The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  On top of one armoured vehicle, its engine still idling, I found the helmets of Lieutenant Rabah Homeida and Private Jamal Abdullah. They had stood no chance, for in front of their vehicle lay another 3 kilometres of burned Iraqi military traffic, at the end of which stood a squad of American soldiers from the U.S. 2nd Armored Division whose motto—Hell on Wheels—appropriately summed up the fate of the thousands in the ghoulish traffic jam below. No film could do credit to this chaos. It was both surreal and pathetic. Saddam Hussein called it an “orderly withdrawal.”

  Around the carnage and dust drove two British Land Rovers of the 26th Field Regiment Royal Artillery, a giant Union flag floating above both of them. It was Staff Sergeant Bob Halls and Gunner Barry Baxter who showed us the track through the sand to reach the Mutla Ridge, picking their way past unexploded cluster bombs and live shells. “You can’t really take in what war does till you’ve seen it,” Baxter says to me. “Why did this happen? Saddam’s forces are nothing to be reckoned with, are they? They didn’t want to go to war. They just wanted to put their hands up. They are our enemy but they didn’t want to be in the war in the first place. They are a sorry sight to see.”

  They were. The prisoners we saw—remnants of the world’s fourth-largest army—were unshaven and exhausted, herded by soldiers of the 16th/5th Lancers, trudging through the desert, throwing personal arms onto a pile of weapons 4 or 5 metres high, guarded by U.S. troops. All the way to the Iraqi border, we found the detritus of the Iraqi retreat, tanks and armour across the road, on their backs in ditches, scattered over the flat desert on either side. Some were still burning. The Americans and British looked at all this with a mixture of awe and relief.

  Lieutenants Andrew Nye and Roy Monk of C Company, 1st Battalion, the Staffordshire Regiment, had spent part of the morning burying the dead. They included women and children, Iraqis or Kuwaitis or Egyptian refugees fleeing the battlefront and caught in the last American and British air attacks. Lt. Nye had lost one of his own men in the fighting. “One of our blokes was killed,” he said. “He was hit in the chest by a rocket-propelled grenade after some Iraqis had raised the white flag. It may be that some of the Iraqis didn’t know others had surrendered. By then we had grown so used to the prisoners, we had seen so many of them and heard about the huge numbers of POWs on the radio. You have to feel this to believe it. There are booby-traps here and the Iraqis who died on this road were stripping Kuwait City. But I shudder to think what it would have been like in their position.”

  We did. Imagining death—the end of life—can leave one gasping with horror at the vacuum, with the nothingness to follow. But to become one with these burned creatures at the moment of immolation, the seconds of indescribable pain, the brief awareness, the knowing of such suffering, this was surely too much. Yet we looked into these carbonised faces. I sought something from them, I suppose, some terrible mystery which I was not entitled to search for and which they were not entitled to reveal.

  My AWACS friend was flying the day after the highway of death had been bombed. “I remember,” he wrote to me six years later:

  . . . how absolutely ecstatic the briefer was when telling us how “the JSTARS had spotted a whole convoy up near Safwan and had called the ABCCC who called in the A-10s who just had a field day!” Apparently, after incinerating a few U.S. Marine Bradleys and at least one British APC, the A-10 pilots had finally improved their aim.

  Much later, we would discover that even the pilots had been sickened—far too late—by their own vile handiwork. “Low pilot morale” was the way it was put, and the British foreign secretary said as much six months later. His words carry infinitely more meaning today than they did then, because his warnings—of what would have happened if “we” had not stopped in Kuwait, of the dangers awaiting “us” if “we” went all the way to Baghdad—connect directly with the disaster in which “our” armies now find themselves in Iraq. If ever the ghosts of the future could come to haunt us, many must have been the phantoms who came back down the years to gaze upon the Mutla Ridge on those cold and overcast days of 1991. Some people, British foreign secretary Hurd said,

  argue that the coalition should have carried the fight to Baghdad and demanded Saddam’s head. In fact, once the Iraqi forces had effectively lost their capacity to defend themselves, many pilots were reluctant to continue the fight . . . First, the coalition explicitly limited its objectives to those set out in the UN resolutions, which related to the liberation of Kuwait. Second, had we gone to Baghdad we would have found ourselves forced to choose and then sustain a new Iraqi government.

