Matthew Parris produced a sketch that painted the month-long internal convulsion as a ‘tribal folk mystery’. The tribe had been gripped by panic, ‘Michael Heseltine – as much, by now, a totem of dissent as a person – found members of the tribe dancing around him and chanting. He responded.’ The tribe’s leader, meanwhile had started ranting, then ‘one of the elders of the tribe, Sir Geoffrey Howe, began to speak. He spoke almost in tongues: he spoke as he had never spoken.’ What followed, Parris suggested,
could have been done as a ballet. It had all the elements of a classical drama. Like Chinese opera or Greek tragedy, the rules required that certain human types be represented; certain ambitions be portrayed; certain actions punished. Every convention was obeyed; every actor played out his role. The dramatic unities of time, place and action were fulfilled … It started with an old leader, who was assassinated as she deserved; then her assassin was assassinated. As he deserved. Then the new leader stepped forward; and here the ballet ended.40
IV
On 2 August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The tiny oil-rich emirate was, per capita, one of the richest countries in the world. Iraq, meanwhile, was burdened with a $70 billion foreign debt, more than half of which was owed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Invading Kuwait had the political objectives of settling a historic argument over a couple of small islands, widening Iraq’s narrow front on to the Gulf and demonstrating President Saddam Hussein’s pretensions to regional supremacy. It had the economic objectives of wiping away the debts owed to Kuwait and seizing her oilfields. In the days preceding the invasion, The Times had reported the breakdown of diplomatic relations and the swelling Iraqi military presence on the Kuwait border. But neither the media nor any intelligence service could work out whether the armed build up was there to coerce the emirate or as a precursor to invading it. The Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, learned that Kuwait was being invaded from the radio news, not British or US intelligence.41 It was a fait accompli. With only the puny Kuwaiti defence forces in the way, the annexation was completed in a matter of hours. Thirty-five British military personnel attached to the emirate were taken prisoner and removed to Baghdad. The Emir’s brother was killed. However, the Emir (whose al-Sabah family had been the local rulers since 1759) managed to escape and the Central Bank in Kuwait had time to transfer the national assets to Bahrain. Oil prices soared 15 per cent. The prospect of higher energy costs at a time when Western economies were slowing down was an alarming one.
With more than one million men under arms, Iraq had the seventh largest army in the world, its armaments swelled in particular by arms deals from France, the Soviet Union and China. After eight years of bloody conflict that may have claimed one million lives, its war with Iran had ended in 1988 with no great gain to either side. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had used them. In March 1988 he had bombed the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja with nerve gases, killing thousands. The Times’s Richard Beeston had been one of the first journalists into the ghost town where once fifty thousand had lived only to find it carpeted with dead bodies: ‘Like figures unearthed in Pompeii, the victims of Halabja were killed so quickly that their corpses remained in suspended animation’, he had written at the time. ‘There was the plump baby whose face, frozen in a scream, stuck out from under the protective arm of a man, away from the open door of a house that he never reached.’42 Thus Saddam was a leader with genocidal tendencies who had every reason to imagine the annexation of Kuwait would pass with only modest protest. Shortly after he had exterminated the Kurds of Halabja, Britain doubled the size of its export guarantee to Iraq and the Americans had provided weapons at a crucial moment when his war with Iran appeared to be going badly.
Saddam, however, had miscalculated. The international community had shrunk from intervening in the fate of Iraqi Kurds or in Iraq’s conflict with the Islamic theocracy of Iran, but the attack on Kuwait was an invasion of a sovereign country. This was as stark a contravention of the UN Charter as could be imagined. What was more, the thawing of the Cold War meant that the Security Council was no longer tied into inactivity by the obstruction of the rival superpowers. There was a historic opportunity to show that collective security could act. Given the scale of Iraq’s precarious finances and its reliance on exporting oil, it was hoped that economic sanctions – so often ineffective in the past – could at last be shown to work, especially given the possibility of their universal application. On 6 August, the UN voted to impose mandatory sanctions against Iraq that included a worldwide ban on its oil exports and on any arms sales or fresh investment into the country. It was only the second time in the UN’s history that economic sanctions on this scale had been imposed. Inauspiciously, the first time had been against Rhodesia in 1967.
