by Robert Fisk
Yes, Jawad survived the entire Iran–Iraq War. He loathed Saddam, he says, yet he fought for him for eight terrible years. “I was at Ahwaz, I was at the Karun River, in the Shamiran Mountains, in the Anfal operation, at Penjwin. I was a conscript and then a reservist but I refused to become an officer in case I had to stay in the army longer.” In my notebook, I put a line beside the word Anfal. Jawad had crossed the Iranian frontier in 1980. He had entered Khorramshahr and then, when Khorramshahr was surrounded, he had retreated out of the city at night.
“I first noticed the gas being used east of Amara. Our artillery were firing gas shells into the Iranians. I couldn’t smell the gas but I soaked my scarf in water and held it to my nose. Because I was a radio operator, I had a lot of equipment round me that protected me from the gas. These were black days and we suffered a lot. After I was wounded, they insisted on sending me back to the front. I had a thirtyfive per cent disability and still they sent me back to the war.”
Jawad manoeuvres a dark green potted plant onto the path, waving his hands at the birds that spring from the undergrowth. If heaven really is a warm and comfortable garden, then Jawad lives in it. And the Anfal operation? I ask. Did he see the effects with his own eyes? Jawad raises his hands in an imploring, helpless way.
“We saw everything. Would you believe this, that when they started using the gas strange things happened? I saw the birds falling from the sky. I saw the little beans on the trees suddenly turning black. The leaves decayed in front of our eyes. I kept the towel round my face, just as I did near Amara.”
And bodies?
“Yes, so many of them. All civilians. They lay around the villages and on the hillsides in clumps, as if streets of people had gathered at the same place to die. Some were scattered, but there were many women who held children in their arms and they all lay there dead. What could I do? I could say nothing. We soldiers were too frightened even to discuss it. We just saw so many dead. And we were silent.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“War against War” and the Fast Train to Paradise
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
—Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
IN THE HUSH OF THE CURTAINED front room, the two former Iraqi pilots and the man who had been second-in-command of Saddam Hussein’s air force sat in front of me in silence. The pilots spoke the heavily accented French they had learned while training on their Mirage fighter-bombers at Cherbourg. I had asked them about the USS Stark. But why now? they wanted to know. Why, sixteen years after an Iraqi Mirage had fired two missiles at the American guided-missile frigate in the Gulf—incinerating thirty-seven of its crew—did I want to know why they had almost sunk the ship? Why not discuss the growing anarchy in Baghdad under American occupation? That very morning in 2003, a car bomb had exploded outside the gates of the American headquarters at Saddam’s former Republican palace.
All three men feared that I was a spy, that I was trying to identify the pilot who killed the young American seamen more than a decade and a half ago. Why else would I ask if he was still alive? I told them I would never betray any human being, that I was a journalist—not an intelligence officer—that I would no more hand them over to the Americans than I would hand Americans over to them. I knew that senior Iraqi air force personnel had all remained in contact with each other after the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, that they now constituted an air force without aircraft. But I also suspected, correctly, that many of these men were now involved in the anti-occupation insurgency. I tried to explain that this was the one Iraqi air force mission that changed the Middle East. Their colleague’s actions on 17 May 1987 had—through one of those grotesque double standards which only Washington seemed able to produce—brought Iran to its knees.
The ex-general looked at me for almost another minute without speaking. Then he gave what was almost a mundane operational report. “I saw him take off from Shuaiba,” he said. “It was a routine flight over the Gulf to hunt for Iranian ships. There was a ‘forbidden zone’ from which we had excluded all ships and the Stark was in that zone. The pilot didn’t know the Americans were there. He knew he had to destroy any shipping in the area—that’s all. He saw a big ship on his radar screen and he fired his two missiles at it. He assumed it was Iranian. He never saw the actual target. We never make visual contact—that’s how the system works. Then he turned to come home.”
