The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he wrote, in his Gallic Wars: “Alea iacta est.” The die is cast. Just after 11 a.m. on 8 November, when the United Nations Security Council voted 15–0 to disarm Iraq, President George W. Bush crossed the Rubicon. “The world must insist that that judgement must be enforced,” he told us. The Rubicon is a wide river. It was deep for Caesar’s legions. The Tigris would be more shallow—my guess was that the first American tanks would be across it within one week of war—but what lay beyond? “Cheat and retreat . . . will no longer be tolerated,” Bush told the UN. And after eight weeks of debate in the Security Council, no one any longer mentioned the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, because, of course, Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with September 11th. “Should we have to use troops,” Bush told a 7 November press conference, “. . . the United States, with friends, will move swiftly— with force—to do the job.” In other words, he would invade Iraq, the “friends,” presumably, being British.

  The United Nations could debate any Iraqi non-compliance with weapons inspectors, but the United States would decide whether Iraq had breached UN resolutions. In other words, America could declare war without UN permission. The BBC, with CNN and all the other television networks, billed Resolution 1441 as “the last chance” for Saddam Hussein. In fact, it was a “last chance” for the United Nations. It was easy to identify the traps. America’s UN ambassador, John Negroponte—later to be his country’s ambassador in Iraq—insisted that the Security Council resolution “contains no hidden triggers.” But it did. It allowed the Security Council to discuss non-compliance without restraining the United States from attacking Baghdad. “One way or another,” Negroponte said, “. . . Iraq will be disarmed.” Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s nightmare headmaster at the UN, performed appropriately. “Crystal clear,” “unequivocal choice,” “serious consequences,” no more “ambiguous modalities.” You could almost feel the cane. No mention, of course, of the CIA’s manipulation of the last team of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. Washington wanted a UN fig leaf for a war on Iraq and was willing to go through an inspection process in the hope that Iraq obstructed it.

  I AM IN ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, preparing to give a lecture to university students on the coming war in Iraq. It is mid-November, and in my hotel room I am dusting off my description of bin Laden, of how I met him in Sudan and Afghanistan. Not since the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan have we heard his voice, although my contacts have insisted to me that he is alive. I turn on CNN. And there, sitting in my room above the Mississippi, I hear his voice. He is alive. It takes only a brief round of phone calls to the Middle East and South-West Asia for my sources to confirm that it is Osama bin Laden’s gravelly voice that is threatening the West in the short monologue transmitted by the Al-Jazeera television channel. So the Saudi billionaire, the man in the cave, the “Evil One”—I quote a Newsweek headline—the bearded, ascetic man whom the greatest army on earth has sought in vain, is with us still.

  “U.S. intelligence”—the heroes of September 11th who heard about Arabs learning to fly but didn’t quite manage to tell us in time—come up with the usual rubbish for the American media. It may be him. It’s probably him. The gravelly voice may mean he’s been hurt. He is speaking fast because he could have been wounded by the Americans. Untrue. The United States was finally forced to acknowledge on 18 November that the man some of them had claimed to be dead was still very much in the land of the living—and uttering the kind of threat that confirms the darkest fears of Western leaders. “Just like you kill us, we will kill you,” bin Laden said.

  When he was recorded, bin Laden was not talking into a tape-recorder. He was talking into a telephone. The man on the other end of the line—quite possibly in Pakistan—held the recorder. Bin Laden may not have been in the same city as the man with the recorder. He may well not have been in the same country. Osama bin Laden always speaks slowly. His voice is rapid, and the reason for this is apparently quite simple: the recorder’s battery was low. When replayed by Al-Jazeera at real-time speed, the voice goes up an octave.

  Writing about bin Laden now is one of the most difficult journalistic tasks on earth. I have to say what I know. I have to say what I think must be true. I have to ask why he made this tape. I start to tap out my report for The Independent. My story moves deeper into questions. Why? What for? Why now? It requires a new, harsh way of writing to tell the truth, the use of brackets and colons. Knowledge and suspicion, probability and speculation, keep grinding up against each other. Bin Laden survived the bombing of Tora Bora. Fact. Bin Laden escaped via Pakistan. Probability. Bin Laden is now in Saudi Arabia. A growing conviction.

  So here, with all its imperfections and conditional clauses, is what I suspect this tape recording means. The story is a deeply disturbing one for the West. I am frightened of the implications of this tape. One of its messages to Britain—above all others after the United States—is: Watch out. Tony Blair was right (for once) to warn of further attacks, though the bin Laden phone call was not (I suspect) monitored. But it was bin Laden. We must start with Tora Bora in the autumn of 2001. Under heavy bombardment by the U.S. Air Force, bin Laden’s al-Qaeda fighters realised they could not hold out indefinitely in the cave complex of the White Mountains above Jalalabad. Bin Laden was with them. Al-Qaeda men volunteered to fight on to certain death against the Afghan warlords paid by the Americans, and bin Laden at first refused to go. He argued that he wished to die with them. His most loyal bodyguards and senior advisers insisted he must leave. In the end, he abandoned Tora Bora in a state of anguish, his protectors hustling him down one mountainside with much the same panic as Dick Cheney’s security men carried the U.S. vice president to the White House basement when al-Qaeda’s killer-hijackers closed in on Washington on September 11th. All of the above comes under the label of “impeccable source.”

