The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  What did all this say about our pretensions for the future, about our desperate, fantasy hope—if we ever did invade Iraq and destroy Saddam’s regime—that these people would greet us as liberators? Iraqis might take satisfaction at the overthrow of their dictator. But punished by twelve years of brutal sanctions, bombed repeatedly by allied aircraft over the same period under the spurious notion that enforcement of the “no-fly” zones would protect them, dusted over by the poison of our depleted-uranium munitions, twice in just over a decade, would they really come to greet and love us—the new occupiers who had so punished them, who had humiliated them and persecuted them over so many years?

  By the late Nineties, my reports from Iraq have now become a diary. I am overwhelmed by what we are doing—what we have done—to this country. How can Iraqis in Baghdad contemplate the future when they have to live by selling their last possessions in the Soukh Midan? One day in February 1998, I found at least a hundred ill-kempt men and a few women standing in the drizzle below the magnificent magenta cupola of the Jama’a al-Qushla mosque. At their feet lay the most pitiable things on display at any of the world’s bazaars: a collection of rusting bath fittings and old car parts, some torn leather shoes, nuts and bolts and moth-eaten rugs, used shirts, second-hand socks and a broken television set lying forlornly in a puddle, its massive brown wooden fittings and tiny screen mindful of a pre-Baathist age. A woman in a soiled black chador looked up at me. Her name was Leila, she said. “Our money is worthless—only God can help us.”

  Sohad still had money, the middle-class wife of a former diplomat whose home overlooked the banks of the great brown greasy Tigris River. She was eighty-one, and a long stay in India taught her the Hindu virtue of sublime patience. “All of us have changed these past seven years,” she said with an air of finality. “We are accepting life as it is. If we can’t get proper medicine, we will go back to old medicine. I had a knee problem. This friend of ours produced a medicine for me from an old herbal formula that the Chinese invented two thousand years ago and I drank a cup of it every morning and now my knee is better.”

  Sohad’s sister was eighty-five. “We live from day to day, from hour to hour. This is part of our changed life—for us, planning is now a luxury. I am not in control, so why bother about it? Now I just want to have a flower in my life, a flower from our garden to look at during the day.” In the hall of their old home is a spread of sepia photographs of Turkish grandfathers, some of them dressed in the tunics and scabbards of the Ottoman army—the army that Private Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment fought in Mesopotamia and that the doomed Australian Gunner Frank Wills fought at Gallipoli. “This is how we get our strength,” Sohad said. “It comes from our Arab and Georgian and Kurdish and Turkish origins.” I met another old lady of great dignity that same day, a woman who had just sold almost all her baccarat glasses. “I bought these glasses on my first visit to Paris in 1947,” she said. “But now I needed the money, so I said ‘to hell with it’—we had it for a great time and enjoyed it, so I let it go. For ‘peanuts’ I sold it. I have only a jug and a carafe left.”

  Yes, Iraqis are a proud people, but the poor have a special, demented vacuum in which they must live. Across the estuary calm of the Tigris, Baghdad continued to moulder away, its pavements veined with weeds, bushes growing in the cracks of the city underpasses, its great railway yards packed with rusting, empty carriages. Even the portraits of Saddam Hussein had become bleached by seven summer suns. As the sanctions ate into the fabric of every soul—except the soulless centre of the regime itself—an army of beggars deployed across the streets.

  The children and women who came beating on the doors and windscreen of my car in the centre of Baghdad were pleading for money and food. One small boy, tears coursing through the mud on his face, no more than four years old, barefoot and dressed in a worn, oversize leather jacket with a dozen holes ripped into it, banged his hands against the car passenger window. “Give me money!” he shrieked, kicking the door, staring at me through the glass and wrinkling his eyes to imitate tears. Or was it imitation? On the pavement an hour later, three more children attacked Lara Marlowe of the Irish Times and myself, older this time, grabbing at our coats, screaming “money” until we gave them a dollar. They grabbed our bags for more until we pushed them from us, cursing them for their assault. Would Madeleine Albright have given them a dollar? Or would she have lectured them on the iniquities of their leader and the need for UN sanctions, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the immorality of weapons of mass destruction? In the only decent coffee shop near my hotel, they were playing a scratched tape of Doris Day. “ Que sera sera,” she sang, as the beggars watched through the windows. “Whatever will be, will be—the future’s not ours to see . . .”

  On my way to Basra from Baghdad with Lara, I hand a beggar girl a 250-dinar note—scarcely 14 cents—only to see her thrown to the road by her friends, the money torn from her dirty fist. Basra is now a pit of desolation. In front of Fatima Hassan’s house, a tide of pale blue and creamy-white liquid streams gently through an open sewer. Her iron front door cannot hide the stench, nor the sound of the screaming, shoeless children in the street. Jumping the sewer—leaping across this little canyon of filth—is a pastime for the kids of the suburb of Dour Sheoun. Stand outside Fatima’s door and they run towards you, blistered, whey-faced, with large eyeballs, the irises ivory-white with malnutrition. A woman—a bright, pretty woman in a black robe with a white headband—introduces us to her eight-year-old daughter Roula, then suddenly says: “Please take her with you.” Sundus AbdelKader is just thirty-three—and she is ready to give away her own child.