Seventy kilometres north-east of Qatar, the American Perry-class frigate’s radar had picked up the Iraqi Mirage F-1 as it flew low and slowly down the coast of Saudi Arabia towards Bahrain. But Captain Glenn Brindel and his crew were used to Iraqi jets flying over them. Iraqi aircraft, he was to tell journalists later, were “deemed friendly.” The green speck on the radar did not represent a threat. Because the Stark held a course almost directly towards the Iraqi Mirage, the frigate’s superstructure blocked the anti-missile sensors and the Phalanx anti-missile battery which had the ability to pick up an incoming missile and fire automatically. But the system had anyway been switched to manual to avoid shooting down the wrong aircraft in the crowded Gulf. The captain would later claim that the detection systems were also malfunctioning. At 10:09 p.m., Brindel ordered a radio message to be sent to the pilot: “Unknown aircraft, this is U.S. navy warship on your 078 for twelve miles. Request you identify yourself.” There was no reply. A minute later, the aircraft banked towards the north and rose to 5,000 feet. The crew in the Stark’s “combat information centre” failed to identify the two Exocet missiles with their 352-pound warheads which had detached themselves from the Mirage and were now racing towards them.
It was a lookout who first saw the rocket skimming the surface of the water towards the ship and telephoned Brindel. Two seconds later, the Exocet punched into the Stark at 600 mph and exploded in the forward crew’s quarters, cremating several of the American seamen as they lay in their bunks. The second missile exploded thirty seconds later. More than a sixth of the frigate’s crew were to die in less than a minute after the first Exocet spewed 120 pounds of burning solid missile fuel into the crew’s sleeping quarters. The warhead failed to explode but smashed through seven bulkheads before coming to rest against the starboard hull plating. The second missile sent a fireball through the crew’s quarters, its 3,500-degree burning fuel killing most of the thirty-seven victims, turning many of them to ash. The Stark filled with thick, toxic smoke, the temperature even in neighbouring compartments soaring to 1,500 degrees. Bunks, computers and bulkheads melted in the heat. One petty officer spent thirteen hours in a darkened magazine room spraying water on 36 missiles as a 2,000-degree fire raged only a bulkhead away. The ship burned for two days. Even after she was taken in tow, the fires kept reigniting.
Listing and flying the American flag at half-staff, the Stark was pulled towards Bahrain. Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger called the attack “indiscriminate.” The Iraqi pilot, he said, “apparently didn’t care enough to find out what ship he was shooting at.” But there America’s criticism of Iraq ended. Even before Saddam Hussein made his own unprecedented and contrite expression of remorse— and long before the U.S. Navy had begun its own three investigations into the attack—President Ronald Reagan decided to blame Iran. “We’ve never considered them hostile at all,” he said of the Iraqis. “They’ve never been in any way hostile.” The Gulf was an international waterway. “No country there has a right to try and close it off and take it for itself. And the villain in the piece is Iran. And so they’re delighted with what has just happened.”54
Listening to Reagan’s words, one might have thought that Iran had started the war by invading Iraq in 1980, that Iran had been using chemical weapons against Iraq, that Iran had initiated the maritime exclusion zone in 1984 which started the tanker war in the Gulf—of which the Stark was indirectly a victim. Iraq was responsible for each of these acts, but Iraq was deemed
“friendly.” Only a few weeks before the near-sinking of the Stark, U.S. under-secretary Richard Murphy had himself visited Baghdad and praised Iraq’s “bravery” in withstanding Iran, spraying its enemies with poison gas now a definition of Iraqi courage for Mr. Murphy. Reagan had rewarded the aggressor by accepting his excuses and referred to the nation that did not kill his countrymen as the “villain.” It was an interesting precedent. When Iraq almost sank an American frigate, Iran was to blame. When al-Qaeda attacked the United States fourteen years later, Iraq was to blame.
All that was left was for Saddam himself to offer his condolences to the families of the dead Americans. They were not long in coming. “Rest assured that the grief which you feel as a result of the loss of your sons is our grief, too,” the Iraqi leader wrote in a letter to the families of the dead, dated 22 May and printed on the stationery of Iraq’s Washington embassy:
On the occasion of the funeral ceremony of the victims lost in the grievous and unintentional incident that has happened to the American frigate Stark, I would like to express to you . . . my condolences and feelings of grief. All the Iraqis and I feel most profoundly the sorrow of moments such as these. Since we have ourselves lost a great many of our dear ones in the war which has been raging now for seven years, while the Iranian government still persists in . . . rejecting our appeals and those of the international community for the establishment of a just and lasting peace.
