The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Powell’s new version of his President’s State of the Union lie—that the “scientists” interviewed by UN inspectors had been Iraqi intelligence agents in disguise—was singularly unimpressive. The UN talked to Iraqi scientists during their inspection tours, the new version went, but the Iraqis were posing for the real nuclear and bio boys whom the UN wanted to talk to. General Powell said America was sharing its information with the UN inspectors, but it was clear already that much of what he had to say about alleged new weapons development—the decontamination truck at the Taji chemical munitions factory, for example, the “cleaning” of the Ibn al-Haythem ballistic missile factory on 25 November—had not been given to the UN at the time. Why wasn’t this intelligence information given to the inspectors months ago? Didn’t General Powell’s beloved UN Resolution 1441 demand that all such intelligence information should be given to Hans Blix and his lads immediately? Were the Americans, perhaps, not being “pro-active ” enough? Or did they realise that if the UN inspectors had chased these particular hares, they would have turned out to be as bogus as indeed they later proved to be?

  The worst moment came when General Powell dscussed anthrax and the 2001 anthrax attacks in Washington and New York, pathetically holding up a teaspoon of the imaginary spores and—while not precisely saying so—fraudulently suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the anthrax scare. But when the secretary of state held up Iraq’s support for the Palestinian Hamas organisation, which has an office in Baghdad, as proof of Saddam’s support for “terror”— he of course made no mention of America’s support for Israel and its occupation of Palestinian land—the whole theatre began to collapse. There were Hamas offices in Beirut, Damascus and Iran. Was the 82nd Airborne supposed to grind on to Lebanon, Syria and Iran?

  How many lies had been told in this auditorium? How many British excuses for the Suez invasion, or Russian excuses—the same year—for the suppression of the Hungarian uprising? One recalled, of course, this same room four decades earlier when General Powell’s predecessor Adlai Stevenson showed photographs of the ships carrying Soviet missiles to Cuba. Alas, Powell’s pictures carried no such authority. And Colin Powell was no Adlai Stevenson.

  IF POWELL’S ADDRESS merited front-page treatment, the American media had never chosen to give the same attention to the men driving Bush to war, most of whom were former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years they had advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush’s most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W. Bush was elected U.S. president. And they weren’t doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the United States but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by Perle. The destruction of Iraq would, of course, protect Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons—always supposing Saddam also possessed them— and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon had in store for them. Although Bush and Blair dared not discuss this aspect of the coming war—a conflict for Israel was not going to have Americans or Britons lining up at recruiting offices—Jewish–American leaders talked about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish–American groups who opposed this madness were the first to point out how pro-Israeli organisations foresaw Iraq not only as a new source of oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris River to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic had to be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University tried to do in The Wall Street Journal the day after Powell’s UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations’ objections to the war might—yet again—be ascribed to “anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent.” This nonsense was opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery, argued that an Iraq war would leave Israel with even more Arab enemies.

  The slur of “anti-Semitism” also lay behind Rumsfeld’s insulting remarks about “old Europe.” He was talking about the “old” Germany of Nazism and the “old” France of collaboration. But the France and Germany that opposed this war were the “new” Europe, the continent that refused, ever again, to slaughter the innocent. It was Rumsfeld and Bush who represented the “old” America; not the “new” America of freedom, the America of F. D. Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolised the old America that killed its native inhabitants and embarked on imperial adventures. It was “old” America we were being asked to fight for— linked to a new form of colonialism—an America that first threatened the United Nations with irrelevancy and then did the same to NATO. This was not the last chance for the UN, nor for NATO. But it might well have been the last chance for America to be taken seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.

  Israeli and U.S. ambitions in the region were now entwined, almost synonymous. This war, about oil and regional control, was being cheer-led by a president who was treacherously telling us that this was part of an eternal war against “terror.” The British and most Europeans didn’t believe him. It’s not that Britons wouldn’t fight for America. They just didn’t want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if that included the prime minister, they didn’t want to fight for Blair either. Still less did they wish to embark on endless wars with a Texas governor–executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, was now sending America’s poor to destroy a Muslim nation that had nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.

  Those who opposed the war were not cowards. Brits rather like fighting; they’ve biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included. But when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons and many Americans were a lot braver than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children. Perhaps Henry VIII’s exasperation in that play better expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: “Do they take me for a simpleton?” The British, like other Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their opposition to this war might ultimately have made them feel more, not less, European.

  Palestine had much to do with it. Brits have no special love for Arabs, but they smell injustice fast enough and were outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians by a nation that is now in effect running U.S. policy in the Middle East. We were told that our invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—a burning, fearsome wound to which Bush devoted just eighteen words in his 2003 State of the Union address. Even Blair could not dismiss it this easily, hence his “conference” for Palestinian reform, at which the Palestinians had to take part via video-link because Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let them travel to London.

