The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  “There’s Sharjah airport,” the radar officer said, and fixed the beam. “I’m listening to a plane landing now—commercial flight—but if I want to know about a specific plane, I ask for an IFF [identification, friend or foe?] and talk to Sharjah control.” There were boards and charts and crayon marks on war-zone lines. The USS Reid —part of Reagan’s Gulf flotilla—had just cut across the Iraqi “exclusion zone.” So much for Stark’s insistence that it stayed outside. Two Soviet Natyaclass minesweepers and a submarine depot ship were listed as outside the Hormuz Strait. Two British Hong Kong–registered ships were waiting for us on the return journey.

  Night was no relief. At 4:15 a.m., Broadsword was in the Gulf of Oman, her engineers dragging a hawser from the support ship Orangeleaf riding alongside her, refuelling in the heat. The humidity cloaked us all. The deck was awash with condensation, the seamen’s faces crawling with perspiration. The sweat crept through my hair and trickled down my back. Our shirts were dark with moisture. It came to all men, even to Russians. Off Fujairah, Moscow’s contribution to the freedom of Gulf navigation—a depot ship and two minesweepers—nestled against each other on the warm tide, the Soviet sailors, glistening and half-naked on deck, waiting for the next inbound Kuwaiti tanker. Here was the principal reason why Reagan wanted to patrol the sea lanes, here was the real “hostile power” that he feared might “dominate” the Gulf. The two British freighters came alongside to be “accompanied” by Broadsword.

  On the bridge, an Indian radio operator could be heard pleading over VHF with an Iranian patrol ship. “We are only carrying dates,” he said. “Only dates.” The Iranian was 30 kilometres away. An Iranian P-3 reconnaissance aircraft answered. “Be aware,” boomed the tannoy throughout Broadsword, “that yesterday the Iraqis launched an Exocet attack on a Maltese tanker carrying oil from Iran. We can therefore expect the Iranians to retaliate . . .” A dog-day mist now swirled around the ship, leaving salt cakes across the flight deck. The two freighters were steaming beside us, an overheated version of every Second World War Atlantic convoy, because Broadsword, however unheroic in her humidity, was—like the American ships—a naval escort.

  BACK IN 1984, WHEN IRAQ began this maritime conflict, the Gulf looked a lot simpler. The Arabs, protesting mightily at every attack by the Iranians and silent when the Iraqis struck at Iranian shipping, were almost as fearful of American involvement as they were of the Iranians. Saudi Arabia maintained a quiet relationship with Iran—just in case Iraq collapsed—while at the same time underwriting Saddam’s war. Ostensibly, the Arabs remained neutral—“at war but skulking,” as Churchill unfairly remarked about the Irish in the Second World War—and offered refuge to any ship’s master who found himself under fire. Bahrain and Dubai would receive the crippled hulks of both sides’ aggression, profiting from the millions of dollars in repairs that their shipyards would make in reconstituting the ships. By 1987, eighteen had been hit twice, six had been attacked three times and two—Superior and Dena—had the distinction of being rocketed and repaired four times in four years. As early as May 1984 there was a floating junkyard of mortally wounded vessels off Bahrain.

  They called it the ships’ graveyard and the term was cruelly appropriate. The great tankers that Iran and Iraq had destroyed were towed here in terminal condition, bleeding fuel oil into the warm, muddy brown waves in the very centre of the Gulf, a series of jagged holes in their scalded superstructure to show how they met their end. The Bahraini government even ran a patrol boat out to this maritime cemetery for journalists to understand what this war now represented. An Iranian Phantom hit the 29,000-ton Chemical Venture so accurately on 24 May that its missile plunged into the very centre of the bridge: there was a 12-metre sign there saying “No Smoking” in the middle of the superstructure; the rocket took out the letters “S” and “M.” The tanker crews along the Gulf were growing restive over the dangers; by the end of May, up to twenty-five ships were riding at anchor off the Emirates alone, waiting for instructions from their owners, and you only had to take a look at the ruin of the Al-Hoot to understand why. The 117,000-ton supertanker was listing with a hole the size of a London bus along her waterline where an Iraqi missile had exploded three weeks earlier. The superstructure had been twisted back and outwards over the stern and the crew’s quarters had simply melted down as if they were made of plastic rather than iron. The gash on the starboard side was so deep I could see daylight through it.

