The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Not even President Bush had made any pretence in the last days of peace to link Iraq with those international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Yet the Americans were—without the permission of the United Nations, with most of the world against them—acting out their rage with a fiery consummation. Iraq, of course, could not withstand this for long. Saddam might claim, as he did, that his soldiers could defeat technology with courage. Nonsense. What fell upon Iraq on 19 March—and I witnessed in Baghdad just an infinitesimally small part of this festival of violence—was as militarily overwhelming as it was politically terrifying. The crowds outside my hotel stood and stared into the sky at the flashing anti-aircraft bursts, awed by their power. Did the British, I wondered as I later stood on my hotel balcony near the Tigris, know where this will lead? Did we British not walk down this same arrogant path against the petty tyrants of Mesopotamia almost a hundred years ago? And look what happened to the British empire. Now, listening to those great explosions around Baghdad, I wondered what time had in store for the American empire.

  Baghdad had always been a harsh place for me. Over the years, I had made many friends in the city—businessmen and their families, artists, retainers from the old regime, and, yes, Baathists and their families and at least one minister, Naji al-Hadithi, first the information minister then the foreign minister, a man whose first response to pointed questions would be to look at the ceiling of his office. Up there, he would be telling us. Up there, in the ceiling, was the microphone. But in the homes of Iraqis, I felt safe. Old photographs would show grandfathers in British army uniform, young women shopping at Harrods in the 1950s and—much later—the same women, middle-aged, enjoying the oil wealth of Saddam’s Iraq, walking in Knightsbridge in the late 1970s and 1980s. But the insufferable heat of Baghdad in summer and the constant “minders” whom the information ministry would attach to reporters on the most innocent of stories would have a claustrophobic effect. After a while the minders took our money and worked for us rather than the regime. We could “buy” them, and during this last Saddamite war they would move imperceptibly from being servants of the regime to servants of the television networks. In the weeks following the “liberation” of Baghdad, they would become our employees, and a few months later we would find them working as employees of the U.S. occupying power.

  When we could shake off the minders, persuade them we were only taking a taxi to the grocery store when in fact we were heading to the slums of Saddam City, we could hear the men of the Shiite opposition, the rage of the Dawa party, the courageous voices of families who lived amid filth, who rose up at our bidding in 1991 and were betrayed but who still waited for their moment of freedom. The senior ministry men knew we were making these illicit visits, but for $100 or $200 they would disregard them. The regime was as corrupting as it was corrupt. Standing on the world’s greatest wealth, it had given its people war and more war and yet more war. I had been in Baghdad as the Iranian Scud missiles had crashed into the nighttime city, on the front lines in the assault on Khorramshahr in 1980; I had seen the Iraqi dead inside Iran in 1982 and inside Kuwait in 1991; and now I would see the Iraqi dead again. Inside my brain was a memories box in which I would see as many Iraqis dead as alive, their bodies as vivid as the living.

  And it dawned on me over a long period that Iraqis must have seen themselves this way. They were both dead and alive. War had become not just part of their lives, but the very fabric of their existence. To fight and die—for Saddam, for Iraq, for Arab nationalism, for patriotism, out of fear—was a natural phenomenon. Between 1980 and 1988 they fought the Iranians to prevent the occupation of their country. Occupation, for Iraqis, for Arabs—for anyone of any race or religion— was not just humiliation. It was a form of rape. The enemy came into your country, your city, your street, your home, your bedroom. They would tie you up, insult your family, torture you, kill you. Saddam’s own secret policemen did that. They, too, were occupiers. Woe betide anyone who tried to take their place.

  The night before the first raids, I had walked around the Jadriya suburb of Baghdad, mixed Sunni–Shia middle class, watching soldiers with their children on their shoulders, hugging their wives goodbye, kitbags over their shoulders, rifles in hand. Snapshot. Paris and Berlin and London 1914. Berlin 1939. Warsaw 1939. London 1939. The Soviet Union 1941. The United States 1941. And before Korea and during Vietnam and among all the armies of the world as they set off on their wars to defend or promote civilisation or fascism or communism. Second Lieutenant Bill Fisk, perhaps, in Birkenhead, 1918? And now. I called at a pharmacy to buy bandages and plaster and lavatory paper. The chemist was a thoughtful man, explaining to the other glowering customers that the foreign journalist was going to share their dangers, that they should treat him with kindness. I told the man that he was especially generous since I thought my own air force, the RAF, would soon be bombing Baghdad. “Yes,” he said with a sad smile, “I rather think they will.”

