posted September 22, 2004 10:19 AM            

Special Dispatch from Max Hastings in Baghdad
Daily Mail, Monday, September 20,2004

Violence, anarchy and a nation convinced it would be better off without us liberators. This is the bleak truth. The war was easily won- but we're losing the battle for Iraqi hearts.

For you and I, surprisingly enough, Baghdad need not be a very dangerous place. So long as we sleep behind concrete blast-baffle walls, eat inside the protected Green Zone, wear helmet and body armour outside it and travel only by armoured vehicle or helicopter, then our prospects are promising.

If, on the other hand, one breaks these rules or lacks access to armed protection, Iraq is a little different. I asked a senior British officer last week wheter there is any place in the country where I might walk safely down the street. He hesitated for a moment, then said: ''No. You are a potential source of wealth.''

By this, he menat that kidnapping is a boom industty- two Americans and a Briton were abducted last week. At this moment, they are threatened with beheading.
And the Iraqi people? They continue to die: 150 last week by suicide bomb and American bomb, together with the gunfire from both sides.
Tony Blair diminished his office yesterdayby talking drivel about Iraq as 'the crucible of global terrorism'. It is nothing of the sort. It is a place where Iraqi people are conducting a confused and bitter internal struggle about their destiny, in which some foreign terrorists have involved themselves.

