The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath party members obviously cultivated: cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drink trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy that it took three muscular thieves to carry them, standard lamps concealed inside brass palm trees, inlaid wooden tables, mother-of-pearl chests of drawers and huge American fridges, so many fridges for so much booze to be drunk by so many of Saddam’s acolytes. Outside the gutted home of one former interior minister, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

  City buses passed me driven by leering young men while trucks backed up to living-room windows to load furnishings directly from the rooms. On the Saddam Bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed that he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still lay dead at the wheel. But there seemed to be a kind of looter’s law. Once a thief had placed his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children were employed to unscrew door hinges and—in the UN offices—to remove light fittings. One stood on the ambassador’s desk to take a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.

  On the other side of the Saddam Bridge, an even more surreal sight could be observed. A truck loaded down with chairs but with two white hunting dogs—the property of Saddam’s son Qusay—tethered by two white ropes, galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I even caught a glimpse of four of Saddam’s horses—including the white stallion he used in presidential portraits—being loaded onto a trailer. Every government ministry in the city had now been denuded of its files, computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing the “liberation” of this property. One could hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam’s henchmen, but how was the government of America’s so-called “New Iraq” supposed to operate now that the state’s property has been so comprehensively looted?

  And what was one to make of the scene on the Hilla road, where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate armed attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad’s bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks—and doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown were just 200 metres from a U.S. Marine checkpoint.

  And already America’s army of “liberation” was beginning to look like an army of occupation. The previous morning I had watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Doura, each man ordered by U.S. soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers—in front of other civilians, including women—to prove that they were not suicide bombers. Following a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt—then shot and killed a man who had walked onto his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in his vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place. In the suburb of Doura, the bodies of Iraqi civilians—many of them killed by U.S. troops in a clash with Iraqi forces earlier in the week—still lay rotting in their smouldering cars.

  And this was just Day 2 of the “liberation” of Baghdad.

  AND SO TO DOURA. Something terrible—how many times have I written those words—happened there, on Highway 8, in the last hours of the “liberation” of Baghdad. Some say a hundred civilians died there. Others believe that only forty or fifty men and women and children were cut to pieces by American tank fire when members of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division’s Task Force 315 were ambushed by the Republican Guard. Many of their corpses lie rotting in their incinerated cars, a young woman, burned naked, slumped face-down over the rear seat on the Hilla flyover bridge next to half of a male corpse which is hanging out of the driver’s door. Blankets cover a pile of dead civilian bodies, including that of a cremated child, a few metres away. A red car, shot in half by an American tank shell, lies on its side with the lower half of a human leg, still in a black shoe, beside the left front wheel.

  No one disputes that the American troops were ambushed here—nor that the battle only ended thirty-six hours later. On the flyover I found a dead Iraqi Republican Guard in uniform, his blood drained into the gutter, one foot over the other, shot in the head. A hundred metres away lay a car with an elderly civilian man dead under the chassis. Two fuel trucks—one of them still burning—lay in a field. A burned-out passenger bus stood beside the main motorway. Hundreds of Iraqis stared at the corpses in horror, most of them holding handkerchiefs to their faces and swatting the flies that buzzed between the living and the dead.

  Captain Dan Hubbard, commanding the 315th’s Bravo Company whose ten tanks and four Bradley Fighting Vehicles hold the flyover bridge, described to me how his men came under fire “from 360 degrees” with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 rifles at 7 a.m. on the morning of 6 April when civilian traffic was moving along the motorway. “We’re here to fight the Iraqi regime, not the civilians,” he said. “There were cars on the road when we were ambushed and we fired over their heads two or three times to get them to stop. Ninety per cent of the vehicles turned away after a warning shot.” And here the captain paused for a moment. “A lot of things go on in people’s heads at such times,” he said. “A lot of people speed up . . . I had to protect my men. We tried our very best to minimise any kind of injuries and death to civilians . . . I have got to protect my soldiers because we don’t know if it’s a carload of explosives or RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. We’ll have the cars removed. The bodies will be taken care of.”

  Captain Hubbard was a thoughtful man, a thirty-four-year-old from Tennessee who named his tank “Rhonda Denise” after his wife who is “the toughest woman I’ve ever met”—though what she would make of the civilian horror on Highway 8 doesn’t bear thinking about. Hubbard’s M1A1 Abrams tank took five direct hits from RPGs—one on the engine—and it was his tank that opened fire on a motorcycle carrying two soldiers at dusk on the first day of the fighting. “In the morning, I went to look at the bodies. There was the Republican Guard whom you saw, who was hit in the head and chest. But his friend was wounded and still alive—he had survived the whole night on the flyover—so I carried him back to our tank, placed him on top and gave him medical aid. Then we got him to our medics and he survived.” Clearly the Iraqi Republican Guard also have a responsibility for this carnage, since they started their ambush, knowing full well that civilians would be on the motorway.

