The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  And so, as I write these words, I prepare for my next fraught journey back to Baghdad, back to the suicide bombers and the throat-cutters and the fast-firing Americans. And through the veil of Iraqi tears, I will draw more portraits of suffering and pain and greed and occasional courage and I wonder if, when I eventually leave this vast chamber of horrors, I will try to emulate the advice of the only poem that always moves me to tears, Christina Rossetti’s “Remember”:

  Better by far you should forget and smile

  Than that you should remember and be sad.

  I think in the end we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors’ folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and arrogance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that’s the thing. Which is why, as I have written this book, I have heard repeatedly and painfully and in a dreamlike reality the footfall of 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk and his comrades of the 12th Battalion, the King’s Liverpool Regiment, marching on the evening of 11 November 1918 into the tiny French village of Louvencourt, on the Somme.

  1 Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, rev. ed. (1990; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), U.S. new edition entitled Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (New York: Nation Books, 2002). Readers interested in the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982, the Qana massacre and other tragedies in Lebanon may turn to Pity the Nation. I have not attempted to rewrite the story of Lebanon here.

  2 The more dangerous the destination, the more fictional the name of the airline that flies there. The only direct flight from Beirut to the cauldron of occupied Iraq was run by another company called—yes, you guessed it—“Flying Carpet Airlines.”

  3 Alexander the Great smashed through the Afghan tribes on his way to India and the land was subsequently ruled by the Kushans, the Persian Sassanians, the Hephthalites and then the Islamic armies whose initial conquests and occupation were fiercely resisted by the Hindu tribes. Genghis Khan invaded in 1219 and was so infuriated by the death of his grandson outside the besieged city of Bamiyan—where two giant 600-year-old Buddhas could clearly be seen, cut into the cliffs above the valley—that he ordered his Mongol army to execute every man, woman and child. Other empires were to extend their territory into what is now called Afghanistan. At the end of the fourteenth century, Timur-i-leng—“Timur, the club-footed,” the Tamburlaine of Christopher Marlowe’s blood-boltered play—conquered much of the land. The Timurids were succeeded by the Moguls of India and the Safavids of Persia. There were periodic rebellions by Afghan tribes, but the outlines of a country that could be identified as Afghanistan only emerged in 1747 when the leader of a minor Pushtun tribe, Ahmad Shah Durrani, formed a confederacy that subsequently invaded the north of India. Only under Dost Mohamed in the 1830s did Afghanistan take on the appearance of a single political nation.

  4 Influenced by the secular revolutions of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Shah Reza in Persia, Amanullah instituted a series of worthy reforms—an elected assembly, a constitutional monarchy, secular education—which delighted the modern “West” but appalled the Islamic authorities who naturally saw in them the end of their feudal, indeed medieval, power. There was insurrection and Amanullah went into Italian exile. His kinsman Mohamed Nadir Khan did not make the same mistakes. He identified himself with the Muslim conservatives and created— a dangerous precedent, this, in a country of such disunity—a new and powerful army. He was assassinated in 1933, to be succeeded by his son Zahir. There followed a brief period of “democracy”—of free elections and a moderately free press—but in 1973 a coup brought Mohamed Daoud to power. Daoud turned to the Soviet Union for economic assistance, promulgated several liberal laws which found favour in the “West”—one encouraged the voluntary removal of the veil from women—but his virtual renunciation of the Durand Line led Pakistan, which had inherited the old frontier of the Raj, to close its border. Afghanistan was now ever more dependent on the Soviet Union.

  5 Literally, “God is Greatest” or “God is the Greatest.” Because in English the expression “is greatest” tends to be used about football teams rather than a divinity, I have used the less accurate but more traditional “God is Great” which more powerfully reflects the faith to Western ears.

  6 True to the maxim that no prison ever loses its original purpose, Po-le-Charkhi was the scene of post-Taliban Afghanistan’s first judicial execution in April 2004. The death sentence of the “bandit” was signed by the country’s pro-American Pushtun president, Hamid Karzai.

