by Robert Fisk
Shortages at home, death squads, starvation diets and twenty-four-hour bombing at the front destroyed the morale of the sixteen soldiers who spoke to me. One of them spoke bitterly of Saddam Hussein, no doubt hoping to impress his Kuwaiti captors but unafraid that his comrades might betray him later. “I want to go back to an Iraq where there is no Saddam Hussein,” he said. It was a wish devoutly held by many millions of Iraqis. Just a day earlier, we—the West—had urged the people of Iraq to bring this about, to rise up and destroy the tyrant.
How easily we did this. How natural it seemed. We had, after all, gone to war in alliance with “the Arabs.” Good men and true of the Christian and Islamic faiths had fought together against Saddam. This was the image portrayed when Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled, the “commander-in-chief of all foreign forces,” sat down at Safwan on 3 March 1991 to arrange the Iraqi ceasefire—and allowed Saddam to keep his helicopters and surviving Republican Guard divisions intact. In the years that followed, the memoirs of those who supposedly led this war proved that the alliance was a sham—and that our reporting of the conflict was as deeply flawed as the men who fought it.
Prince Khaled used to employ an American public relations company to manage his press conferences. Deep in the high-pile-carpeted interior of the Saudi defence ministry, an Irish-American of massive build—a certain Mr. Lynch from Chicago—would stand just behind Prince Khaled, choosing which journalists should be permitted to ask questions and suggesting to the rather portly Saudi commander how he should reply. It was, to put it mildly, an unbecoming performance. Prince Khaled would beam into the television cameras and pour out his effusive thanks to the American people for sending their sons to defend his land while Mr. Lynch nodded sagely at his shoulder. The prince’s presentation was made all the more extraordinary by a hairline so thick and low that he appeared to have recently undergone a hair implant. His thin moustache added an even more surreal touch, making him look unhappily like those bewhiskered gentlemen who in silent movies used to tie ladies to railway lines in front of express trains.
King Fahd’s decision to invite American troops to Saudi Arabia had been “one of the most courageous of his life,” Khaled told us. He himself saw nothing wrong with this invitation to the foreign “guests.” America would respect the laws of Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia respected the United States. “Respect” was the word the Saudis always used. The foreigners would respect Islam and would respect the Arabs. And of course, Arabs would respect America. Khaled expressed his “respect” for Schwarzkopf, and Schwarzkopf duly disclosed his own “respect” for Khaled’s generalship. It sometimes seemed that there was no end to this mutual admiration, even when Saudi troops fled their posts at Khafji. After the Saudis and Qataris and their Pakistani mercenaries fought their way back into the town, there was the ever-smiling prince, now sporting a bright blue Kevlar helmet adorned with transfers of a general’s four stars, declaring his pride in his army and their American allies.
Imagine, therefore, Khaled’s surprise when, browsing through Schwarzkopf’s autobiography a year later, he found that the American commander’s “respect” for him was not quite as deeply held as he apparently thought. Khaled, according to Schwarzkopf, complained that American troops were wearing T-shirts bearing a map of Saudi Arabia (maps were “classified”), that a rabbi had boasted of blowing the Rosh Hashanah ram’s horn on Islamic soil (the rabbi was in America and quoted in an Israeli newspaper), that the Americans were bringing “dancing girls” into Dhahran; Khaled wanted the Americans to launch their ground offensive from Turkey rather than Saudi Arabia and told Schwarzkopf that the Syrians didn’t want to fight. Khaled was chosen for his job, Schwarzkopf wrote, by two American generals.
The Saudis should have expected such treatment. In the months that followed the liberation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia emerged as America’s main financial client in the Middle East, a vassal state supporting the finances of Washington’s poorer allies in the region—Egypt, for example—and buying off the suspicions of those less enthusiastic about American policy, especially Syria. In return for American firepower and political support, Saudi Arabia became Washington’s bankroller.