  Just to the north lay the 178,000-ton Safina al-Arab, moving restlessly in the swell as a Swedish-registered tanker tried to take off the last of her crude oil. The stuff was everywhere, down the sides of the ship, across the water, turning even the foam on the waves dark. I could smell it from a mile away. The salvage crews—mostly Dutchmen—knew the risks but strolled the decks as if they were in harbour rather than sitting on bombs 115 kilometres out in the Gulf.

  It was an isolated place.56 On the map of the Middle East, the Gulf seemed just a crack in the landmass between the deserts of Arabia and southern Iran, but the seas could be rough and the horizon featureless save for the lonely and vulnerable tankers butting through the sirocco winds up to Ras Tanura and Kuwait. They had no convoys to sail in then, no protection from the air, and they crept in those days as close as they could to the southern shoreline. They passed us as we photographed the graveyard of their more unfortunate brethren, ill painted for the most part, plunging through the heat haze, targets of opportunity for either side in the upper reaches of the Gulf, depending on their masters and their ports of call.

  The sea should have been polluted but it was alive with flying fish that landed on their tails, long yellow sea snakes that came up out of the green depths to look at us, and porpoises and even turtles. Big-beaked black cormorants effortlessly outflew our fast Bahraini patrol boat. The oil slicks came in thick, viscous patches and in long thin streaks that shredded their way up the pale blue water towards the wrecks. The only sign of President Reagan’s concern in those days was the discreet grey majesty of the USS Luce, a Seventh Fleet missile cruiser that lay all day off the Mina Salman channel outside Bahrain harbour, a picket boat filled with armed sailors slowly circling it to ward off unconventional attackers—an idea before its time, since the USS Cole would not be struck by suicide bombers in Aden for more than another decade. Besides, the radio traffic from the Luce, clearly audible on our own ship-to-shore radio, seemed mostly bound up with the complexities of bringing new video films aboard for the crew. A few hours later, a smaller U.S. patrol craft moved into port and the Luce gently steamed off into the sweltering dusk, its in-house entertainment presumably updated.

  But other American warships were—even then—playing the role of convoy escorts. This unofficial and unacknowledged protection was given no publicity in Washington, nor among the Arab states, coinciding with their own desire to keep the U.S. Navy over the horizon. Sometimes the escort was provided by the USS John Rodgers, a sleek, twin-funnelled missile cruiser that last defended American interests by bombarding the Chouf mountains of central Lebanon less than a year earlier. At other times, the USS Boone, a squat and rather cumbersome flat-topped missile carrier, came up by night from the Emirates and rested off Bahrain. Anyone who approached the warships by day—which we did, of course—would be confronted by a steel-helmeted U.S. sailor manning a fixed heavy machine gun.

  U.S. Air Force cargo jets were already flying regularly into the airports of the Gulf states, carrying equipment so bulky that they were forced to deploy their giant C-48 droop-wing transports. These flights were being made to the countries that Reagan always called “our Arab friends,” a definition that no longer included Lebanon—from which U.S. forces had been famously “redeployed to sea” three months earlier, following the bombing of the Beirut marine barracks and the killing of 241 U.S. servicemen—but which very definitely embraced the conservative oil states of the Gulf peninsula. If the Americans were to become strategically involved—as they would do three years later—then the Arab
states would have to be portrayed, as I wrote in The Times in May 1984, “as the innocent party in the dispute: the Iranians, inevitably, will be the enemy.” And so it came to pass. Was it not Iranian aircraft, the Iranian regime and ultimately Iranian ideology that threatened the security of the area? Again, we would be expected to forget that Iraq began the war and that Iraq was the first to order its air force to attack oil tankers in the Gulf.

