms of providing law and order, as well as street cleaning, they are doing a better job than the occupiers-the first land line telephone system to be restored in Baghdad is expected to be in the Gayera district. The local mosque has put its engineers into the bombed-out exchanges.
I went to a briefing for aid agencies with Karen Walsh, a CPA administrator charged with "local governance and civil society." She told me of plans to promote the election of community councils for Baghdad's boroughs-freely and without interference, with women especially encouraged to participate. I asked her how this scheme would fit in with those bits of the city where such structures were already visibly in place-the Shi'i bits-and where women's participation was not on the agenda. She waffled about how communities must decide for themselves how they would be run.
Coalition policy is, of course, actively against Shi'i, or "fundamentalist," control of Iraq, or even of parts of it. Shi'is make up 60 per cent of the population, and almost all of the poorest classes. Some senior Shi'i clerics are committed to a pluralist and democratic society, but the outcome of the coalition's great delay of April and May has been the Shi'is great opportunity to establish their control.
Bremer has to deliver. If he does not, then Arabist diplomats fear things will go the way of Lebanon's crack-up in the 1980s. Other pessimists draw analogies with Yugoslavia, claiming that Iraq is only feasible under dictatorship. The most important task now is the restoration of the confidence of those secularised, educated middle-class Iraqis who must take the lead in the rehabilitation of the nation if it is to work. More than once I was asked by anguished Iraqis whether the Americans had deliberately allowed the ransacking of the infrastructure; if this was part of some grander plan to destroy Iraq. No one could believe my answer: that the invaders had just made a mistake in underestimating the policing task.
UN resolution 1483 unequivocally holds Iraq's new government to preserving the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq, and to installing "properly constituted" and "representative" government. It is a tall order, handing the Americans and British the task of maintaining the structural integrity of a state which has known no real peace, and little unity, since the British cobbled together its unlikely elements in 1921. Further, the US and Britain have pledged to install a political mechanism-democracy by universal suffrage-which has never made much impact in the Arab world. Their stewardship of Iraq will be judged on these promises. There can be no slipping out of responsibilities, as is happening in Afghanistan. The bed is made, and the coalition must lie in it.
