The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  This news put me in a devilishly awkward position. What was I to tell Norman Schwarzkopf? If I said nothing, he would certainly hear about the theft from somewhere else. I suggested that as the matter was of such crucial importance, Paddy [Hine] himself should fly out to brief the CinC personally and this he agreed to do. At the same time, the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Vincent, flew to Washington to brief Colin Powell, so dangerous did the whole incident seem and so potentially destructive of Anglo-American relations.

  Schwarzkopf “seemed relaxed” at the news, according to de la Billière, although the latter’s contemporary notes reveal another little secret hitherto kept from Washington. “Cock-up No 2,” de la Billière wrote, “is when I’m told to tell NS [Norman Schwarzkopf] we are with him all the way, whatever happens, and he finds out Brit ministers will not delegate ROE [rules of engagement] for me to release aircraft for rapid response to a pre-emptive Iraqi strike . . . ”135

  It was an unsettling Christmas. My friend and colleague Terry Anderson was still a hostage in Lebanon, held by men who were demanding the release of those Dawa party prisoners in Kuwait—if, indeed, they were still in jail. Because I was able to maintain some slight contact with Terry via his kidnappers, I flew to New York to talk to Terry’s boss at AP, Louis D. Boccardi—a small, dapper man with the disconcerting habit of talking to visitors while playing taped music very loudly in his office—and to Terry’s close friend, Don Mell. Mell, or Donald C. Mell the Third as we were constrained to call him, had been Terry’s photo editor in Beirut and took me out for a memorable turkey dinner in the Rainbow Room of the GE building in Manhattan. I say “memorable” although, like most of Mell’s dinners in Beirut, it was difficult to remember the last part of it. While not as slim as he was in his nimble wartime days in Lebanon, Mell had the disconcerting ability to attract throngs of gorgeous waitresses the moment he entered the restaurant, an effect he greeted with a wicked smile.

  “Fisky, there’s going to be a war and the old U-S-of-A will win, as usual,” he said once we’d sat down. “Remember Lebanon? Remember what a giant fuck-up that was? Well, I’m sure we’ll do just as well in Iraq.” He might have been talking of events thirteen years later, although, for tens of thousands of Iraqis—at least half a million if we were to include the long-term aftermath of the 1991 war—his assessment would be all too accurate. Mell was also travelling back to the Gulf for the liberation of Kuwait—we didn’t doubt that this would be accomplished—and we drank champagne together over the Manhattan skyline. The Empire State Building was patriotically illuminated in red, white and blue and the World Trade Center simmered at the tip of Manhattan. Mell and I both agreed that the impact of America’s actions in the Middle East would eventually come to haunt the West— we even talked about this over dinner—although we never guessed that the explosion was less than eleven years and less than four miles away.

  I arrived back to a cold, damp, bleak Saudi Arabia. The three hundred thousandth Kuwaiti refugee had long ago crossed the border—the Iraqis had reduced the indigenous population of their “nineteenth province” to two-thirds of its pre-invasion level—and King Fahd and Saddam Hussein were engaged in a bitterly personal dispute in which both God and Satan were invoked. It related directly to Saudi Arabia’s original support for Iraq’s 1980 aggression against Iran. Saddam had complained of Fahd’s meanness at this time—an extraordinary insult to any Arab, let alone a Saudi—and Fahd’s response was as devastating in its exposure of their quarrel as it was revealing in its detail of just how much the Saudis had spent in their attempt to destroy Iran a decade before:

  Why did you not fulfil your promise to me and Egyptian President Hosni Moubarak that you would not launch an aggression in Kuwait? After only a few days from your pledge, you committed the most vicious crime in the history of mankind when you crept in with your army in the darkness and shed blood and expelled an entire nation [in]to the desert in violation of all norms and values . . . you have . . . insisted on continuing aggression, claiming that Kuwait was part of Iraq. God knows that Kuwait was never under the Iraqi rule and the members of the family of Sabah were rulers of Kuwait since about 250 years.136 . . . Who authorised you to kill [a] million Iranian and Iraqi Muslims? . . . Who authorised you to occupy Kuwait and kill its sons, rape its women, loot its property and destroy its landmarks? No doubt Satan and your covetousness have urged you to do so at the expense of the Arab Gulf countries which were proud of the Iraqi army.

