The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  As the “war” progressed—as the pictures of bombers streaking across Saudi Arabia and the skies above Kuwait became routine—those of us who did not join the infamous “pools” discovered a conflict that did not fit so easily into the television studios, with their super-patriotic anchormen, their verbose ex-generals, their model tanks and their bloodless sandpits. Saudi military checkpoints were ordered to prohibit all journalists from travelling towards the border unless they had signed up for the military “pool” and censorship. So along with a bunch of recalcitrant French reporters and photographers, I dressed myself up in the camouflaged anti-gas kit which The Independent had purchased for its staff and stuck on my head a large British steel helmet. This was a gift from Major Alan Barnes, a sympathetic and highly subversive member of the British army’s education corps. His selection of First World War poetry, apparently nicked from an army library, travelled with me throughout the conflict. The French contrived to dress up in the sloppy battledress of their own national army—Gitanes dangling from lower lips only enhanced their cover—while in my airless anti-gas cape and Barnes’s commando-style helmet, I was able to pass myself off as a vaguely bored liaison officer. The key to success, we quickly discovered, was to approach each checkpoint without looking at the soldiers guarding the road. Our lack of courtesy proved we were genuine.

  By the time I reached Khafji in this way, the Saudi border town had been transformed. A towering column of smoke rose 3 kilometres high over the abandoned streets. Iraqi shells—forty in all, fired from a 130-mm gun in a clump of trees on the Kuwaiti side of the frontier—had found their target. Flames bubbled around the base of the smoke inside the Arabian oil company’s storage depot, crimson and yellow, taunting U.S. Marine Sergeant Bill Iiams and his nine men who stood in the sand, dismantling their long-range radio aerials and preparing, without much enthusiasm, to enter the town. A transistor radio was broadcasting from the back of his Humvee, from which came the voice of a Washington reporter extolling the track record of the U.S. Air Force. Marine Rafee Saba, a twenty-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, with a disconcerting Yorkshire accent—he had spent his childhood in Sheffield—was more interested in the radio than in the evidence that the Iraqis just might be able to hit back. “Only one plane lost in one thousand sorties,” he shouted. “Can you beat that?”

  Sergeant Iiams was still watching the fires from the oil terminal and the canopy of smoke that was now spreading 15 kilometres out to sea. “No one’s attending the fire, are they?” he asked. My French colleagues and I had already done the rounds of Khafji and knew more than the marines. No, we said, no one had called the fire brigade. In fact, there was not a soul in Khafji to lift a telephone. The entire population—every family, the owner of the barber’s shop, the Pakistani store owner, the managers of the town’s three restaurants, the staff of the local hotel, even the local Khafji constabulary—had fled.

  And we had already discovered Khafji’s unhappy secret. Street after street bore the evidence of panic: clothes lying in the middle of the road where they had fallen from trucks and jeeps, limousines left unlocked, a police car abandoned in the main highway, its driver’s door open. When we drove right down to the Kuwaiti border, well within range of the Iraqi gun-line, we found the Saudi army’s positions unmanned, their sandbagged emplacements empty, their tents deserted. Only a lone Saudi National Guard patrol—three tall young men with very long beards and red berets—was left to represent the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

  They were proud men who shook our hands because they were pleased to see friendly faces so close to the Iraqis. How many Iraqis there were beyond the trees it was impossible to say, but their shells had tracked across the town in a straight line, next to the empty customs post, through the wall of a garden, in the middle of a street, until one of the last rounds hit the oil terminal and provided this scruffy place with its landmark plume of smoke. Not long after the shelling, we watched a helicopter fly up the coast and fire two missiles into the trees and the artillery stopped firing. There were other fires, deep inside Kuwait. Perhaps 25 kilometres from us, an immense curtain of smoke, kilometres in length and height, rose magisterially into the pale winter sky. It must have been an ammunition dump or a petrol store which the Americans had set alight.

