Saddam : His Rise and Fall by Con Coughlin Read Free Book Online Page A

made a number of raids on those cells and detained scores of Saddam’s sympathizers. Despite this success, there was no letup in the attacks, which suggested that, while Saddam had undoubtedly been involved in coordinating some of the elements involved in the resistance when he was on the run in Tikrit, by the time he was captured the insurgency had taken on a life of its own.
    The reasons were manifold for the widespread discontent in Iraq that continued well after Saddam’s overthrow and capture. The primary cause of the hostility directed toward the coalition and its allies in Iraq was the occupation itself. The majority of the Iraqi people were glad to see the back of Saddam and the Baathists, with the notable exception of the Sunni cliques that had thrived during the thirty-five years the country had been run by the Baath Party. A survey conducted in Iraq in March 2004 to mark the anniversary of the war showed that 56 percent of Iraqis believed that they were better off without Saddam. Even so, while Iraqis were generally relieved to have been liberated from Saddam’s tyranny, most of them had no desire to see their country occupied by foreign powers, and consequently became increasingly frustrated at the slow rate of progress made by the coalition toward establishing a new Iraqi government. The atmosphere was not helped by chronic shortages in electricity, fuel, and other essential supplies that existed long after the war had ended. The Iraqi people blamed their discomfort on the Americans, especially for their not having done more to prevent the widespread looting that broke out after the liberation of Baghdad, and for their awarding lucrative contracts to repair the damage to a number of high-profile American companies.
    The high level of unemployment, together with the absence of an indigenous security system, exacerbated the sense of lawlessness, particularly in Baghdad where the murder rate rose more than tenfold in the months following the war. The lawlessness was exacerbated by the coalition’s unilateral decision to conduct a widespread debaathification program within Iraq’s military and civil service, purging all the main government institutions of Baathists to eradicate completely any trace of the old regime. In so doing more than a half-million Iraqis became unemployed and, more to the point, had little prospect of any future employment, making them an obvious target for recruitment to the various underground groups responsible for maintaining the insurgency against the occupying powers. Many of the new Iraqi leaders believed the debaathification process had been taken too far. After all, not everyone who had joined the Baath Party under Saddam had done so because they were enthusiastic supporters of Baathist ideology.
    Iraqi concerns about the way their country was taking shape post-Saddam were deepened because of the coalition’s slow rate of progress toward handing over power to an elected Iraqi government. It had been widely predicted before the war that winning the peace in Iraq would prove to be more difficult than winning the military campaign, but even so the Bush administration appeared reluctant to take the issue seriously. A detailed appraisal of Iraq’s likely postwar political landscape that was compiled by a team of experts at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York was ignored, as was a similar study that was submitted by the British Foreign Office. After the war, the group of neo-conservative ideologues that had aligned itself with Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon made no secret of their determination to introduce to Iraq a modern, Western-style democracy that would serve as arole model for the rest of the Arab world. By attempting to impose their radical political agenda on the Iraqi people, the neoconservatives risked alienating Iraq’s traditional ruling elite who made it abundantly clear that they had no desire to have their religious, ethnic, and tribal