  On the front of the incinerated bus, for example, I found part of a Kalashnikov rifle, its wooden butt in cinders but its ammunition clip still intact. There were crude slit trenches beneath the flyover and the wreckage of a military truck. In all, two American soldiers were killed in the battle and up to thirty wounded. Special Forces were involved in the shooting and six U.S. vehicles destroyed, including two tanks. Captain Hubbard said he had been fired at from a row of civilian houses beside the road and had shot a tank round on to one of the roofs. Its impact was clearly visible.

  Many families had come to find their dead relatives and bury them, but I counted at least sixteen civilian bodies—and parts of bodies—still on the highway, several of them women. And of course, this killing field raised a now familiar question. Americans fired tank shells at civilian motorists. Still their bodies lay mouldering beside the road—along with the dead soldier—and still no one had buried them. Sure, the American
s tried not to kill civilians. But all would have been alive today had President Bush not ordered his army to invade their country.203

  There would be no inquiry. Nor would there be any inquiry into any of the dreadful events that occurred during the Gone With the Wind epic of looting and anarchy with which the Iraqi population chose to celebrate our gift to them of “liberation” and “democracy.” It started in Basra, with our own shameful British response to the orgy of theft that took hold of the city. The British defence minister, Geoffrey Hoon, made some especially childish remarks about this disgraceful state of affairs, suggesting in the House of Commons that the people of Basra were merely “liberating”—that word again—their property from the Baath party. And the British army enthusiastically endorsed this nonsense. Even as tape of the pillage in Basra was being beamed around the world, there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards cheerfully telling the BBC that “it’s absolutely not my business to get in the way.” But of course it was Colonel Blackman’s business. Pillage merits a specific prevention clause in the Geneva Conventions, just as it did in the 1907 Hague Convention upon which the Geneva delegates based their “rules of war.” “Pillage is prohibited,” the 1949 Geneva Conventions say, and Colonel Blackman and Mr. Hoon should have glanced at Crimes of War, published in 2002 in conjunction with the London City University Journalism Department, to understand what this means.

  When an occupying power takes over another country’s territory, it automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its civilians, their property and institutions. Thus the American troops in Nasiriyah became automatically responsible for the driver who was murdered for his car in the first day of that city’s “liberation.” The Americans in Baghdad were responsible for the German and the Slovak embassies that were looted by hundreds of Iraqis, and for the French Cultural Centre that was attacked, and for the Central Bank of Iraq that was torched on 11 April and which, however contaminated it may be by the previous regime— Arab nations tend to deposit their most odious creatures in the role of central bank governor—is the core financial power in Iraq, the new version of Iraq just as much as the old.

  But the British and Americans discarded this notion, based though it is upon conventions and international law. And yet again, we journalists allowed them to do so. We clapped our hands like children when the Americans “assisted” the Iraqis in bringing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the television cameras, and yet we went on talking about the “liberation” of Baghdad as if the majority of civilians there were garlanding the soldiers with flowers instead of queuing with anxiety at checkpoints and watching the looting of their capital. We journalists cooperated, too, with a further collapse of morality in this war. Take, for example, the ruthless bombing of the residential Mansour area of Baghdad in the attempt to kill Saddam. The Anglo–American armies claimed they believed Saddam and his two evil sons Qusay and Uday were present. So they bombed the civilians of Mansour and killed at least fourteen decent, innocent people, almost all of them—and this would obviously be of interest to the religious feelings of Messrs. Bush and Blair—Christians.

  Now one might have expected the BBC World Service Radio next morning to question whether the bombing of civilians did not constitute a bit of an immoral act, a war crime perhaps, however much we wanted to kill Saddam. Forget it. The presenter in London described the slaughter of these innocent civilians as “a new twist” in the war to target Saddam—as if it was quite in order to kill civilians, knowingly and in cold blood, in order to murder our most hated tyrant. The BBC’s correspondent in Qatar—where the Centcom boys pompously boasted that they had “real-time” intelligence that Saddam was present—used all the usual military jargon to justify the unjustifiable. The “Coalition,” he announced, knew it had “time-sensitive material”—i.e., that they wouldn’t have time to know whether they were killing innocent human beings in the furtherance of their cause or not—and that this “actionable material” (again I quote this revolting BBC dispatch) was not “risk-free.”

