by Robert Fisk
Saddam was acting, it seemed, according to an American script. It wasn’t the first time that this odd continuity operated between Washington and Baghdad. Just as both sides found it expedient to ignore the mass Iraqi casualties of the 1991 war, so now Saddam was playing his appointed role as aggressor. “Saddam is mad, but you know why he’s done this?” an old Kuwaiti friend—one of the lucky ones to escape captivity inside Iraq in the last days of the war—asked me. He was laughing, a trifle contemptuously, I thought. “Saddam doesn’t care about Bush. He wants the Arabs to care. The UN fails in Bosnia . . . More important, the UN fails to get Israel to take back the Palestinian detainees in Lebanon [deported illegally by the Israelis as ‘terrorists’]. But the UN lets America use the big stick on Iraq. Saddam wants the Arabs to think about that difference. He thinks that way the Arabs will turn to him.”
Saddam was doing this in an increasingly self-delusional way. His half-hour television broadcast to Iraqis on 17 January 1993 was a masterpiece of Arab nationalist bombast. He cursed the Arab “traitors” who had opposed him and the Iraqis who had rebelled against his rule two years earlier. The UN he branded a mere satrapy of the United States—this, at least, was an allegation of some merit—and insisted that the “Mother of all Battles” had not ended, nor had the struggle for “victorious Iraq.” Nor for a “liberated Palestine.” And Kuwait and Iraq were part of “one nation.” It was a Gulf War anniversary speech aimed at “the children of Arabism everywhere.”
In some ways, the unsmiling Saddam was the same dictator whom the West had learned to loathe during the occupation of Kuwait. His olive-green uniform, with the inevitable brigadier-general’s crossed-swords insignia on its shoulders, was crudely offset by a bowl of red-and-white flowers. Iraq was glorious, its people steadfast, acting only on behalf of the “Arab nation.” America and its partners were “criminals,” bent only on the division of a powerful Arab nation prepared to stand alone and on the acquisition of Kuwait as a “rented oil well.” But he then embarked on a striking personal attack on the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait, talking to the Kuwaiti population in an eerie combination of threat, entreaty and apology.
He urged Kuwaitis to “learn the lessons,” to “absorb the circumstances” and “understand” the period of Iraqi occupation. Iraqis who had committed any acts against Kuwaitis had been punished, he announced. “Those Kuwaitis who remained in their country will remember that one of the [Iraqi] officers remained hanging for everyone to see because of the bad things he did to Kuwaitis. This is the real face of Baghdad. These are the principles of Baghdad . . . if there were any bad acts they took place through traitors, directed by the enemies of Iraq.”
There was no mention of the torture chambers, the rape of foreign women, the doorstep execution of resistance men and women (in front of their families, of course); merely a reference to the unfortunate necessity that faced Iraqi armoured forces to “return fire” when they were attacked. Kuwaitis should therefore feel “brotherhood and love in God and in the nation which holds them in its heart in Baghdad.” Kuwaitis did not remember history quite so romantically, though few would forget the hanging Iraqi colonel—truly “the real face of Baghdad”—who was indeed suspended from a crane in a central square, allegedly, so it was said at the time, for helping the Kuwaiti resistance.
But the culprit for all this suffering, according to Saddam, was the Kuwaiti emir. He had invested $60 billion in Western banks while Arabs endured “poverty and starvation.”156 He had failed to heed Baghdad’s warnings not to seek Iran–Iraq War debt repayments and to end oil overproduction, warnings made by Saddam at the Arab summit on 27 May 1990, repeated on 17 July and again in an Iraqi foreign ministry memorandum to the Arab League that same day. Saad Abdullah al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti negotiator at the Jeddah summit with the Iraqis—the meeting whose breakdown led immediately to Iraq’s invasion—had received, so Saddam’s tale went, secret orders from the emir not to settle the dispute. The people of Kuwait should learn their lesson and take control of their country from a family which allowed foreigners to run Kuwait but who fled from the Iraqi army “like leaseholders, without saying goodbye.”
