by Robert Fisk
Another sand-engrained page emerged from my file, a single flimsy page from a five-year-old copy of The Economist. “Iraqis, saddened by misfortune, are turning for comfort to their religion,” the report says. “So, in his own manipulative way, is their leader.” Saddam was building in Baghdad the largest mosque in the world, with room for 45,000 worshippers and minarets 600 feet in height. The Iraqi flag now had the words Allahu akbar—God is great—inscribed in the white rectangle between the red and black of the national banner, the eagle of Iraq between the Allahu and the akbar. In 1997 Saddam had given Abdul Monim Abu Zant, a Jordanian calling for an Islamist state in his own country, a weekly half-hour programme on Iraqi television.
“Mosque attendance is rising fast, particularly among the young,” the Economistreporter writes. He quotes a Baghdad resident who says: “Before the [Kuwait] war about 90 men would come to the mosque in my neighbourhood for Friday prayers. Now, more than 1,000 worshippers turn up, mostly young people. There is not enough space, so they pour into the streets.” There had been increased observance during the Ramadan month of fasting. The Economist regarded Saddam’s involvement in this reawakening of Islam as “manipulative” but, listening to the government’s response to the suicide bombing—not to mention the news of Nomani’s “martyrdom”—I began to wonder if Saddam was being compliant rather than manipulative, whether he had discovered a power that would have to be appeased rather than suppressed, one that embraced his own Sunni Muslim people as well as the Shia. Within a week, two women—an even more unheard-of precedent—would blow themselves up at another American checkpoint.
At dusk, the ground around the Baghdad North Gate Cemetery shook with the vibration of the bombs. The oil-grey sky was peppered with anti-aircraft fire. And below the clouds of smoke and the tiny star-like explosion of the shells, Sergeant Frederick William Price of the Royal Garrison Artillery, Corporal A. D. Adsetts of the York and Lancaster Regiment and Aircraftman First Class P. Magee of the Royal Air Force slept on. An eerie place to visit, perhaps, as the first of the night’s raids closed in on the capital of Iraq. Not so. For Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri had spoken earlier of these graves of colonisers past. For No. 1401979 Sergeant Price and No. 4736364 Corporal Adsetts and No. 210493 Aircraftman Magee all died in Britain’s first colonial war in Iraq, in 1921.
And what was it that Mr. Sabri, dressed in his Baath party uniform, said? “British soldiers already have their graveyards in Iraq, from the 1920s and from 1941 . . . Now they will have other graveyards where they will be joined by their friends, the Americans.” Which is why I took a street taxi that very same hour of dusk to the North Gate Cemetery on the old Mosul road from Baghdad to have a look at the men about whom Naji Sabri spoke. Private Nicholson of the York and Lancaster Regiment was only twenty-three when he died on 12 August 1921, Private Clark of the Royal Army Service Corps was thirty-eight when he was killed six days later. This first guerrilla war against Western occupation is now to be refought, according to the Iraqi Baath party. But when? Against this huge invading force? Or afterwards?
“We shall turn our desert into a big graveyard for the American and British soldiers,” Sabri said. As the missiles criss-crossed Baghdad—one swept over the Tigris at only 200 feet above the ground to explode with a roar and a plume of grey smoke in a presidential compound—the temperature of the language rose proportionately. The new colonisers, according to the foreign minister, were using the old British “golden rule” of “divide and conquer”—forget for a moment that “divide et impera” was originally a Roman rule—and he promised they would never break the unity of the Iraqi people. How much of this rhetoric would be abandoned if there was a way out of this war? “Real diplomacy,” the fantastical Sahaf announced, “is to kill them [the Americans and British] on the battlefield so that they feel that their dreams have been foiled. We are not going to allow these dirty lackeys to remain on the land of Iraq.” Lackeys? Didn’t it use to be “lackeys and running dogs” when the Soviet Union existed? Are we really reverting to colonialism? Since the Americans have not reneged on their pledge of occupation and military government, it’s hard to avoid the question. Nor was it difficult to imagine what Aircraftman First Class Magee might think as his grave vibrated to the explosion of bombs from the very same Royal Air Force he long ago died for in Iraq.
It is growing hotter in Baghdad—in every sense of the word—and in a month the temperature will rise to 35 degrees Celsius. The dense black shroud of oil smoke that covers the city is now creating a fog that makes even the mildest of air raids into a thing of mystery. At 4:45 p.m. next day comes the sound of jets yet again, followed by a series of short, sharp explosions that last for up to a minute. They sound all too familiar to my ears: the rumble of cluster bombs—legal against armour but decidedly illegal if used against civilians. I peer for ten minutes through the smoke from a high-rise apartment block, to no avail. Whether the bombs are dropped in the suburbs, on a military barracks or in a built-up area is impossible to discover. Nor is the status of Baghdad in this war. Far from being besieged, its main roads north and south are still open—a few trains are still leaving for northern cities—and although U.S. troops are reported to have set up a checkpoint on the road west to Amman, they appear to have been a “flying column,” stopping trucks and cars for a few hours and then vanishing into the desert at night.