  Fatima has five children. Her husband was a car-painter in Kuwait before Saddam invaded the emirate; he stayed on for eight months after its liberation, still working but unpaid by his Kuwaiti employers. Now he sells sandwiches. “We don’t eat eggs or milk,” she says. “We can’t afford to eat meat. We drink the tap-water—we don’t boil it. This little boy of mine has trouble breathing, this one has a swollen stomach because of the water. We go to the hospitals but the doctors say there is no medicine. Wherever we go, they say there is no medicine.”

  Outside, an older woman in black pushes her way through the street urchins. “I have two crippled people in my family,” she pleads. “They have fever and sore throats. Can you take them with you to Europe?” We explain that we are not doctors, but she thrusts into our faces a thick piece of yellow paper with a history of muscular dystrophy from which her relatives are suffering. After half an hour, my writing hand grows numb listing the sicknesses and starvation. A child has anaemia, another has severe respiratory problems, a third cannot control its bowels; it appears to be dying. “When are you going to lift the sanctions?” yet another woman shouts at me. “Our children need food and clothes.”

  At the end of the street, there is a tootling trumpet, a fat man with a drum and a stooped old soldier marking time for a squad of thirty-three middle-aged, half-bearded men, all carrying Kalashnikovs but most of them in shoddy uniforms. These are the local Dad’s Army, Saddam’s heroic volunteers, preparing to withstand the might of America. They march round a traffic island while the children chant the Iraqi national anthem:

  A country that stretches its wings over the horizon

  And clothes itself in the glory of civilisations . . .

  This land is a flame and a light,

  Like a mountain that overlooks the world . . .

  We have the anger of the sword

  And the patience of the Prophet.

  Then the kids go back to sewer-jumping. And this, I remind myself, is the country which, according to Messrs. Clinton and Blair, threatens the whole world.

  We drive across to Basra’s old port, the harbour that the British invested in 1914, once visited in the late eighteenth century by the young Horatio Nelson. “Five Englishmen ran this port until 1958,” Ali al-Imara proudly announces. “The first chairman was John Ward, from 1919 until 1942, and then w
e had William Bennett until 1947. They were very good men. In 1958, Mr. Shaawi took over; he was a very good man too.” There is no mention of the 1958 Iraqi revolution that ended British stewardship of Basra’s old harbour and of Iraq itself. But why be churlish in a place of such decrepitude? Today, the gates to the wharf are still adorned with well-polished Tudor roses, but the slates have cascaded off the roofs of the old colonial offices. The railway lines, laid down when Basra was an international terminal, are corroded.

  The wide, sluggish waterway of the Shatt al-Arab, so fateful and laden with death in Iraq’s recent history, drifts past the hulks tied up on the quays. Here is the Yasmine, a trawler under whose black paint it is still possible to read the words Lord Shackleton, Port Stanley, F.I. (Falkland Islands); and there the Wisteria, all 6,742 blackened tons of her, her mentors slowly dismembering the burned-out tanker. Who set fire to her? I ask three Iraqi officials on the quay. “An Iranian missile hit it in 1981,” one of them replies. But his friend mutters in Arabic: “Tell him it was the Americans.” Then they all chorus: “It was the Americans!”

  Basra lives on lies: if only the Iranians hadn’t attacked Iraq and closed the river in 1980, they tell you—but it was the Iraqis who invaded Iran; if only the UN had not slapped sanctions on Iraq after the Iran–Iraq War—and we are supposed to forget the little matter of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Even the ships have changed their names in embarrassment. The supply ship Atco Sara, according to a half-erased name, used to be the Pacific Prospector of Illinois and, before that, the Northern Builder. There is a Krupps hoist and a set of rusting cranes bearing the name “Thomas Smith and Sons of Leeds” on a black iron plate.

  And I cannot but remember how I arrived at this city and its port eighteen years before. I had watched these ships burn. Just downriver was the island from which Jon Snow had embarked to rescue the crew of the trapped freighter Al-Tanin as I cowered on the riverbank waiting for him, the Iranian tracer fire zipping towards us across the darkened Shatt al-Arab River. It was on this very quayside, aboard a Yugoslav freighter, that I filched the maps of the waterway for Jon and the Iraqi frogmen who were to rescue the crew. From Basra each morning, Gavin Hewitt of the BBC and I would set out to watch the “Whirlwind War” that would destroy the Islamic Republic. And now the Iraqis had reaped the whirlwind.

  Behind us now, the marshalling yards are filled with long freight trains, massive grey wagons hooked up to leave on a journey that should have started in 1980, the trucks now entangled with weeds and bushes. Mr. al-Imara strides along the docks. “Take as many pictures as you want,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the sanctions, we would have this port dredged and running.” An old dog falls asleep on the tracks below the stern of the Wisteria, its steel ladders twisted against the hull to which they were welded eighteen years ago.

