April 2, 2003

BAGHDAD – So it's a "truly remarkable achievement,'' is it? General Tommy Franks says so. Everything is going "according to plan," according to the British. So it's an "achievement" that the British still have not "liberated" Basra. It is "according to plan" that the Iraqis should be able to launch a Scud missile from the Fao peninsula – supposedly under "British control" for more than a week.

It is an achievement – truly remarkable, of course – that the Americans should lose an Apache helicopter to the gun of an Iraqi peasant farmer, should spend four days trying to cross the river bridges at Nasiriya, only to be confronted by their first suicide bomber at Najaf.

One half of the entire Anglo-American force – still called "the coalition" by journalists who like to pretend it includes 35 armies rather than 2 and a bit (the "bit" being the Australian Special Forces) – is now guarding and running the supply line through the desert. And Baghdad is bombed but not besieged.

The Americans bomb a passenger bus close to the Syrian border and don't even apologize. An Iraqi soldier kills himself attacking U.S. marines in his car and it is an act of "terrorism." And now Secretary of State Colin Powell announces – to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the largest Israeli lobby group in the United States, which of course supports this godforsaken and illegal war – that Syria and Iran are "supporting terror groups'' and will have to "face the consequences.''

So what's the "plan"? Are we going to forget Baghdad for a few months and wheel our young soldiers west to surround Damascus? Where, for heaven's sake, is all this going?

Strange, isn't it, how all that fuss about chemical and biological warfare has been forgotten. The "secret" weapons, the gas masks, the anti-anthrax injections, the pills and chemical suits have now been erased from the story – because bullets and rocket-propelled grenades are now the real danger to British and American forces in Iraq. Even the "siege of Baghdad," a city that is 30 miles wide and might need a quarter of a million men to surround it, is fading from the diary.

I have a suspicion that what's gone wrong has nothing to do with plans. Indeed, I suspect there is no real overall plan. Because I rather think this war's foundations were based not on military planning but on ideology.

Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project: Sept. 11, 2001 (oddly unmentioned now), links between Saddam and bin Laden (unproved), weapons of mass destruction (hitherto unfound), human rights abuses (at which we originally connived when Saddam was our friend), and then, finally, the most heroic project of all, the "liberation" of the people of Iraq. Oil was not mentioned although it is the all-important and dominating factor in this illegitimate conflict – no wonder General Franks admitted that his first concern, prior to the war, was the "protection'' of the southern Iraqi oil fields.

Few Iraqis doubt – even the ministers in Baghdad speak about this – that the Americans could, ultimately, occupy the country. They have the force and they have the weapons to smash their way into every city and impose a curfew and rule the land by martial law. But can they make Iraqis submit to that rule? Unless the masses rise up as Bush and Tony Blair hope, this is now a nationalist war against the most obvious kind of imperial power.

Yet there is one achievement we should note. The ghastly Saddam, the most revolting dictator in the Arab world who does indeed use heinous torture and has indeed used gas, is now leading a country that is fighting the world's only superpower and that has done so for almost two weeks without surrendering. Yes, General Franks has accomplished one "truly remarkable achievement.'' He has turned the monster of Baghdad into the hero of the Arab world and allowed Iraqis to teach every opponent of America how to fight their enemy.

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent of London. This story is published by arrangement with the Independent syndicate.