By evening, Vice President Ramadan turns up at the pseudo-Greek villa assigned to government spokesmen beside the Ministry of Information—he has the intriguing habit of never looking at anyone who asks him a question—to insist that 6,000 Arab volunteers have arrived in Iraq to fight the Americans and British, half of them anxious for “martyrdom.” Ramadan repeats yet again that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and spends some time—rather a lot of time, in fact— claiming that the Americans and British might plant such weapons in Iraq in order to fool the world and justify their invasion. And then comes a lecture which, I couldn’t help suspecting, reflected all too faithfully the current anger of Saddam Hussein.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Feisal, was Ramadan’s—and thus Saddam’s—target. “He has offered advice—which is something he is in the habit of doing—and his advice is that he would like to see our leader leave his post . . .” Ramadan thunders. “Let me tell this lackey, this stooge, this small entity—they know full well who his cousin is, the so-called Prince [Ambassador] Bandar in Washington, and who he works for. Let them [the Saudis] say to him: ‘Go to hell. All we wish for is that you do not have an Arab name . . .’ Let me tell you—you are too small, too small, too much of a nothing, to say a word to the leader of Iraq. Those who give up will be swept away from the land of the Arabs.” Which didn’t do a lot for Iraqi–Saudi relations.
Then we in Baghdad hear that Secretary of State Colin Powell is announcing— to the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest Israeli lobby group in the United States, who of course support the invasion—that Syria and Iran are “supporting terror groups” and will have to “face the consequences.” What, we all asked, was happening now? Are we going to forget Baghdad for a few months and wheel our young soldiers west to surround Damascus? George W. Bush now tells us the war may be “long and difficult”—he didn’t tell us that before, did he?—and according to Tony Blair, this is “only the beginning.” Strange how all that fuss about chemical and biological warfare had been forgotten. The “secret” weapons, the gas masks, the anti-anthrax injections, the pills and chemical suits and all the rest have now been erased from the story—because bullets and rocket-propelled grenades are now the real danger to British and American forces in Iraq. Even the “siege of Baghdad”—a city that is 30 miles wide and might need a quarter of a million men to surround it—is fading from the diary. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, according to The New Yorker, interfered with the generals’ plans. This was going to be—I quote Rumsfeld—“war of a kind we have never seen before.”
Sitting in a Baghdad
café, listening to the god-awful propaganda rhetoric of the Iraqis but watching the often promiscuous American and British air attacks— targeting an alleged missile battery near a marketplace in a capital city at midday during a sandstorm is going to kill civilians—I have a suspicion that this war’s foundations were based not on military planning but on ideology. Long ago, as we knew, the right-wing pro-Israeli lobbyists around Mr. Bush planned the overthrow of Saddam. This would destroy the most powerful Arab state in the Middle East— Israel’s chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, demanded that the war should start even earlier than it did—and allow the map of the region to be changed for ever. Powell stated just this a month ago.
Illusions were given credibility by a superpower moral overdrive. Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project. September 11th (oddly unmentioned now), links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden (unproven), weapons of mass destruction (unfound), human rights abuses (at which we originally connived when Saddam was our friend), and then, finally, the most heroic project of all—the “liberation” of the people of Iraq. Oil was not mentioned, although it is the all-important and dominating factor in this illegitimate conflict. No wonder General Tommy Franks, the American commander, admitted that his first concern, prior to the war, was the “protection” of the southern Iraqi oilfields. So it was to be “liberation” and “democracy.” How boldly we crossed the border. With what lordly aims had we invaded Iraq.
Few Iraqis doubted—even the ministers in Baghdad spoke about this—that the Americans could, ultimately, occupy the country. “They have the force,” I wrote on 2 April, “and they have the weapons to smash their way into every city and impose a curfew and rule the land by martial law. But can they make Iraqis submit to that rule? Unless the masses rise up as Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair hope, this is now a nationalist war against the most obvious kind of imperial power. Without Iraqi support, how can General Franks run a military dictatorship or find Iraqis willing to serve him or run the oil fields? The Americans can win the war. But if their project fails, they will have lost.” I read these words today with some mystification. There they are, printed in The Independent. But I cannot remember writing them. Perhaps the suicide bombing had jogged my reporter’s hand, maybe that rhetoric about “martyrdom.” War produces infinite fatigue. All day we would travel and write and try to stay alive and then at night, curled up in our beds in the Palestine Hotel in the belief—vain as it was to turn out—that this guaranteed our safety, we would lie awake as giant explosions tore across the city. War is also about insomnia.
At last, the Iraqis decide to truck us out of Baghdad. To Mussayib and to Hilla. The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi army is prepared to defend its capital, I wrote in my notebook, should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? Looking back, I wonder if that is why we were taken, to view the earthworks and ditches and gun embrasures that would, in a few days, be abandoned by their defenders.
For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi army deployed like this. The Americans may say they are “degrading” the country’s defences but there was little sign of that here. That a Western journalist could see more of Iraq’s military preparedness than many of the reporters “embedded” with British and American forces said as much for the Iraqi government’s self-confidence as it did for the need of Saddam’s regime to make propaganda against its enemies.
