by Robert Fisk
As I said, something is going terribly wrong here in Baghdad and something is going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States government. Why, for example, did Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld claim last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction in Baghdad? His statement was a lie. But why did he make it? The Americans say they don’t have enough troops to control the fires. This is also untrue. If they don’t, what are the hundreds of troops deployed in the gardens of the old Iran–Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the hundreds camped in the rose gardens of the Presidential Palace near the Jumhuriya Bridge?
So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of their cultural heritage—their very cultural identity—in the looting of the archaeological treasures from the national museum, the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State archives and the Koranic library and the vast infrastructure of the nation we claim we are going to create for them. Why, they ask, do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burned, dehistoried, destroyed? Why are they issued with orders for a curfew of millions of people by their so-called liberators? . . . It’s easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war which lacked all international legimitacy. But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially for those who are false optimists and invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations like weapons of mass destruction which have still been unproved. So I’ll make an awful prediction. That America’s war of “liberation” is over. Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Into the Wilderness
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
—Rudyard Kipling, from “Recessional”
HIGHWAY 8 is the most dangerous road in Iraq. It is littered with smashed and burned-out American trucks and police cars blown up by rocket-propelled grenades. Every government checkpoint has been abandoned. Insurgents swarm through the villages to the east. This is kidnap country, throat-slitting country. Highway 8 is a symbol of the collapse of all our dreams. But as I am standing by the road talking to an Iraqi family, searching for the location of a Red Cross car whose driver has just been murdered, the ground begins to move and a long, roaring beast of sound swamps us.
From far to the south, a cloud of grey smoke is powering up into the sky, a thousand exhausts turning the sun dark, the biggest convoy I have ever seen in my life. The Americans are changing their brigades, the largest military movement since the Second World War, a 40-mile trail of armour and men moving up Highway 8 towards me. With the Iraqis, I sit in the muck at the side of the road. This I must watch. This I must absorb if I am to understand this war. Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees and hundreds of trucks with thousands of lean young men in battledress, wearing shades, pointing their rifles at the dangerous countryside, porcupine quills along the sides of each lorry, hour after hour of them. Six Apache helicopters come thrashing over the trees, riding shotgun, turning like aerial rodents and sweeping back down the highway at speed. The soldiers don’t bother to look up. They glance at us, a few of them, at the Englishman and the Iraqis sitting in the dirt as these twentieth-century Crusaders drive up to their great concrete-walled fortresses on the Tigris, deep into the wilderness of occupation.
And I do begin to understand. Two thousand years ago, a little to the west of here, we would have sat by the roadside as the ground shook to the tramp of Rome’s legions. Now we live in the American empire. Yes, this war was about oil. Yes, it was fuelled by folly and arrogance and lies. But it was also about the desire—the visceral need—to project power on a massive scale, based on neo-conservative fantasies, no doubt, but unstoppable, inexorable. Our army can go to Baghdad. So it will go to Baghdad. It will pour over Sumeria and Babylon and all the caliphates and across the land where civilisation supposedly began.
BUT NO FOREIGN ARMIES come here and escape unpunished. It is now a broiling 5 June 2003. High over Iraq, President George W. Bush is casting his Olympian eye over ancient Mesopotamia after praising the Americans who had “managed” the war against Saddam Hussein, and far below him, on a dirty street corner in a dirty town called Fallujah that Mr. Bush would prefer not to hear about, is a story of American blood and American power and American boots smashing down the front gates of Iraqi homes. “She’s got a gun,” an American soldier shouts when he catches sight of a woman in her back yard holding a Kalashnikov rifle. “Get to the other side of the road,” he bellows at me, “or we’ll hit you when we open fire.” I scamper to the other side of the road and I see the woman with the Kalashnikov. “Put it down!—Put the gun down!” he screams at her again. The soldiers are hot and tired and angry. They’ve been up since 3 a.m., ever since someone fired a grenade at a truckload of troops from the 101st Airborne. You could see why Bush chose to avoid any triumphal visits to Iraq.