  It was instructive that King Fahd should have blamed Saddam for a million Muslim lives lost during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War—since Saudi Arabia had been Iraq’s principal bankroller in that war—but the details of just how much money the Saudis had been prepared to spend on Saddam’s behalf in that conflict were as shameful as they were revealing:

  You said in your message that we had only extended to you $11.53 million to contribute to [the] reconstruction of al-Basra in addition to one million dinar[s] worth of equipment to reconstruct Fao.

  But we would like to make [the] facts clear:

  Oh Ruler of Iraq, the Kingdom extended to your country $25,734,469,885. 80¢.

  The implications of this took some time to sink in. Saudi Arabia, whose king called himself the custodian of Mecca and Medina, had given Saddam $25 billion to fight and kill fellow Muslims in Iran.137 The Americans had supplied the intelligence and some of the chemicals (along with the Germans). The Russians gave most of the armour. But the Saudis largely supplied the cash. I mused for some seconds on the eighty cents tacked on the end of the bill, an addition which suggested that a truly eccentric mind was at work in the Saudi royal treasury.

  ONE OF THE DHAHRAN AIRPORT Saudi immigration officers had invited us to dinner in his desert tent, and it seemed a good place to watch the sands of peace run out in Geneva. Mohamed poured the hot, over-sweet tea. Abdullah handed round the plates of grapes, bananas and carrots. James Baker flickered on a black-and-white screen in the corner of the Arab tent. It was a strangely comforting place to hear the news. There we were, surrounded by six Saudis in their white-and-brown robes and kuffiah headdress, lying on brightly coloured carpets, our shoulders hunched against camel saddles, munching away on spiced chicken and shish kebab as the path to war was laid out before us. When Baker suddenly looked up and began with those all important words—“Regrettably, ladies and gentlemen,” dreadful, hollow words which should have frightened us all—the Saudis merely glanced at the screen with the same attention they would later apply to a videotape of a dance band.

  And when the U.S. secretary of state, his image floating up and down on the big old screen, pronounced his fatal judgement—“in over six hours, I heard nothing that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever”—only Mohamed’s younger brother paid attention. He raised his hands level with his shoulders like a man in the act of surrender. “So it will be war,” he said. “What can we do?”

  This must have been how the tribes regarded impending disaster hundreds of years ago, lying on their carpets, tearing the legs off a roast chicken under the protection of a cloth roof. In front of us, a charcoal brazier glowed, its iron legs buried deep in the sand. Mohamed and Abdullah passed around more tea and fruit; the others paid more attention to Baker now. Khaled, a thin youth with a pointed beard, clucked his tongue. “On the day this starts,” he said, “I shall pack up and leave.”

  Mohamed had rigged up his television set to a home-made aerial which sucked in CNN’s live broadcast from the Geneva press conference. The signal was poor but we could read the words “Intercontinental Hotel, Geneva” on the lectern in front of Baker, and listen to his explanation of why he would not accept “linkage” between the Gulf crisis and the Arab–Israeli conflict. To a Westerner, Baker made sense. He insisted that Iraq was opposed by “twenty-eight nations” rather than by the United States. “Now the choice lies with the Iraqi leadership.” But when Tariq Aziz appeared on the television, his Arab accent drawing the attention of all in our
little tent, Baker’s words seemed somehow less convincing, not because Iraq had right on its side—everyone agreed that Saddam Hussein was a bad man—but because Baker was an American and Aziz, like the six Saudis, an Arab.

  Why, I asked Mohamed, had the Saudis for so long been Saddam Hussein’s closest friends? Had they really trusted him and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz? Had they not believed the reports of Iraq’s use of poison gas in the war against Iran? Or had they been friends because Saddam was an Arab or, more to the point, a strong Arab whose power was feared as well as respected? It was Abdullah who replied. “We were never told bad things about Saddam,” he said. “We were told in our newspapers—by our government—that he was a good man. Governments always say what they want their people to understand. That is what happens here. We were not told the truth.” Then he paused for a few seconds. “But I will do anything my government tells me.”

