Best- and worst-case scenarios play out 1 Iraqi city gets to work, 1 descends into chaos
By James Cox
USA TODAY
BASRA, Iraq -- By the thousands, the people of Basra helped themselves Tuesday.
They hoisted 40-foot lengths of steel rod onto trucks and ripped faucets from hospital sinks. They piled paint cans on donkey carts and stacked carpets on their heads. In a massive wave of looting, they dragged industrial generators behind their cars, tossed rattan furniture from hotel windows and sped off with university microscopes. Much of what they could not steal, they burned.
Twenty minutes' drive south, a much different scene unfolded. In Umm Qasr, a British commander coaxed four anxious local men -- an engineer, two teachers and a former political prisoner -- to take control of their town of 40,000.
In 45 minutes, the men breezed through a checklist drawn up by Col. Peter Jones of the 23rd Pioneer Regiment. They agreed to set a dinars-to-dollars exchange rate, get IDs for local fishermen, flip on the town's telephone exchange, find a landfill site, restore the supply of cooking gas and use poison to cull the large number of stray cats and dogs. After the meeting, they set out to inspect an ice house that wasn't working and power lines that had been knocked down.
In cities and villages across southern Iraq, U.S. and British forces have left chaos and uncertainty behind them as they sped toward Baghdad to finish Saddam Hussein and his regime. Relief groups have not been able to move in with water, medicine and other supplies because there are no police or troops to keep order.
The U.S. team tasked with running Iraq in the initial months after a defeat of Saddam's government remains marooned at a seaside resort in Kuwait while Bush administration insiders debate its role.
''Relief to the Iraqi people has not kept pace with either the military's progress to Baghdad or the expectations of those in its wake,'' said Michael Kocher, a coordinator with the aid group International Rescue Committee. ''It's order and water'' that Iraqis need, he said.
Though tiny compared with sprawling Basra and other Iraqi cities, Umm Qasr offers a glimpse of where things could be headed if they go well. The British moved quickly to find respected locals without ties to Saddam's ruling Baath Party. At first, the men refused to go public with the fact that they had agreed to serve as an informal town council. However, ''It's OK now. We are free,'' said a smiling Ra'ad al-Asadi, an electrical engineer at the Umm Qasr port.
Jones, the British commander jokingly dubbed the Governor of Umm Qasr by his troops, offered constant encouragement to the four Iraqis at Tuesday's meeting. ''You're the minister,'' he reminded one. ''It's your town,'' he said later.
The men had simple requests. They wanted a ceiling fan in the room where they were meeting. ''It's your building,'' the thick-armed colonel replied. They also asked whether British troops could agree not to use the term ''rubbish.''
''We call it garbage,'' explained Kazem Ghazi, 37, an English teacher and translator.
Up the road, though, things were getting ugly in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city with more than a million residents. The British took control of the city Monday after a siege that lasted nearly two weeks. Tuesday, troops rumbled in with 10 tanker trucks, each containing about 5,200 gallons of water. The trucks were parked beside armored personnel carriers and Challenger tanks to keep melees from breaking out among mobs gasping with thirst.
Much of the pillaging took place in the shadow of British tanks parked along a main artery. Looters stripped hardware off telephone poles and packed a commandeered city bus with stolen office furniture. British soldiers moved only against looters taking food: heavy bags of rice, wheat, sugar and tea. They forced some, at gunpoint, to give up the goods.
The scene was too painful for many to watch.
''Ali Baba, Ali Baba,'' murmured a group of indignant men as a neighbor wheeled away a file cabinet. They were recalling the Arabian Nights character who discovered treasures collected by 40 thieves.
At Basra General Hospital, thieves were driven off by the staff. In the parking lot, looters left a battered dental chair, hundreds of scattered pills and intravenous tubing. A doctor's aide angrily complained that promised help had not arrived from coalition forces and relief groups. ''Any person coming only speak. Only make promises. Nothing coming,'' Nasser Abdul Saadi said.
A military spokesman said British forces are putting a local sheik into power in Basra and asking him to set up a city administration. Whether that will help is unclear. U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, at Central Command in Qatar, didn't rule out a replay of the Basra madness in Baghdad. Tuesday, there were reports of some looting already in the capital.
''We know that there is often in liberated areas a vacuum in terms of control -- especially when you've had as tight a grip as this regime has had on its people for so long,'' Brooks said Tuesday. ''I think as time goes on, more law and order will be established.''
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