  The French were good in the desert. Some of my French reporter colleagues had served in their army in Africa and used compasses to move off the highway and drive through the sand to avoid the American checkpoints that wouldn’t be fooled by our outlandish military clothes. A journalist from the French military magazine Raids was later bombed by one of his own country’s Mirage aircraft; the ordnance failed to explode, so he lifted the unexploded bomb onto the back of his jeep and took it off to a French airbase to complain.

  The wet sand clung to our tyres and turned the roads into mud-rinks. The soldiers were cold. The troops of the U.S. 24th Mechanized Infantry Division sat on their vehicles in their rainproof ponchos, slapping their sides for warmth. Across the mud, the British were huddled in their trucks with blankets or sitting in tents with an oil stove sputtering between them. No one could believe that the temperature would fall to almost zero in the Saudi desert. The wind came from the southwest, blasting over the sodden mass of grey earth, filling the sabkha depressions with water, turning the oil-soaked supply routes into death traps. A Humvee lay almost unrecognisable in the sand after its collision with a truck. A massive American M1A1 battle tank lay upside down in the desert, its turret and barrel half buried in the mud, a lone soldier watching over its vast hulk.

  Far out across the desert, we could hear the thumps and bangs of U.S. Marine batteries shelling the Iraqis. But the gathering of allied armies—how quickly we had begun to use the word “Allies” as if this was the eve of D-Day—bore little relation to the comfortable, efficient scenarios outlined by the American and British commanders in Riyadh. Construction work on supply routes was hopelessly behind schedule, six-hour traffic jams had built up in the mudpits around divisional headquarters and many junior officers were leading their units to the front lines without maps. The entire British 32nd Field Hospital drove all the way to the Kuwaiti frontier without a single map and were trying to negotiate their way through the last Saudi patrol east of Khafji—and straight into the arms of the Iraqis—until we alerted a group of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who turned them round.

  They were lucky they did not turn up in the early hours of 30 January 1991, when an Iraqi mechanised column of tanks and armoured personnel carriers— alerted no doubt that their target was undefended—crossed the border and entered Khafji from the west, capturing the town and, in a separate engagement to the south-west, killing twelve U.S. marines. Exactly two weeks after the Americans announced that the liberation of Kuwait had “begun,” American troops were now fighting—and dying—to liberate a corner of Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t meant to be this way.

  By the time I reached the edge of Khafji next morning, a blanket of dense, oily fog hung over the frontier as American 155-mm guns banged shells into the streets around the oil storage depot. I found Marine Corps Sergeant John Post, a tall man with a big bushy moustache, recording “hostile” incoming fire on his sand-sprinkled, crackling radio near the American guns as mortars exploded inside the town, a faint white wisp of smoke showing their fall of shot. A broken water tower, smashed away by shells after someone concluded that the Iraqis had put a forward observer on top, stood out against the grey backcloth of smoke. “I don’t know why we let the Iraqis go into Khafji in the first place,” Post said. “But this is a Saudi operation and the Iraqis are still in there—maybe two hundred of them. They’re said to be Iraqi special forces. I guess the Saudis got several hundred prisoners— I’ve counted twelve busloads of them so far with Saudi guards at both ends of each bus. But the Iraqis are fighters.”

  All night, flares had hung over Khafji and its stubborn defenders. A Harrier had swooped out of the east and bombed near the seafront. We made a call to the Khafji Beach Hotel, to be gree
ted by an Iraqi soldier who announced his support for “Arabism” and issued a string of oaths into the receiver, deprecating “Hosni Mubarak and the so-called Custodian of the Two Holy Places.” Sergeant Post, with fourteen years in the Marine Corps, shook his head and leaned against his Humvee, the squat, crablike version of the jeep which the Americans had now brought into battle for the first time, a TOW missile-launcher mounted on its back. They were to become part of American life in the decade to come. As usual, there was a transistor playing on top of the vehicle, a combination of pop music—which the marines enjoyed and which competed with the din of artillery fire—and news reports of 300 Iraqi dead in Khafji and 500 Iraqi prisoners, which the marines enjoyed even more.