  This, Hurd said, would have drawn “allied troops” into the “morass of Iraqi politics,” risking “our” lives and public support for the mission.

  LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of 2 March 1991, my old friend Alex Thomson of ITV and I drove from the “highway of death,” north up the road to Safwan and beyond, to a place where the Iraqi dead lay in profusion over the desert floor. Packs of dogs had got among them, tearing the limbs apart, ripping at clothes to gnaw at stomachs and thighs. The dogs fought each other for this nightmare feast. Some had already run off with severed body parts. One dog had an arm in its mouth and raced across the sand, the fingers of a dead hand trailing cruelly through the muck. Thomson’s crew dutifully filmed this obscenity. Alex, who was to write one of the most critical studies of the media in this war, looked at me coldly. “Never get on the air of course,” he said. “Just for the archives.”

  And that was it. When journalists wished to film the war, they chafed at the restrictions placed upon them; but when the war was officially over and the restrictions lifted and they could film anything they wanted, they did not, after all, want to show what conflict was like. I noticed how the Iraqis who had comparatively clean deaths—those who were obliging enough to die in one piece and collapse picturesquely, lying like fallen warriors by the roadside—would turn up on television screens, briefly of course, to symbolise the “human cost” of war. But the world was not allowed to see what we saw, the burned, eviscerated souls, the chopped-off, monstrous heads, the scavenging animals. Thus did we help to make war acceptable. We connived at war, supported it, became part of it.

  Back in Kuwait that night, I filed my dispatch to The Independent , tired and depressed and angry at my own profession. To the end of my report on the Iraqi dead, I added, almost as an afterthought, two paragraphs about Egyptian guest workers who were fleeing the chaos to the north:

  As we neared the Iraqi frontier, Egyptian refugees began to straggle down the highway, some weighed down with blankets and begging for water, others pushing their surviving possessions in rusting supermarket trollies, a few asking for cigarettes. Many were too tired to talk, having walked 60 miles from Basra.

  “They shoot all Egyptian people in Iraq,” one of them said, but would not add to that chilling remark. A group of American soldiers said they had heard the Iraqis were shooting at refugees on the border.

  I called the paper’s foreign desk an hour later to ask if Harvey Morris had any questions about my report. “Ah-ha, I was interested in the last two paragraphs,” he said. “I suppose you realise what you are reporting, don’t you? The rising has started.”

  How typical that I should have failed to realise what this meant. Now that the Gulf War was officially over, the real bloodbath was about to begin.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Betrayal

  . . . waving our red weapons o’er our heads, Let’s all cry, “peace, freedom, and liberty!”

  —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, i, 110–11

  ON THE EVENING OF 24 FEBRUARY 1991, as the Sky television crew and I were preparing to set off for Kuwait from the Saudi border town of Khafji, a CIA-run radio station called The Voice of Free Iraq broadcast a call to the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein’s regime. It was explicit: the war and destruction would continue unless the Iraqi people overthrew their dictator. The radio didn’t say that the moment of liberty was at hand. Iraqis
were told that if they wanted to survive, they must rebel. “Hit the headquarters of the tyrant and save the homeland from destruction,” the radio said. But anyone listening to the station was entitled to believe that the Western and Arab armies would come to their rescue.

  The speaker was Salah Omar al-Ali, ex-member of Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council and the Regional Command of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, personally purged by Saddam in 1972. The radio was transmitting from Saudi Arabia. And al-Ali was quite specific:

  Rise to save the homeland from the clutches of dictatorship so that you can devote yourself to avoid the dangers of the continuation of the war and destruction. Honourable sons of the Tigris and the Euphrates, at these decisive moments of your life, and while facing the danger of death at the hands of foreign forces, you have no option in order to survive and defend the homeland but to put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang.

  No option. No option if Iraqis were to survive. This was crude, frightening stuff. Saddam, al-Ali said, was “the criminal tyrant of Iraq” who was pushing the country’s sons to a massacre because he had refused to withdraw from Kuwait:

  Prove to your people and nation that you are faithful and honourable sons of this generous country and this honourable nation. Stage a revolution now, before it is too late. He thinks of himself alone. He is not interested in what suffering you endured during the past few months of this destructive crisis. He insists on continuing to push your faithful sons into this massacre in defence of his false glory, privileges and criminal leadership.