Survivors of the ambush were among the soldiers, remembering the early hours as only soldiers can. “They fired a grenade at a two-and-a-half-ton truck full of the 101st Airborne and then strafed it with AK fire and then just disappeared into the night,” one of them said. “The guys were in a terrible state. One of our soldiers was dead with his brains hanging out of his head and his stomach hanging out, and there were eight others in the back shouting and pulling bits of shrapnel out of their legs.” Before dawn, the Americans came back to wash their comrades’ blood off the street. Then they returned once more to deal with the people who live in this scruffy corner of the old Baathist city of Fallujah.
In Qatar—before his hour-and-a-quarter flight through Iraqi airspace—Mr. Bush had done his best to lay down an appropriately optimistic narrative of the Iraq war. Iraq was a better place now that Saddam had gone—“a great evil has been ended,” he said, and praised the “humanitarian work of U.S. troops” in the country. On weapons of mass destruction, he was a little more circumspect. “We are on the look. We will reveal the truth . . . But one thing is certain. No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the Iraqi regime is no more.” But of course, no weapons of mass destruction had been found. Nor would they ever be found here.
If President Bush thought his soldiers should be proud of what they had done in Iraq—that is what he told his men and women commanders—in Fallujah it was all sweat and fear and loudspeakers ordering civilians from the streets. Would the gunmen who “disappeared into the night” have really hidden in the nearest houses to the main road, right next to the scene of their ambush? Not unless they were mad. But someone in the 3rd Infantry Division decided to send the American 115th Military Police Company to capture a few guns and round up the usual suspects. It didn’t make for happy viewing.
Ever deeper into their occupation, these soldiers were confused about the people they had just “liberated.” Some were good men. Take Sergeant Seth Cole, who once lived in the English city of Northampton, and who worked out that if just 10 per cent of the people of Fallujah didn’t like Americans, “that is an awful lot of people.” Take Sergeant Phil Cummings, a cop from Rhode Island, a big cheerful man who talked to the Iraqis glowering at him from the pavement. “Some of these people don’t like us even though we came to save them. But I always smile at them. At the schools, the kids throw rocks at us and I give them candy. I give them candy—they give me rocks.”
But it didn’t take long to see why children might throw rocks. There was another American soldier 40 metres away who was busy losing hearts and minds. “Tell them to get the fuck out of here,” he ordered a private soldier, pointing at a group of teenagers. Then he turned to a middle-aged man sitting on a chair on the pavement. “You stand up and I’ll break your neck,” he scre
amed.
That’s when they saw the woman with the AK. “She’s got a gun! There’s a woman with a gun.” The cry rippled down the lines of American troops. A few hours with soldiers who are as likely to be victims as they are victors, and you realise why they have to shout information to each other like street vendors. “She’s got a gun!” “She’s got a gun!” “She’s got a gun!” went up and down the street again.
Three soldiers pushed their rifles through the iron latticework of the back gate, all shouting “Put the gun down!” until a tall, sweating MP smashed his boot into the door and it swung open. “She’s put the gun down—we’ve got the gun!” Three soldiers ran into the yard and came back with a Kalashnikov. Then two female officers brought out the woman, a teacher in the local high school, veiled and dressed all in black. “Why did you hold the gun?” one of the women soldiers asked her. The woman’s eyes stared back through the slit in her veil. Then she folded her arms in a gesture of defiance and refused to speak.
“Please, sir, you’re taking my son away—he’s done nothing wrong.” There had been the crashing of another door down the street, and I just caught sight of a young man in a brown shirt being driven away in a Humvee between two American MPs. An elderly man was pleading with a medical officer. “Why my son? Why my son?” Things were no better 2 metres away. A tall soldier from Massachusetts—how eerie the name sounded here in this heat-blasted town—was listening to a man who spoke good English, who wanted to help. Over the road, three soldiers were hammering on a metal screen. “It’s an old, sick man who lives there, it’s only his shop, he sells candies to kids,” the Iraqi was telling the soldier. He did not reply.
