The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  In the end, the Iraqi opposition could only end its deliberations with an uninspiring demand for a host of “committees”—those get-out institutions so loved by Arab leaders who want to avoid serious decisions—the most important of which was supposed to be the “Committee for National Salvation,” the nearest they could agree to a government-in-exile, and the most ridiculous of which was the creation of a delegation to tell the rest of the world what was happening in Iraq—as if the world did not already know. For it was now clear that when the American 1st Armored Division halted its tanks north of Safwan, the killing fields went on moving northwards into Iraq without them, consuming the land in fire and blood. As many—perhaps more—Iraqis were now perishing each day than died in the allied air assaults of the previous month. It was Ayatollah al-Mudaressi who graphically summed up his people’s tragedy. “Kuwait has been liberated,” he said, “at the cost of the blood of the Iraqi people.”

  As the truth of this was made manifest in the execution grounds of southern and central Iraq, Washington watched in cruel silence. The administration, according to The Washington Post, could not decide whether it wished to keep U.S. troops in Iraq to restrain “Hussein’s ability to suppress the rebellions” or withdraw “so Iraqi military forces could consolidate control and then possibly challenge his claim to leadership.” The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, was at his most craven. “What’s the better option to get rid of Mr. Saddam Hussein?” he asked rhetorically. “I really don’t know.” The Bush administration had taken no position on the issue “because it really is an internal problem” within Iraq. Powell had “no instructions to do anything” that would benefit either side.

  American aircraft were now flying at will over Iraq, low enough for their pilots to see the battles with their own eyes. Their reconnaissance pictures picked up the street barricades, burning buildings and Iraqi tanks—and in some cases the attacking Iraqi helicopters which Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled had obligingly allowed them to keep flying—in the streets of Iraq’s major cities. If the Americans would reluctantly move in to protect the Kurds—as they were later forced to do by public opinion—no such inclination was shown towards the Shia of southern Iraq. Despite the eyewitness evidence of terrible crimes against humanity, there would be no attempt to save the Shia population whose religious links with Iran so frightened Washington and its Arab allies in the Gulf.

  On the American lines in southern Iraq, further descriptions of these atrocities were now being given by Iraqi ex-soldiers. Ibrahim Mehdi Ibrahim, a thirty-two-year-old army deserter, told how Republican Guard units lured families from their homes with promises of safe passage and then trained artillery on them. Saddam’s soldiers, he said, were trying “to harvest them, the wheat with the chaff, with helicopter gunships while they hid in the fields.” A U.S. Army medic told of treating terrified Shia refugees who had been “beaten with pipes, with burns and a lot of kids beaten with barbed wire. A lot had families killed off. A couple of girls, twelve and thirteen, were beaten on the face with fists or blunt objects.” Several weeping men arrived at an American checkpoint at Suq as-Shuyukh with identical stories of entire families massacred together by Iraqi Republican Guard forces. Another Iraqi army deserter said that “families that wanted to leave, they were surrounded and mowed down on the street. We saw with our eyes how they brought the wounded out of hospitals and shot them along with the doctors treating them. When the Iraqi army entered one week ago, the families that had fled the fighting returned with their children. They lined them up against walls and executed them.” The secrets of the mass graves outside Musayeb—revealed so many years later— proved that this man’s story was no exaggeration.

  In America, The New York Times announced that the United States had “consigned the Iraqi insurgents to their fate,” quoting a “senior official”—as usual, anonymous—who said, “We never made any promises to these people. . . . There is no interest in the coalition in further military operations.” This was certainly the case among America’s Arab allies. For if the behaviour of the United States and Britain was both shameful and immoral, the reaction of most of the Arab regimes was humiliating. Many Arab journalists had expressed their revulsion that the Iraqi army—the largest and supposedly the most sophisticated in the Middle East—had been routed so ignominiously. In Arab newspapers, the destruction on Mutla Ridge was called a nakba, a catastrophe—the same word used for the Palestinian exodus of 1948. But except in Syria, there were few words of sympathy in Arab capitals for the desperate men fighting on against Saddam in the ruins of southern Iraq or in the Kurdish mountains. The massacres in Basra and Najaf and, later, in Kirkuk elicited no expressions of horror from the Gulf kings and emirs, nor among the ageing presidents supported by the West. Almost all had their own minorities to repress—many of them Shia minorities—and were in no mood to rouse their people to indignation at the outcome of the Iraqi insurgency. To his disgrace, Yassir Arafat—a man whose own people’s exile should have awoken in him an equal sympathy for the fleeing Kurds—expressed not the slightest compassion for them.