Economic sanctions were a means of avoiding taking greater risks. On the day the news of the invasion broke, The Times stated that one of Mrs Thatcher’s senior aides had indicated Britain would not take military action. Sir Anthony Parsons, who had been Ambassador to Iraq, wrote an Op-Ed article expressing his hopes for economic sanctions since ‘it is difficult to imagine military action being taken, whether by the Arab states, one or more of the great powers, or the United Nations. The world of 1990 is far removed from the world of 1945, in which the victorious allies could overawe potential aggressors.’ This turned out to be a complete misreading of the situation although the editorial line of The Times concurred with Parsons’s assessment, suggesting, ‘a mostly American counter-invasion to force Iraq to withdraw, as requested by the exiled Emir, is not an option’. Given the size of the Iraqi army and Saddam’s threat to turn Kuwait into a ‘graveyard’ if there was any attempt to liberate it, ‘the operation would have to be on a scale not seen since Vietnam’. The very mention of that dreaded word appeared to rule out declaring war. Instead, economic sanctions should be allowed to take hold, since ‘Iraq’s political and social weaknesses offer a reasonable hope that Saddam Hussein will not last for ever’.43 With this assessment, The Times proved to be wrong on both counts: a war to liberate Kuwait could be fought and won at minimal human cost to the liberators and economic sanctions, as practised then and for many years later, would have no effect in bringing Saddam down.
What frightened the West was that, far from stopping at Kuwait City, the Iraqi forces might press on into Saudi Arabia. If Saddam Hussein achieved this, he would gain control of more than 60 sixty per cent of the world’s oil reserves. The extent to which he could hold the developed world hostage hardly needed underlining and for those seeking a resolute response it was fortuitous that President George Bush was meeting Margaret Thatcher (still Prime Minister) in Aspen at the very moment when the Iraqi tanks massed on the Saudi border. On 7 August, the United States began deploying forces to shore up the defence of Saudi Arabia and enforce the embargo through an effective blockade. Yet this was not the same as preparing to liberate Kuwait and as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, maintained in an article The Times had published the previous day, ‘there is little stomach for an American lead in the pursuit of genuine military action’.44 A far more expansive outlook was proposed on the same page, the following day, by the noted Middle Eastern commentator Amir Taheri. He maintained that Saddam Hussein was in a far weaker position than the size of his army suggested. Indeed, an opportunity now existed to foster democracy in the Gulf. ‘Kicking Saddam out of Kuwait with his tail between his legs should be just the first step towards creating a new and stable system in the region,’ Taheri wrote, for while ‘a decade or so ago, there was, perhaps, no credible base for democracy in the Arab states of the Gulf, today, however, all have strong middle classes, many of them western educated and familiar with modern forms of government. Given a chance they could learn the democratic game.’45 Taheri’s arguments fell upon deaf ears in 1990. Yet, thirteen years later, they would make perfect sense to those in the White House and Downing Street as they plotted what they hoped would be a successful endgame to the protracted problem of Sadda
m Hussein.
The House of Saud’s decision to allow US troops on Saudi soil was crucial in changing minds about the possibility and desirability of removing Saddam from Kuwait by force. It was a fateful decision in many ways. Permitting Christian soldiers in the land of Islam’s most sacred sites helped to drive Osama bin Laden down the path of hatred that was, in time, to lead to 9/11, the ‘War against Terror’ and the American decision to occupy Iraq. Such consequences were ill perceived in the summer of 1990. What began as an immediate shoring up of Saudi defences soon expanded into preparations for the military liberation of Kuwait. The appetite of the UN and of other Arab nations (with the notable exception of Jordan) for liberating the emirate state made this transformation possible. Saddam’s eccentric diplomacy – on the one hand appealing to Arab solidarity by trying to link a settlement to Palestinian claims while calling for a Holy War to overthrow the Egyptian and Saudi governments and even offering concessions to Iran – did not enhance his regional reputation. There were 1400 British nationals in Iraq. When Saddam had them rounded up so that they could be used as human shields against attack he only hardened British public opinion against him. His decision to be filmed in a display of faux affection stroking the hair of one of his captives, a five year old boy named Stuart Lockwood, only gave the impression that he was some sort of twisted pervert.