So we stood in the ovenlike sun until the shop-front door opened. Three soldiers pointed their weapons at the slowly widening crack in the door. And then behind it we saw a very old man with a massive, long white beard and white hair in all directions, a frail creature—“ancient” was the word I wrote in my notebook— who had to lean on his refrigerator of ice-creams to steady himself, dressed in a long white gown. He looked like a prophet and for a few moments the Americans paused. “I’m sorry, sir, we have to search your shop,” one of them said. And the three went inside while the old man stood in the street and looked at us and at the shop and then hobbled back into the darkness.
There was some shooting a few hundred metres away and the soldiers ran for cover behind walls and gardens. Then a black-and-gold painted gate was booted open and a man in a grey dishdash came out and sat by the gatepost with his hands on his head and his family sitting on the porch beneath the bougainvillea while the Americans went through their home. Another AK was produced—almost every family in Iraq has two or three guns. These Iraqis were, for the most part, what we would call middle-class people, educated and with homes that might pass for villas in this run-down city with its broken munitions factories and its Baath party apparatus so deep that it’s hard to find an official uncontaminated by the stain of Saddam. Here it was, all of twenty-three years ago, that I came to see the great Iranian POW camps of the Gulf War, here and in the neighbouring town of Ramadi. These were tough people. Smashing down their doors would carry a penalty.
And so the Americans made a hundred more enemies among those they had “liberated.” One young man in Fallujah told me that a few nights earlier, gunmen had arrived at his family home and asked them to join a new resistance movement. “We turned them down,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d say if they came again.”
In Fallujah, one of the American MPs turned to me as his search operation was called off. “The Third Infantry Division are coming in here to go through this place tomorrow,” he said. And on the motorway east to Baghdad, I saw the American armour moving towards the city. There they all were again, Bradleys and Abrams and Humvees and transporters and trucks. And on their armour and gun barrels the soldiers had painted names. “Armed Response” was on one, with a picture of a naked girl astride a tank shell. “Another Round Anyone?” was on another. There was “Deadly Commemoration” and “Any Last Words” and, incredibly, “Abusive Father”—with a Christian cross beside the name. Fallujah was going to be “gone through.” And as the months passed, it was going to inflict its own “deadly commemoration” on the Americans.
As I write these words today, in the summer of 2005, back briefly in what I still like to think of as the safety of Beirut, as I go through my notebooks of the last two and a half years, the Iraqi insurrection takes on a savage, epic quality. In Baghdad now, many reporters practise “hotel journalism,” hiding in their rooms, ordered by their own security men to avoid the swimming pool, using Iraq’s deteriorating mobile phone system to talk to the Americans and British marooned in their own fortress across the Tigris, behind the concrete and machine-gun embrasures they have erected around Saddam’s old republican palace. Patrick Cockburn of The Independent and myself and several other journalists still move around Baghdad, even travelling the murderous airport road, but we do so with Iraqis in private cars, often hiding behind an Arabic-language newspaper, peeking out of the window, stopping only for a minute to see the carnage the suicide bombers have left. Mouse journalism. Now the military and political rulers of “new” Iraq have to be helicoptered from their compound to the airport—the airport road is already deemed by the authorities too unsafe for Westerners to use—and from their castle all they can see of the country they rule is through the gunslits of their own defences. Visit any Crusader castle in Lebanon and you will find out that all the Christian warriors of Europe could see from their own twelfth-century battlements was through the arrow slits built into their walls. Yes, we are the Crusaders now. But we are Crusaders who are blind to reality. George W. Bush and Tony Blair still claim their war is going well. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and are still being killed. Wal-Mart suicide bombers—produced, it seems, from some hidden assembly line—blow themselves up at the rate of two or three a day. Corpses are found by the dozen on the banks of the Tigris or dumped on Baghdad garbage tips. Foreigners are kidnapped and decapitated on tape. No weapons of mass destruction were ever discovered. Nor any link between Saddam and the massacres of 11 September 2001.