  Across the Middle East, thousands of journalists now gathered for the latest war-by-media. There would be no more “pools”; henceforth, journalists travelling with the military would be “embedded.” It was a sign of the complacency of the press and television that they willingly adopted this supine word as part of their own vocabulary. Fox and CNN and the big American networks now spoke as one. Part Two of the “War on Terror” was about to begin, complete with its golden logos and theme music. American journalism had developed its own special controls over the years, the use of “controversial” words—“occupied” being one of those most necessary to avoid, unless used about Saddam’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait—deleted in favour of a set of “safe” definitions. I even listed some of the phrases and clauses that would become de rigueur in the Iraqi war: “liberated” for American-occupied, “terrorists” for Iraqis who resisted American occupation, “die-hards” for insurgents, “now
at last it can be told” for reporters at the site of Saddam’s mass graves. They were all used. “Collateral damage” was reheated for further use. Television journalists based in Baghdad were told that their reports would carry a caveat: that their dispatches had been “monitored by the Iraqi authorities.” “Monitored” meant “censored,” although in many cases this was not true. Whenever I was interviewed on air from Baghdad in the coming weeks, I would always protest that no one listened to my calls—and that if they did, I would tell the truth whether they liked it or not. But television and radio stations like rules. They feel safer that way.200

  On 15 March, I took the last commercial flight into Saddam’s Iraq—the very last plane whose baggage would be tagged to “Saddam International Airport”—a Royal Jordanian Airbus containing a few journalists, some eastern European contract workers and a flood of Iraqis who preferred to spend the coming terrible weeks with their families—perhaps to die with them—rather than exile themselves in the third-class hotels of Amman. We were heading for a country about to be invaded by more than a 100,000 American and British troops, but the crew went about their business as if there was no crisis and no war. We ate the usual cake and sandwich in-flight meal, were told to put our seats in the upright position before landing, to keep our seatbelts fastened until the aircraft had come to a complete halt. Our safety was their first concern.

  For Baghdad, it was night number one thousand and one, the very last hours of fantasy. As UN inspectors prepared to leave the city in the early hours of 17 March, Saddam Hussein appointed his own corrupted son Qusay to lead the defence of the city of the caliphs against the American invasion. Yet at the Armed Forces Club, I found the defenders playing football. Iraqi television prepared Baghdad’s people for the bombardment to come with music from Gladiator. Until the last moment, the UN—only hours from packing—diligently continued its work by disarming the soon-to-be-invaded nation, observing the destruction of two more al-Soummoud missiles. It was a disarmament which the Americans had so fervently demanded and in which they had now totally lost interest. With the inspectors gone, there would be nothing to stop the Anglo-American air forces commencing their bombardment of the cities of Iraq.

  So was Baghdad to be Stalingrad, as Saddam told us in those last hours of peace? It didn’t feel like it. The roads were open, the checkpoints often unmanned, the city’s soldiery dragging on cigarettes outside the UN headquarters. From the banks of the Tigris—a muddy, warm-sewage-swamped version of Stalingrad’s Volga—I watched the evening fishermen casting their lines for the masgouf that Baghdadis eat after sunset. The Security Council Resolution withdrawn? Blair calls an emergency meeting of the Cabinet? Bush to address the American people? Baghdad, it seemed, was sleepwalking its way into history almost as soundly as America and Britain.

  How come I found a queue of Iraqis waiting outside the Sindbad Cinema in Saadun Street that night queuing for that ancient Egyptian clunker Private Lives, its posters displaying the ample thighs of its heroine? True, the local Baathist papers regaled us with reports of peace marches and peace protests around the world—as if Bush was going to call back his 140,000 men because Jordanians burned American flags in Amman.

  The detachment was quite extraordinary, as if we were breathing in Baghdad a different kind of air, existing on a planet quite removed from the B-52s and Stealths and cruise missiles and Mothers of All Bombs that would soon make the ground tremble beneath our feet. The very history and culture of the Arab world were about to be visited by a Western-made earthquake, the like of which had never been seen before. Even the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman empire would be made redundant in the next few hours. Yet on the banks of the Tigris stood a massive statue, bound up in sacking and gauze, a monolith of epic proportions, waiting for its unveiling: another bronze likeness of Saddam Hussein.

  In the fumes of Baghdad’s traffic, among its old yellow taxis, brand-new red double-decker buses and trucks, I searched for signs of the tempest to come. There were a few. Queues of cars outside gas stations, filling up for the last time, a clutch of antique shops closing down for the duration, a gang of workers removing the computers from a ministry, just as the Serbs did before NATO visited Belgrade in the spring of 1999. Didn’t the Iraqis know what was about to happen? Did Saddam?