As for the “infidels” whose forces still stood “on sacred Muslim land,” they had changed their objectives, from the defence of Saudi Arabia to the destruction of “the Iraqi regime.” Why else had the “no-fly” zones been instituted? These zones, along with the refusal to allow Iraqi planes to fly, were “an act of war despite the ceasefire.” The West was anxious to destroy the nation which “from Zakho [in Kurdistan] to Fao [in the far south of Iraq] remains a bastion of freedom.” With just a hint of emotion, he predicted that “the infidels will ultimately know who is victorious . . . if the aggressors continue, they will fail. God help you!” Here, without any doubt, was the old Saddam.
And within hours of their January 1993 air strikes against Iraq, the Americans decided to make an issue of further Iraqi “provocations” along the Iraq– Kuwait border, demanding that Baghdad close down six of its police posts in the UN-controlled demilitarised zone by midnight on 14 January—or face the consequences. The U.S. threat came on the eve of the arrival in Kuwait for “operational reasons” of 1,250 American soldiers from the U.S. 1st Armored Cavalry Division. The six Iraqi positions—all containing armed Iraqi border policemen—had actually been in existence for almost a year, during which the frontier had been withdrawn—although Washington had made no issue about their presence then.
In all of this, journalists played a special role: to run the American story. And sure enough, the U.S. military reinforcements sent into Kuwait were attended by the usual camera crews and hair-perfect reporters and agency men who wanted those equally perfect shots of the men who were going to defend Kuwaiti freedom. So it was that Captain Lackey drew his line on the tarmac of an Iraqi airbase. “If you come over this line, I’m going to remove you from the airfield,” he bawled at the reporters. “I’m going to tell the security people to move you out of here if you don’t obey this instruction. Is there anybody who doesn’t understand what I’ve told you?” The camera crews dutifully assembled like schoolchildren, toes and tripods on the white-painted strip. The U.S. 1st Cavalry Division was about to arrive.
Maybe it was the American army’s revenge for the media debacle on the beaches of Mogadishu—the collapse of the UN mission to Somalia was still to come—but Captain Lackey knew what he wanted. While long lenses whirred at the miniature figures climbing down the steps of the 747, we craned over the necks of the photographers to catch sight of this latest symbol of America’s “resolve” in the Gulf as the soldiers, many of them carrying “comfort bags,” straggled across the apron to a line of old American school buses parked 300 metres from the jumbo.
Instead of talking to the soldiers who were about to perform—if President Bush’s words about his bomber pilots applied to them—“God’s work,” we were instead encouraged to talk to the civilian crew of the chartered Northwest Airlines 747. So journalists surrounded the prettiest crimson-uniformed stewardess as the plane’s captain—in a splendidly staged advertisement for his airline—regaled us with the soldiers’ in-flight meal services. The men and women drawing yet another line in the sand had spent their sixteen hours in the air munching their way through barbecued chicken, rice and eggs. No questions here—no thought for what the Iraqis were eating 100 kilometres to the north of us. Just the usual network men performing their usual duties, breathlessly and urgently. I pulled out my notebook to capture some of their gems. “Just sixty miles from the Iraqi border . . .” “. . . six weeks, but they could be here much longer.” “. . . and for the Kuwaitis, this is another reassuring sign . . .” “. . . a deterrent against retaliation Saddam Hussein might try across the Kuwaiti border.”
The quotations were real, but was the mission? Were these young men and women with their pre-positioned company of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, of M1A1 tanks and their artillery battery anything more than a symbol? Not really. In the end, Presiden
t Bush fired off another set of cruise missiles towards Baghdad—and within minutes of their arrival, the Iraqi policemen began dismantling their posts in Um Qasr, one of them being shot dead by a Kuwaiti policeman. “It was just an ordinary night,” Captain Mike Maugham of the 1st Cavalry’s Alpha company described it to me later. “We stayed up half the night watching the football game— we got the whole match with the Bills. But the first sergeant would come in from time to time switching the channel and during breaks in the game, we’d go over to CNN in Baghdad.”