The real issue is whether the regime of Ayad Allawi, who met the Prime Minister at Dwoning Street yesterday, can win sufficient support amid continuing guerilla war to avoid the collapse of all the Anglo-American coalition's hopes.
A blizzard of statistics issues from Coalition headquarters about the impressive number of locals recruited to the interim government's police and national guard- the ING- who are supposed to take over security responsibilities from the allies next year. But numbers are far less important than the simple, sceptical question posed by a British officer: 'Will the buggers fight?'
Mohammed, and ING recruit whom I met at a Baghdad checkpoint last week, said that while he is grateful for the $190 a month the job pays, in a society where unemployment is around 40 per cent, he tells his neighbours that he earns the money in the market: 'If they knew I worked for the Americans, I would be killed.'
Even when the thermometer is beating 100 degrees, some of his comrades do street duty masked in balaclavas.
The Americans, of course, are still striving to perceive reasons for optimism. General David Petraeus, the airborne commander responsible for organising and training Iraq's new forces , says wryly: 'It's more manageable being in this country than reading about it. This place is a roller-coaster. Right now, the coaster is climbing.'
By counting ammunition expenditure and American casualties, he can make a case. August was a bloody month, in which U.S. losses were heavy. The British fired 100,000 rounds, probably more than they expended during 30 years of conflict in Ulster.
Soldiers say: 'This is not Northern Ireland. Unlike the IRA, the enemy here stays to fight. This is war fighting.' In August, British troops are estimated to have killed 162 insurgents in action.
September has seen a steep decline in firefights. Since the Shia cleric Ali Al Sistani delivered his amazingly effective injunction to suspend violence, armed clashes have diminished to around 40 a day, in a country the size of France. If you want to walk on the sunny side of the street with George Bush, here is good news.
Yet in considerable degree, this month's decline in engagements reflects a decision by Coalition commanders to pursue a less aggressive strategy.
Lieutenant Colonel Matt Maer of the 1st Battalion Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, whose men were engaged in some of the heaviest fighting last month in Al Amara, says bleakly: 'The enemy are getting better. They'll be back, older and bolder.'
For a newcomer to Iraq, manifestations of allied presence are astounding: hundreds of acres of concrete blast walls, tanks and armoured vehicles festooned with aerials and signal wire, coated in yellow dust.
In the great Saddamite palaces, amid echoing halls of marble and gilt, allied generals peer into computer screens which spew forht graphs, flow charts and statistics.
The corridors teem with soldiers, spooks, aid advisers, almost all armed. The notice boards and signs would delight Stanley Kubrick, he of Dr. Strangelove: 'Bridge NIght is almost here. Join Our Happy Group'; 'Alcoholics Anonymous, Baghdad branch'; 'Dining Facility: No long guns, no loaded pistols unless authorised'.
There is a blabbling tower of nationalities: beaming Gurkas making fortunes as private security guards, Italians cherishing their mess halls' reputations for offering the finest food in the country, together with their solidiers' saintly reluctance to shed blood, especially their own.
There are reporters from all over the world. There are women in uniforms and out of them, displaying the complacency born of knowledge that however grave their weight problems might seem back home, in Iraq every Western girl possesses the divinity conferred by scarcity.
Hope is the chief commodity manufactured in these marble halls; hope that Sistani the peacemaker's heart condition will not kill him; hope that Ayad Allawi's caretaker Iraqi government can stay the distence; hope that its new forces will prove willing to fight.
The Bush administration's craving for good news pervades every command post. 'We are very conscious that the centre of gravity of this situation is currently in the United States,' says one senior American.
Another, U.S. ground force commander General Thomas Metz, has Fox News running mute on the big TV screen in his office round the clock. What Fox says is as important to decision-making as reports from the battlefront.
Always, of course, Washington strives to get a few more Americans home before the nation votes. Last week, for instance, the Pentagon was urging Baghdad to use more Iraqi supply trucks, to liberate American drivers.
Every GI removed from teh theatre helps the Bush administration make its tattered case that the job is getting done.
Yet swirling across the sky by helicopter between the Coalition's enclaves of power and iced water, one looks down upon another world: rows of brown houses among the palm trees, cars gridlocked at intersections where there is no power for traffic lights, people going about such business as they have to do, which means survival.
Far beyond the Coalition's ken, outside the allied fortresses, there are the Iraqi people.
What do they think? For all their vast intelligence-gathering machinery, it is amazing how little the allies know about the Iraqis they are supposed to be saving. It is hard to gauge mood from a Bradley or Warrior armoured vehicle.
Neither spies nor journalists can readily communicate with 'ordinary people' save the swarms of building contractors labouring on allied facilities, and those Iraqis who take their lives in their hands by committing themselves openly to the Allawi government.
What we do know is bleak. The insurgents' extraordinary achievement is that a majority of Iraqis are now convinced they would be better off without their 'liberators'.
This is a devastating, probably decisive defeat for the Coalitioin. It represents a propaganda failure which dwarfs every military success.
Iraqis have been freed from a tyrant, and promised a future in which a host of good things will be heaped upon them if they will only succumb to America's ideas of democracy. Yet they baulk.
Now, as ever, Arab logic and Western logic make no rendezvous. Pride, together with the misery imposed by American military clumsiness provoked by the insurgency, persuades Iraq's people that they would rather do things in their own way, however muddled and hopeless, than in ours.
Hardly a cent of America's staggering $18.4billion reconstruction budget is visible on the streets. Iraqis see only that they have no jobs; crime sweeps the land; the electricity system operates in spasms; the middle class on whom they Washington neo-conservatives pinned such hopes before the war scarcely dare raise their heads.
A British political expert observes grimly: 'For all we do, Iraqis don't see the value for them.'
He added a fierce criticism of the extravagance of American firepower: 'It is deeply uncomfortable to be in partnership with an army which has a completely different concept of how to treat people from ours. A lot of Iraqis are being killed by the U.S. Army who would not get killed by us.'
A Kuwaiti interpreter serving in a British battalion, with whom I rode thorough Basra in an Armoured Land Rover observed wonderingly: 'This could be a really great country, but Iraqis don't know how to move on. They won't help themselves and they don't want anyone else to help them.'
In recent weeks, there have been American policy changes. There is now a big emphasis on using local contractors for reconstruction work, rather than pouring more billions into the pockets of U.S. contractors entwined with the Bush administration. Yet this concession to reality comes very late.
It is a big handicap that international non-governmental organisations cannot send people out into the country to promote aid programmes because civilian movement is too dangerous.
Every foreign eye is now turned upon the Iraqi elections scheduled for January. Even if violence abates sufficiently to allow polling, British analysts think it will be difficult to achieve a 25 per cent turnout.
In consequence, it will be hard to persuade either Iraqis or the world to accept the legitimacy of any outcome.
It is a fantastically difficult, probably impossible, task to fit this country to stand on its own feet, to create institutions and forces that can sustain a local government, before popular pressure become irresistible for the 'liberators' to leave.
The momentum of nation-building is constantly arrested by new violence- which is the insurgents' purpose.
If the allies could hold the ring for five years, they might be able to lay foundations that would hold. As it is, many allied officers are privately convinced that Coalition troops will be forced out within 18 months.
British forces, as usual, are doing everything that soldiers alone can achieve. But they are wading in sand, great masses of shifting sand.
There is no meeting of minds between the Coalition and the confused, frustrated Iraqi people, who want only peace to get on with their lives, and are bewildered about how to secure it.
Amid supine, impassive Iraqis, the Coalition's eager experts, trainers and advisers look like boy scouts in a brothel. I remember a dawn- one of those glorious, deep-red Asian dawns- in 1971, at an American airfield in Vietnam. Along th runway stood serried ranks of helicopters: Hueys, Chinooks, Cobras.
The crews walked out, silhouetted against the sunrise, swung themselves aboard and started up. Within minutes the whole strip pulsed with the roar of engines. Then, in a great surge of power, the massed choppers swept away into the sky.
As I watched, I thought: with such a might, how can such a nation lose a war?
Yet it did. Thsi week, I remembered that sensation of 33 years ago as America's confident young warlords in their body armour and tinted visors locked and loaded the machine-guns of the fabulous Blackhawk helicopters, then like knights of Star Wars lifted us over Baghdad.
Unlike Vietnam, there is no prospect that Iraq's insurgents will inflict military defeat on the Americans and the British. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that they can frustrate the purpose of our presence.
If Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told Tony Blair the truth in their talks yesterday, he will have acknowledged that anarchy is perilously close, Blair appeared to recognise the gravity of the allies' predicament by his telling reference to the 'new Iraqi conflict' after their meeting.
In Baghdad, the last slide of a Coalition screen briefing proclaims splendidly: 'END STATE: Iraq at peace with its neithbors, with a representative government that respects the rights of all Iraqis, and security forces sufficient to maintain domestic order and to deny safe haven to terrorists.'
Whatever the follies of last year's war, these are honourable objectives. Failure will be a tragedy for the world, as much as for the Iraqi people. Yet the Bush administration has pursued its purposes with awesome incompetence.
Today, we are seeking to climb an Everest against the clock. And the clock is winning.