Even now, Saddam had to add his own propaganda line, although it neatly dovetailed with Reagan’s own distorted view of the conflict. Iran’s “rejection” of appeals from the “international community” alluded to Iran’s refusal to accept UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions which failed to demand punishment for the “aggressor” nation. Pentagon spokesman Dan Howard also said Reagan’s vilification of Iran was because of its refusal “to go to the bargaining table.”55 Shipping officials in the Gulf always suspected that the Iraqis made their night-time attack on the Stark in the hope that the United States would believe an Iranian aircraft tried to destroy the frigate and would therefore retaliate against Tehran. In the event, they didn’t need to waste their time with such conspiracy theories: America blamed Iran anyway. A few days later, Reagan called Iran “this barbarous country.”
Saddam compared the American relatives of the Stark to the families of Iraqis killed during his aggression against Iran, thus turning the U.S. Navy personnel into the surrogate dead of his own atrocious war. Saddam’s plaintive call for a “just and lasting peace” was almost Arafat-like in its banality. The final American abasement came when Washington dispatched a full-scale U.S. Navy inquiry team under Rear Admiral David Rodgers to Baghdad, where they were told they would not be permitted to question the Iraqi pilot who fired the two Exocet missiles; nor did the Iraqis agree with the Americans that the Stark was outside Iraq’s self-imposed “exclusion zone” when it was hit. The Americans said the vessel was at least 10 nautical miles outside, Iraq claimed it was at least 20 nautical miles inside. Weinberger’s call to produce the Iraqi pilot was ignored. Captain Brindel of the Stark was relieved of his command, his weapons officer was reprimanded and left the navy, and his executive officer disciplined for “dereliction of duty.”
The Americans always assumed that the Iraqi pilot had been executed—hence Iraq’s refusal to produce him—but the ex-deputy commander of the Iraqi air force insisted to me in Baghdad that this was untrue. “I saw him a few months ago,” he said. “Like me, he’s out of work. But he obeyed all our rules. We were fighting a cruel enemy. It was a mistake. We weren’t going to get rid of one of our senior pilots for the Americans. The Americans were inside our ‘forbidden zone.’ We told them not to enter it again—and they obeyed.”
A visit by a group of U.S. senators to the melted-down crew quarters on the Stark was sufficient to set them off in a spasm of rage at the one country that had nothing to do with the American deaths. Republican Senator John Warner, a former secretary of the U.S. Navy, described Iran as “a belligerent that knows no rules, no morals.” Senator John Glenn was reduced to abusing Iran as “the sponsor of terrorism and the hijacker of airliners.” Thus Saddam’s attack on the Stark was now bringing him untold benefits. Americans were talking as if they were themselves contemplating military action against Iran.
Reagan pretended that the Americans were in the Gulf as peacemakers. “Were a hostile power ever to dominate this strategic region and its resources,” he explained, “it would become a chokepoint for freedom—that of our allies and our own . . . That is why we maintain a naval presence there. Our aim is to prevent, not to provoke, wider conflict, to save the many lives that further conflict would cost us . . .” Most Americans knew, Reagan said, that “to retreat or withdraw would only repeat the improvident mistakes of the past and hand final victory to those who seek war, who make war.” The Iranians, needless to say—the victims of Iraq’s aggression—were those “who seek war, who make war,” not “friendly” Iraq which had anyway been taken off the State Department’s list of “international terrorist countries” in 1982, two years after its invasion of Iran and in the very year that Iran reported eleven Iraqi poison gas attacks against its forces. The truth was that the Stark—one of seven U.S. warships in the Gulf—was sailing under false pretences.