  Saddam, according to the broadcast, had already smuggled his family and personal wealth from Iraq. “He will flee the battlefield when he becomes certain that the catastrophe has engulfed every street, every house and every family in Iraq.” The Voice of Free Iraq used Iraqi state radio frequencies and the same opening music for its news broadcasts; it had begun its short- and medium-wave broadcasts at the start of the year, and the Iraqis had tried to jam the station’s heretical messages almost at once, even though it only transmitted for a few hours every evening.

  But it wasn’t just the CIA’s clandestine radio that was relaying this dangerous, apocalyptic message. Seventeen-year-old Iraqi Shiite Haidar al-Assadi listened in Basra to the call to arms over the Arabic Service of the Voice of America and expected “the allies to liberate Iraq and rid us of this criminal.” He put a Kalashnikov rifle over his shoulder and walked the streets of his native city, tearing pictures of Saddam off the walls. Only days earlier, al-Assadi’s home had been destroyed when a U.S. jet fired a missile into several buildings in the city, leaving his brother with shrapnel wounds to the shoulder. But like many other Iraqis who suffered under Allied bombardment, he heeded the American appeal.

  “I joined in because ever since I opened my eyes, people around me hated Saddam. Both my uncles were imprisoned for twelve years for saying that the Iran–Iraq war would not end without the death of Saddam . . . I remember listening to the Arabic service of the Voice of America which told us that the uprising was large and we would be liberated.” By 6 March, The Independent’s Richard Dowden had moved in front of the American army and reached the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah 160 kilometres north-west of Basra, already in Iraqi rebel hands. As he wrote in his extraordinary dispatch:

  The revolution, bursting out after years of oppressive Baath rule, appears confused and chaotic, united only by the hatred for Saddam Hussein of the Shia Muslims in southern Iraq. It is a nationalist revolution aimed at ridding the country of the Baath regime, according to its leaders, but it also has strong overtones of an Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism. Abu Iman, the rebel commander of this town, said the regime would be replaced by a government of the people which would not model itself on western democracy or the Iranian revolution, but follow its own path. It would be neither Sunni nor Shia but for all Iraqis.

  Where Saddam’s portrait had been defaced, Dowden found posters of Ayatollah Khomeini and a leading Shiite cleric. But he was also given a printed announcement by Nasiriyah’s “revolutionary committee” which said the aims of the new government

  were to finish the war, sweep away the Baath system and establish a new government based on democracy and nationalism. It ordered Baath members to join the new government despite what they had done to Iraq. However, according to the revolutionary leaders, the governor of the town, Taha Yassin Hussein, and other leading local Baath figures have already been executed. This appears to be a revolution of the poor. All its leaders were scruffily dressed in dirty kuffiyas and djellabas; they were unshaven and argued constantly . . .

  Yet another “highway of death” had greeted Dowden as he approached Nasiriyah, where the road was:

  littered with wrecked military vehicles, many of them with decomposing bodies hanging from them or lying on the ground near by. At the entrance to the town, by the rebels’ roadblock (which consists of a chair, a table, two tyres and a cluster bomb casing) are two juggernauts. Inside each are the corpses of about 100 Iraqi soldiers. These refrigerated meat lorries were bringing the bodies back from the front four days ago and, we were told, their drivers refused to stop at the roadblock. The rebels fired on the drivers who fled. The bodies have not been touched since.

  But Dowden finished his report with a disturbing comment from the local rebel leader, Abu Iman:

  The Americans are not helping us. They stop us on the road and take our weapons. It is they who helped build up Saddam, then they destroyed him; now the war is over they will support him again.

  In the years to come, American and British leaders would deny responsibility for the mass Iraqi uprising which they encouraged. Already in northern Iraq, tens of thousands of Kurds had also risen against their oppressors and—ignoring past American betrayals—eagerly awaited allied help. The first reaction of British prime minister John Major was sarcastic. “I don’t recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular revolution,” he snottily remarked. And in the first days of Kuwait’s liberation, the men who claimed they’d fought a “just” war got away with it. So great was the relief in the West that so few Americans and British had been killed during the conflict which had apparently ended, so appalling were the stories of individual Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, so enormous the oil fires—though they burned at even greater temperatures across southern Iraq, where American B-52s had set the wells on fire—that the terrifying events north of the American lines went initially almost unnoticed.

