The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Obsessed with their own demonisation of Saddam Hussein, both Bush and Blair now constantly reminded us of the price of appeasement. Bush thought he was the Churchill of America, refusing the appeasement of Saddam. It seemed as if the Second World War would be for ever the excuse, the warning, the justification, the utterly dishonest paradigm for every folly, for every bloodbath we initiated. The Second World War was an obscenity. It ended in 1945. Yet you might have thought, in early 2003, that Hitler was alive in his Berlin bunker. The Luftwaffe, if you listened to Bush and Blair, was still taking off from Cap Gris Nez, ready to bombard London after years of appeasement of Nazi Germany. Yet it was our air forces that were about to strike from Iraq’s “Cap Gris Nez”—Kuwait and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and assorted aircraft carriers—to pulverise not London but Baghdad. What was it about our Lilliputian leaders that they dared to trivialise the massive sacrifice of the Second World War for their squalid conflict against Iraq, elevating Saddam’s tinpot dictatorship into the epic historical tragedy of the 1939–45 war?198

  How could a sane human being react to this pitiful stuff? One of the principal nations that “did nothing about Hitler” was the United States, which enjoyed a profitable period of neutrality in 1939 and 1940 and most of 1941 until it was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. And when the Churchill–Roosevelt alliance decided that it would only accept Germany’s unconditional surrender— a demand that shocked even Churchill when Roosevelt suddenly announced the terms at Casablanca—Hitler was doomed.

  Not so Saddam, it seemed. For Donald Rumsfeld offered the Hitler of Baghdad a way out: exile, with a suitcase full of cash and an armful of family members, if that is what he wished. I couldn’t recall Churchill or Roosevelt ever suggesting that the Führer should receive a golden handshake. Saddam is Hitler—but then suddenly he’s not. He is—said The New York Times—to be put before a war crimes tribunal. But then he’s not. He could scoot off to Saudi Arabia or Latin America, if he took Rumsfeld at his word. In other words, he wasn’t Hitler after all.

  What, I kept asking, happens after the invasion? On 26 January I asked our Independent on Sunday readers what we planned to do when Iraqis demanded our withdrawal from their country. “For we will be in occupation of a foreign land. We will be in occupation of Iraq as surely as Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And with Saddam gone, the way is open for Osama bin Laden to demand the liberation of Iraq as another of his objectives. How easily he will be able to slot Iraq into the fabric of American occupation across the Gulf. Are we then ready to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan and countless other countries? It seems that the peoples of the Middle East—and the West—realise these dangers, but that their leaders do not, or do not want to.”

  Travelling to the United States more than once a month, visiting Britain on the penultimate weekend of January 2003, moving around the Middle East, I had never been so struck by the absolute, unwavering determination of so many Arabs and Europeans and Americans to oppose a war. Did Tony Blair really need that gloriously pertinacious student at the British Labour party meeting on 24 January to prove to him what so many Britons felt: that this proposed Iraqi war was a lie, that the reasons for this conflict had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, that Blair had no business following Bush into the war? Never before had I received so many readers’ letters expressing exactly the same sentiment: that somehow—because of Labour’s huge majority, because of the Tory party’s effective disappearance as an opposition, because of parliamentary cynicism—British democracy was not permitting British people to stop a war for which most of them had nothing but contempt. From Washington’s pathetic attempt to link Saddam to al-Qaeda, to Blair’s childish “dossier” on weapons of mass destruction, to the whole tragic farce of UN inspections, people were no longer fooled. The denials that this war had anything to do with oil were as unconvincing as Colin Powell’s claim in January 2003 that Iraq’s oil would be held in “trusteeship” for the Iraqi people. “Trusteeship” was exactly what the League of Nations offered the Levant when it allowed Britain and France to adopt mandates in Palestine and Transjordan and Syria and Lebanon after the First World War. Who will run the oil wells and explore Iraqi oil reserves during this generous period of “trusteeship”? I asked in my paper. American companies, perhaps?