  The Saudis were fighting in the town, although many of their reinforcements, it quickly transpired, were Qatari—some of them Pakistani soldiers on loan to the government of Qatar—and on the highway I caught sight of a heavy transporter bearing the wreckage of a Qatari army tank, a shell hole clean through its rear-mounted engine. There was another rumble. Sergeant Post shook his head again. “Those B-52s are laying it on over there in Kuwait,” he said. “Can you imagine what it must be like under that?” No, it was impossible to conceive of the carnage going on across the border, under that terrible black cloud. Hours earlier, in the night 240 kilometres away, I had heard the earthquake of the B-52s. The desert carried the sound much further, a deep, distant drum roll, a minute and a half in length.

  Iraqis were dying only 25 kilometres away, in their hundreds, but the euphoria of power had already gifted the Americans with a certain jubilation which, I suggested in a report that night, “will earn them more enemies in the Middle East in the years to come.” On the ground, the marines were more prosaic. Captain John Borth, Post’s commanding officer, viewed it all with the eyes of a man who had seen only the few kilometres of land around him. “If Saddam can take an empty town like Khafji—big deal,” he said. “He’s losing a lot of men to take a town that has no significance. I’m sure if we’d been more concerned about it, we’d have done a lot more.” Perhaps. But Khafji did matter a lot. It was in Saudi Arabia. It was one of the kingdom’s biggest towns. Schwarzkopf contemptuously and wrongly referred to it as a “village” when he originally reported the Iraqi attack. It was a town. It was therefore essential for the Allies to announce its recapture— which British prime minister John Major, having evicted Mrs. Thatcher from Downing Street, did while Iraqi troops were still fighting in the streets.

  In the end, it had to be a famous Saudi victory. The “martyrs of Khafji”—the eighteen soldiers and national guardsmen killed in its recapture—were now immortalised by Crown Prince Abdullah as “the symbol of valour and courage in the minds of generations to come. What they have gained is a great honour for this country and their families.” Saudi television neglected to point out that this “honour” would have been unnecessary had Saudi and American soldiers defended Khafji in the first place; they also spared readers the videotape of the shrivelled, carbonised bodies of the kingdom’s “martyrs,” lying in the ash of their personnel carriers. Amid the wreckage of the town to which its population returned, I heard no rejoicing. Why, the shopkeepers asked us, were the Americans not now liberating Kuwait? Instead, they were witnessing, live on their television sets, the destruction of Iraq. When I tried to explain to a Saudi clothing importer that the liberation of Kuwait was obviously going to be preceded by bombing, his response was immediate. “But the bridges, the electricity, the oil in Iraq, the people in the hospitals . . . Why must the Americans do this?”

  It was a question asked with ever-increasing frequency. It was pointless for the Americans to explain that the more they bombed those “cockroaches,” the less would be the human cost to the allied forces—including the Arab armies— when they at last advanced upon Kuwait. On CNN, an ever more potent and therefore dangerous medium for the local population, Saudis heard that the killing and wounding of Iraqi civilians—of Arabs, most of them Muslims—constituted “collateral damage” in a “target-rich environment,” phrases that possessed a personal as well as an obscene edge when viewers were of the same faith as the victims.

  The role of journalism in the 1991 Gulf War was as cheap as it was dishonest. If the relationship between reporters and soldiers was osmotic, it was also, on the journalists’ part, parasitical. We fed off war. We wanted to become part of it. An American colonel commanding the U.S. airbase in Bahrain decided to honour the “pool” reporters who had been attached to his fighter-bomber squadrons since the day war broke out. They had not flown in any aircraft. They had braved no ground fire. Save for a few false Scud alerts, they had done nothing more than repeat the clichés of the returning pilots and their commanders. But the base commander produced for each of them a small American flag which, he said, had been carried in the cockpits of the very first U.S. jets to bomb Baghdad. “You are warriors too,” he told the journalists as he handed them their flags.

