Policing Iraq by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 04-13-2003 U.S. must quickly build a corps of Iraqi cops untainted by Saddam The photo-opera moment of the war in Iraq has come and gone. For a few days, the images so long predicted from the safety of Washington materialized in Baghdad. In the dense Shiite ghetto, with its population of 2 million, crowds erupted in jubilation over the fall of their Sunni oppressor. A small number of Iraqis and a larger contingent of journalists watched the toppling of the statue of dictator Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, his bronze head briefly swathed in a triumphant American flag. That was swiftly replaced by an Iraqi flag, but the first image was sent around the world. Alas, that image was of American conquest, not Iraqi liberation. But no war is only about images, and this war goes on. Americans and Iraqis continue dying. A suicide bomber strikes at a checkpoint, a soldier dies and others are scarred for life. A sniper fires from some hidden place, and another young soldier dies. A blurry mixture of defrocked Republican Guards, irregulars, apprentice urban guerrillas, religious fanatics, Fedayeen — the name doesn’t matter — still exists in Baghdad and other places. They can kill, and they will also die. All British and American commanders are swiftly learning what they must have known all along: It’s easier to topple a statue than to erect a civil society. Certainly, nobody can believe religion will provide much social cement. A few days ago, in the holy city of Najaf, two Shiite clerics were hacked to death in the ancient shrine of Imam Ali. One was a collaborator with Saddam, the other a respected exile named Abdul Majid al-Khoei back from years in London. Al-Khoei apparently fired a pistol when a crowd threatened the Saddam ally. Both men were destroyed with knives and swords. This should be no surprise in a country where religion can be a matter of life and death and where years of tyranny have created a seething climate of revenge. We might never know how many personal scores are being settled, the dead added to the piles of casualties of the war. As in every afflicted place, from Eastern Europe to Rwanda, memory is not easily erased or traded for a good meal and clean water. Not every victim can accept the demand for forgetting. Other Iraqis have more limited goals. We’ve seen the emergence of what someone long ago described as “his majesty, the mob.” Looters are running freely in the streets, smashing into foreign embassies, liberating the contents of hotels, Baath Party offices, government buildings and private homes: carpets, toilet fixtures, immense Hollywood-style vases, refrigerators, ceiling fans, chairs, silverware — some of the worst junk ever manufactured. This clearly has nothing to do with patriotism or celebration. The looters appear to have interpreted liberation as license, a familiar spirit in a mob. Seeing their opportunities, they are taking them. Some looters are almost certainly in a giddy fever of acquisition, taking for themselves those things they could not dream of having during the long, impoverished years of the dictatorship. Other looters are almost surely professional thieves, perhaps from the many thousands of common criminals set free last year by Saddam. The stolen goods almost certainly will be hidden and, eventually, when peace comes, find their way to the bazaars. The process is a kind of instant redistribution of income. But it’s also dangerous for everybody, from the American soldiers to the ordinary Iraqis. For the moment, in Basra and parts of Baghdad, to evoke Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” This should be no surprise, either. The police were essential to Saddam’s regime. The worst of them were torturers and killers. A few must have been people just trying to make a living. But all have vanished. They have not been replaced. And this we know: Foreign soldiers make poor local police. They can’t read the place. They can’t see the nuances, the subtleties, the connections. They have no informants they can completely trust. Very few know the language. The British have acknowledged this in Basra. The Americans are about to learn it in Baghdad. One thing is clear: As soon as all combat ends, and perhaps even earlier, the American military viceroy will have to create a civilian police force. That must comprise ethnically diverse Iraqis who are uncontaminated by Saddam’s regime — a very small pool of volunteers. There seems no easy way to create such a force in a hurry, or even to decide who will lead it. If a Shiite becomes chief of national police, how will the minority Sunnis and Kurds react? We have no way of knowing. Perhaps there will be some clumsy compromise, with a police triumvirate providing law and order for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. But the new police force will have to resist the long Iraqi tradition of brutality, along with the temptations of corruption as foreign money begins to flood the country (remember what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union). The new police force will face the same challenge as the new Iraqi government: to persuade millions of Iraqis to exchange fear for respect. If the fear goes, respect does not automatically follow. What is the gain to the average Iraqi if fear of the regime gives way to fear of armed criminal gangs? And how does the American viceroy balance all these factors? The first time an Iraqi policeman is caught torturing a prisoner, the Americans will be blamed. As a result, some of them might die. For the moment, mere anarchy continues. Ordinary Iraqis not hurt by the war are being killed or robbed by liberated Iraqi fanatics, by liberated Iraqis who want revenge for injuries or by liberated Iraqi gangsters. This sort of anarchy after World War I led to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, because sometimes people will give up freedom to get stability and safety. If order is not swiftly established in Iraq, the most terrible of all ironies might be waiting up the road: the rise of a new Iraqi tyrant to replace the one erased with such expenditure of blood and treasure.