  7 Lewis later went on to anchor ITN’s evening news in London but also indulged himself by writing books about dogs and cats, a pastime that was probably more rewarding than reporting Karmal’s press conferences.

  8 Karmal was flown back to Moscow by the Russians in 1986 to be replaced by Mohamed Najibullah, the head of the Khad secret police. He was subsequently deposed by mujahedin factions and took shelter in the UN’s Kabul offices in 1992, three years after the Soviet withdrawal. In 1996, the Taliban took Najibullah from his dubious protectors—“some men have come for you,” one of the UN officials bleakly announced to Moscow’s former servant—and, after emasculating the former secret serviceman, hanged him from a tree along with his brother, Afghan currency bills stuffed into his mouth and pockets. This was, no doubt, the fate that the “night letter”s’ authors had hoped for Karmal—who was to die of cancer in 1996 in Moscow.

  9 From his executive office in London’s Fleet Street—approximately 5,700 kilometres from Kabul—the managing director of Reuters, Gerald Long, dutifully fired off a letter to The Times, condemning me for holding the Kalashnikov. “Much though everyone will understand the natural instinct for self-preservation,” he wrote, “he [Fisk] should have refused to carry the gun. If we are to claim protection for journalists reporting conflict, journalists must refuse to carry arms in any circumstances. Those who are responsible for the safety of journalists will instruct them to avoid avoidable risks. The risk to all journalists of any journalist carrying a gun is in my view greater than the doubtful protection a gun can give him.” Despite the letter’s odd syntax, I could not have agreed more. But how were we journalists supposed to “avoid avoidable risks” in Afghanistan? I had been trying to travel to Mazar on a bus, not to Kabul on a Soviet convoy.

  10 All my dispatch lacked was a photograph for The Times. Major Yuri had taken pictures of me for his personal scrapbook—or for the KGB—but I had none of him. So when I trudged out through the packed snow to the gate of the Soviet army base back in Kabul and caught sight of a Russian hat, complete with red hammer and sickle badge and strap-up fur ear muffs, on a lorry driver’s empty seat, I snatched it from the truck and stuffed it under my brown Afghan shawl. For years, I would proudly produce this memento of Soviet military power at dinners and parties in Beirut. But within ten years the Soviet Union had collapsed and tourists, alas, could buy thousands of identical military hats—along with those of Soviet generals and admirals and batteries of medals won in Afghanistan—in Moscow’s Arbat Street for only a few rubles.

  11 And printed all but one. Ivan Barnes had felt that a paragraph in a feature article in which I recorded how Gavin and I had come across a tribesman outside Jalalabad standing on a box and sodomising a camel was too much for Times readers.

  12 As usual, Churchill saved his own thoughts for his last sentence: “One man was shot through the breast and pouring with blood; another lay on his back kicking and twisting. The British officer was spinning round just behind me, his face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out. Yes, it was certainly an adventure.”

  13 Anxious to avoid incriminating Ali if he was forced to hand over my file on his journey to Peshawar, I sent a suitably oblique message about the policemen to The Times, telling them that I was having “Maigret problems”—a reference to Georges Simenon’s famous French police inspector. But in time of war, journalists sho
uld never be too clever. Sure enough, someone on the foreign desk passed my message to CBC’s London office who immediately sent back a telex sympathising over my “migraine” problems.

  14 At this time, many Afghans also believed that Polish, East German, Czech and other soldiers from the Soviet satellite states were arriving in their country to support Russian troops. These false rumours probably began when Russians were heard speaking German in the Kabul bazaar. But these were Soviet troops from the German-speaking area of the Volga.

  15 It was instructive to note that Soviet journalists had so much difficulty in conveying the reality of this early stage of the war that Moscow newspapers were reduced to printing extracts from Western dispatches, including my own.