  The incident said a lot about the new, cosy, damaging relationship between reporters and the military, one that would be honed and chiselled and polished in time for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. So thorough had been the preparation for this war, so dependent had journalists become upon information dispensed by the Western military authorities, so enamoured of their technology, that press and television reporters found themselves trapped by their own childish enthusiasm.

  For most of the journalists in the Gulf—and for most of the Western soldiers— war was an unknown quantity, exciting as well as frightening, historic as well as deadly. The notion that this was a “just war”—as Archbishop Robert Runcie and President Bush would have had us believe—presented us all with a moral context for our presence. If Saddam Hussein was the Hitler of the Middle East— worse than Hitler in Bush’s flawed historical analysis—then it was inevitable that our reporting of the conflict would acquire an undertow of righteousness, even romanticism.

  Thus when RAF fighter pilots took off from a Gulf airbase in late January 1991, a young British reporter told her audience that “their bravery knows no bounds.” When U.S. navy jets took off from the carrier USS John F. Kennedy at the start of the war—in a campaign which was to cause many civilian casualties— a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer filed a “pool” dispatch from the ship describing how “Thursday morning was one of those moments suspended in time . . . paving the way for a dawn of hope.” Journalists were now talking of Iraq as “the enemy,” as if they themselves had gone to war—which, unfortunately, they had.

  Their language was often that of the 1940s, when Hitler’s armies had reached the Pas de Calais and were poised to invade Britain. Journalists in army costume and helmets were attempting to adopt the gravitas of Edward R. Murrow and Richard Dimbleby. The “pool” reporters were not under air attack like Murrow. They were not flying on missions over “enemy” territory as Dimbleby had done on the Hamburg firestorm raid. But they were preparing the world for “the biggest tank battle since World War Two” and “the largest amphibious operation since D-Day or Korea.” There was to be no major tank battle and no amphibious operation at all. But the armies constituted “the Allies,” with that reassuring echo of the wartime alliance which overthrew Hitler—and in which Saddam’s hero, Stalin, played arguably the leading role.

  This nonsense was as dangerous as it was misleading. When the three largest Christian armies in the world were launching a war against a Muslim nation from another Muslim nation which contained Islam’s two holiest shrines, this was no time to draw parallels with the Second World War. If Ed Murrow were alive today, he would have been among the few reporters in Baghdad—like my colleague Patrick Cockburn of The Independent—describing the effects of American air raids on civilians. This bombardment could well presage the start of renewed hatred between the West and the Arab world, but our reporting did not begin to reflect this.

  It is not easy for journalists to exercise self-criticism when they are reporting history. And to cast doubt on the word
of American or British officers in the Gulf was to invite almost immediate condemnation. Those of us who reported the human suffering caused by Israeli air raids on Beirut in 1982 were libelled as anti-Semitic. Any expression of real scepticism about American military claims in the Gulf thus provoked parallel accusations. Had we taken Saddam’s side? Did we not realise that Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990?

  There could not be a reporter in Saudi Arabia who did not realise that Saddam Hussein was a brutal, wicked dictator who ruled through terror. There could be no doubt about the savagery of his army in occupied Kuwait. Reporters who wandered off to investigate military affairs in Saudi Arabia risked at worst deportation. The last journalist who did that in Baghdad had been hanged. Long before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, we were reporting on his atrocities—unlike the Saudi royal family who were bankrolling his dreadful regime, and the U.S. government who were supporting it.

  Yet most of the journalists in military “pools” were now wearing the uniform of their Western protectors. They relied upon the soldiers around them for advice. Fearful of a conflict on land, they naturally looked to the soldiers for comfort. They dug trenches with their protectors. They lined up submissively with the soldiers for the frightful cocktail of pills and injections—against anthrax, against bubonic plague—which the Western armies wished to pump into them. I advised one close colleague to have nothing to do with this witches’ brew—now widely believed to be, along with depleted uranium munitions, a cause of the debilitating and sometimes fatal “Gulf War Syndrome”—and to this day she is grateful to me. These journalists were dependent on the troops for communications, perhaps for their lives. And there was thus a profound desire to fit in, to “work the system,” a frequent and growing absence of critical faculties.