  Bin Laden went either to Kashmir (possible, though unlikely) or Karachi (most probable). I say this because bin Laden boasted to me once of the many admirers he had among the Sunni clergy of this great, hot and dangerous Pakistani city. He always talked of them as his “brothers.” He had given me those posters in Urdu which these clerics had produced and pasted on the walls of Karachi. He liked to quote their sermons to me. So I’ll go for Karachi. But I may be wrong. In the months that followed, there were little, tiny hints that he remained alive, like the smell of tobacco in a room days after a smoker has left. An admirer of the man insisted to me that he was alive (fact, but not an impeccable source). He was trying to find a way of communicating with the outside world without meeting any Westerner. Absolute fact. His most recent videotape—which was dismissed as old by those famous “U.S. intelligence sources” because he didn’t mention any events since November 2001—was new. (Strong possibility, backed up by a good— though not impeccable—source.)

  So why now? The Middle East was entering a new and ever more tragic phase of its history, torn apart by the war between Israelis and Palestinians and facing the incendiary effects of a possible Anglo–American invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden must have realised the need to once more address the Arab world—and his audiotape, despite the threats to Britain and other Western countries, was primarily directed towards his most important audience, Arab Muslims. His silence at this moment in Middle East history would have been inexcusable in bin Laden’s own eyes. And just to counter the predictable counter-claims that his tape could be old, he energetically listed the blows struck at Western powers since his presumed “death.” The bombings of French submarine technicians in Karachi, a synagogue in Tunisia, the massacre in Bali, the Chechen theatre siege in Moscow, even the killing of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan. Yes, he was saying, “I know about all these things.” He was saying he approved. He was telling us he was still here. Arabs might deplore this violence, but few would not feel some pull of emotion. Amid Israel’s brutality towards Palestinians and America’s threats towards Iraq, at least one Arab was prepared to hit back. That was his me
ssage to Arabs.

  Bin Laden always loathed Saddam Hussein. He hated the Iraqi leader’s un-Islamic behaviour, his secularism, his use of religion to encourage loyalty to a Baath party that was co-founded by a Christian. America’s attempt to link al-Qaeda to the Baghdad regime has always been one of the most preposterous of Washington’s claims. Bin Laden used to tell me how much he hated Saddam. So his two references to “the sons of Iraq” are intriguing. He makes no mention of the Baghdad government or of Saddam. But with UN sanctions still killing thousands of children—and with Iraq the target of a probable American invasion—he cannot possibly ignore it. So he talks about “Iraq’s children” and about “our sons in Iraq,” indicating Arab Muslim men who happened to be Iraqi, rather than Iraqi nationalists. But not Saddam. It’s easy to see how the U.S. administration may try to use these two references to make another false link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, but bin Laden—who is intelligent enough to be able to predict this—clearly felt that an expression of sympathy for the Arabs of Iraq outweighed any misuse Washington could make of his remarks. This has to come under the label of speculation (although near-certainty might be nearer the mark). Washington does indeed use these phrases to prop up its false contention that there are bin Laden–Saddam links. Back in 1996, bin Laden told me that British and French troops in Saudi Arabia were as much at risk of being attacked by his followers as American forces. In 1997 he changed this target list. The British and French he now dissociated from any proposed attacks. But in the new audiotape they are back on the hit list along with Canada, Italy, Germany and Australia. And Britain is at the top.

  The message to us—the West—is simple and repeated three times. If we want to back George W. Bush, the “pharaoh of the age”—and “pharaoh” is what Anwar Sadat’s killers called the Egyptian president after his murder more than two decades ago—we will pay a price. “What business do your governments have in allying themselves with the gang of criminals in the White House against Muslims . . . ?” I have heard bin Laden use that Arabic expression ifarbatu al-ijran twice before in conversation with me. “Gang of criminals.” Which is what the West has called al-Qaeda.

  A few days earlier, after I gave a lecture in North Carolina, a woman in the audience had asked me when America would go to war in Iraq. I told her to watch the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post for the first smear campaigns against the UN inspectors. And, right on time, the smears began in early December. One of the UN inspectors, it was now stated—a man appointed at the behest of the State Department—was involved with pornography. Another senior official, we were told—a man who again was appointed at the urging of the State Department—was previously fired from his job as head of a nuclear safety agency. Why, I wonder, did the Americans want these men on the inspection team? So they could trash it later? The official drubbing of the UN inspectors began way back in September when The New York Times announced, over Judith Miller’s by-line, that the original inspections team might, according to former inspector David Kay, be on a “mission impossible.” The source was “some officials and former inspectors.”

