The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  As the Americans pushed in the United Nations for a worldwide arms embargo against Iran, Iranian government officials authorised a massive new weapons procurement programme. Hundreds of pages of documentation from the Iranian National Defence Industry Organisation (INDIO) shown to me by dealers in Germany and Austria listed urgent demands for thousands of TOW anti-tank missiles and air-to-air missiles for Iran’s F-14 aircraft. The Iranians were offering $20 million for one order of 155-mm gun barrels, demanding more than 200,000 shells at $350 a shell.

  King Hussein of Jordan, frightened that what he called “my nightmare”—the collapse of Iraq and an Iranian victory—might be close, hosted a secret meeting of Saddam Hussein and President Hafez el-Assad of Syria at a Jordanian airbase known only as “H4” in the hope that Assad might be persuaded to abandon his alliance with Iran. Nine hours of talks between the Iraqi and Syrian dictators, whose mutual loathing was obvious to the king, produced nothing more than an arrangement that their foreign ministers should meet, but such was the king’s political stature that his failures always reflected well upon him. The worthiness of his endeavours always appeared more important than their results; was he not, after all, trying to bring about an end to the Gulf War by calling upon Arab leaders to unite?

  Kuwait now accepted an offer by Reagan to re-flag its tankers with the Stars and Stripes. Washington decided to parade its new and provocative policy by escorting the huge 401,382-ton supertanker Bridgeton up the Gulf to Kuwait, a phenomenal story to cover, since television crews from all over the world were hiring helicopters in the United Arab Emirates to follow this mega-tanker to her destination. I flew into Dubai on 23 July 1987 on an MEA aircraft from Beirut and—true to form—the flight-deck crew invited me to sit in the cockpit. And from there, at 10,000 feet over the Gulf, I saw Bridgeton, putting half a knot onto her previously acknowledged top speed of 16½ knots while three diminutive American warships described 3-kilometre circles round her hulk. “Mother-hen surrounded by her chicks,” I wrote scornfully in my notebook. The Americans closed to battle stations as they passed within range of Iran’s Silkworm missiles and the island of Abu Moussa, where Revolutionary Guards maintained a base.

  It was a fiasco. South-east of Kuwait and still 200 kilometres from its destination, the Bridgeton struck a mine on her port side and the U.S. naval escorts, anxious to avoid a similar fate to that of the Stark two months earlier, immediately slunk away in line behind the Bridgeton’s stern for protection. On board the escorting missile destroyer USS Kidd, the captain ordered armed seamen to the bow of his vessel to destroy any suspicious objects in the water by rifle-fire. Iranian fishing boats had been in the area before the Bridgeton was hit, but there was no way of identifying the mine. This permitted the Iranian prime minister, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, to praise the “invisible hands” which had proved the vulnerability of America’s “military expedition.” With her speed cut to a quarter and her port side number one compartment still taking water, the Bridgeton continued what was now a political rather than a commercial voyage towards Kuwait.

  It transpired that the Americans had no minesweepers in the area, had not even bothered to look for mines in the 30-kilometre-wide channel where the tanker was struck, and now feared that their own warships were more vulnerable to mines than the vessels they were supposed to protect. Kuwaiti and American officials now sought to load the Bridgeton with crude oil, an overtly political act because, as one shipping agent asked contemptuously, “Who in their right mind would load his cargo onto a damaged ship?” The sorry tale of military unpreparedness was only made worse when Captain Yonkers, the U.S. naval officer in command of the three warships—the destroyer Kidd and two frigates—blandly admitted that he did not wish to sail back through the same sea lane because “one of the things I do not now have is the capability to defend my ships against mines.” This statement was compounded by Rear Admiral Harold J. Bernsen, who told reporters accompanying the convoy that “it may sound incongruous, but the fact is [that] a large ship, a non-warship such as the Bridgeton , is far less vulnerable to a mine than a warship . . . if you’ve got a big tanker that is very difficult to hurt with a single mine, you get in behind it. That’s the best defence and that’s exactly what we did.” Such statements provoked an obvious question: if the U.S. Navy could not protect itself without hiding behind a civilian vessel, how could it claim to be maintaining freedom of navigation in the Gulf?