A month after the invasion, Mrs Thatcher announced Britain would send ground troops to the Gulf. In November, Bush massively increased the US ground forces dispatched to the area. On 29 November, UN Resolution 678 was passed by twelve votes to two (China abstained, only Cuba and Yemen voted against) authorizing a military solution to drive Iraq out of Kuwait unless she withdrew voluntarily by 15 January 1991. With Rosemary Righter influencing the leader-writing stance, The Times had swung round in favour of UN-backed armed intervention. This, after all, was a rare opportunity for the UN’s principles for international order to be tested. By the time war broke out, twenty-eight Arab, Asian and Western nations had joined the coalition supporting the implementation of the UN’s resolutions to free Kuwait. Although The Times’s first reflex had been to back economic sanctions, Righter saw that ‘giving sanctions time to work’ was the mantra used by those determined to avoid war at any cost. As far as she was concerned, the record of such sanctions did not justify the faith the peace campaigners placed upon then, especially given Saddam’s indifference to human suffering. ‘Not since 1939 has an aggression left so clear a choice to those seeking a just international order’ asserted the leading article justifying war: ‘The coalition ranged against Iraq represents a step towards the collective enforcement of international law. This experiment must be made to work in the Gulf or countries must arm and ally themselves as best they can against the law of the jungle.’46
Britain went to war in the Gulf, unlike in the Falklands, with the united endorsement of the national press. The tabloids vied with each other to take the most jingoistic line (the Daily Mirror, which had disliked fighting General Galtieri, was now under the ownership of the pro-Israeli Robert Maxwell). Preferring the economic sanctions route, the Guardian was the most reluctant convert to a military solution, yet, whatever their varying levels of enthusiasm, that no national newspaper opposed going to war outright proved to be a moment of remarkable political unanimity in Fleet Street and a far cry from both the Suez and Falklands experiences. For those not given to marching in step with the Tories, endorsing the Government’s line was made easier when the less abrasive John Major supplanted Margaret Thatcher only eight weeks before the bombing raids began.
Given Saddam’s ruthless record and his threat to launch missiles against Israeli cities, Fleet Street drew up its own dispositions for a long campaign that would stretch resources to the full. With Graham Paterson in command of the newspaper’s war coverage, The Times finalized its own arrangements eight days before the UN deadline was due to expire. Decisions had to be taken on how many pages could be added and what deadlines could be stretched. The graphics team was put on twenty-four-hour call, ready to illustrate maps with swooping Apache helicopters and guided missiles bursting out of the page. A large body of pre-written analysis was commissioned that examined the military and diplomatic background to the outbreak of hostilities. Rosemary Righter would compose most of the leaders. The defence correspondent, Michael Evans, would spend much of the next couple of months at MoD briefings. Peter Stothard and Martin Fletcher would file from Washington. Among the twelve Times reporters filing from the Middle East would be Michael Knipe in Cairo, Christopher Walker in Saudi Arabia and Richard Owen in Jerusalem. Jamie Dettmer would report on the Royal Navy’s war from on board HMS London and Philip Jacobson, embedded with the 7th Armoured Brigade in Saudi Arabia, would advance with the Army. The details of the company’s life insurance policy were examined.47 Most important of all, Richard Beeston would tough it out behind enemy lines, as The Times’s correspondent in Baghdad.
Much of the official military information was disseminated from the daily briefings held at the coalition headquarters in Riyadh – hundreds of miles from the battlefront. With the experience of the Falklands conflict to draw upon, the MoD drew up a seven-page document providing guidance on what information could be released. It listed thirty-two examples of what journalists should not report without first clearing their copy with the Ministry. The guiding principle, of course, was that no information should be published that could assist the enemy. Detailing size, capability and location of allied units was clearly off limits. The same applied to publishing casualty figures before the Ministry decided it was safe to do so. Reports that included information about ongoing operations and damage to naval vessels or military aircraft were also prohibited without prior clearance if the details had not already been announced officially. Looking at the rules, Christopher Walker expressed the opinion of many reporters who feared ‘one of the most sanitised wars this century in terms of immediate reportage’.48 In return for being ’embedded’ with the soldiers and sailors, Jacobson and Dettmer had to remain with their military escort officers at all times. Where need be, copy had ‘this report is subject to allied reporting restrictions’ tagged to the end of it.