  16 But at least Hitchcock’s “Huntley Haverstock” would go on seeing the war with his own eyes. Charles Douglas-Home would later express to me every editor’s fear for a story uncovered. “Now that we have no regular coverage from Afghanistan,” he wrote, “I would be grateful if you could make certain that we do not miss any opportunity for reporting on reliable accounts of what is going on in that country . . . We must not let events in Afghanistan vanish from the paper simply because we have no correspondent there.”

  17 During his time as UN secretary-general, Waldheim had successfully concealed his role in the Wehrmacht’s Army Group E in Yugoslavia, when German troops and their Croatian allies participated in the mass killing of Serbs and Muslims. Although there was no evidence that he took part in these massacres, Waldheim’s denial that he knew that war crimes were taking place in Bosnia at the height of the battles between the Nazis and Tito’s Partisans in 1943 was at odds with my own investigations in the region. When I visited the Bosnian town of Banja Luka in 1988, I discovered that one of Waldheim’s intelligence offices stood next to a wartime execution ground and only 35 kilometres from the extermination camp of Jasenovac—of which Waldheim said he knew nothing at the time. In the Middle East, the UN’s top man would later lecture political leaders on guerrilla warfare, without revealing that he was an expert in the subject. My abiding memory of leaving Bosnia that summer was a call to Ivan Barnes at The Times to tell him that I saw so many parallels in modern-day Yugoslavia with Lebanon on the eve of conflict in 1975 that I believed a civil war would break out in Bosnia in the near future. Barnes laughed at my naiveté. “We’ll report it if it happens,” he told me. In 1992, I was reporting the Bosnian war—for The Independent.

  18 Students of Saddam Hussein’s later bestialisation should note that the U.S. ambassador’s successor, Loy Henderson, wrote to the State Department of Mossadeq that “we are confronted by a desperate, a dangerous situation and a madman who would ally himself with the Russians.” Replace the Russians with al-Qaeda and it could be President Bush or Prime Minister Blair in 2002.

  19 Unsurprisingly, the CIA announced in 1997 that almost all its documents on the Mossadeq coup had been destroyed in the early 1960s—“a terrible breach of faith with the American people,” according to the former CIA director James Woolsey, who in 1993 had publicly promised that the Iran records would be made public. A CIA historian noted that there had been “a culture of destruction” at the agency in the early Sixties.

  20 When he died in 2001, it was Woodhouse’s wartime career that was remembered. His obituary in The Independent (26 February 2001) made no mention of his Persian skulduggery.

  21 Not that the future Ayatollah Khomeini at this stage was opposing the Shah. The American academic James A. Bill wrote of rumours that the future leader of Iran’s Islamic revolution was one of those who urged the preeminent Shia cleric of the day, Ayatollah Sayed Mohamed Hussein Burujirdi, to support the Shah’s political system. Iranian newspaper biographies of Khomeini in 1979 intriguingly left out any reference to his activities more than a quarter of a century earlier.

  22 One of its victims was Massoud Ahmadzadeh, an engineer later executed by the regime. In 1972, Nuri Albala, a French lawyer, who attended his trial, described how Ahmadzadeh pulled up his pullover to show the marks of torture. “The whole of the middle of his chest and his stomach was a mass of twisted scars from very deep burns. They looked appalling . . . His back was even worse. There was a perfect oblong etched into it, formed by a continuous line of scar tissue. Inside the oblong, the skin was again covered in shiny scars from burning.” Ashraf Dehqani, who escaped from prison after torture—she was an opposition militant—wrote of how she was raped by her Savak torturers and had snakes placed on her body.

  23 An almost identical law, passed by Paul Bremer, the U.S. proconsul in Baghdad after America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, brought widespread protests from Iraqis and helped mobilise popular opposition to the U.S. occupation.

  24 There were other odd parallels with America’s later disaster in Iraq. The Shah, while still in power, always insisted that his enemies were “communists” and “fanatics.” President Bush was always claiming that America’s enemies were “Saddam remnants” and “foreign terrorists.” Neither the Shah nor Bush could admit that they faced a popular domestic insurgency.