  For newspaper reporters, this was again a frustrating story. From the shore, it was impossible to see the tanker fleets or their escorts. Only by being in the air could we have any idea of the immensity of the conflict. The Iran–Iraq War now stretched from the mountains of Kurdistan on the Turkish border all the way down to the coastline of Arabia, the land that once in part belonged to the Sherif Hussein of Mecca whom Lawrence had persuaded to join the Allied cause in the First World War. The question was overwhelming: how could we write about this panorama of fire and destruction if we could not see it? The television networks with their million-dollar budgets flew their own planes. They needed pictures. We did not. But during the Lebanese civil war, which was now in its thirteenth year, I had befriended many of the American network producers and crews, often carrying their film to Damascus or Cyprus for satelliting to the United States. And the American NBC network now happily allowed me to fly in their helicopter out of Dubai—provided I acted as an extra “spotter” of ships in the heat-hazed sea lanes.

  At least forty warships from the United States, France, the Soviet Union and Britain were now moving into station in the Gulf and the waters of the Gulf of Oman outside Hormuz; America would have the largest fleet—twenty-four vessels, with 15,000 men aboard—including the battleship Missouri. The superlatives came with them; it was one of the biggest naval armadas since the Korean War and very definitely the largest U.S. fleet to assemble since Vietnam. They would all be guaranteeing the “freedom” of Gulf waters for “our Arab friends”—and thus, by extension, Iraq—but they would do nothing to protect Iran’s shipping. It was scarcely surprising that the Iranians should announce their own “Operation Martyrdom” naval manoeuvres off the Iranian coast with the warning that “the Islamic Republic will not be responsible for possible incidents against foreign planes and warships passing through the region.”

  From my seat in NBC’s chopper, I now had an aerial platform from which to observe the epic scale of the conflict. Off Dubai, we flew at almost mast height between a hundred tankers and gas carriers, moored across miles of sea, big creamy beasts, some of them, alongside dowdy freighters and rust-streaked tubs packed with cranes and haulage equipment. True, they were under orders to wait for a rise in the spot price of oil rather than to delay their voyages because of Iran’s naval threats. But such was the blistering heat across the Gulf that we often blundered into warships in the haze without seeing them. “This is U.S. warship. Request you remain two nautical miles from U.S. warships. Over.” The voice on the radio had a clipped, matter-of-fact East Coast accent but retained its unnecessary anonymity. “U.S. warship. Roger. Out.”

  When we saw them spread across 6 kilometres of gentle swell—three tankers in V-shaped formation, the four warships at equidistant points around them—they looked set for a naval regatta rather than a hazardous voyage up the Gulf. The foreign tankers lying across the ocean around them, some with steam up, others riding the tides for their masters’ orders, were somehow familiar, faint echoes of those great convoys that set off through the Western Approaches forty-six years earlier. Three new American-registered ships— Gas King, Sea Isle City and Ocean City—were unremarkable symbols of Washington’s political determination in the Gulf; ill-painted, a touch of rust on their hulls, the American flag not yet tied to their stern. The U.S. warships Kidd, Fox and Valley Forge lay line astern and abeam of them, a further American vessel standing picket. There was an element of theatre about it all, this neat little configuration of high-riding empty tankers and their grey escorts, lying in the hot sea, actors awa
iting the curtain to rise upon their own farce or tragedy.

  There was a small but sudden bright, golden light on the deck of the Valley Forge and an illumination rocket moved gracefully up over the sea then drifted untidily back towards the waves. “This is U.S. warship,” the voice came back into our headsets, louder and more clipped. “You are inside two nautical miles. Request you clear. Over.” Coming up at us from the Valley Forge now was a big anti-submarine helicopter, an SH 603 whose remarkable ascent was assisted by two oversize engines. It came alongside, its crew staring at us from behind their shades, a lone hand in the cavernous interior gesturing slowly in a direction away from the ships. Around nine in the morning, a sleeker warship with a long, flat funnel and Exocet missile launchers on her decks sailed slowly across the rear of the American convoy, a British frigate of the Armilla patrol, HMS Active keeping the sort of discreet distance from America’s latest political gamble that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher would have approved of, at least one nautical mile from the nearest American ship.

