General Richard Dannatt.

On October 12, Britain's new army chief, General Richard Dannatt, provoked a political storm by calling in a newspaper interview with the Daily Mail for a withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, warning that the British military should "get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems". Gen. Dannatt described British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq policies as "naive," declaring that while Iraqis might have welcomed coalition forces following the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the good will has since evaporated after years of violence. Gen. Dannatt also said, "Whatever consent we may have had in the first place" from the Iraqi people "has largely turned to intolerance".

The only problem about Sir Richard Dannatt's comments on Iraq is that they did not go far enough. He rightly said that our presence exacerbates the security problem. In other words foreign military occupation provokes armed resistance in Iraq as it would in most countries. But it is seldom realised that the US and Britain have largely provoked the civil war now raging across central Iraq.

The fact that there is a civil war in Iraq should no longer be in doubt with the UN saying that 3,000 Iraqi civilians are being killed every month and the dramatic claim last week by American and Iraqi health researchers that the true figure goes as high as 15,000 a month.

Baghdad has broken up into a dozen different hostile cities in each of which Sunni and Shia are killing or expelling each other. The city is like Beirut at the height of the Lebanese civil war. The wrong identity card, car number plate or even picture on a mobile phone is enough to get a driver dragged out of his car and killed. Militias are taking over. Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods that lived peaceably together for decades now exchange mortar fire every night.

The last time I drove from Baghdad airport to the centre of the city the journey took three times as long as usual because we took a peculiarly serpentine route. The reason was that my Sunni driver was trying to avoid any checkpoints manned by the largely Shia police commandos or police who might take him away, torture and kill him.

Baghdad has broken up into a dozen
different hostile cities in each of which
Sunni and Shia are killing or expelling
each other. The city is like Beirut at
the height of the Lebanese civil war.
The wrong identity card, car number
plate or even picture on a
mobile phone is enough to get a
driver dragged out of his car and killed.
Militias are taking over. Sunni and
Shia neighbourhoods that lived
peaceably together for decades now
exchange mortar fire every night.

It is as bad in the provinces around Baghdad where many of the deaths go unrecorded. Last month I was in Diyala, a mixed Sunni-Shia province of 1.5 million people north of Baghdad, where a weary looking federal police commander threw up his hands when I asked him if there was a civil war.

"Of course there is", he said. "What else do you call it when 60 or people are being killed in Diyala alone every week." In fact the true figure for this one province is probably higher. Many bodies are never found. I talked to one woman who fled the town she had lived all her life after her son, a taxi driver, had disappeared when he was delivering a washing machine. Many bodies are thrown into the Tigris or its tributaries and float down river until the bodies are caught by the weirs south of Baghdad.

In Mosul province in northern Iraq there is an impending civil war between Sunni Arabs and Kurds. Local officials said that 70,000 Kurds had fled so far this year and they expected the province to break up. I could only get to the centre of Mosul city by driving at breakneck speed with two cars packed with armed Kurdish guards. They warned me against attracting the attention of the almost entirely Sunni Arab police.

Was this civil war always inevitable? There was always going to be friction and possibly violence between the three main communities in Iraq - Sunni, Shia and Kurd - after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The Sunni were going to lose much of their power and the Shia and Kurds were going to gain it. But the occupation of Iraq by US and British armies over the last three years has deepened the divide between the communities.

Tony Blair's thesis that the insurrection
in Iraq is the work of some Islamic
Comintern operating across the
Middle East was always nonsense.
The guerrillas in Iraq are strong
because they are popular. A leaked
Pentagon poll last month showed that
75 per cent of the five million strong
Sunni community support
armed resistance.

The Sunni Arab community fought back against the occupation in arms; the Kurds largely supported it; the Shia did not like it but used it to take power at the ballot box. Tony Blair's thesis that the insurrection in Iraq is the work of some Islamic Comintern operating across the Middle East was always nonsense. The guerrillas in Iraq are strong because they are popular. A leaked Pentagon poll last month showed that 75 per cent of the five million strong Sunni community support armed resistance.

The present slaughter in Iraq is happening because existing ethnic and sectarian hostilities combined with animosities created by the occupation. For instance, a Sunni ex-army officer supporting the resistance now saw a Shia serving in the Iraqi army or police not just as the member of a different Islamic sect but as a traitor to his country collaborating with the hated invader.

The last excuse for the occupation was that at least it prevented civil war, but this it very visibly is not doing. On the contrary it de-legitimises the Iraqi government, army and police who are seen by Iraqis as pawns of the occupier. When I asked people in Baghdad what they think of their government, they often reply: "What government? We never see it. It does nothing for us."

In the eyes of Iraqis the occupation goes on despite the supposed handover of power to Iraq in June 2004. Baghdad is full of signs of this. For instance the main government intelligence service, essential in fighting a guerrilla war, has no Iraqi budget because it is entirely funded by the CIA. One former Defense Ministry official plausibly defended himself from the allegation that he helped steal the entire military procurement budget of US$1.3 billion by arguing that his ministry was in fact run by American officers without whose say so he could not move a machine gun from one side of the Tigris to the other.

The last excuse for the occupation
was that at least it prevented civil war,
but this it very visibly is not doing.
On the contrary it de-legitimises
the Iraqi government, army and
police who are seen by Iraqis as
pawns of the occupier. When I asked
people in Baghdad what they think of
their government they often reply:
"What government? We never see it.
It does nothing for us."

The White House and Downing Street have never recognized how the deep unpopularity of the occupation among Iraqis has generated resistance. This commonsensical but overwhelming important fact has now been pointed out by Sir Richard Dannatt, but there is little sign that Tony Blair has taken it on board despite his claim to be in full agreement with the forthright British army commander.

The government's picture of Iraq is not so much a tissue of lies as a tissue of fantasies. It is absurd to say that American and British forces will stay until Iraqi security forces are trained to take their place. What soldiers and police lack is not training but loyalty to the Iraqi government. So far from establishing an independent Iraq or preventing a civil war the continued presence of American and British troops deeply destabilizes the country, de-legitimizes its government and deepens sectarian hatred.

Note: Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq, published by Verso.