  So at the start of this new and one-sided war, we reporters would be recording two different conflicts: the suffering of Iraqis and the death throes of the regime. The latter wanted us to view the two as identical. The Americans and British insisted that they were destroying the regime in order to end the suffering. In fact, the suffering and the dying struggle of Iraqi Baathism could no more be separated than you could tear the bandages off a wound without causing the patient to shriek in pain. It was easy to argue that Saddam’s wickedness was the cause of all their woes, but wounded and dying Iraqis did not see their fate in quite those terms. They were being attacked by Americans, not by Iraqis. American missiles and bombs were destroying their homes. Had they fought and died on the Iran front, only to be attacked and occupied by another foreign power? The Pentagon clearly understood this equation. Why else would the American military refuse to do what any professional army—or occupying power—would do: to count the number of civilian deaths during and after the war?

  Donald Rumsfeld was to assert that the American attack on Baghdad was “as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed.” But he could not have told that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looks at me on the first morning of the war, drip-feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tries vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her legs—they were bound up with gauze—and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. Her mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg, which the little girl thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha’s mother thinks that if her child’s two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from her paralysis. She was the first of the patients brought to the Mustansariya University Hospital after America’s blitz on the city began.

  There is something sick, obscene, about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we reporters turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi minister of health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to emphasise the “bestial” nature of the American attack. The Americans say that they don’t intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain. So let’s forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the cocky moralising of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip—this bright morning in March 2003—around the Mustansariya College Hospital. For the reality of war—and here I unashamedly make my point again—is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about “coalition forces” which our “embedded” journalists were already telling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy—which this war does not—is primarily about suffering and death.

  Take fifty-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs, but
who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders—they are now twice their original size. She was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missiles struck Baghdad. “I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere,” she told me. “It was on my arms, my legs, my chest.” Amel Hassan still has multiple shrapnel wounds in her chest. Her five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt’s front door when the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding, although the blood has clotted around her toes and is stanched by the bandages on her ankles and lower legs. Two boys are in the next room. Saad Selim is eleven, his brother Omar fourteen. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest.

  Isra Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel wounds to the legs, sustained when she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the blitz began. Imam Ali is twenty-three and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover her head with a black scarf but she cannot hide the purple wounds to her legs. Multiple shrapnel wounds. After a while, “multiple shrapnel wounds” sounds like a natural disease, which I suppose—among a people who have suffered more than twenty years of war—it is.

  So was all this, I asked myself, for 11 September 2001? All this was to “strike back” at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than had the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wondered, that these children, these young women, should suffer for September 11th? Wars repeat themselves. Always, when “we” come to visit those we have bombed, we have the same question. In Libya in 1986, American reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991, “we” asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And now a doctor found himself asked by a British radio reporter—yes, you’ve guessed it—“Do you think, Doctor, that some of these people could have been hit by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire?”

  Should we laugh or cry at this? Must we always blame “them” for their own wounds? Certainly we should ask why those cruise missiles exploded where they did, at least 320 in Baghdad alone, courtesy of the USS Kitty Hawk. Isra Riad came from Sayadiyeh, where there is a big military barracks. Najla Abbas’s home was in Risalleh, where there were villas belonging to Saddam’s family. The two Selim brothers lived in Shirta Khamse, where there was a storehouse for military vehicles. But that’s the whole problem. Targets are scattered across the city. The poor—and all the wounded I saw were poor—live in cheap, sometimes wooden houses that collapse under blast damage.

  It’s the same old story. If we make war, we are going to kill and maim the innocent. Dr. Habib al-Hezai, whose FRCS was gained at Edinburgh University, counted 101 patients of the total 207 wounded in the raids in his hospital alone, of whom 85 were civilians—20 of them women and 6 of them children—and 16 soldiers. A young man and a child of twelve died under surgery. No one will say how many soldiers were killed during the attacks.

  Driving across Baghdad was an eerie experience. The targets were indeed carefully selected, even though their destruction inevitably struck the innocent. There was a presidential palace with four 10-metres-high statues of the Arab warrior Saladin on each corner—the face of each, of course, was Saddam’s—and, neatly in between, a great black hole gouged into the façade of the building. The Ministry of Air Weapons Production was pulverised, a massive heap of prestressed concrete and rubble. But outside, at the gate, there were two sandbag emplacements with smartly dressed Iraqi soldiers, rifles over the parapet, ready to defend their ministry from the enemy which had already destroyed it.