Yet the war is going well, we are told. A second war—against “terror,” of course—was now being fought in Iraq, Blair announces to an astonished audience of journalists. Iraq is on the road to democracy after national elections, albeit that the Sunni population largely failed to vote. That is the story. Saddam is imprisoned and awaiting trial—actually Iraq is now so insecure that the Americans are holding him in secret at their airbase in the emirate of Qatar. Democracy is blossoming across the Middle East. Or so we are supposed to believe. And I remember those who have died. Margaret Hassan, the gentle, tough lady who distributed medicines to the dying children of Iraq, kidnapped, videotaped in tears, mistreated and then shot in the face, executed for television screens. Marla Ruzicka, who would sit by the pool at the Hamra Hotel collating the number of Iraqis who have been killed since the invasion. Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand, as one report suggested? Marla was roasted alive as a suicide bomber exploded himself against a convoy of U.S. mercenaries on the airport road. I have watched many times Ken Bigley’s face as he pleads and repleads on the videotapes to Tony Blair. Then comes his inevitable decapitation.
Each morning in Baghdad, I would visit the city morgue. There would be twenty—sometimes thirty—fresh bodies arriving each day, sometimes whole families shot down or torn apart by suicide bombers or knifed to death or killed at American checkpoints. When the Americans brought bodies to the morgue, the staff were told not to perform autopsies. What did this mean? Outside, the relatives of the dead would shriek and weep and swoon with sorrow and curse the Americans, even if their loved ones were killed in family feuds or revenge attacks. The Americans and British keep no lists of the Iraqi dead, only of their own much-mourned soldiers—well over 1,700 Americans by the summer of 2005—so we can talk about “our” sacrifice and ignore the fate of those tens of t
housands we came to “liberate.”
How did it start, the beginning of the end? In Fallujah, only days after the occupation began, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi Sunni demonstrators, killing seventeen of them. They said they had come under fire. But reporters who reached the school in which the troops were billeted could find no bullet holes. Fallujah never forgave them. The insurgency started within hours. The city would later be taken over by Iraq’s ferocious resistance, along with Ramadi. Whole provinces of Iraq would fall under their control. So the Americans invaded Fallujah again—and then a second time—and fought their way over the rubble of the ruined city. We have won. Victory. After Paul Bremer arrived as America’s first proconsul—he it was who was to appoint the former CIA agent Iyad Allawi as “interim” prime minister—he would call the insurgents “deadenders,” “diehards,” Saddam’s “remnants.” All it would need was the capture of Saddam himself and the rebellion would end.
He was wrong. I remember a young, angry Iraqi in Ramadi whose family had just been shot at an American checkpoint. “I won’t join the resistance as long as Saddam and his family are free because if we drive the Americans out, we’ll get Saddam back again. But if they eliminate Uday and Qusay and Saddam, I will kill Americans myself.” And the Americans did kill Saddam’s awful sons Uday and Qusay—along with Qusay’s own fourteen-year-old son, about whom they didn’t talk very much—in a pseudo-Palladian villa in Mosul, shot down by Task Force 20, a mix of Special Forces and CIA operatives who didn’t bother to try and capture them when they resisted. And then, inevitably, they found Saddam.
In a hole in the ground. “Ladies and gentlemen—we got him!” Bremer crowed. “This is a great day in Iraq’s history.” The 13th of December 2003 was supposed to be the end of the insurrection. After this, why would anyone bother to fight the occupiers of Iraq? Unkempt, Saddam’s tired eyes betraying defeat; even the $750,000 in cash found in his hole in the ground demeaned him. Soon Saddam would be produced in a secret court in chains. He looked in that first extraordinary videotape which the Americans produced like a prisoner of ancient Rome, the barbarian cornered at last, the hand caressing the scraggy beard. All those ghosts—of gassed Iranians and Kurds, of Shiites shot and dumped in the mass graves of Kerbala, of the prisoners dying under excruciating torture in the villas of Saddam’s secret police—must surely have witnessed something of this.