Predictably, an embittered Prince Khaled launched a series of attacks on the “respected” Schwarzkopf, accusing him of concocting stories and distorting facts “to give himself all the credit for the victory over Iraq while running down just about everyone else.” Poor Khaled. Did he really believe that the Americans would accept him as a four-star general alongside the Schwarzkopfs and the de la Billières? Typically, he failed to object to one of the most offensive passages in Schwarzkopf’s book, perhaps because he failed to understand its implications. Readers are invited to spot the insult:
Khalid [sic] was ideal; he’d been educated at Sandhurst, the British military school, had attended the U.S. Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, held a master’s degree in political science from Auburn University, and was the highest ranking prince in the Saudi Armed Forces. His military credentials were nowhere near as important as his princely blood, since almost all power in Saudi Arabia resides in an inner circle of the royal family. Simply put, unlike the other generals, Khalid had the authority to write cheques.
Cheques for transportation. Cheques for water. Cheques for fuel. This is why Prince Khaled was important. For the Gulf War, after massive arms purchases from the West had discredited George Bush’s promise to reduce the level of weapons in the Middle East, ended as a net profit to the Western alliance, fought by young men from Detroit and Glasgow but paid for by Prince Khaled’s uncle and king, the “Custodian of the Two Holy Places.” Could two such partners show each other anything more than mercantile respect?140
Curiously, the commanders of the two largest Western armies in the Gulf spent a good deal of their memoirs trying to persuade us that they do “respect” the Arabs and the Muslim Middle East. Visiting the Gulf as head of the U.S. Central Command in 1989, Schwarzkopf claimed to admire the Arab way of life, hunting with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in the Emirates, even dressing up in Kuwaiti robes for dinner. His Arab counterparts welcomed him into their palaces and mosques, Schwarzkopf wrote, “now that they knew of my fascination with their culture.”
General Sir Peter de la Billière seemed even more smitten with Arab “culture.” “I liked and respected Arabs and understood their way of life,” he wrote. “I came to appreciate the Arabs well, to appreciate their fine culture.” A few pages later, he is boasting again of “my understanding of Arabs and their way of life.” Yet a good part of de la Billière’s previous service in the Middle East had involved hunting down Arabs as an officer in the SAS. In Oman, he says, he failed to “eliminate” or capture the three dissident Arab leaders but succeeded in forcing them into exile. At Wadi Rawdah, the SAS attacked two guerrilla strongholds and “effectively put them out of business.” Oddly, de la Billière does not choose to mention the Iranian embassy siege in London when the SAS—of which he was then director—broke into the building, rescued the civilian captives held there and then proceeded to execute all but one of the Arab hostage-holders.
Perhaps it was necessary, so many months after the Gulf War, to romanticise the relationship between the West and the Arabs, between Christians and Muslims, unconsciously to simplify and reconstruct the reasons why the Western armies embarked on their crusade to save the biggest oil lake in the world and to prevent Saddam from becoming the largest controller of the world’s oil. Schwarzkopf, who at least understood the need for America to maintain its relations with the Arab world, stated that one of the war’s aims was to “eliminate Iraq’s ability to threaten the Arab world.” Millions of Arabs suspected that the war—and the invasion of Iraq twelve years later—was to eliminate Iraq’s ability to threaten Israel, which, given the enormous effort to destroy the mobile Iraqi Scud-launchers which were firing at Israel, may not have been far from the truth.141
Neither Schwarzkopf nor de la Billière chose to mention the killing of
hundreds of Palestinians in Kuwait and the “ethnic cleansing” of tens of thousands of others by the Kuwaitis that followed the war. Schwarzkopf has only three references to Palestinians in his book, the second of which shows an insensitivity that might well have provoked Khaled. It records a conversation between the general and the prince in October 1990, after Israeli police shot down twenty-one Palestinian civilians in Jerusalem. Schwarzkopf says he “cautioned General Khalid not to be too quick to condemn America’s historic support of Israel, particularly just after the American people have absorbed ten accidental deaths incurred while defending Saudi Arabia.” That Schwarzkopf could compare military accidents— however tragic—with what was, in effect, a massacre shows just how removed from reality was his “fascination with Arab culture.”