  Take the inspectors. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and now, alas, Colin Powell didn’t want to give the inspectors more time. But why not, for God’s sake? On 12 September 2002, when Bush, wallowing in the nostalgia of the 11 September 2001 crimes against humanity, demanded that the UN act, he insisted that it send its inspectors back to Iraq. They should resume and complete their work. Bush, of course, was hoping that Iraq would refuse to let the inspectors return. Horrifically, Iraq welcomed the UN. Bush was waiting for the inspectors to find hidden weapons. Terrifyingly, they found none. Now they were still looking. And that was the last thing Bush wanted. Bush said he was “sick and tired” of Saddam’s trickery—when what he meant was that he was sick and tired of waiting for the UN inspectors to find the weapons that would allow America to go to war. He who wanted so much in September 2002 to get the inspectors back to work, now, in January 2003, didn’t want them to work at all. “Time is running out,” Bush said. He was talking about Saddam but he was actually referring to the UN inspectors, in fact to the whole UN institution so laboriously established after the Second World War on the initiative of his own country.

  The only other nation pushing for war—save for the ever-grateful Kuwait— was Israel. Here are the words of Zalman Shoval, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s foreign affairs adviser, in January 2003. Israel, he said, would “pay dearly” for a “long deferral” of an American strike on Iraq. “If the attack were to be postponed on political rather than military grounds, we will have every reason in Israel to fear that Saddam Hussein uses this delay to develop non-conventional weapons.” As long as Saddam was not sidelined, Shoval said, it would be difficult to convince the Palestinian leadership that violence didn’t pay and that it should be replaced by a new administration. Arafat would use such a delay “to intensify terrorist attacks.” So now the savage Israeli–Palestinian war could only—according to the Shoval thesis—be resolved if America invaded Iraq; terrorism could not be ended in Israel until the United States destroyed Saddam. There could be no regime change for the Palestinians until there was regime change in Baghdad. And by going along with the Bush drive to war, Blair was, indirectly, supporting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (since Israel still claimed to be fighting America’s “war on terror” against Arafat).

  Saddam was not unlike the Dear Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, the nuclear megalomaniac with whom the Americans had just been having “excellent” discussions but who didn’t have oil. How typical of Saddam to send Ali “Chemical” Majid—the war criminal who gassed the Kurds of Halabja—to tour Arab capitals, to sit with President Bashar Assad of Syria and President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon as if he never ordered the slaughter of women and children. But Bush and Blair said nothing about Majid’s tour—either because they did not want to offend the Arab leaders who met him or because the link between gas, war crimes and Washington’s original support for Saddam was still a sensitive issue.199

  On 4 February 2003 I was in Austin, Texas, waiting to fly up to New York to watch Colin Powell convince the UN Security Council that Washington’s lies about weapons of mass destruction were not lies at all but honest-to-God truth. But there was one sure bet about the Powell statement, I wrote that day: he wouldn’t be talking about Afghanistan. For since the Afghan war was the “successful” role model for America’s forthcoming imperial adventure across the Middle East, the near-collapse of peace in this savage land and the steady erosion of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—the nightly attacks on American and other international troops, the anarchy in the cities outside Kabul, the warlordism and drug trafficking and steadily increasing t
oll of murders—were unmentionables, a narrative constantly erased from the consciousness of Americans who were now sending their young men and women by the tens of thousands to stage another “success” story. This article, I wrote:

  is written in President George Bush’s home state of Texas, where the flags fly at half-staff for the Columbia crew, where the dispatch to the Middle East of further troops of the 108th Air Defence Artillery Brigade from Fort Bliss and the imminent deployment from Holloman Air Force Base in neighbouring New Mexico of undisclosed numbers of F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers earned a mere 78-word down-page inside “nib” report in the local Austin newspaper.

  Only in New York and Washington do the neo-conservative pundits suggest—obscenely—that the death of the Columbia crew may well have heightened America’s resolve and “unity” to support the Bush adventure in Iraq. A few months ago, we would still have been asked to believe that the post-war “success” in Afghanistan augured well for the post-war success in Iraq.