True, there are signs of the Americans and British striking at the Iraqi military. Two gun pits have been turned to ashes by direct air strikes, and a military barracks—empty like all the large installations that were likely to be on the Anglo-American target list—has been pulverised by missiles. A clutch of telephone exchanges in the towns around Hilla have been destroyed; along with the bombing of six communications centres in Baghdad, the country’s phone system appears to have been shut down.
On a rail track further south, a train carrying military transport has been bombed from the air, the detonations blasting two entire armoured vehicles off their flat-bed trucks and hurling them in bits down an embankment. But other APCs, including an old American M-113 vehicle—presumably a captured relic from the Iranian army—remained intact. If that was the extent of the Americans’ success south of Baghdad, there are literally hundreds of military vehicles untouched for 150 kilometres south of the capital, carefully camouflaged to avoid air attack. Like the Serb army in Kosovo, the Iraqis have proved masters of concealment. An innocent wheat field fringed by tall palm trees turned out, on closer scrutiny, to be traversed with bunkers and hidden anti-aircraft guns. Vehicles were hidden under motorway bridges—which the Americans and British very definitely do not wish to destroy because they want to use them if they succeed in occupying Iraq—and fuel trucks dug in behind deep earth revetments. At a major traffic intersection, an anti-aircraft gun was mounted on a flat-bed truck and manned by two soldiers scanning the pale blue early summer skies.
As well they might. Contrails hung across the skies between Baghdad, Kerbala and Hilla. Above the centre of Hilla, home to the ancient Sumerian Babylon, a distant American AWACS plane could be seen circling high in the heavens, a tiny white dot indicating the giant scanner above the aircraft, its path followed by the eyes of scores of militiamen and soldiers. Driving the long highway south by bus, I could see troops pointing skywards. If hanging concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully, fear of an air strike has almost the same effect. An Iraqi journalist beside me insisted that an American or British aircraft whose course we had been fearfully tracking from our vehicle was turning back towards the south, ignoring traffic on the main road. A few minutes later, it reappeared in front of us, flying in the opposite direction.
Driving the highway south, a lot of illusions are blown from the mind. There are markets in the small towns en route to Babylon, stalls with heaps of oranges and apples and vegetables. The roads are crowded with buses, trucks and private cars—far outnumbering the military traffic, the truckloads of troops and, just occasionally, the sleek outline of a missile transporter with canvas covers wrapped tightly over the truck it is hauling. In the town of Iskandariyah, cafés and restaurants were open, shops were selling take-away kofta meat balls and potatoes and the tall new television aerials that Iraqis now need to watch their state television channel, whose own transmitters have been so constantly attacked by American and British aircraft. This was not a population on the edge of starvation; nor indeed did it appear to be a frightened people. If the Americans were about to launch an assault through this farmland of canals and massive forests of palm trees and wheat fields, it looked at first glance like a country at peace.
But the large factories and government institutions seemed deserted, many of the industrial workers and employees standing outside the main gates. Only 30 kilometres south of Baghdad, there came the thump of bombs and our bus shook with the impact of anti-aircraft rounds. A series of artillery pieces to our right were firing at an elevation over our heads, the gun muzzles blossoming gold, the shells exploding above the canopy of grey smoke from Baghdad’s oil fires which now spread 80 kilometres south of the city.
The images sometimes stretched the limits of comprehension. Children jumping over a farm wall beside a concealed military radio shack; herds of big-humped camels moving like biblical animals past a Soviet-made T-82 battle tank hidden under palm branches; fields of yellow flowers beside fuel bowsers and soldiers standing amid brick kilns; an incoming American missile explosion that scarcely prompts the farmers to turn their heads. On one pile of rubble north of
Hilla someone had fixed the red, white and black flag of Iraq, just as the Palestinians tie their banners to the wreckage of their buildings after Israeli attacks.
Was there a lesson in all this? I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway—you can feel the temperature rise as you drive south—with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations. The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black kuffiah scarves round their heads, whom I saw 150 kilometres south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a “degraded” army on the verge of surrender.
All this, I wrote that night, may be an illusion. The combat troops I saw may have no heart for battle. The tanks may be abandoned when the Americans come down the highway towards Baghdad. The fuel bowsers may be towed back to the capital and the slit trenches deserted. Saddam may flee Baghdad when the first American and British shells come hissing into the suburbs and the statues of the Great Leader that stand outside so many villages along the highway may be ritually sundered. This would prove to be very much the case. But it didn’t feel that way in early April. It looked like an Iraqi army and a Baath party militia that were prepared to fight for their leadership, just as they had at Um Qasr and in Basra and Nasiriyah and Suq al-Shuyukh. Or was it something else they might be fighting for? An Iraq, however dictatorial in its leadership, that simply rejected the idea of foreign conquerors? Or Iraqis who cared more about Iraq than Saddam and who identified the Americans as their enemies without obeying Saddam’s orders?