  And then he went on to describe, without a moment of reflection on the moral issues involved, how the Americans had used their four 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs to level the civilian homes. These were the very same pieces of ordnance that the same U.S. Air Force used in their vain effort to kill Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001. So now we were using them, knowingly, on the flimsy homes of civilians of Baghdad—folk who would otherwise be worthy of the “liberation” we wished to bestow upon them—in the hope that a gamble, a bit of “intelligence” about Saddam, would pay off.204

  The Geneva Conventions have a lot to say about all this. They specifically refer to civilians as protected persons, who must have the protection of a warring power even if they find themselves in the presence of armed antagonists. The same protection was demanded for southern Lebanese civilians when Israel launched its brutal “Grapes of Wrath” operation in 1996. When that Israeli pilot, for example, fired his U.S.-made Hellfire missile into the Mansouri ambulance in Lebanon, killing three children and two women, the Israelis claimed that a Hizballah fighter had been in the vehicle. The statement proved to be untrue. But Israel was rightly condemned for killing civilians in the hope of killing an enemy combatant. Now we were doing exactly the same. So no more namby-pamby Western criticism of Israel after the bunker-busters have been dropped on Mansour.

  More and more, we were committing these crimes. The mass slaughter of more than 400 civilians in the Amariya air-raid shelter in Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War was carried out in the hope that it would kill Saddam. In the 1999 bombardment of Serbia we repeatedly bombed civilian areas—after realising that the Yugoslav army had abandoned their barracks—and in one of the most vicious incidents towards the end of that war, an American jet bombed a narrow road bridge over a river. NATO said the bridge could carry tanks even if there was no tank on it at the time. In fact, the bridge was far too narrow to carry a tank. But another pilot returned to bomb the bridge again, just as the rescuers were trying to save the wounded. Victims of the second bomb included schoolgirls. Again, we forgot about this in our euphoria at winning the war.

  Why? Why cannot we abide by the rules of war that we rightly demand that others should obey? And why do we journalists—yet again, war after war— collude in this immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and illegal act into a “new twist” or into “time-sensitive material”? Wars have a habit of turning normally sane people into cheerleaders, of transforming rational journalists into nasty little puffed-up fantasy colonels. But surely we should all carry the Geneva Conventions into war with us, along with the history books. For the only people to benefit from our own war crimes will be the next generation of Saddam Husseins. Isn’t that what the insurgents were to learn within weeks and months of the occupation?

  BUT WE COULD ALWAYS FALL BACK on the argument that would become our sine qua non in the months and years to come, the most quotable quote, the easiest line in the book, the very last resort of the scoundrel in Iraq: Saddam was worse. We weren’t as bad as Saddam. We didn’t kill and torture in the Abu Ghraib prison— these qualifications would be dropped later for obvious reasons—because we were civilised, liberators, democrats who believed in freedom. We were the good guys.

  So in those first hours after the “liberation” of Baghdad, I did go and take a peek into the heart of darkness. I waded through the cartridge cases of the Jumhuriya Bridge battle that lay like winter leaves across the highway—the tank whose shell had killed my two colleagues was still there, hatches down—and walked through the great Raj-gate of Saddam’s Presidential Palace. Inside was the holiest of holies, the ark of Saddam’s Baathist covenant, his very own throne. The seat was covered in blue velvet and was soft, comfortable in an upright, sensible sort of way, with big gold arm-rests upon which his hands—for Saddam was obsessed with his hands—could rest, and with no door behind it through which assassins could enter the room. There was n
o footstool, but the sofas and seats around the vast internal conference chamber of Saddam’s palace placed every official on a slightly lower level than the caliph himself.

  Did I sit on Saddam’s throne? Of course I did. There is something dark in all our souls which demands an understanding of evil rather than good, because—I suppose—we are more fascinated by the machinery of cruelty and power than we are by angels. So I sat on the blue throne and put my hands over the golden arm-rests and surveyed the darkened, gold-glistening chamber in which men of great power sat in terror of the man who used to sit where I was now sitting. “He knew human folly like the back of his hand,” Auden wrote of his eponymous dictator. Ah yes, the hands.

  Behind the throne was a vast canvas of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem— minus the Jewish settlements—so that the third-holiest city of Islam hung above the head of the mightiest of Iraqi warriors. And opposite Saddam’s chair—there was no electricity and the room was in darkness and the torchlight that illuminated the opposite canvas could only produce a gasp of astonishment and horrible clarity—was a different work of Baathist art. It depicted a clutch of huge missiles, white-hot flames burning at their tails, soaring towards a cloud-fringed, sinister heaven, each rocket wreathed in an Iraqi flag and the words “God is Great.”

  The godly and the ungodly faced each other in this central edifice of Baathist power. The American 3rd Infantry Division who were camped in the marble halls and the servants’ bedrooms had been searching in vain for the underground tunnels that were supposed to link this complex with the bomb-smashed Ministry of Defence next door. They had kept the looters at bay—though I found some of them thieving televisions and computers in the smaller villas of the palace grounds— because, so they said, General Tommy Franks would probably set up his proconsulship here and, if the Americans could create a compliant Iraqi government, a new U.S.-appointed administration might be running the country from this vast pseudo-Sumerian complex within a few months.