  President George W. Bush was banging on again about Iraqi anti-aircraft defences firing at American and British pilots—even though the “no-fly zones” had nothing to do with the UN inspections nor, indeed, anything to do with the UN at all. The inspections appeared to be going unhindered in Baghdad. But what was George Bush now telling us? “So far the signs are not encouraging.” What did this mean? Simply that America planned to go to war whatever the UN inspectors found. The New York Times—now a virtual mouthpiece for scores of anonymous U.S. “officials”—had persuaded itself that Iraq’s Arab neighbours “seem prepared to support an American military campaign.” Despite all the warnings from Arab leaders, repeated over and over again, month after month, urging America not to go to war, this was the nonsense being peddled in the United States.

  And suddenly, the British government came up with another of its famous “dossiers” on Saddam’s human rights abuses. Yes, again, we knew about his raping rooms and his executions and his torture when we eagerly supported his invasion of Iran in 1980. So why regurgitate it yet again? I noticed at once a little point in the latest British “dossier.” It revealed that a certain Aziz Saleh Ahmed, a “fighter in the popular army,” held a position as “violator of women’s honour.” Now I happened to remember that name. This was the same Aziz Saleh Ahmed who turned up on page 287 of the book published back in 1993 by Kanan Makiya, who formerly called himself Samir al-Khalil. Even ignoring the controversy about this “revelation” at the time, what was the British government doing rehashing the Aziz Saleh Ahmad story all over again as if we’d just discovered it, when it was at least eight years old and—according to Makiya—was first seen more than a decade ago?

  In the meantime, Bush’s foreign policy advisers were busy hatching up the conflict of civilisations. Kenneth Adelman, who was on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was saying that for Bush to call Islam a peaceful religion was “an increasingly hard argument to make.” Islam was “militaristic” in Adelman’s eyes. “After all, its founder, Mohammed, was a warrior, not a peace advocate like Jesus.” Then there was Eliot Cohen of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who was also on the Pentagon board. He now argued that the “enemy” of the United States was not terrorism but “militant Islam.” Adelman and Cohen did not vouchsafe their own religion, but Islam was clearly their target. Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster—who used to run a radio station in southern Lebanon which uttered threats against Muslim villagers and UN troops—said that “Adolf Hitler was bad but what the Muslims want to do to Jews is worse.” Jerry Falwell, one of the pit bulls of the religious right, called the Prophet a “terrorist,” while Franklin Graham, son of the same Billy Graham who made anti-Semitic remarks on the Nixon tapes, called Islam “evil.” Graham had spoken at Bush’s inauguration.

  We ignored this dangerous rhetoric at our peril. Did Blair ignore it? Wasn’t he aware that there were some very sinister people hovering around Bush? Did he really think Britons were going to be cheer-led into war by “dossiers” and the constant reheating of Saddam’s crimes? Didn’t we want the UN inspectors to do their work? If a reporter’s job is to describe the lies of statesmen, then at least The Independentalso thought it a journalist’s duty to condemn them. “I rather think that we are being set up for war,” I wrote in my paper on 4 December, “that Britain will join America in invading Iraq, whatever the inspectors discover. In fact, we are being prepared for the awful, incredible, unspeakable possibility that the UN inspectors will find absolutely no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That will leave us with only one conclusion: they were no good at their job. They should have been in the oil business.”195

  After a lecture in New York, I am approached by a young American, a member of a U.S. Special Forces intelligence team newly returned from Afghanistan. He shows me photographs of al-Qaeda suspects, hooded and shackled as they are put aboard an American transport aircraft to Kandahar. They live in pens of eight or ten men. They are given cots with blankets but no privacy. They are forced to urinate and defecate publicly because the Americans watch their prisoners at all times. We agree to meet at a coffee shop in lower Manhattan next morning. He turns up on time but nervous, looking over his shoulder, worried that someone might be following us, starting from his seat when my mobile phone rings.

  U.S. forces, he says, have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq; they are finding it almost impossible to crack the al-Qaeda network because bin Laden’s men have resorted to primitive methods of communication that cut off individual members of al-Qaeda from all information. This man’s prognoses were totally at variance with the upbeat briefings of U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Even in Pakistan, the man tells me, middle-ranking Pakistani army officers are tipping off members of al-Qaeda to avoid American-organised raids. “We didn’t catch whom we we
re supposed to catch,” he says. “There was an over-expectation by us that technology could do more than it did. Al-Qaeda are very smart. They basically found out how we track them. They realised that if they communicated electronically, our Rangers would swoop on them. So they started using couriers to hand-carry notes on paper or to repeat messages from their memory, and this confused our system. Our intelligence is high-tech—they went back to primitive methods that the Americans cannot adapt to.”

  There were originally “a lot of high-profile arrests.” But the al-Qaeda cells didn’t know what other members were doing. “They were very adaptive and became much more decentralised. We caught a couple of really high-profile, serious al-Qaeda leaders but they couldn’t tell us what specific operations were going to take place. They would know that something big was being planned but they would have no idea what it was.” The intelligence officer, who had spent more than six months in Afghanistan in 2002, was scathing in his denunciation of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord implicated in the suffocation of up to 3,000 Taliban prisoners in container trucks. “Dostum is totally culpable and the U.S. believes he’s guilty but he’s our guy and so we won’t say so . . . one of the things we failed to do was create a real government. We let the warlords firmly entrench themselves and now they can’t be dislodged.”