  One of the Saudis walked into the tent with a tray of whisky bottles, perhaps half a dozen of them, which Mohamed proceeded to pour into pint-size mugs. Jameson, Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniel’s, I couldn’t believe this. “We confiscate them from the passengers who try to smuggle alcohol into the airport,” Mohamed beamed. Given the vast quantities his guests were now drinking, glugging the stuff back as if it was juice instead of liquor, I realised that Saudi Arabia’s strict antialcohol laws had as much to do with consumption as they did with religion. Saudis didn’t know how to drink.

  I knew something was wrong when I asked Abdullah if he really thought the Americans would leave Saudi Arabia. At this, Khaled suddenly stood up and announced angrily: “I will not stay here in this tent if you continue this conversation.” It was a dark, unnerving moment, as if the disaster presaged on that flickering screen had at last penetrated the minds of the six Saudis, creating some kind of disorder in the tent. Mohamed asked if the Kurds should have a state. “Why should they?” Khaled asked, his face flushed.

  He did actually leave the tent, his robes flowing at his heels, until Mohamed went to persuade him to return. Another man arrived, along with his wife, an unprecedented breach of custom and etiquette and—many Saudis would say— morality. She was a dark-haired woman with a gentle smile who did not wear a veil but sat silently beside her husband at one side of the tent, clutching a black gown around her shoulders. The men talked vigorously, Mohamed all the time asserting that he would not leave his home if there was a war. “Where would I go?” he asked. “What is the point? The war can go anywhere.”

  On the screen, Dan Rather was telling us now of the probability of war. He spoke of massive bombardments of Iraqi forces, of devastating air strikes, of “neutralising” Iraq’s military potential. Sitting amid these Saudis, his words seemed obscene, unnatural. He was a Westerner, talking with promiscuous ease about the possible violent death of thousands of Arab Muslims at the hands of America. The Saudis listened to this with great discomfort. So did I. Imbibing the poisoned fruits of the West, they were about to experience its killer instincts.

  They might have spoken of this had there not come from behind us, through the tent’s fragile green wall, a growl of sound, long, persistent, gradually increasing in depth and intensity. We all knew what it was. Its howl penetrated every corner of the tent, drowning out Rather’s voice, making the picture jump nervously until our ears were swamped with the sound. We were all familiar with it. One of President Bush’s great C-5 military transports on the final approach to the nearest airbase, 30 metres over our heads, filling our vulnerable tent with its decibels.

  In the last days before the onslaught, it was still possible to drive up the highway to the Kuwaiti border. They were days of gales and irony. The stormclouds gusted in over the coast and fanned the white smoke that trailed in a friendly way from the chimneys of the Kuwaiti power station. You could see it all quite clearly from the Saudi frontier, the pale white generating station and its twin chimneys still providing electricity to Iraq’s occupying soldiers and their captive citizens on the other side of the border. It spoke of normality, of life going on as usual.

  Down the hill from the deserted customs shed, I found a Pakistani at the till of his grocery store, its shelves half empty. No point in restocking just now, he told me. Round the corner in the playpark by the sea, a man in a white robe stood with his black-veiled wife and their tiny child. Change their clothing and it could be any rainy day on the seafront at Margate or Coney Island. No sign of Iraq’s half-million soldiers on the other side of the frontier. And on this side, only a fat Westerner with grey hair in a pick-up truck—Vietnam generation, unable to hide his paunch under a parka jacket—stared towards Kuwait to represent the half-million Americans and their allies.

  I walked around Khafji, but the integrity of the Arab quarrel was elusive. Most of the women and children had fled but a few Saudi soldiers were phoning home from the local post office, a war film playing on the television set in the lounge of the Khafji Beach Hotel, watched intently by a policeman. I had to drive down the bypass before I found a three-vehicle U.S. army patrol, its soldiers helmeted and perched high in their armoured vehicles, obeying the speed limit, halting at the traffic lights. For months I had watched the armour streaming up this highway. Like the Kuwaiti power station, it had become a sight so familiar that it had acquired its own permanence. I could imagine that in another six months, even in a year’s time, the tanks and guns would still be advancing up this road, that Bush would still be threatening to evict Iraq from Kuwait, that the power station would still be emitting its white smoke, as if the preparations for war were eternal, like the desert.