  The morning traffic built up on the roads beside the Tigris. No driver looked too hard at the Republican Palace on the other side of the river or the Ministry of Armaments Procurement beside it. They burned for twelve hours after the first missile strikes. It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life. But then again, no one under Saddam’s regime would spend too long looking at such things, would they? Iraqis were puzzled as to what all this meant. In 1991, the Americans struck the refineries, the electricity grid, the water pipes, communications. But on day two of this war, Baghdad could still function. The land-line telephones worked, the Internet operated, the electrical power was at full capacity, the bridges over the Tigris remained unbombed. My guess was that when—“if ” was still a sensitive phrase— the Americans arrived in Baghdad, they would need a working communications system, electricity, transport. What had been spared was not a gift to the Iraqi people, I concluded; it was for the benefit of Iraq’s supposed new masters. How wrong I was.

  The Iraq Daily emerged with an edition of just four pages, a clutch of articles on the “steadfastness” of the nation—steadfastness in Arabic is soummoud, the same name as the missiles Iraq partially destroyed before Bush forced the UN inspectors to leave by going to war—and a headline that read: “President: Victory Will Come in Iraqi Hands.” During the bombing on Friday night, Iraqi television— again, there had been no attempt by the United States to destroy the television facilities—showed an Iraqi general, appearing live, to reassure the nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile explosions blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television camera.

  So where did all this lead us? In the early hours next day, I looked once more across the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the colonnaded ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and the sky was lowering with smoke. The buttressed, rampart-like palace—sheets of flame soaring from its walls—looked like a medieval castle ablaze; Ctesiphon destroyed, Mesopotamia at the moment of its destruction, as it had been seen so many times, over so many thousands of years. Xenophon struck south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. The caliphs came. And then the Ottomans and then the British. All departed. Now come the Americans. It was not about legitimacy. It was about something much more seductive, something Saddam himself understood all too well, a special kind of power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq wished to demonstrate as he smashed his way across this ancient civilisation.

  That second afternoon, the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around Baghdad in the hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 6:20 p.m. on 22 March, when Saddam’s biggest military office block, a great rampart of a building twenty storeys high beside his palace, simply exploded in front of me, a cauldron of fire, a 100-foot sheet of flame and a sound that had my ears singing for an hour afterwards. The entire buttressed edifice shuddered under the impact. Then four more cruise missiles came in. It was the heaviest bombing Baghdad had suffered in more than twenty years of war. To my right, a long colonnaded building looking much like the façade of the Pentagon coughed fire as five missiles crashed into the concrete. In an operation officially intended to create “shock and awe”— Rumsfeld’s latest slogan—shock was hardly the word for it. The few Iraqis in the streets around me—no friends of Saddam, I would suspect—cursed under their breath.

  From high-rise buildings, shops and homes came the thunder of crashing glass as the shock waves swept across the Tigris in both directions. Minute after minute the missiles came in. Many Iraqis had watched—as I had—the television tape of those ominous B-52 bombers taking off from Britain only six hours earlier. Like me, they had noted the time, added three hours for Iraqi time ahead of London and guessed that, at around 9 p.m., the terror would begin. The B-52s, almost certainly firing from outside Iraqi airspace, were dead on time. Policemen drove at speed through the streets, their loudspeakers ordering pedestrians to take shelter or hide under cover of tall buildings. Much good did i
t do. Crouching next to a block of shops, I narrowly missed the shower of glass that came cascading down from the upper windows as the shock waves slammed into them.

  A few Iraqis—husbands and wives, older children—could be seen staring from balconies, shards of broken glass around them. Each time one of the great golden bubbles of fire burst across the city, they ducked inside before the blast wave reached them. As I stood beneath the trees on the corniche, a wave of cruise missiles passed low overhead, the shriek of their passage almost as devastating as the explosions that were to follow. How, I asked myself, does one describe this outside the language of a military report, the definition of the colour, the decibels of the explosions? The flight of the missiles sounded as if someone was ripping to pieces huge canopies of silk across the sky.

  There is something anarchic about all human beings, about their reaction to violence. The Iraqis around me stood and watched, as I did, the tongues of flame bursting from the upper stories of the building beside Saddam’s palace, reaching high into the sky. Strangely, the electricity grid continued to operate and around us the traffic lights continued to move between red and green. Billboards moved in the breeze of the shock waves; floodlights continued to blaze on public buildings. Above us, curtains of smoke were moving over Baghdad, white from the explosions, black from the burning targets. How could one resist this? How could the Iraqis ever believe—with their broken technology, their debilitating twelve years of sanctions—that they could defeat the computers of these missiles and of these aircraft? It was the same old story: irresistible, unquestionable power.