  I could only be reminded of that remarkable and very recent account by a former Cuban ambassador. He had been part of a 1990 delegation sent by Castro to persuade Saddam of the overwhelming American firepower that would be sent against him if he did not withdraw from Kuwait. “I’ve received several reports like that,” Saddam replied. “It’s our ambassador to the UN who sends them to me and most of the time, they finish down there.” And here Saddam gestured to a marble rubbish bin on the floor.

  Was the marble bin still being filled with similar reports? Iraqi state television told us yet again on 16 March that Saddam had said, personally, once more, that although Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the past, they no longer existed today. Now we know he was telling the truth. It was America’s own weapons of mass destruction and its sponsorship of Israel, Saddam said, that threatened the world. All day, a UN C-130 aircraft baked on the tarmac at Saddam International Airport—there were two more UN transport aircraft in Cyprus—ready to bring the 140 inspectors out of Iraq before Bush and Blair launched their blitz. No one questioned the obvious: why had the inspectors bothered to come in the first place? If the British, as the attorney general in London claimed on 16 March, didn’t need UN Security Council Resolution 1441 to wage war because they were justified under earlier resolutions, why on earth did they vote for it? Because they hoped Saddam would refuse to accept them back. Or, as Saddam put it rather neatly in his latest address, “the inspectors came to find nothing.”

  A group of foreign “peace activists” stood hand-in-hand along the parapet of Baghdad’s largest bridge, old men and young American Muslims and a Buddhist in a prayer shawl, smiling at the passing traffic, largely ignored by Iraqi motorists. It was as if Iraqis were less caught up in this demonstration than the foreigners, as if their years of suffering had left them complacent to the terrible reality about to fall upon them. What did this portend for the Americans? Or the Iraqis?

  So I went at dusk on this last night of peace to the great eggshell monument that Saddam erected to the Iraqi dead of his 1980–88 war against Iran, whose cavernous marble basements are inscribed with the names of every lost Iraqi. “Hope comes from life and brings fire to the heart,” one of the lines of Arabic poetry says round the base. But the couples sitting on the grass beside the monument had not come to remember loved ones. They were courting students whose only political comment—aware of that “minder” hovering over my shoulder—was that “we have endured war so many times, we are used to it.”

  So I am left with a heretical thought. Might Baghdad ultimately become an open city, its defenders moved north to protect Saddam’s heartland, the capital’s people left to discover the joys and betrayals of an American occupation on their own? I suppose it all depends on the next few hours and days, on how many civilians the Americans and the British manage to kill in their supposedly moral war. Would Iraqis have to construct another monument to the dead? I asked in my report to The Independent that night. Or would we?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Atomic Dog, Annihilator, Arsonist, Anthrax, Anguish and Agamemnon

  You ask me about the sack of Baghdad? It was so horrible there are no words to describe it. I wish I had died earlier and had not seen how the fools destroyed these treasures of knowledge and learning. I thought I understood the world, but this holocaust is so strange and pointless that I am struck dumb. The revolutions of time and its decisions have defeated all reason and knowledge.

  —The Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz describing the sack of Baghdad by Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, 1258 (translation: Michael Wood)

  A PULSATING, MINUTE-LONG ROAR of sound brought President George W. Bush’s crusa
de against “terrorism” to Baghdad. There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defences and then a series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under us, the walls moving, the sound waves clapping against our ears. Tubes of fire tore into the sky around the Iraqi capital, dark red at the base, golden at the top. Looking out across the Tigris from the riverbank, I could see pin-pricks of fire reaching high into the sky as America’s bombs and missiles exploded on to Iraq’s military and communication centres and, no doubt, upon the innocent as well. Valhalla, I said to myself. This needed Wagner, the Twilight of the Gods, Götterdämmerung .

  No one in Iraq doubted that the dead would include civilians. Tony Blair had said just that in the House of Commons debate that very same week. But I wondered, listening to this storm of fire across Baghdad, if he had any conception of what it looks like, what it feels like, or of the fear of those innocent Iraqis who were, as I wrote my report an hour later, cowering in their homes and basements. Just before the missiles arrived, I talked to an old Shia Muslim woman in a poor area of Baghdad, dressed in traditional black with a white veil over her head. I pressed her for what she felt. In the end, she just said: “I am afraid.” The explosions now gave expression to her words.

  That this was the start of something that would change the face of the Middle East was in little doubt; whether it would be successful in the long term was quite another matter. It was a strange sensation to be on the ground, in at the start of this imperial adventure. The sheer violence of it, the howl of air-raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles, carried its own political message; not just to Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions announced. This is how we do business. This is how we take our revenge for 11 September 2001.