  On the day before Schwarzkopf commenced his bombardment of Iraq—“I have already issued the terrible orders that will let the monster loose,” he wrote to his wife on 17 January 1991—American journalists seemed almost disappointed. Like the British press, the big American papers had been telling their readers—up to the point where war really was imminent and a certain reticence became obligatory—that the fighting would be a pushover. “K” Day for the headline writers was a relief. When Baker and Tariq Aziz were still talking, there was an almost palpable sense of unease among some of the American media experts. Peace fears loomed. But once Baker admitted failure, they were happy. War hopes rose. This was not mere cynicism. One U.S. radio reporter warned his listeners in the first week of January that the Gulf crisis was “sliding” towards a settlement. Like Shewmaker’s hero General Patton—who ended up admiring the beauty of war and distrusting the horrors of peace—many of the reporters had psyched themselves into a state of mind in which peace was immoral and war represented goodness.

  Nor, at first, did it seem there was much place in this new war for print reporters. We all knew that the air bombardment of Iraq would begin after Saddam refused a United Nations deadline to withdraw from Kuwait. So when my phone rang in the early hours of 17 January and a young journalist on The Independent’s night shift snapped that “CNN are showing the first bombs dropping on Baghdad—when can you file?” I told him that I was watching the same pictures in Dhahran and that we knew the bombs would drop this morning. The real story, I said, was that the most powerful armies in Christendom were now poised to fight the largest military force in the Muslim world. “So when can you file on this?” the voice asked again. I already have, I said. The Christian–Muslim “clash of arms” had been on our front page the previous day.

  But I drove across to the airbase at Dhahran and there were the American jets taking off by the squadron, bomb-heavy and leaving a trail of gold-and-purple exhaust fires across the sky. It made good television, an Eastman Color insert into the pale electric greens of CNN’s Baghdad anti-aircraft fire and distant explosions. In the early hours of that same morning, twelve Saudi fighter-bombers also took off from an airbase in the Eastern Province to attack Iraq. The decision to dispatch the Tornadoes on their sorties—they were purchased as part of the Saudi–British Al-Yamamah project—was taken personally by King Fahd and warmly applauded by President Bush. No attention was
paid to the fact—no reporter mentioned—that at dawn, eleven of the twelve jets returned with their bombs still attached to their wings, their pilots saying they failed to find their targets. The twelfth plane unloaded its ordnance over the western Iraqi desert. But did they really lose their way?

  The following night, a further seven Saudi-piloted Tornadoes took to the air from the same base, en route for western Iraq. Of these planes, no fewer than six failed to drop their bombs. But appearances had been preserved. The pilots were duly paraded before the press. The Saudis were fighting. President Bush could claim that Arab as well as Western forces were at war with Iraq. You only had to look at the Tornadoes to see the irony involved. The tail of each fighter-bomber displayed the Saudi flag, upon which was inscribed in Arabic the first words of the Koran. “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his Prophet.” Thus did the first sura of Islam’s holiest book constitute the battle flag of the Arabs who had gone to war against another Muslim nation. “Yes, Iraq is Arab,” one of the Saudi pilots explained to me before leaving on a third sortie. “But when a brother Arab attacks you, he is your enemy. Saddam is our enemy now.”

  Or so it appeared. One day after the beginning of the bombardment—calling this blitzkrieg a war was pushing the margins of reality a little far at that stage— Fahd himself announced that the battle constituted “the sword and voice of truth” and that God would “register victory for His army.” The House of Saud had now committed itself irrevocably to the Western military forces. King Fahd remained overall commander of the “joint forces,” another of the quaint epithets behind which America’s overwhelming strength within the alliance was supposed to be hidden. The Saudis thought they had muzzled criticism of the Americans from their own religious hierarchy, allowing sheikhs to vent their anger on domestic targets—upon women drivers, for example—and generously acting as hosts to the distraught if intensely arrogant Kuwaiti royal family.