  The calvary of the Shia went largely uncovered by Western reporters— certainly by television—and its dimensions could only be gathered from the desperate men and women arriving at the American checkpoints north of Kuwait. In Kurdistan, however, television and newspaper reporters were on the ground, living—and in at least four cases dying—among the fighters and refugees as Saddam’s counter-attack set off a tragedy of biblical proportions. Journalists trudged alongside the tens of thousands of Kurdish men and women as they fled north into the snow-thick mountains along the Turkish border, old men dying of frostbite, women giving birth in the snow, children abandoned amid the drifts. As The Independent was to say with bleak accuracy, “the mightiest military machine assembled since the Second World War watches the atrocity show from the sidelines.”

  So, despite the anguished dispatches of their own correspondents, did the great American newspapers and the East Coast heavyweight “opinion formers.” The Washington Post was in favour of non-intervention, while The New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb complained that “the logic of intervention leads on, inevitably, to capturing Baghdad . . . While Iraqi troops failed to fight in Kuwait, we cannot count on similar timidity in their citadel. And who will fight on our side? No one. And what of civilian casualties? Many more. And what do we do after we have occupied Baghdad? And for how long? And at what cost?”

  Here again, the ghosts of the future might visit the past. Yes, if American forces had continued towards Baghdad, as Schwarzkopf quite soon believed they should have done, what would have happened? The Arab coalition would have fallen apart. America—probably alongside Britain—would have had no “friends.” But there can be little doubt that if the Americans had pressed on to destroy Saddam’s regime, they would have received the welcome from the Iraqis that they confidently expected—but did not get—in 2003. Indeed, after the betrayal of 1991, the Americans could never receive that welcome. In 1996, President George Bush Senior was to speak on television in a series of interviews that his own son would rashly ignore when he illegally invaded Iraq in 2003. If U.S. forces had pursued Saddam to Baghdad, Bush Senior said haltingly, “there would be, downtown Baghdad . . . America occupying an Arab land, searching for this brutal dictator who had the best security in the world, involved in an urban guerrilla war.”

  Which, of course, subsequently came to pass, even if Bush failed to realise that it was the capture of Saddam that would encourage the “urban guerrilla war” of which he presciently spoke.150 The moral issue, however, is that Bush had supported the call for the Iraqi rebellion. He had enthusiastically endorsed the rising. The CIA’s radio station had broadcast appeals to the Iraqi population to overthrow Saddam. These appeals, it was plain, burdened the Americans with a moral obligation to protect those they had called to arms on their side. To ignore these brave and desperate men when they responded—to leave them and their famil
ies to be exterminated—was not only an act of dishonour but a crime against humanity. Yet even after the American government was forced to offer military protection to the Kurds—albeit when their insurrection had been substantially crushed—they could still regard the Gulf War as a moral conflict, indeed an uplifting one for Americans. By August 1991, U.S. defence secretary Dick Cheney was able to describe the war as a “catharsis” for post-Vietnam America. “It was almost a healing process for a wound that had been open for a long time,” he said.

  The real wounds—the tens of thousands of desperately wounded survivors of the Iraqi insurgency, the broken, decimated families of the Shias and Kurds, the even greater number of executed fighters and civilians now entombed beneath the sands of Iraq by Saddam’s killers—were not part of Cheney’s “healing process.” Their catharsis was to die. They did our bidding. They had served their purpose. They had failed to topple Saddam. This was their fate. But “we” had been “healed.” Bush had called for the overthrow of Saddam and then said he never intended to help the rebels in their struggle. An Associated Press report bluntly outlined the Bush policy in early April. The president, it said, “is betting that Americans are more concerned about getting U.S. troops back from the Gulf than helping Iraqi rebels topple Saddam Hussein.”