Iraq had placed its “exclusion zone” around Kharg Island in January 1984 because it was losing the land war it had initiated more than three years earlier; by attacking tankers lifting oil from Iran’s Kharg Island terminal, Saddam hoped to strangle his antagonist economically. His aircraft henceforth fired at ships of any nationality that were moving to and from Iranian ports. Iran retaliated by targeting vessels trading with Iraq through the Arab Gulf states. Iraq’s massive imports of arms for the war were transiting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose funding of Iraq’s war effort was close to $404 billion; any ship trading with either nation was now threatened with Iranian air attack. Between 18 April 1984 and 18 May 1987—the day after the Stark was hit—227 ships had been attacked in the Gulf, 137 of them by Iraq and 90 by Iran; several had been struck by missiles and repeatedly repaired, and of the 227 total, 153 were oil tankers. Between May 1981 and 18 May 1987, 211 merchant seamen, most of them foreigners, were killed on these ships, of which 98 were on oil tankers; it was a tiny figure compared with the hundreds of thousands of combatants in the land war, but it internationalised the conflict—as both Iraq and Iran probably hoped that it would.
American warships were now ostensibly keeping the sea lanes open for international shipping, to prevent the Gulf becoming, in Reagan’s odd term, a “chokepoint.” But U.S. vessels were not shielding Iranian tankers from Iraqi attack. Nor were they seeking to protect foreign oil tankers lifting Iranian oil for export at Kharg. America’s mission in the Gulf was to protect only one side’s ships— Iraq’s—in the sea lanes. Already the Americans were proposing to escort Kuwaitiflagged tankers in the Gulf, which did not carry Iranian cargo. They carried Iraqi oil for export. Iraq might not be able to gain any victories in its land war with Iran, but with American help, as the Iranians realised at once, it could win the sea war. Reagan claimed that the United States was fighting “war against war” in the Gulf. In fact, Washington was fighting a war against Iran.
Eleven days after the Stark was rocketed, the Iranians complained that a U.S. warship in the Gulf had “threatened” an Iran Air passenger jet flying from Shiraz to Doha, in Qatar, and ordered the pilot to alter course. My own investigation among Dubai air traffic controllers established that the American warning came from one of four naval vessels escorting a Kuwaiti-registered ship with a cargo of arms to Bahrain. “The incident provided just the sort of scenario for a . . . tragedy in the Gulf,” I wrote in my dispatch to The Times that night. “Iran Air flies scheduled routes to both Doha, the capital of Qatar, and to the Gulf emirate of Dubai further east, regularly overflying the waters in which American . . . frigates patrol. Although the Iranians did not say so, the pilot probably flew unwittingly over a U.S. nava
l unit which identified the plane as Iranian and ordered it to change course.” The “tragedy” was to come exactly fourteen months later.
There were plenty of portents. Not long after the Stark was hit, I spent a day and a night on Gulf patrol with HMS Broadsword. Accompanying British ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Reagan’s now famous chokepoint—the word “escort” was never used by the British—and discouraging the attentions of the Iranians might have seemed a simple matter in the dry memoranda that their naval lordships used at the defence ministry in London. But inside the glow-worm interior of the Type-22 class frigate, the radar monitors watched with feverish intensity for the transponder numbers of the civilian aircraft passing over Broadsword. “If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful,” one of them said.
At least the air conditioning was pumped into their little nest—for the computers, of course, not for them—but what afflicted most of the seamen in the Gulf was the heat. It burned the entire decks until they were, quite literally, too hot to walk on. British sailors stood on the edges of their shoes because of the scalding temperatures emerging from the steel. The depth-charge casings, the Bofors gun-aiming device, were too hot to touch. On the helicopter flight deck, the heat rose to 135 degrees, and only a thoughtless leading hand would have touched a spanner without putting his gloves on. It created a dull head, a desperate weariness, an awesome irritation with one’s fellow humans on the foredeck.
Inside the ship—and their lordships would have appreciated the cleanliness of Broadsword’s galleys and mess decks and bunks and short, fearful advertisements warning of the dangers of AIDS in Mombasa port—the heat shuffled through the vessel faster than the seamen. The officer’s mess was a cool 80 degrees. One glass of water and I was dripping. Open the first watertight door and I was ambushed by the heat, just as I was seven years earlier in the streets of Najaf. After the second door, I walked into a tropical smelter, the familiar grey monochrome sea sloshing below the deck. How can men work in this and remain rational? Or—more to the point—how could the Iraqis and Iranians fight in this sweltering air and remain sane?