  In the autumn of 1980, when it seemed certain to them that Khomeini’s regime would collapse in anarchy under the onslaught of the Iraqi army around Abadan, the Arab Gulf states—those very states which by 1984 were seeking UN censure of Iran for its air attacks on the shipping lanes—poured billions into Iraq’s war funds. But now that Iran’s Islamic revolution had proved more tenacious than they thought, the Arabs were stapling their hopes to a worthless peace mission to Tehran and Riyadh by Syria, the one Arab country which very shrewdly decided at the beginning of the war that its Baathist enemies in Baghdad—rather than Khomeini’s mullahs—might prove to be the losers. The failure of the Arab Gulf states to draw the same conclusion had now led to a disjointed policy that was as impossible to follow as it would be to justify historically.

  Sheikh Khalifa Sulman al-Khalifa, the Bahraini prime minister and brother of the emir, insisted to me in June of 1984 that Iraq did not start the war. “I believe that—Iraq likes to protect itself like any other nation . . .” he said. “Of course, a war starts with something. You never know how far it will go on either side. First there is fire and fire depends on wind and the direction in which the wind blows. Sometimes people get carried away—they think they are strong.” This was the nearest he came to criticism of Saddam. Now Bahrain—like the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council—was demanding a UN Security Council resolution that would condemn only Iran for air attacks in the Gulf. He was not in favour of U.S. intervention. “There are ways of helping us and one of them is to stop the supply of arms to the fighting parties from Europe and from the Far East countries.” And this, it has to be remembered, came from the prime minister of a country that was enthusiastically bankrolling Saddam’s aggression.

  The Kuwaitis, who once denounced any foreign intervention on Gulf soil, had by November of 1983 reached the conclusion that the defence of the Strait of Hormuz was the responsibility of the countries that benefited from it—in other words, the West. Sheikh Ahmed al-Sabah, the foreign minister, was quoted in the Beirut newspaper An-Nahar as saying that the Gulf was an “international” region in which he could not object to foreign intervention. Then on 27 May 1984 Kuwait’s ambassador to Washington was warning against American involvement because it might “prompt the Soviet Union to enter the area.” This was a strange observation to come from the only wealthy Gulf state to permit a Soviet embassy in its capital and the one country which had hoped Soviet goodwill could be used on behalf of the Gulf states at the UN Security Council.

  The Saudis, on the other hand, were still fearful of any American presence in the Gulf. U.S. bases on Gulf territory would run counter to the anti-Israeli campaign carried on by the sheikhdoms, while a prolonged American presence could quickly ignite the sort of fires that brought ruin upon the Americans and their client government in Lebanon. Reagan’s strategic cooperation agreement with Israel had not been forgotten in the Gulf—and Israel had added fuel to the Gulf War by supplying arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iranian enemy. This was long before Iran-Contra, when the Americans used Israel to channel weapons to Tehran.

  The Soviets, after watching the destruction of the communist Tudeh party in Iran, were sending massive new tank shipments to Iraq. The Israelis had provided large quantities of small arms and ammunition to the Iranians. So had the Syrians. The French were still supplying Exocet missiles to the Iraqis while the North Koreans sold Soviet rifles to Iran. The Americans had been quietly re-establishing their relations with Baghdad—at this point, they were still increasing their “interests section” in the Belgian embassy in Baghdad—at the very moment when Saddam most needed the moral as well as the military support of a Western power. While George Bush was in Pakistan denouncing Iran’s “oppressive regime,” Saddam was reported to be hanging deserters by the roadside outside Baghdad.

  On 29 May 1984 the first load of 400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and launchers arrived by air in Saudi Arabia from the United States. President Khamenei of Iran sarcastically warned Washington that Iran would “resist and fight” any U.S. forces sent to the battle zone. “If the Americans are prepared to sink in the depths of the Persian Gulf waters for nothing, then let them come with their faith, motivation and divine power,” he said. As for the Gulf Arabs, he warned: “You will be neutral in the war only if you do not provide Saddam with any assistance. But a neighbour who wants to deliver a blow at us is more dangerous than a stranger, and we should face that danger.” Well aware that the Arabs were still giving huge financial support to Iraq, the oil-tanker crews took Khamenei’s threats seriously. Several vessels on the Kuwait run through the sea lanes north-west of Bahrain were now travelling by night for fear of Iranian air attack.

