Global Policy Forum

By Robin Cook

In the single week since the London bombings there have been 11 suicide attacks in Iraq. One car bomb this week wiped out 30 children, one as young as six, who had gathered to plead for western chocolates from American soldiers. I do not draw a parallel between London and Baghdad to diminish the pain and horror caused by the crime on our own shores, but because that appalling experience should give us some insight into the violence that is now a daily occurrence in Iraq. And as the occupying force we bear responsibility for its security. There may be room for debate over whether there is a connection between the war in Iraq and the London bombings, but there is no escaping the hard truth that the chaos in that country is a direct result of the decision to invade it, taken in defiance of the intelligence warning that it would heighten the terrorist threat.

And still those who took us into the war are not frank with us. For months those of us who have asked for a timetable for withdrawal from the occupation of Iraq have been told that it would encourage the insurgents to circle that date in the calendar. Yet at the weekend we learned from another leaked minute that the Ministry of Defence has ticked the middle of next year as the target by when it will have reduced the British presence to about a third of its present level.

This has nothing to do with progress against the insurgents, who are growing bolder rather than weaker. It is entirely to do with American domestic politics. As George Bush sinks in popularity back home, his desperation rises to cut his losses in Iraq. The leaked memo confirms that the Bush administration is planning to cut its occupying forces to a third by the first half of 2006, which would make it politically impossible at home for Britain not to do the same.

Apparently there is a row going on between the Pentagon, which wants "a bold reduction", and the US commanders on the ground, who know that they cannot contain the insurgency with their present numbers and do not see how they will be able to do better with fewer. For once I find myself on the side of the Pentagon. Heavy-handed US occupation is not the solution to the insurgency but a large part of the problem. US army rules of engagement appear to give much greater weight to killing insurgents than to protecting civilian lives. It is alarming testimony to its trigger-happy approach that statistics compiled by the Iraqi health ministry confirm that twice as many civilians have been killed by US military action as by terrorist bombs. The predictable result is that the US occupation breeds new recruits for the insurgency at a faster rate than it kills existing members of it.

Nor is it only the fatalities of US forces that foster resentment. Homes in every neighbourhood have been trashed by US forces in futile searches for insurgents. Every extended family knows of at least one person who has disappeared into the new gulag of detainees. A year after President Bush promised to demolish Abu Ghraib it is being expanded, rather than closed, to accommodate an even larger number than were held there by Saddam. It is an inexorable law of foreign occupations that the greater the repression, the stronger the resistance. The reduction in US forces may be planned for the wrong reason, but should be welcomed as a step in the right direction. It does though present the coalition governments with a rhetorical problem.

They have repeatedly told us that they would stay in Iraq until the job was done. Patently the job is not done if it is measured by success in getting on top of the insurgency. It has therefore been necessary to redefine what was meant by the job they promised to complete. Last week an imaginative new interpretation surfaced. Apparently, when Donald Rumsfeld warned that the insurgency could take a decade to contain he did not mean the US troops would stay that long to defeat it but that they would expect the Iraqi forces to do the job for them. In short, completing the job now is not bringing peace to Iraq but equipping the Iraqis to fight their own civil war, possibly for another 10 years. The Iraqi government itself appears to have a shrewd grasp of its need to find other allies, hence its surprising agreement last week to a mutual defence pact with Iran.

It is striking how little events on the ground in Iraq have figured in the key decisions of this sorry episode. The timing of the original invasion was dictated not by the reports on the UN weapons inspections but by the momentum of the US military build-up. Now the timing of the exit from occupation is going to be determined not by progress in restoring security in Iraq but by the date of next year's mid-term congressional elections in the US.