However, in vital respects, the Gulf situation was very different from the Falklands War. Then, the British Government had been able to restrict the coverage of the Task Force’s mission to British journalists working for British newspapers and broadcasters. Censoring their work was thus relatively easy within a national framework of agreed rules and understandings and the absence of satellite coverage meant that no instant broadcasts could be sent from the battlefront. No such limitations applied in the Gulf where the world’s media descended and where CNN, the world’s first twenty-four-hour satellite news broadcaster, was able to transmit words and pictures instantly all over the globe. The ‘national interest’ was not obviously something that a multinational broadcaster would feel bound to honour. The nature of the British media’s contribution was also different. In the Falklands War most of the journalists following the Task Force were employed by newspapers. This was not the case at the outbreak of the Gulf War. In the last days before Operation Desert Storm commenced, ITN had a forty-six-strong team in Saudi Arabia and Baghdad, the BBC had around thirty and there were thirty-five from national newspapers, along with a handful from the regional press and news agencies.49
The Times also had its armchair generals in position. The long build-up of coalition forces in Saudi Arabia had given the Iraqis plenty of time to dig in. Yet, Michael Evans predicted that, unlike the Iran – Iraq conflict, Desert Storm would be a war of rapid movement. The five hundred French-and Soviet-made fighter planes of the Iraqi air force would be ‘unlikely to survive the first hours of conflict’ given the likelihood that they would be the first target of American bombing. Consequently, the Iraqis would have to deal with American air superiority and technological firepower the like of which they had never faced in the long struggle with Iran. American, British and French night-vision
equipment would give them a huge advantage in striking during the night. There was, however, the potential for a massive tank battle, with Iraq’s 4200 tanks deployed in and around Kuwait against the coalition’s three thousand strong force. Evans seemed certain that the coalition would prevail while Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Armitage went further, writing a column that suggested it could prove to be ‘a very short campaign.’50 These views were far removed from the opinion of peace campaigners and Sir Edward Heath, whose prophecies were apocalyptic.
Shortly before midnight (9.50 p.m. GMT) on 16 January, Operation Desert Storm began, as expected, with intensive aerial bombing. Two days later Iraq launched the first of several Scud missile attacks on Israel cities, including Tel Aviv, in the dead of night. America’s deployment of Patriot anti-missile defences – and the inflated claims made for their effectiveness – was intended to quell Israeli demands for revenge. Yet, the fear that the Scuds would inflict great damage – physically and politically – was never far from the minds of those following the conflict. In fact the damage inflicted by the Scuds was minor compared with the ordinance raining down upon the Iraqis. The first couple of weeks of Operation Desert Storm consisted of an unremitting aerial bombardment in which wave upon wave of flight sorties and missiles severed Saddam’s communications system. Within two days of the assault commencing, Beeston reported, ‘The capital’s communications centre is destroyed, hit by four precision missiles. The Presidential Palace lies half in ruins’ in a city largely ‘deserted and those who have not fled are making plans to do so.’51 Ineffectual anti-aircraft flak drifted up into the Baghdad night sky and images were beamed back from the nose of US missiles as they homed in with deadly precision upon their target. These were pictures made for television, a moving image world in which the print media could not compete except with the sort of graphics that some readers felt turned the conflict into a comic strip. Those who had expected Baghdad would be carpet bombed like a second Dresden were relieved that technological advances in missile technology had created greater discrimination. But even the smartest bombs could not avoid civilians who found themselves in the way and the ugly phrase ‘collateral damage’ began to take a gruesome hold over reporting the death of innocent bystanders. Beeston also made clear that some targets were being missed and that anti-Western sentiment from civilians he encountered on the streets was hardening.52
The History of the Times Page 54
