Iraq's lethal Catch 22

Ten months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime, the situation is getting ever worse. According to aid agency USAID there were more attacks during January than any month since September. These included 642 organised assaults involving mortars, hand-grenades and small-arms, 522 ‘random’ incidents from drive-by shootings to rock-throwing, and 11 attacks on coalition aircraft. Little wonder that, as we report today, there is a growing demand for British machine-guns and other weaponry from security firms in Iraq.

This escalation of violence was bloodiest in the two devastating suicide bombs on Tuesday and Wednesday. In the first, a truck bomb killed more than 50 Iraqis as they lined up to apply for jobs at a police station in the Shiite town of Iskandariyah. A day later, a car exploded outside an army recruiting centre in central Baghdad. By devastating crowds of their fellow Iraqis as they queued for such jobs, the bombers sent a clear message to those they view as collaborators: work with the Americans and die.

Ordinary Iraqis desperately need the protection of homegrown security forces - this week the Governing Council's security committee said Baghdad alone needed 30,000 police, 10 times the current number. And it seems certain that the insurgents are stepping up their attacks in a desperate attempt to hinder the creation of Iraqi security forces, as they know it is easier to inspire hatred towards Americans, and to use local knowledge against them.

The terrorists, whether al-Qaeda or Baath loyalists, do not care that a job as a policeman or soldier is one of the very few decent employment opportunities for Iraqis. Many are fundamentalists who will not be happy until they have wrought the same devastation on Iraq as their spiritual brethren the Taliban unleashed on Afghanistan. Other insurgents have a simpler goal, to see their land freed of the forces of the West, whom they view as an occupying force. All of this presents the coalition with a terrible Catch 22: Iraq can only become stable and prosperous while the West offers might and money to provide security and pay for reconstruction; but while the ‘infidels’ remain in Iraq, the terrorists will not permit progress.

Certainly, the case for an expeditious coalition withdrawal gets stronger with every day, and every death. The reasons why the allies went into Iraq have now gone. If there ever were weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that there are none now, and Saddam Hussein is also gone. The fact that Tony Blair and George Bush chose to justify war by highlighting the former rather than the latter is now academic. All that matters is that we did not go to war to fulfil the only task remaining in Iraq - the transformation of a society and economy ravaged by Saddam’s brutal regime. That job would be best handled by a new, democratically elected Iraqi leadership, though bringing that about won’t be easy. Last week Lakhdar Brahimi, adviser to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, cast doubt on whether democratic elections could be held before Washington’s target date for the handover of power, June 30. And there are other good reasons for some form of strong international presence to remain in Iraq. USAID also warned that increasing tensions between Kurds, Shias and Sunnis threatened the Balkanisation of Iraq, and US officials admit they fear the country could easily slip into civil war in the same way the former Yugoslavia and some Soviet states did. Only an external force can prevent such an implosion; and after decades of living in a police state run by self-serving brutes, we cannot expect the Iraqis to learn to run a fledgling democracy overnight.

But this international presence can no longer be dominated by America, especially an America which is doling out reconstruction contracts for every oil pipe and electricity power line to US firms.

The US needs to understand that unless it backs off, everything that is done to help Iraq’s recovery will be viewed as ‘Made in America’. As such, it will be viewed as a legitimate target by those who would bomb Iraq back into the Stone Age.