  Iran’s anger was growing.61 Its Revolutionary Guards began assaulting un-escorted merchant ships with rocket-propelled grenades, approaching them on power boats from small Iranian islands in the Gulf and then opening fire at close range. All this time, the margins of error grew wider. In mid-August, an American fighter aircraft over the Gulf fired two rockets at an Iranian “plane” that turned out to be nothing more threatening than a heat “band” in the atmosphere. Two weeks later, the Kuwaitis fired a ground-to-air missile at a low-flying cloud because humidity had transformed the vapour into the image of an approaching jet aircraft on their radar screens.

  Crowds ransacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran but the “spontaneous” demonstration in protest at the Mecca deaths included some very professional locksmiths who stole $40,000 in cash from the embassy vault. In an effort to damage Iran’s economy, the Saudis threatened oil price cuts, although this was a self-defeating weapon. Iraq, like Iran, relied upon its oil exports to help fund its war and, with scarcely any foreign currency reserves, Baghdad now owed $60 billion in foreign debts. Kuwait, one of Iraq’s principal financial supporters, would see the $17 million in profits which it had obtained from its additional oil exports since the U.S. re-flagging of its tankers disappear overnight. The Arabs therefore remained as vulnerable financially as they often believed themselves to be militarily.

  And now more mines were discovered in the Gulf. One exploded against the supertanker Texaco Caribbean off Fujairah in the Gulf of Oman, far outside the Arabian Gulf. The explosion ripped a hole in her number three tank large enough to drive through in a family car. There was more condemnation of Iran, but very little mention of the fact that the ship was carrying not Kuwaiti exports but Iranian crude oil from the offshore terminal at Larak. Like the Iraqi missile attack on the Stark—the assault that brought Washington to a frenzy of anger against Iran—now the Iranians were supposedly mining their own supertankers, again displaying that cold contempt for world peace of which they had always been accused. Sure enough, within two days, a British Foreign Office minister was talking of Tehran’s “very irrational regime.”

  Two more mines were found by, of all people, an NBC crew. Steve O’Neil, flying low over the sea in our usual chopper, was looking through his view-finder when he glimpsed a large, spherical black shape disappearing past the helicopter’s left skid. He was only a few metres from the water, flying at more than 150 kilometres an hour, but the object was too sinister—too familiar from a dozen war movies—to be anything other than a mine. A few hours later and in almost identical circumstances, a CBS crew found another mine, black-painted like the first but weighted down by a chain. Chinese military technicians working with the Iranians reported that Iran had built a factory near the port of Bandar Abbas to upgrade the old mines they were buying, mines that were originally manufactured—a short pause for imperial reflection here—in Tsarist Russia.

  In April, the American warship USS Samuel Bo Roberts was almost sunk when it struck a mine while on Gulf patrol. On 21 September, Rear Admiral Bernsen, the same officer who had meekly agreed that his ships were better off using supertankers for their own protection, decided that sonar-equipped “Seabat” helicopters aboard the USS Jarrett —by historic chance, a sister ship of the Stark—should attack the Iranian naval vessel Iran Ajr after it was observed for thirty minutes laying mines in the Gulf 80 kilometres north-east of Bahrain. Reporters later taken aboard the 180-foot Iranian vessel—an unromantic nine-year-old Japanese roll-on-roll-off landing craft—saw ten large black-painted mines bearing the serial number “M08” near the stern of the boat with a special slide attached to the deck so that the crew could launch them into the sea. Bullet holes riddled the deck, cabins and bridge structure, with trails of blood running along the galleyways. Three of the thirty-man Iranian crew were killed in the attack, two more were missing believed dead and another four wounded, two seriously. Rafsanjani said that the American claim of minelaying was “a lie,” but it clearly was not, and the Iranians finally retracted their assertion that the Iran Ajr was an innocent cargo vessel. Saddam Hussein now had the satisfaction of knowing that the United States had aligned itself with Iraq as an anti-Iranian belligerent.

