Tackling the Looters - 16 May 2003

"To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" - that was the original vow of the United Nations which alas it has failed to keep throughout 58 years of its existence.

Today the post-war burden of the United States, having come through the scourge of a war, is not, as was first imagined, to reorganise a civil society and put in place what they call a transitional government, the immediate, urgent task is to prevent Iraq's descending from chaos into anarchy.

I must say that whatever was allowed for in the very careful planning of the liberation of Iraq I don't believe even Secretary Rumsfeld had any conception of how huge and wildly ungovernable the looting would be.

The sheer wickedness of robbing a hospital, not only of its beds and blankets but of medical equipment, including life-saving devices for which the witless looters had no imaginable use.

I think the tolerable limit was reached last Monday when American marines responding to fire from an asylum broke the outer wall and plunged in, along with an army of looters, while at least 500 of the 800 incarcerated psychotics, rapists, murderers, dangerous schizophrenics and so on, tumbled out and are now at large in the city.

Why was all this allowed to happen? Because all the American forces had been ordered from the start not to shoot anyone but an obvious combatant.

Here's a definition: "looting - the pillage of valuables in time of war, according to the rules of war a crime punishable by instant execution but not universally followed".

I recall that in Basra, in the first days, British soldiers fired on some looters but then, for no given reason that I read about, they stopped.

Certainly the Americans were forbidden to perform instant execution, it was an element of administration policy, which in the early days of the war bent over backwards to avoid the appearance of conquerors.

You may have noticed that months before the war started a theory had been advanced by some Western intellectuals and very quickly was crudified into a popular protest among ordinary people, it was the theory that the United States was now launched on a new imperial crusade, that empire was a truer slogan than liberation.

Sympathetic intellectuals elaborated a programme much like that with which British liberals, throughout the 19th Century, looked on the development of their empire as a humane social undertaking.

Prince Albert's passionate belief that Britons had a duty to lift the peoples of the dark continent out of abject poverty and exploitation by unscrupulous traders, to build railroads, a civil service, medical stations, create a merchant class.

This idea of empire as a huge peace corps is, I should say, practically unheard of in the United States where the vast majority of people think of empire as a very wicked form of exploiting primitive peoples which the British, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians and the Portuguese eventually shed themselves of and none too soon.

By this 21st Century I'm sure most Americans have forgotten, if they ever knew, that President Theodore Roosevelt had the great ambition, partially fulfilled, in Central America and the Pacific to found an American empire.

The remaining bits of the American empire are remote islands officially designated inland territories.

But I have to say that at the first outcry about a new American empire the administration did everything it could to obliterate the picture of an imperialism on the march. However, I'm afraid to people who are normally anti-American it has been food and drink.

Reluctantly last Tuesday, President Bush officially recognised that before you could have an interim government there must be an interim police force.

That's been the trouble since the day Saddam's statue was toppled and we breathed relief at the end of the war. The war with the civilian population had just begun.

So last Tuesday President Bush, through Mr Paul Bremer - who's the new civilian with the unenviable job of creating a new Iraq - the president issued an order that from now on United States military forces are authorised to shoot looters on sight.

This has been done with full knowledge of the risk entailed in shooting young people, the unemployed, family heads desperate for food and electricity. The administration has spoken with all its fingers crossed.

Until the cities can somehow acquire workable police forces it seemed the only thing to do. The administration is well aware it will not necessarily make the occupying Americans any more popular.

Once again I think I'd better say that about a third of the population of the United States, up from the Deep South, through Missouri and the Midwest, the people there are equally concerned for their own lack of power - which means light, heat, air conditioning, flushing toilets - after, we hope, the end of a plague of tornadoes. In two weeks more than a hundred that have damaged or destroyed more than 80 small towns.

Talking of natural disasters I must take note of a study that was published last week, at the end of a meeting of seismologists - earthquake specialists - producing a big surprise.

Namely that there is an inland geological vein or fault running more or less parallel with the New England seaboard that could cause a deal of trouble.

Earthquakes in New England? When? When? They aren't saying, though the meeting added of course that California can expect earthquakes till the end of time.

And of course they have happened in that state since the days of the early Spanish conquest.

A famous conquistador, Portola - an 18th Century governor of what was called New Spain - camped by a river whose surrounding land one night trembled in a frightening fashion.

When he moved on Portola did what all explorers do, he gave a name to his last resting place. he called it Santa Ana de los Temblores - of the "temblores", of the quakes.

An old historian writes: "In later usage the name was shortened to Santa Ana - out of deference to local feelings, the appendage was dropped."

There are three main faults that wriggle deep underground through central and southern California.

In deference to local feeling their names are not often mentioned, just as in deference to wishful feeling San Franciscans for the past three generations make a point of referring to the 1906 earthquake as "the fire".

We have a friend, indeed my wife's oldest friend whom she's known since their teens, let's call her Bea for Beatrice. For, by a happy coincidence, that is her name.

About 20 years ago she decided to go and live in California to be with the daughter who'd settled there.

Bea, when she left the east, didn't know much about California but she certainly had heard about the earthquakes.

She lived down the peninsula from San Francisco, close by the big, thriving city of San Jose, which has had its share of quakes, so recently as 1989.

Ever since then she's harboured a secret dread of earthquakes. Now understand she's not a nervous type - she's tall, handsome, very intelligent and sensible and - I almost said - down to earth.

But one time she confessed to this secret dread, so ever-present that she got into the habit, just before she went to bed, of taking all the upstanding earthenware - plates, cups, saucers, whatever - and putting them securely in a drawer.

Well about 10 years ago I was out in San Francisco and I covered a conference of seismologists which had met to estimate the likely timing and scale of the next big one that would arise from the California faults, especially the one that starts out in the ocean in the north and runs in under Napa County and through San Francisco and on south.

The conclusion of the conference was that this region of the country was likely to get the big one sometime in the next 30 or 40 years.

But the big, and for Californians joyful news was, that the truly big one was likely to arrive sometime in the following 10 years by odds of five to one and it wouldn't be in California at all but in a fault - long unreported - that runs from about Hartford, Connecticut down through the New York suburbs and on to and through Philadelphia.

We'd never heard of it. It also came out, incidentally, that the busiest little seismological station in America, perhaps in the world, is a village just across Long Island sound there, in Connecticut, that records three or four earthquakes every day of the year.

The Connecticut Chamber of Commerce has never told us about it.

But once the news was out several officials in the state of Connecticut hastened to publish the truth. Which is that these quakes are minute, barely registering on the Richter scale.

But I did a talk about that conference and being close by I rushed a fair copy of it to our friend Bea.

And she stopped, she said she stopped from then on packing up the crockery every evening. She just heaved a happy sigh that she doesn't live in Connecticut.

I felt at the time I'd done my good deed for the year.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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