ANALYSIS:The Americans seem more like prisoners of Iraq than its liberators, writes Lara Marlowe
THE IRAQI Airways station manager was writing my ticket by hand when the electricity went out in Baghdad airport. "There is no light in our offices," he sighed. "There is no light in our houses. There is no light in our lives."
The light metaphor has flip-flopped since Gen Jay Garner was appointed to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq back in April 2003. The Iraqis were blinded by the light then, Garner said: "Iraq has been in a dark room with no light for 35 years and two weeks ago, we opened the door and pushed them out in the sunlight and they cannot see yet."
Compare that with the US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker: "The reality is it is hard in Iraq and there are no light switches to throw that are going to go dark to light."
One of the most serious failures of the US occupation has been its inability to improve living conditions for Iraqis.
Any visitor to Baghdad is immediately struck by the incredible hardness of being. Anxiety about explosions, stray bullets and checkpoints where one could be kidnapped or murdered for being the wrong religion goes without saying. There is virtually no reconstruction, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars that US taxpayers have poured into Iraq. The capital - with the exception of the Green Zone where US and Iraqi officials live - receives one hour of electricity each day. Car journeys that took 10 or 15 minutes before the war now take hours, mainly because of military convoys and high profile PSDs (private security details) transporting Iraqi or US officials who hide behind mirror glass windows.
They plough through traffic with space invader-like flashing lights and sirens, forcing Iraqi civilians off the road and into on-coming traffic.
To his credit, the outgoing US commander in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, realises that the solutions to Iraq's problems are political, not military. Petraeus advocates interaction between US forces and Iraqis. But it's hard to strike up a spontaneous conversation when your interlocutor wears body armour and a helmet, and his bodyguards watch you with M4 assault rifles at the ready.
The war has evolved substantially over the past year. The military surge - the injection of 30,000 extra troops, mainly into Baghdad - enabled US forces to drive al-Qaeda in Iraq from much of the capital. At the same time, the US co-opted the Sunni Sahwa, or Awakening, movement that started in Anbar province as a reaction against al-Qaeda excesses.
That, combined with a six-month truce declared last September by Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Muslim leader of the Mahdi Army militia, led to a marked reduction in violence.
But the Sunnis' honeymoon with the US could easily unravel. The purely bilateral relationship is not backed up by parallel reconciliation between Sunnis and the government of the Shia prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. It is in part based on shared US and Sunni hostility towards Tehran.
Maliki - whom President George Bush wanted to sack last August - is now praised by Iraqis (especially the Shia), and even the US embassy, for dispatching the Iraqi army to challenge Sadr's militia and al-Qaeda.
There's a consensus that the emergence of strong central government is the only hope of saving Iraq. At this stage, it's like putting a leaf in a glass of water in the hope it will grow into a tree.
US officials constantly emphasise that any gains are "fragile and reversible". By July, the US will have drawn troops down to below pre-surge levels and Gen Petraeus has spoken of further reductions in the autumn. The Sadrists and al-Qaeda may simply be biding their time.
Though the Sadrists and al-Qaeda represent the Shia and Sunni extremes of the insurgency, they're not comparable. Al-Sadr is a populist leader with millions of followers in the Shia south and the slums of northeast Baghdad. The Shia are engaged in a class struggle between the poor, uneducated Sadrists - the oppressed, in Shia parlance - and the Shia religious elite of the Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Council parties, who share power in Maliki's government.
The great irony of the invasion is that Washington and Tehran both support the Maliki government. The US accuses Iran of backing the Mahdi Army.
The majority of Iraqi parliamentarians have demanded a timetable for a US withdrawal, but the Mahdi Army is the only Shia group that fights the US presence. Though they don't say so, the Iranians probably consider the Mahdi Army to be a "legitimate resistance movement".
A recent report by the influential International Crisis Group faulted the US for failing to engage with Sadr and his militia during his truce, which was broken by Maliki at the end of March. Like them or not - and they have often behaved like thugs - Sadr and the Mahdi Army are an important component of Iraqi politics that will not go away. The recent battles were a clear attempt to cow and/or exclude them from local elections now scheduled for November. The strategy could easily backfire.
The Bush administration sometimes describes Iran as the greatest threat to Iraq's future, sometimes al-Qaeda. US presidential candidate Barack Obama stands out among politicians for his sensible statements on Iraq. "I continue to believe that the original decision to go into Iraq was a massive strategic blunder," Obama said in senate hearings last month. "The two problems you've [ ambassador Crocker and Gen Petraeus] pointed out, al-Qaeda in Iraq and increased Iranian influence in the region, are a direct result of that original decision."
All three US presidential candidates advocate withdrawing US troops from Iraq. You would too, if you were standing for president of the United States. And if the next president wants to be re-elected in 2012, he or she had better keep his word.
Yet the signals are contradictory. A US department of defence construction engineer told me work continues on dozens of new bases in Iraq. Will the US ever leave Iraq? I asked him. "Never," he answered. The Pentagon has contracted to expand Camp Bucca prison camp, near Basra, from 20,000 to 30,000 people. It is already the world's largest extrajudicial internment camp.
The US will next week begin moving into the largest embassy in the world, on 104 acres beside the Tigris, in the Green Zone. The 27-building complex cost $700 million (€444.67) and is the size of the Vatican. The 2,000 or so Americans who will live and work inside need never venture outside its 15ft-thick walls. They will have their own water and electricity systems, entertainment complex, swimming pool and school.
As Jane C Loeffler, the author of The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America's Embassies, writes: "Although the US government regularly proclaims confidence in Iraq's democratic future, the United States has designed an embassy that conveys no confidence in Iraqis and little hope for the future. Instead, the United States has built a fortress capable of sustaining a massive, long-term presence in the face of continued violence ..."
I was able to drive the length of the new US embassy last week. The huge, sand-coloured blocks look more like Alcatraz than a statement of imperial power. Surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire and watch towers, it says one thing: America has become the prisoner of Iraq.
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Lara Marlowe returned to Baghdad five years after covering the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath for The Irish Times