  The United States followed up on its success against the Iranian minelayer just over three weeks later with a naval strike against two Iranian oil platforms 130 kilometres east of Qatar. Four U.S. guided missile destroyers firing 5-inch guns demolished the Rustum and Rakhsh platforms. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger called it a “measured response” to an Iranian missile attack on an American-flagged tanker the previous week. All that initially came from the Iranians was a distant Iranian voice pleading over a crackling radio for a naval ceasefire so that wounded men could be evacuated from one of the burning rigs. The two platforms had been used as military bases by Revolutionary Guards, the Americans claimed. Tehran warned, not very credibly, that the United States would receive a crushing response from Iran.

  Because these military actions involved the Western powers, little attention was paid to the far more serious casualties still being inflicted in the land war, even when the victims were clearly civilians. On 12 October, for instance, an Iranian ground-to-ground missile allegedly aimed at the Iraqi defence ministry in Baghdad struck the Martyrs Place Primary School, 20 kilometres from the ministry, as children were gathering for morning class. The explosion killed 29 children and wounded 228 other civilians, a hundred of them critically. Iraq had just recommenced the use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces outside Basra, but this did not prevent the Iraqis capitalising on what they immediately condemned as an example of Iranian “bestiality.”

  BASRA HAD COME TO DEFINE this last and savage stage of the war. For the Iranians, it remained the gateway to southern Iraq, the very roads to the shrines of Kerbala and Najaf and Kufa beckoning to the Iranian soldiers and Pasdaran who were still boxed into the powdered ruins of Fao. Iraq was still able to maintain an army of 650,000 men spread through seven brigades from Suleimaniya down to the front line outside Fao. Presidential guards and special forces made up 30,000 of these troops and the “popular army” of conscripts and “volunteers” at least 400,000. An “Arab army” of 200,000, many of them Egyptians, constituted the rest of Iraq’s strength. But by early 1987 the Iranians had massed a force of 600,000 just opposite Basra. It seemed inevitable that Field Marshal Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, Prime Minister, Secretary General of the Regional Command of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and friend of America, would have to make another of his famous retreats.

  And when the Iranians did break through in January 1987 and made their dash for Basra, they wanted to show us. At night, we were taken up behind the Iranian lines, our bus crunching through wadis as the skyline was lit by artillery fire, hour after hour of grinding through the dark amid thousands of troops moving up to the line, the same old approaching fear of death and wounds settling over us. Severa
l years earlier, a ministry minder had led a Reuters reporter into a minefield. Both were blown to pieces. The Iranians proclaimed the Reuters man a “martyr” and were only just prevented from sending his widow a glossy book of coloured photographs depicting other martyrs in various stages of dismemberment and putrefaction.

  I spent the night on the sand floor of a deep, white-washed underground bunker. We were given juice and dooq—cold drinking yoghurt—and nan bread and cheese and tea, and I lay, as usual, sleepless beneath my blanket. Before six next morning, the Revolutionary Guards arrived to take us all to visit “the front” and I climbed wearily up the steep steps towards the sun and heat and the roar of gunfire and the heavy crumping sound of incoming shells. Dezful was CinemaScope. Fao was devastating. But this was an epic with a cast of thousands. Tanks and trucks and heavy guns were pouring westwards with hundreds of Iranian troops sitting on armour and lorries or marching alongside them. To my horror, I noticed that our escort would be none other than Ali Mazinan, the crazed and bespectacled Revolutionary Guards officer with an obsession about Iraqi date exports who had sent me off on the lunatic helicopter flight to Fao. He advanced towards me now with the warmest of smiles, embraced me in a grizzly-bear hug and kissed me on both cheeks. Never was Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief ” more necessary to a correspondent. Poetic faith was about the best there was to cling on to in the next few hours.