Breaks in the game. Captain Maugham confessed that watching the anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad on CNN was “a sobering experience,” but there were plenty of well-worn clichés to be had along the line of Bradleys next morning. Saddam was “going to get his ass kicked” and it was “time to finish the job.” CNN had uncomfortably proved that an explosion in the lobby of the Rashid Hotel which killed a female receptionist was caused by an American missile—Brent Sadler popped up with a hunk of cruise misssile, complete with computer codings—and this produced the usual scepticism. “Nobody likes to see civilian casualties”—this from Second Lieutenant Bernard Ethridge—“but that’s kind of a function [sic] of war. It just happens. But if a cruise missile hit that hotel, I don’t think the hotel would have so little damage. Our soldiers talked about this; they thought that maybe a dud anti-aircraft round came back on the Iraqis.” As usual. When Palestinians died under Israeli bombing in Beirut in 1982, they were killed by their own gunfire. When the Americans bombed Libya, the civilian casualties were killed by stray Libyan anti-aircraft missiles. When the Americans blasted civilians to bits in the streets of Baghdad in 2003, the Iraqis were killed, once more, by their own anti-aircraft rockets—or by pieces of old shrapnel cunningly planted in the ruins by Saddam’s secret policemen. It was never us. Or if it was, we didn’t mean it.
Thus when President Clinton loosed off another twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles against Baghdad on 27 June 1993 in retaliation for Iraq’s alleged involvement in the attempted murder of George Bush in Kuwait more than two months earlier—the case against the accused Iraqis, still to be heard, would be riddled with inconsistencies and the court hearing deeply flawed—little interest was shown by journalists when eight civilians were found to be among the victims. One of them was Leila Attar, a distinguished Iraqi painter who had exhibited her work in Kuwait, Cairo and New York. It would be almost five years before I heard the full story of her tragedy.
For in 1998, in an art gallery behind the Meridien Hotel in Baghdad, there worked an old man, Abu Khaled—“a guest in this life with perhaps three or four more years to live”—who told me of that hot June night when he said farewell to Attar, who was the joint director of the gallery. “She left at nine p.m. and it was only in the morning that the man who made tea here said: ‘Abu Khaled, Madame Attar is in the hospital.’ But she was not. I found her daughter and her son in the hospital. But they said she was still under her house.” When Abu Khaled reached the artist’s home in the Mansour district of Baghdad, he found Leila Attar’s husband dead under the rubble. “No one could find her,” he said. “But then I saw her long hair between the bricks of the house and I knew she was there. We found her with her handbag still gripped in her hand. She was trying to get away when the missile struck.”
There was neither apology nor remorse in Washington. It was Saddam who was being attacked, his regime and his murderous apparatus of secret policemen. And when I visited the rubble of Leila Attar’s home in Baghdad in 1998, sure enough, there was, just behind her house, a large mukhabarat security service compound of high brick walls and barbed wire. The cruise missile had not quite cleared her house on the way to its target. So again, it wasn’t our fault. Collateral damage. We didn’t mean it. President Clinton told Americans they could “feel good” about the attack.
And all this was apparently provoked by an Iraqi plot to kill ex-President Bush. In October of 1994—well over a year after the Clinton air raids—I went along to the Kuwait appeal “trial” of the thirteen men convicted of planning to kill Bush. The accused, grey-uniformed and grey-faced, many of them bearded and several apparently praying, listened without emotion as Judge Abdullah al-Issa started his judicial review. But given the chance to talk, at least one of the condemned men had plenty to say. And for a man who had been convicted by President Clinton— who had launched his retaliatory air raids before the initial court hearings had been concluded—and sentenced to the gallows by the state of Kuwait, Wasli al-Ghazali looked understandably angry as he fingered the brown-painted bars of the cage in Court No. 15. “Every Arab child is worth all of America,” he shouted at us. “I am an Iraqi citizen. Bush killed sixteen members of my family. I have lost all of my feelings.” Al-Ghazali and the twelve other men, one of them a Kuwaiti, were all allegedly involved in the plot.
According to the Kuwaiti authorities, Iraqi intelligence ordered the defendants to kill Mr. Bush in a plot that was uncovered by the Kuwaiti security services just a day before the former president arrived in the country. One of the defendants was said to have been found in possession of a car loaded with 180 pounds of explosives, while al-Ghazali was accused of planning to assassinate Bush with a belt-bomb strapped to his waist. However, he later retracted his confession, while others in the original trial claimed they had been beaten into making false confessions or had crossed the border on a smuggling expedition.