  But the yellow bunting and the church bells with which we Westerners were enjoined to celebrate the “end” of the 1991 Gulf War were now a mockery. The splintering of the fragile glass upon which the Middle East rests had now stretched 800 kilometres up the Tigris and Euphrates. More human lives—most of them civilians—were being destroyed every day inside Iraq than at any time since Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “We warned them of this,” a senior Gulf Cooperation Council official told me in Riyadh. “We told the Americans that the liberation of Kuwait might set the region on fire. We told them they might have to stay, even though our people did not want this. But they never, never learn.”

  You only had to talk to the Kuwaitis, let alone the Iraqi opposition or the Syrians, that dreadful spring to realise that for them the events in the Gulf represented not an isolated, dramatic moment in their history—bloody yet controllable—but a tragic continuum that began before the break-up of the Ottoman empire and which was now growing more terrible in the mountains of Kurdistan. Historically, no Western involvement in the Arab world has been without its betrayals, although treachery followed more swiftly on this occasion than anyone could have guessed. What was supposed to have started as a noble Western crusade to free Kuwait from aggression had turned into a tragedy of catastrophic proportions. “Future historians,” I wrote in my paper in April 1991, “may well decide that the liberation of Kuwait marked only the first chapter of the Gulf War, the massacre of Shiites and Kurds inside Iraq the second. History itself suggests the West will not be able to avoid involvement in the forthcoming chapters.”

  By the first week of April, 2 million Kurdish refugees were clustered along the icy frontiers of Turkey and Iran, up to 12,000 of them dying on the borders. And America, along with its Western allies, now decided that the tragedy—far from being the logical result of their own appeals for an insurrection—was yet another of Saddam’s crimes against humanity. Kurdish suffering, and the brutality of Saddam’s killer-squads, did represent a crime against humanity by the Iraqi regime. But all Western involvement in the Iraqi insurgents’ predicament would now be expunged in a welter of humanitarian aid. Guilty consciences would be drowned in meals-ready-to-eat, tents and millions of dollars’ worth of aid. And in the weeks to come, as U.S. and British troops deployed in northern Iraq to protect the Kurdish refugees, dropping thousands of tons of blankets and food in hundreds of air-drops—several of which actually killed the recipients when they crashed into the mountains—a new and deeply unpleasant message would be put forth by the West. Come, see what happened to the Kurds. See what Saddam’s murderers were capable of. Who could now doubt the moral case for war against Saddam? Here was final proof—amid the refugee camps in the mountains—of Saddam’s viciousness. Just as we would dig up the mass graves of the insurgents and their families twelve years later as more “final proof” of Saddam’s iniquities—to “prove,” of course, that we were right to have invaded Iraq in 2003—here in 1991 we were displaying an equal body of evidence to display his wickedness. The Shia dead, needless to say, had already been largely forgotten.

  History now had to be rewritten to take account of these less than subtle shifts of U.S. policy. “We will not countenance interference in refugee operations,” Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, ponderously warned Saddam on 14 April. Then, in the very same breath, he added, “We are not going to intervene, as we’ve said before, in a civil war.” This was outrageous. Without anyone challenging these deceitful remarks, Scowcroft turned the insurgency that his own government had called for into a “civil war” between Iraqis. The rebels were now participants in an internal dispute. Those whom we had called upon to overthrow Saddam were taking part in a conflict that now had nothing to do with us. These Iraqis, of course, believed what we had originally told them: that they were trying to overthrow a dictator at our request.