  25 There were now 3.5 million people out of work—about 25 per cent of the workforce—and 50 per cent of the population lived in grossly overcrowded cities. The food shortages were not just caused by Khomeini’s insistence that Muslims should in future refuse to eat frozen meat; they were brought about by Iran’s proud refusal to import more foreign goods. Yet until the previous winter, the country had been relying on $2 billion of imported foodstuffs.

  26 These changes were nothing to the problems afflicting the editors of the Times Atlas in London. On 13 December, I received a message from Barry Winkleman of Times Books asking for the new names of Pahlavidezh in Kurdistan, Reza Shah Pahlavi reservoir north of Dezful and Shahreza south of Isfahan. In Tehran, he wanted to know, “what was the old name of Taleghani Avenue?” Answer: Takht-e-Jamshid Street.

  27 Ireland in 1920 also comes to mind.

  28 Lessons in journalism. When I filed my report from Tehran that evening, I made a point of telling The Times that they must give due credit to the two American networks and should under no circumstances change the order in which I had placed our names in the dispatch, my own at the end. The foreign desk promised to ensure that this was done. Then, late at night, a sub-editor thought that The Times should have its own reporter in front of the U.S. networks and altered the order of names, giving the impression that the Americans had been “piggybacking” my own interview. I cursed the paper. Jennings, who was to die of cancer in 2005, cursed me. It was days before he forgave me for The Times’s unprofessional behaviour.

  29 It was typical of the bureaucracy of U.S. security that American journalists arriving back at JFK airport in New York from Tehran with the published volumes containing the embassy documents found the books seized by U.S. Customs on the grounds that they contained “restricted” government papers. What the people of Tehran could buy on the street for 15 rials a copy was forbidden to the people of America.

  30 There seemed no end to these revelations. Among the last of the documents released by the government were secret papers inexplicably abandoned in the Iranian eastern desert on 24 April 1980, when the Americans aborted their attempt to rescue the embassy hostages after a C-130 and a U.S. helicopter crashed into each other, killing eight U.S. servicemen. The documents, produced in book form by the Iranians—complete with fearful pictures of the fire-scorched bodies of some of the dead Americans—included dozens of high-altitude and satellite photographs of Tehran, emergency Iranian landing fields, maps, coordinates and codewords which the rescuers were to use in their transmissions to the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz.

  31 By the time he died of heart disease and cancer in 2003, Khalkhali was thought to have sent at least 8,000 men and women to the gallows and the firing squad.

  32 This was believed to be the first time in living memory that Muslims had been stoned to death in the Middle East after a court hearing. Stoning was a common village punishment in Iran and other Is
lamic countries for hundreds of years, and in the nineteenth century, members of the minority Bahai sect were killed with stones in Shiraz and Tehran. But they died at the hands of mobs, not after a judicial trial. Prostitutes were stoned to death long before the time of the Prophet Mohamed and the Bible describes how Jesus Christ tried to stop the practice.

  33 I was taping Khalkhali’s prison tour for CBC radio, and on the cassette in my archives it is still possible to hear the Hojatolislam’s lips smacking over his ice-cream as he discusses the finer points of stoning.

  34 The full flavour of the somewhat portentous statement released in English by the Pars News Agency on 16 December is best conveyed in the following extract: “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful and the Islamic nation of Iran—the Great Satan, the United States, this origin of corruption of West [sic ], after being defeated by our great nation, is trying to give asylum to its corrupt servant, the runaway Shah, and to prevent justice being implemented . . . In order to free itself from its great political deadlock and befool its nation, the U.S. has embarked on a futile effort and has sent the criminal Mohamed Reza out of the U.S. and has delivered to its poppet [sic] Panama. We herebye [sic] announce that to reveal the treacherous plots by the criminal U.S. and to punish it, the spy hostages will be tried.”

  35 Grandson of Genghis Khan who destroyed Baghdad in 1258 as part of the Mongol campaign to subdue the Islamic world.