And although the earlier court had sentenced all of the men—six to death, the rest to prison terms—there was a host of reasons why Kuwaiti and foreign lawyers should have doubted the fairness of this particular trial. There had been plea retraction, other evidence of beatings by the security police, a scandalous lack of pre-trial access to the defendants by local lawyers and, most extraordinary of all, of course, a missile attack on Baghdad—based on the defendants’ guilt but staged before their conviction. It was little wonder that Najib al-Wougayan, the small and persistent lawyer for the only Kuwaiti condemned to death, Badr al-Shaamari, claimed that the Clinton attack prejudiced the fairness of his client’s trial.
“Clinton’s missile attack on Baghdad placed the hearing in a political context,” he said. “Before the trial finished, Clinton said that he had evidence that Iraq was behind the bomb attack on Bush. How could he do this before the trial had been concluded? There are defendants who have admitted their guilt and I do not quarrel with this—they made confessions. But Badr did not. He is innocent and the Americans condemned him.” In fact, the White House had said that it had “certain proof” of Iraqi guilt in the plot, a claim that Amnesty International would later condemn as undermining the defendants’ presumption of innocence. Eight years later, George Bush’s son, during a speech intended to garner support for his invasion of Iraq, would recall how Saddam “tried to kill my dad.”
The explanation that the men were involved in routine smuggling rather than political assassination was given further credibility when Salim al-Shaamari, the brother of the accused Kuwaiti, began giggling during a court appearance after being asked by the judge why his face appeared familiar. He replied that he had been imprisoned on fifteen previous occasions for smuggling whisky into Kuwait. Further doubt was cast on the court’s fairness when a public prosecutor referred to the accused as “this rotten group of defendants.”
For all this, Leila Attar died.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Plague
There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done. He has attempted (as I may call it) to poison the wells.
—John Henry, Cardinal Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1864
IN OCTOBER 1994, we had another “Crisis in the Gulf,” as CNN liked to bill each would-be re-invasion of Kuwait. This time, according to the Pentagon, Saddam had “massed” 60,000 troops in southern Iraq, along with 900 tanks and even more armoured vehicles. None of the journalists sent off to report this latest drama apparently remembere
d how confidently they had described the routing of the Iraqi army in 1991, how Saddam’s soldiers had been in “disarray,” his Republican Guards “decimated” by U.S. bombing, his logistics “annihilated.” But after being assured by the world’s leaders that Saddam had been totally defeated, his “decimated” Republican Guard divisions were now supposedly returning to haunt the battlefields again. And those television pundits and reporters for the satellite channels were bombarding Middle East capitals with visa requests and booking themselves on to any aircraft that could reach the Gulf faster than President Clinton’s carrier group. “Were they manipulating us or falling into the trap of believing their own reports?” I asked in my paper.
A Kuwaiti journalist probably got it right when he pointed out that Saddam was trying to force the UN to lift sanctions—as well as redeploy his own Iraqi army after a rumoured coup attempt in Baghdad—while Clinton wanted to distract attention from his indolence in Bosnia before congressional elections. But our preprogrammed response seemed to be unstoppable.157 As usual, no one bothered to assess the civilian casualties that would follow yet another strike on Iraq.
And sure enough, journalists who were transported up to Kuwait’s border with Iraq found it hard to meet the demands of their editors. Many of us could discover only a solitary Kuwaiti tank in the desert, a vehicle that was subsequently used to tow our own press bus out of the sand. On the other side of the border, there were equally slim pickings. United Nations officers disclosed that their reconnaissance aircraft, whose flight path gave them a view over 20 kilometres north of the frontier, had not observed a single Iraqi tank or personnel carrier. The few Iraqi policemen beyond the border—now abiding by the line of the new border—could hardly be called aggressive; several of them, it transpired, regularly begged for food from the UN, pleading for clothes to replace their ragged uniforms. “We’re not supposed to give them anything,” a UN officer admitted. “But it’s hard to turn someone away when they’re hungry.”