  It is an odd affliction that now besets Iraq’s Baathist bureaucracy. Tutored to boast of all that is best about Iraq, they now have to publicise all that is worst. It must be an awfully difficult transition. For who knows when the orders might come down from Baghdad to reverse the process yet again? Mr. al-Imara tells us he is a poet as well as being “foreign relations adviser” to Basra port. And he quotes, as we walk beside his decaying, marooned ships, a work of his which he calls “Confrontation”:

  When you shoot with a bullet from anywhere,

  The bullet will head straight for my chest;

  Because the events through which we have passed

  Have made my chest round.

  And we look at Mr. al-Imara’s diminutive chest and laugh politely. Whose bullets is the poet referring to? Surely not those that scar the façade of Basra’s central police station, still a gutted marble shell beside one of the city’s foetid canals. Certainly not those that smashed into the burning governorate building during the same 1991 uprising by Basra’s Shiite majority, now replaced with masses of prestressed concrete. And not the bullets that were fired into the city’s police cars, now replaced—as they have been throughout Iraq—with gleaming new Hyundai saloons, a final mockery to the starvation of the people the police are supposed to “control.” On the grainy old television in my Basra hotel room, Saddam is seated before his Revolutionary Command Council, making a joke at which his uniformed courtiers guffaw. “When he laughed, respectable senators burst into laughter.”

  The Corniche of Martyrs corrects any misapprehension about the enemy. For along the west bank of the Shatt al-Arab, below the dank portals of the Basra Sheraton Hotel, stand the dead heroes of Saddam’s “Whirlwind War.” For these three dozen Iraqi soldiers—out of perhaps half a million—death will not have been in vain. Each man, modelled in bronze from photographs, points across the muddy waterway towards the precise location of the war front, inside Iran, at which he died. “Corporals and Sergeants and Captains and Majors and Colonels—all martyrs of the Qadisiya war,” it says in brass on each pedestal.

  The soldiers, three times life-size, are identified by name, along with a colossus down the bank representing Saddam’s cousin General Adnan Khairallah, one of the greatest and most popular of Iraq’s military leaders—too popular for Saddam perhaps. He stands facing his cannon-fodder, right arm raised in honour of their courage; he was to die—“tragically,” as the Iraqi press obediently announced at the time—in a helicopter crash not long after the Iran–Iraq War ended. Below these statues, the street urchins hawk nuts parcelled in old newspapers at 12 cents a package.

  They are as far as they can get from the food chain, at the furthest corner of Iraq, clamped between Iran’s suspicions to the east, and Kuwait’s hatred to the south, and the West’s contempt, dominated by rusting ships and the towering giants of the dead. Each night in Iraq, I pound away on my heat-cracked laptop with its partially damaged screen, writing about the suffering and the volcanic anger of Iraqis. It is 16 October 1998. This is the report I send to my paper that night from Baghdad, one that I will read again in 2003, after we have occupied Iraq and found ourselves facing a ferocious insurgency:

  Fairy lights illuminate the Babeesh Grill Restaurant in President Street. Mock stained glass windows discreetly protect the clientele. For this is an up-market bistro for up-market eaters, most of them UN officials. The hungry Iraqis who are not dazzled by the fairy lights outside can just make out the candlelit tables and the foreigners inside as they wolf their way through beef and roast chicken, side-plates heaped with fruits and vegetables or—the Babeesh’s speciality—shrimp salad. Soft music plays as white-jacketed waiters serve the UN’s finest, the sanctions boys and the arms inspectors and the men and women who try desperately to undo the suffering caused by the gentlemen in the glass building on the East River 5,990 miles away.

  But despite the white-liveried waiters, whatever you do, don’t mention the Titanic. Iraqi state television has shown James Cameron’s film three times (he can forget about the royalties) as a balm for hardship, the Baghdad equivalent of bread and circuses. But unlike the Titanic, the Babeesh has no third class diners. This is a restaurant for those who measure money by the kilo rather than the Iraqi dinar note. Now that the dinar is worth 0.0006 of a dollar (thanks to the employers of the Babeesh’s clientele), my own meal for three needed a stack of 488 one hundred dinar notes, a wad of cash a foot thick. No wonder some cafes have given up counting their takings—they check the bills by stacking the dinar notes on a weighing machine.

  So you can forget the Weimar Republic in a land where an average villager can expect to earn a mere 3,400 dinars a month. Let me repeat that: 3,400 dinars—two dollars—a month. Which means that our little snack at the Babeesh—and there was no wine because alcohol is banned in restaurants on orders from the man whose name no one says too loudly—cost fourteen times the monthly salary of an Iraqi. So why no food riots? Why no revolution?

  Take a stroll off Rashid Street in the old part of town and you can see why. The sewage stretches in lakes, wall-to-wall, a viscous mass of liquid so pale green in colour that it possesses its own awful beauty
. This is what happens when the electricity cuts out and the water treatment plants and sewage facilities go unrepaired. Electrical appliance vendors—for Rashid Street is where you go for a light-bulb, an adapter, a piece of wire—hug the walls like nuns to keep the mess from their plastic shoes. “You have done this to us,” a thin, bearded man said to me as I asked (heaven spare me) for an electric kettle. The kettle could only be obtained at a foreign goods shop in the suburbs for just over $20—around nine and a half times the monthly salary of the Iraqi villager.