  Covering this protracted war for a newspaper was an exhausting, often unrewarding business. The repetition of events, the Iraqi attacks on Kharg Island, the massing of hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops outside Basra, the constant appeals by both sides to the UN Security Council, the sinking of more oil tankers, had a numbing quality about it. Sometimes this titanic bloodbath was called the “forgotten war”—even though at times it approached the carnage of the 1914–18 disaster. I dislike parallels with the two greatest conflicts of the twentieth century. Can we really say, for example, that Saddam’s decision to invade Iran in 1980 was a blunder on the scale of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which led to the deaths of 20 million Russians—when perhaps only a million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s aggression? Certainly, by the time it ended, the Iran–Iraq bloodletting had lasted as long as the Vietnam War. And Saddam’s war was the longest conventional conflict of the last century, a struggle of such severity that the barrels of the Iranian army’s guns had to be replaced twelve times before it ended in 1988.

  My visits to the battle fronts, and to Tehran and Baghdad, seemed to have a “story-so-far” quality about them. Statistics lost their power to shock. In 1985 alone, Colonel Heikki Holma of the UN’s inspection team in Iran estimated that 4,500 Iranians had been killed or wounded by chemical weapons. In two years, there had been at least sixty major chemical attacks by Iraq. The casualty figures were obviously on a Somme-like scale—again, I found myself unwillingly using the parallels of my father’s war—but neither side would admit the extent of its own losses. By 1986 alone, a million had perished in the war, so it was said by the Western diplomats who rarely if ever visited the war front, 700,000 of them Iranian. The Iranians said that 500,000 Iraqis had been killed. There were—and here the figures could be partly confirmed by the International Red Cross—100,000 Iraqi POWs in Iran and around 50,000 Iranian POWs in Iraq. Both sides were together spending around $1.5 billion a month on the war.

  In Iran, the conflict had changed the mood of the theologians trying to conduct the battle with Iraq. Only a year earlier, there were daily reports of torture and mass rape coming out of the grey-walled confines of Evin prison. But in April 1985, Hojatolislam Ali Ladjevardi, the Tehran prosecutor, was dismissed from his post together with many of his murderous henchmen; executions were now carried out almost exclusively on common criminals rather than enemies of the state. “The executions have been toned down,” an Iranian businessman put it with mild sarcasm. “Now they only kill murderers and narcotics men. The worst they do to a girl who offends Islamic law is to cut her hair off.” There was a growing acquiescence—rather than acceptance—of the Khomeini regime that produced an irritable freedom of speech; shopkeepers, businessmen, Iranian journalists, even conservative religious families could complain about the government without fear that they would be betrayed to
the Revolutionary Guards.

  It was part of an illusion. The Islamic Republic had not suddenly become democratic; it had cut so deeply into its political enemies that there was no focus of opposition left. In 1984 at least 661 executions were believed to have been carried out in Tehran, a further 237 up to Ladjevardi’s dismissal. The figures were Amnesty International’s, but the Iranians themselves admitted to 197 judicial killings between March 1984 and April 1985, claiming that they were all for drug offences. The introduction of a machine specially designed by Iranian engineers to amputate fingers was proudly announced by Tehran newspapers, proving that the revolution was as anxious as ever to exact punishment on those who contravened its laws.

  Such public freedom of expression as still existed could be found in the Majlis, the institution that so many critics had once predicted would provide only a rubber-stamp parliament for Khomeini’s decrees. There was a confrontation in parliament over a series of laws on land reform, trade and the budget. Conservative members led by Rafsanjani, the speaker, wanted to preserve the power of the clergy and the bazaaris, arguing for a liberal economy and no changes in land ownership. More radical members who claimed to follow “the line of the Imam” were demanding full government control of trade, land distribution and a number of social reforms that sounded like socialism. The result was government paralysis. Landowners refused to till their fields lest their property became profitable and was taken away by the state.