  So let’s break through the curtain for a while and peer into the fastness of the land that both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair promised not to forget. Hands up those who know that al-Qaeda has a radio station operating inside Afghanistan which calls for a holy war against America? It’s true. Hands up again anyone who can guess how many of the daily weapons caches discovered by U.S. troops in the country have been brought into Afghanistan since America’s “successful” war? Answer: up to 25 per cent.

  Have any U.S. troops retreated from their positions along the Afghan–Pakistan border? None, you may say. And you would be wrong. At least five positions, according to Pakistani sources on the other side of the frontier, only one of which has been admitted by U.S. forces. On December 11th, U.S. troops abandoned their military outpost at Lwara after nightly rocket attacks which destroyed several American military vehicles. Their Afghan allies were driven out only days later and al-Qaeda fighters then stormed the U.S. compound and burned it to the ground.

  It’s a sign of just how seriously America’s mission in Afghanistan is collapsing that the majestically conservative Wall Street Journal— normally a beacon of imperial and Israeli policy in the Middle East and South-west Asia—has devoted a long and intriguing article to the American retreat, though of course that’s not what the paper calls it.

  “Soldiers still confront an invisible enemy,” is the title of Marc Kaufman’s first-class investigation, a headline almost identical to one which appeared over a Fisk story a year or so after Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979–80. The soldiers in my dispatch, of course, were Russian. Indeed, just as I recall the Soviet officer who told us all at Bagram air base that the “mujahedin terrorism remnants” were all that was left of the West’s conspiracy against peace-loving (and Communist) Afghans, so I observed the American spokesmen—yes, at the very same Bagram air base—who today cheerfully assert that al-Qaeda “remnants” are all that are left of bin Laden’s legions.

  Training camps have been set up inside Afghanistan again, not—as the Americans think—by the recalcitrant forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s anti-American Afghans, but by Arabs. The latest battle between U.S. forces and enemy “remnants” near Spin Boldak in Kandahar province involved further Arab fighters, as my colleague Phil Reeves reported. Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami forces have been “forging ties” with al-Qaeda and the Taliban; which is exactly what the mujahedin “terrorist remnants” did among themselves in the winter of 1980, a year after the Soviet invasion.

  An American killed by a newly placed landmine in Khost; 16 civilians blown up by another newly placed mine outside Kandahar; grenades tossed at Americans or international troops in Kabul; further reports of rape and female classroom burnings in the north of Afghanistan—all these events are now acquiring the stale status of yesterday’s war.

  So be sure that Colin Powell will not be boasting to the Security Council today of America’s success in the intelligence war in Afghanistan. It’s one thing to claim that satellite pictures show chemicals being transported around Iraq, or that telephone intercepts prove Iraqi scientists are still at their dirty work; quite another to explain how all the “communications chatter” intercepts which the U.S. supposedly picked up in Afghanistan proved nothing. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, you can quote Basil Fawlty: “Whatever you do, don’t mention the war.”

  The 5th of February 2003 was a snow-blasted day in New York, the steam whirling out of the road covers, the U.S. Secret Servicemen—helpfully wearing jackets with “Secret Service” printed on them—hugging themselves outside the fustian, asbestos-packed UN headquarters on the East River. Exhausted though I was after travelling thousands of miles around the United States, the idea of watching Secretary of State Colin Powell—or General Powell, as he was now being reverently re-dubbed in some American newspapers—make his last pitch for war before the Security Council was an experience not to be missed. In a few days, I would be in Baghdad to watch the start of this frivolous, demented conflict. Powell’s appearance at the Security Council was the essential prologue to the tragedy—or tragicomedy if one could contain one’s anger—the appearance of the Attendant Lord who would explain the story of the drama, the Horatio to the increasingly unstable Hamlet in the White House.

