Robert Fisk in Baghdad

15 December 2003: (The Independent) “Peace” and “reconciliation” were the patois of Downing Street and the White House yesterday. But all those hopes of a collapse of resistance are doomed. Saddam was neither the spiritual nor the political guide to the insurgency that is now claiming so many lives in Iraq - far more Iraqi than Western lives, one might add - and, however happy Messrs Bush and Blair may be at the capture of Saddam, the war goes on.

In Fallujah, in Ramadi, in other centres of Sunni power in Iraq, the anti-occupation rising will continue. The system of attacks and the frighteningly fast-growing sophistication of the insurgents is bound up with the Committee of the Faith, a group of Wahabi-based Sunni Muslims who now plan their attacks on American occupation troops between Mosul and the city of Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad. Even before the overthrow of the Baathist regime, these groups, permitted by Saddam in the hope that they could drain off Sunni Islamic militancy, were planning the mukawama - the resistance against foreign occupation.

The slaughter of 17 more Iraqis yesterday in a bomb attack on a police station - hours after the capture of Saddam, though the bombers could not have known that - is going to remain Iraq’s bloody agenda. The Anglo-American narrative will then be more difficult to sustain. Saddam “remnants” or Saddam “loyalists” are far more difficult to sustain as enemies when they can no longer be loyal to Saddam. Their Iraqi identity will become more obvious and the need to blame “foreign” al-Qa’ida members all the greater.

Yet the repeated assertions of US infantry commanders, especially those based around Mosul and Tikrit, that most of their attackers are Iraqi rather than foreign, show that the American military command in Iraq - at least at the divisional level - knows the truth. The 82nd Airborne captain in Fallujah who told me that his men were attacked by “Syrian-backed terrorists and Iraqi freedom-fighters” was probably closer to the truth than Major Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, would like to believe. The war is not about Saddam but about foreign occupation.

Indeed, professional soldiers have been pointing this out for a long time. Yesterday, for example, a sergeant in the 1st Armoured Division on checkpoint duty in Baghdad explained the situation to The Independent in remarkably blunt words. “We’re not going to go home any sooner because of Saddam’s getting caught,” he said. “We all came to search for weapons of mass destruction and attention has now been diverted from that. The arrest of Saddam is meaningless. We still don’t know why we came here.”

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By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
Copyright: The Independent

15 December 2003: So they got Saddam at last. Unkempt, his tired eyes betraying defeat; even the $750,000 in cash found in his hole in the ground demeaned him.

Saddam in chains; maybe not literally, but he looked in that extraordinary videotape yesterday like a prisoner of ancient Rome, the barbarian at last cornered, the hand caressing the scraggy beard. All those ghosts - of gassed Iranians and Kurds, of Shias gunned into the mass graves of Karbala, of the prisoners dying under excruciating torture in the villas of Saddam’s secret police - must surely have witnessed something of this.

“Ladies and gentlemen - we got him,” crowed Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Iraq. “This is a great day in Iraq’s history. For decades, hundreds of thousands of you suffered at the hands of this cruel man. For decades, this cruel man divided you against each other. For decades, he threatened to attack your neighbours. These days are gone for ever … the tyrant is a prisoner,” he said.

Tony Blair said: “Saddam has gone from power, he won’t be coming back. That the Iraqi people now know, and it is they who will decide his fate.”

It took just 600 American soldiers to capture the man who was for 12 years one of the West’s best friends in the Middle East and for 12 more years the West’s greatest enemy in the Middle East. In a miserable 8ft hole in the mud of a Tigris farm near the village of Ad-Dawr, the president of the Iraqi Arab Republic, leader of the Arab Socialist Baath party, ex-guerrilla fighter, invader of two nations, friend of Jacques Chirac and a man once courted by President Ronald Reagan, was found hiding, almost certainly betrayed by his own comrades and now destined - if the Americans mean what they say - to a trial for war crimes on a Nuremberg scale.

For weeks, US forces had prowled the countryside along the Tigris river, arresting former Baathist functionaries, questioning former bodyguards, blasting away at the guerrillas of Tikrit and Samarra and Mosul and killing civilians along with them.

But yesterday was, beyond a doubt, an American military victory - if, and only if, this ends the insurgency against the Americans.

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