  War breeds a special kind of exhaustion. We all suffered from it beneath the vast clouds of burning oil that turned day into night, blanketing huge areas of Kuwait and Iraq; Western and Arab soldiers, fleeing Iraqis, liberated Kuwaitis, fearful Palestinians, Iraqi prisoners, journalists too, we moved through a cloak of half-darkness and fatigue. Slogging fourteen floors up the fire escapes of Kuwait’s Meridien Hotel, the reporters who might have been moving further north were staggering under a burden of broken phone lines, immense tiredness and statistics. The figures came at us like gunfire. General Schwarzkopf announced on 27 February that “we were 150 miles from Baghdad and there was nothing between us and Baghdad” and that his army had captured or destroyed 3,000 Iraqi tanks, 1,857 armoured vehicles and 2,140 artillery pieces. More than 50,000 Iraqis had been taken prisoner. British military figures put the number of prisoners at 175,000 and suggested that up to 4,000 Iraqi tanks might have been destroyed in the liberation and the thirty-eight-day air bombardment that preceded it.

  No one questioned how Schwarzkopf could have acquired such precise statistics less than twenty-four hours after President Bush had announced the liberation of Kuwait. He had confidently announced on 30 January that all thirty Scud missile sites in Iraq had been destroyed in “almost 1,500 sorties” while on 14 February, U.S. Lieutenant General Tom Kelly said that thirty days of bombardment had destroyed about 1,300 “of the 4,280 Iraqi tanks in and around Kuwait” and that around another 500 had been severely damaged. Only a truly sceptical eye would have spotted a Reuters report on 27 February w
hich quoted British Captain Simon Oliver of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards as saying that Saddam’s best Republican Guard troops, still equipped with their T-72 tanks, appeared to have escaped the allied forces south of Basra. “We have seen tank tracks leading north, and the Republican Guards may have withdrawn,” he said. Journalists should have guessed what the military must already have known; that the Republican Guards had other, far more pressing business inside southern Iraq.

  The Americans were quite specific about their casualties: 148 Americans killed. They were less forthcoming about Iraqi losses. On 14 February, Kelly said he thought “the number’s very high because of the constant bombing.” By 28 February the Saudis were talking about 100,000 Iraqi dead, while a former French military analyst, Colonel Jean-Louis Dufour, estimated Iraqi dead at up to 150,000. Schwarzkopf talked only of “a very, very large number.” On 19 February, Saadoun Hamadi, the former Iraqi deputy defence minister, had claimed that 26,000 Iraqis—civilian and military—had been killed in 65,000 air sorties. When a Pentagon source told Newsday almost six months after the Kuwait liberation that 8,000 Iraqi troops had been buried alive in their trenches by the earthmovers and ploughs mounted on the tanks of the attacking U.S. Mechanized Infantry Division, the brief moment of compassion which this engendered probably had more to do with guilty consciences over Western inaction towards the Iraqi insurgents than it did with the enormous loss of human life that it represented.143

  Only later would we learn some less heroic truths about the liberation of Kuwait. The Americans, it transpired, dropped nearly as many tons of bombs each day as were dropped on Germany and Japan daily during the Second World War. Of the 148 U.S. servicemen killed, 35—almost one-quarter—had lost their lives to “friendly fire” from other American forces.144 The non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office would subsequently state that the Pentagon and its military contractors made claims for the precision of their Stealth fighter jets, Tomahawk cruise missiles and laser-guided “smart bombs” that were “overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data or unverifiable.” The supposedly “invisible” Stealth achieved only around a 40 per cent success rate on bombing runs, while only 8 per cent of the bomb tonnage dropped on Iraqi targets were “smart” or guided munitions. The much-trumpeted Patriot anti-missile missile, the GAO said, destroyed only 40 per cent of the Scud missiles aimed at Israel and 70 per cent of those fired at Saudi Arabia. In fact, as Seymour Hersh, that blessing for journalism, would reveal, an Israeli air force report later stated that “there is no clear evidence of a single successful intercept” of an Iraqi Scud by a Patriot over Israel.