Both men thunder their condemnation of Saddam’s iniquities, although even here de la Billière’s history is skewed. At one point, he talks of Saddam’s war against “expansionist Iran” when in fact it was Saddam who was expansionist. It was Iraq that invaded Iran in 1980, not the other way round. So much for understanding “the Arab way of life.” If “respect” there was for the Arabs and Muslims, however, it was squandered when de la Billière made his jubilant demand at the war’s end—as the corpses of tens of thousands of Iraqi Muslim soldiers lay across Kuwait and Iraq, many of them thrown unidentified into mass graves—that British people should “get out there and ring the church bells.” However unconscious he may have been of its content or effect, could there have been a clearer revelation of Christian triumphalism over Islam?
But even de la Billière’s outrageous self-promotion does not touch Prince Khaled. For when the latter’s own memoirs duly appeared in 1995, he felt able to tell his readers that the approval of his application to enter the war college at Maxwell Air Force Base suggested that “God [was] guiding my career to prepare me for what was to come.” He is “touched” when Chinese diplomats compare him to Henry Kissinger. Before the war, Khaled slept in a room beneath the Saudi defence ministry. “I suffered from loneliness,” the general who called his book Desert Warrior tells us. “ . . . To calm myself and to take my mind off the war, I developed a night-time addiction to American TV comedies. After chortling over one of these for half an hour, I would fall peacefully to sleep.”
It got worse. Arguing with the French defence minister, Prince Khaled indirectly compares himself to Churchill, whose Cross of Lorraine (de Gaulle) was also hard to bear. He fusses because Schwarzkopf’s chair is bigger than his, insists that Schwarzkopf must visit his office for meetings rather than the other way round, and describes the Khafji fighting as “a pivotal battle of the war.” His task, Khaled solemnly informs us, was “more difficult and complicated” than Schwarzkopf’s. Khaled cannot kneel when he accepts an honour from Queen Elizabeth and goes on to pick up Légions d’Honneur and other decorations from France, Bahrain, Hungary, Kuwait, Morocco, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Senegal and, of course, Saudi Arabia. This was, the general informs us, “something of a record . . . for an Arab soldier in war,” adding happily that “I would like to thank those who gave me a medal.” Is this really what soldiering is all about?
Khaled tells us about the need to protect Saudi Arabia’s unique culture and “traditions.” The latter, though he doesn’t say so, include lopping off the heads of criminals—shooting in the back of the head if the condemned prisoner is a woman—and virtual apartheid for the entire female population of the kingdom. Khaled spends two pages dictating the need for loyalty to the royal family—the system by which 5,000 or so princes, including himself, dominate a land of around 9 million people after inviting the Americans to protect them. Khaled’s own father, Prince Sultan, he constantly reminds us, was defence minister and played a role “as important as that of Defence Secretary Cheney in the United States.” Yet it was Prince Sultan who suggested as America prepared for war that the West should perhaps do a deal with Saddam after all.
In Khaled’s sahara of a book, there are occasionally revealing moments; how the Iraqi intelligence service infiltrated the postwar Iraqi refugee camps in Saudi Arabia, for example, and Schwarzkopf’s stunning lapse at Safwan when he gave the Iraqis permission to use helicopter gunships after the ceasefire. “Absolutely no problem,” the American told the amazed Iraqi generals. “ . . . this is a very important point, and I want to make sure that’s recorded, that military helicopters can fly over Iraq . . . ” Thank you, the Iraqis said. And went on to slaughter the Shia of Basra and the Kurds of the north.
The good prince quotes Clausewitz, but had to take a holiday after the war “to recover my composure after the stress of the great events in which I had played a part.” He often suffered, it transpires, “from nightmares about fighting, about death . . . Had I done a good job? I leave this to the judgement of my contemporaries—and to history.”
AS PRINCE KHALED WAS RECOVERING from the war and preparing for his holidays, the wreckage of the Iraqi army was streaming home, still under ferocious attack by the Americans. After the ceasefire, for example, General Barry McCaffrey’s 24th U.S. Infantry Division staged a four-hour assault against retreating Iraqis near the Euphrates River, destroying more than 750 vehicles, including a busload of women and children, and killing thousands of soldiers. An Apache helicopter crewman was heard yelling “Say hello to Allah” as he launched a Hellfire missile at them. Not a single American was killed.142 Western news agency journalists in Baghdad interviewed fleeing soldiers who described the horrific battlefield massacres. “It was dark,” one Iraqi told the Associated Press. “I was stepping on bodies, arms, legs and heads of dead soldiers.” Another described how “we were taken in army trucks and cars from the battlefield, and scores of dead bodies covered the 12-lane highway. We would not stop to pick up the living wounded. We ran for our lives.”