  President Bush then proceeded to expand on this new and mendacious narrative of events. In a speech in Alabama the same day, he said that Washington would “not tolerate any interference” in international relief efforts, but then said, “I do not want one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq that’s been going on for ages.” Note the semantics here. Saddam must not interfere in the distribution of international relief—but he wasn’t interfering, or even planning to interfere, in what the Americans were to call “Operation Provide Comfort.” Saddam’s helicopters and murder-squads were annihilating the insurgents and their civil populations before they could reach the relief centres, machine-gunning and bombing the Kurds as they desperately tried to reach the shelter of the mountains. When they arrived there, they were evidence of Saddam’s brutality. But while they were on their way, they were participants in a “civil war”—and therefore unworthy of intervention. Furthermore, they were—before they reached the location of our “international relief efforts”—taking part in a civil war that had been “going on for ages.”

  It was a mystery to most Iraqis that they were involved in a civil war in the first place, let alone one that had been going on for so long. True, Saddam’s persecution of the Kurds might have been intended to ignite just such a conflict. But civil war was the one form of violence from which Iraq had been historically free. There had never been a civil war in Iraq. And this remained true when, twelve years later, the American and British occupation forces in Iraq claimed that their enemies in the country were trying to foment a civil war—having presumably forgotten that Bush Senior thought one had already occurred in Iraq. All this, it should be recalled, was a pre-run for our refusal to save the lives of the innocent in the Bosnian war in 1992, just a year after the Iraq war was declared to be at an end. In Bosnia, as the Muslims were slaughtered by the Serbs, European and American statesmen repeated the same mantra: that this was a “civil war”—indeed, that this “civil war” had been going on for “ages.”

  Maybe the American line troops and the marines understood the truth, along with the aircrews who now found themselves home from Kuwait and turned round within days and sent all the way back to the country they thought they’d finished with. They were there in their thousands, another army, this time an army of conscience—of guilty conscience, I suspected—ordered to save lives rather than to kill. The Shia lives were gone, of course, the last execution pits filled north of Basra, but the Kurdish lives were still there, some of them. The Americans were smart guys. A helo ride was to plug into real small-town America, cassette in my hand as we flew over the making of a new country which one day, if the Kurds weren’t betrayed yet again—as I rather thought they might be—would be a nation called Kurdistan. The first break-up of Iraq.

  As usual, the Americans wanted to be tourist guides. �
�OK, Bob, we’ll show you some of Iraq.” Warrant Officer Tim Corwin meant exactly what he said. He guided the CH-47 Chinook—“Cyclone-Seven-Five”—off a mountain wall above a 600-metre chasm where the valleys and the great fertile plains of Mesopotamia spread out below us. On the aviation chart, which bounced on Corwin’s knee in time to the engines, we were indeed moving deep into Iraq. In reality, we were flying over a country called Kurdistan. Woe betide the Iraqi soldier who fired on us or on the British troops snaking down the mountainsides below us.

  Corwin’s voice, crackling through the headphones to Chief Warrant Officer “Chuck” Lancaster, told the whole story. “Iraqi half-track on the right. Three Brits beside it. Very pretty valley, this whole place. If you see any bad guys, let me know.” On the end of a rubber-coated radio wire, Sergeant James Sims swung his heavy machine-gun barrel out of the American helicopter’s starboard door, traversing the valley walls that raced past us. “No one,” he replied, his eyes scanning the outcrops of rock above him, feet braced against the turbulence that wafted up out of the crevasse. “Ain’t no bad guys.”

  Outside al-Amadia, there were more “Brits,” Royal Marine berets moving along a road, green flowers against the black tarmac, and a string of Land Rovers. Corwin pressed his radio button. “The Brits are all over the place.” Lancaster nodded and pressed his own button. “I like to see that.” More Land Rovers now on the long straight road to Zakho, and civilian cars piled high with bedding.

  On the hilltops, the Iraqi bunkers lay abandoned, the muddy tracks of armour and guns slinking away towards the nearest roads. An Iraqi fortress, complete with gunslits and four stone turrets, drifted past to port, its Iraqi flag in tatters, its doors open to the wind, the last wreckage of Saddam’s persecution of the Kurds. This was no longer Iraq. It had become something different, a new creation shaded onto our maps, ever deeper down the rift valleys towards the heat haze over Mosul.