  There was an almost macabre opening to the play when General Powell arrived at the Security Council, cheek-kissing the delegates and winding his great arms around them. CIA director George Tenet stood behind Powell, chunky, aggressive but obedient, just a little bit lip-biting, an Edward G. Robinson who must have convinced himself that the more dubious of his information was buried beneath an adequate depth of moral fury and fear to be safely concealed. Just like Bush’s appearance at the General Assembly the previous September, you needed to be in the Security Council to see what the television cameras missed. There was a wonderful moment when the little British home secretary Jack Straw entered the chamber through the far right-hand door in a massive power suit, his double-breasted jacket apparently wrapping itself twice around Britain’s most famous ex-Trot. He stood for a moment with a kind of semi-benign smile on his uplifted face, his nose in the air as if sniffing for power. Then he saw Powell and his smile opened like an umbrella as his small feet, scuttling beneath him, propelled him across the stage and into the arms of Powell for his big American hug.

  You might have thought that the whole chamber, with its toothy smiles and constant handshakes, contained a room full of men celebrating peace rather than war. Alas, not so. These elegantly dressed statesmen were constructing the framework that would allow them to kill quite a lot of people—some of them Saddam’s little monsters no doubt, but most of them innocent. When Powell rose to give his terror-talk, he did so with a slow athleticism, the world-weary warrior whose patience had at last reached its end.

  But it was an old movie. I should have guessed. Sources, foreign intelligence sources, “our sources,” defectors, sources, sources, sources. Ah, to be so well-sourced when you have already taken the decision to go to war. The Powell presentation sounded like one of those government-inspired reports on the front page of The New York Times—where it was, of course, treated with due reverence next day. It was a bit like heating up old soup. Hadn’t we heard most of this stuff before? Should one trust the man? General Powell, I mean, not Saddam. Certainly we didn’t trust Saddam, but Powell’s speech was a mixture of awesomely funny recordings of Iraqi Republican Guard telephone intercepts à la Samuel Beckett that just might have been some terrifying proof that Saddam really was conning the UN inspectors again, and ancient material on the Monster of Baghdad’s all too well known record of beastliness.

  If only we could have heard the Arabic for the State Department’s translation of “OK buddy”—“Consider it done, sir”—this from the Republican Guard’s “Captain Ibrahim,” for heaven’s sake. The dinky illustrations of mobile Iraqi bio-labs whose lorries and railway trucks were in such perfect condition suggested the Pentagon didn’t have much idea of the dilapidated stat
e of Saddam’s railway system, let alone his army. It was when we went back to Halabja and human rights abuses and all Saddam’s indubitable sins, as recorded by the discredited UNSCOM team, that we started eating the old soup again. Jack Straw may have thought all this “the most powerful and authoritative case” for war—his ill-considered opinion afterwards—but when we were forced to listen to the Iraqi officer corps communicating by phone—“Yeah,” “Yeah,” “Yeah?,” “Yeah . . .”—it was impossible not to ask oneself if Colin Powell had really considered the effect this would have on the outside world. From time to time, the words “Iraq: Failing to Disarm—Denial and Deception” appeared on the giant video screen behind General Powell. Was this a CNN logo? some of us wondered. But no, it was the work of CNN’s sister channel, the U.S. Department of State.

  Because Colin Powell was supposed to be the good cop to the Bush–Rumsfeld bad cop routine, one wanted to believe him. The Iraqi officer’s telephone-tapped order to his subordinate—“Remove ‘nerve agents’ whenever it comes up in the wireless instructions”—seemed to indicate that the Americans had indeed spotted a nasty new line in Iraqi deception. But a dramatic picture of a pilotless Iraqi aircraft capable of spraying poison chemicals turned out to be the imaginative work of a Pentagon artist. And when Secretary Powell started talking about “decades” of contact between Saddam and al-Qaeda, things went wrong for the “General.” Al-Qaeda only came into existence in 2000, since bin Laden—“decades” ago— was working against the Russians for the CIA, whose present-day director was sitting grave-faced behind Mr. Powell. It was the United States which had enjoyed at least a “decade” of contacts with Saddam.