In the years to come, I would meet many of the Iraqi soldiers who survived those terrible last days. Lieutenant Ehsan al-Safi was a junior officer in the Iraqi 15th Engineering Brigade when he and a friend found themselves under American air attack on a Kuwait bridge. “Covered in flesh” from other soldiers, they lay on the ground as two more Iraqis leaped to safety from their armoured personnel carrier. The blast of the American bomb hurled the abandoned vehicle forward towards el-Safi’s friend. When he got to his feet, he grabbed his friend’s arm “but there was nobody attached to it.” On two wide parallel highways north of Kuwait, the Iraqis were burned alive in convoy traffic jams. Many of them were conscripts. Some survivors whom I met came from the Kurdish and Turkoman communities in Iraq, a number were Armenians, one of whom had grandparents murdered in the 1915 genocide. One Kurd to whom I spoke had endured the firestorm on the highway and escaped back to Iraq, only to find himself homeless in the mountains of the far north when the Kurdish uprising—encouraged by the Americans—was crushed by Saddam.
SADDAM’S ROAD TO RUIN stretches for 100 kilometres up the highway from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border at Safwan. It is a road of horror, destruction and shame; horror because of the hundreds of mutilated corpses lining its route, destruction because of the thousands of Iraqi tanks and armoured vehicles that lie charred or abandoned there, shame because in retreat Saddam’s soldiers piled their armour with loot. Shame, too, because we punished them all with indiscriminate, unnecessary death.
The dead are strewn across the road only 8 kilometres out of Kuwait City and you see them still as you approach the Iraqi frontier where the burning oil wells are squirting fire into the sky. It is, of course, the horror that strikes you first. Scarcely 25 kilometres north of the city, the body of an Iraqi general lies half out of his stolen limousine, his lips apart, his hands suspended above the roadway. You can see his general’s insignia on his stained uniform. He had driven into the back of an armoured vehicle in the great rout. Farther up the road, corpses lay across the highway beside tanks and army trucks. One Iraqi had collapsed over the carriageway, curled up, his arms beside his face, a neat moustache beneath a heavy head with its back blown away.
The wholesale destruction begins another 25 kilometres on, beneath a motorway bridge that stands at the bottom of a low hill called Mutla. It was here, trapped by American and British bombing of the road at the top of the hill, that the Iraqis perished in their hundreds, probably their thousands. Panic-stricken they must have been, as they jammed themselves in their vehicles, twenty abreast, a vast column 6 kilometres long, picked off by the American and British pilots. There were tanks and stolen police cars, artillery and fire engines and looted limousines, amphibious vehicles, bulldozers and trucks. I lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smouldering wreckage or slumped face-down in the sand. In scale and humiliation, it was, I suppose, a little like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. There must have been all of two divisions spread up this road.
Napoleon’s army left Moscow burning and Saddam’s army tried to burn Kuwait, but the French did not carry back this much loot. Amid the guns and armour, I found heaps of embroidered carpets, worry beads, pearl necklaces, a truckload of air conditioners, new men’s shirts, women’s shoes, perfume, cushions, children’s games, a pile of hardback Korans on top of five stolen clocks. There were crude rubber gas masks and anti-gas boots—the Iraqis had prepared themselves for chemical warfare of a kind—and thousands of rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, shells and bayonets.
My car bumped over unspent grenades and rifle barrels. I discovered several tanks and armoured vehicles abandoned in such terror that the keys were in the ignition, the engines still running. I found one that was loaded with suitcases full of matches, rugs, food mixers and lipstick. A child’s musical box lay in the sand still playing “and a happy new year, and a happy new year . . . ” Iraqi equipment— daggers, belts, berets and helmets—lay everywhere with their owners’ names written on the straps.
