The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  36 For seventy years, Samuel Martin’s gravestone stood in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: “In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn., Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire.” In the gales of shellfire that swept over Basra during the 1980–88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many of the gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months that followed the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming the broken headstones and even the brass fittings of the central memorial stolen.

  37 Lawrence made no mention of his confident assertion to a cabinet committee two years earlier that “in Irak the Arabs expect the British to keep control.”

  38 The Germans had no more success in Iraq than any other Western powers over the past century. They flew 24 Heinkels and Messerschmitts into Mosul but lost their top Luftwaffe liaison officer in a dogfight over Baghdad. Only when Iraqi resistance to British forces was collapsing did Hitler issue his Military Directive No. 30 on the Middle East. “The Arab liberation movement in the Middle East is our natural ally against England,” it announced. “In this connection the rising in Iraq has special importance . . .”

  39 Mesopotamia had been the seat of kindly rulers, but it is not difficult to find precedents for cruelty. During the African slave revolt in Iraq from 869 to 883, the Caliph Moutaded failed to persuade a slave leader called Mohamed “Chemilah” to denounce his comrades. “Even if you have my flesh roasted,” Chemilah is said to have replied, “I will never reveal the name of the person in favour of whom I administered the oath and whom I recognise as an imam.” The caliph said that he would administer the punishment Chemilah had just designated. The unfortunate man was said to have been “skewered on a long iron rod which penetrated him from his anus to his mouth; he was kept like this over a huge fire until he died, heaping invective and curses on the caliph, who attended his torture.” Another version of his demise says that he was tied between three spears, placed over a fire and turned like a chicken “until his skin began to crackle.” Then he was tied to a gallows in Baghdad.

  40 In The Sphinx and the Commissar, Heikal told of Nikita Khrushchev’s reaction to his cigar-smoking. “Suddenly Khrushchev turned on me. ‘Are you a capitalist?’ he demanded. ‘Why are you smoking a cigar?’ ‘Because I like cigars,’ I said. But Khrushchev seized my cigar and crushed it out in the ashtray. I protested. ‘A cigar is a capitalist object,’ said Khrushchev . . . The next time I interviewed Khrushchev, in 1958, I left my cigar outside. Khrushchev asked me where it was. ‘I want to crush it again,’ he said.”

  41 See pp. 162ff.

  42 Simon Sebag Montefiore found other parallels. Gori, Stalin’s Georgian birthplace, was barely 800 kilometres north of Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit. Both men were raised by strong, ambitious mothers, abused by their fathers; both were promoted by revered potentates whom they ultimately betrayed.

  43 Impossible though it was to assess Iraqi public opinion under Saddam, I could speak to old Iraqi friends in their homes. In a feature article filed to The Times on 30 July 1980, I noted that many Iraqis “admitted even in private that stability under President Hussain [sic] is preferable to the social chaos that might occur if the freedoms of liberal western thought were suddenly introduced.” Twenty-four years later, their fears of anarchy proved all too real.

  44 Mohtashemi was also imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but told me years later that “none of this hindered or affected my beliefs or my determination and this made me even more resolute in my decision to fight and struggle against the United States of America, Israel and all the other proxy governments and states.”

  45 Days before the siege, I had visited the embassy to request a visa to Iran and was asked to leave my second passport at the mission. After the fire, I had to send a message to Ivan Barnes from Beirut to say that I “think we have to assume my second passport now smouldering with the charred corpses in the embassy.” I decided I would use my first passport to acquire an Iranian visa from diplomats at Iran’s embassy in Beirut “in the hope that they don’t blow up too, making Fisky stateless” and—if no visa was forthcoming—that I would try to enter Iran without one.

  46 My “utterly reprehensible” journalism at least had the merit of putting both sides’ noses out of joint. In the summer of 1980, Tony Alloway, the Times stringer in Tehran, told Ivan Barnes, the foreign news editor, that he could not obtain accreditation for me in Tehran because Iranian officials “were extremely upset both by the arrival of Robert Fisk in Tehran without proper visa . . . and by the copy he filed and vowed never to let him in again.” The visa problem had been caused by the burning of my second passport in Iran’s own embassy in London.

  47 Many years later, Naccache would tell me that he and his gunmen—another Lebanese, two Iranians and a Palestinian—had “tried to attack Bakhtiar’s apartment but we failed because the door was armoured. We just had little pistols. If you check the place, you don’t know if it’s armoured or not. There was a shootout with the French gendarmes who were guarding him. Two people were killed; I was wounded in the arm and thigh. No one saw this woman. The bullet went through her door and unfortunately hit the woman in the head. The shootout was with the policemen. When I was in hospital, the judge said there was a woman killed. I asked: What woman? I didn’t understand. I said that’s very bad. I felt very badly. We hadn’t foreseen that at all. She was innocent but immediately I proposed, according to the principles of Islam, that funds should be paid to the victim’s family in recompense, also to the family of the dead policeman.” Naccache said that he led his men to kill Bakhtiar because “I felt there was a danger of a repeat of the coup against Mossadeq. That’s why we decided to attack Bakhtiar. He was the head of a plot to do a coup d’état against the revolution and come back to Iran . . . I had no personal feelings against Bakhtiar. It was purely political. It was not an attempted assassination. A sentence of death passed by the Iranian revolutionary tribunal is carried out as an execution.” According to Naccache, the proof of Bakhtiar’s coup plot was furnished by an Iranian military officer who handed to the authorities the names of other officers involved with Bakhtiar; they were arrested and more than a hundred were executed.

  48 For years, the Iranian authorities openly accused Bakhtiar of planning a coup. A booklet published by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance in Tehran in 1981 stated that he had been “setting the scene for his 1953 style return to Iran. By this time the American administration probably was thinking of an American Iran without the Shah . . .”

  49 See p. 814.

  50 By 1987, the year before the Iran–Iraq War ended, the American government believed Iran had only five F-14s able to fly, along with just fifteen Phantoms.

  51 We had to be careful with the freedom of reporting we were sometimes able to enjoy. Hewitt and his crew at one point hired a river boat to film on the Shatt al-Arab. Stopped by the Iraqi authorities, the boat’s owner was taken away. “He will be punished,” a remorseful Hewitt was told. He was advised that any protest on the boatman’s behalf would only make this unknown “punishment” worse.

  52 He claimed, accurately, that the Prince of Wales would pronounce “thousands and thousands of pounds” as “thicends and thicends of pines” and was able to perform variants of regal accents in situations of enormous peril.

  53 At first, according to Al-Ahram’s military affairs correspondent, the Iraqis sent European arms agents to Cairo to purchase the munitions “because they did not want us to know we were dealing with them. But when they asked for Soviet heavy artillery ammunition . . . we knew it was the Iraqis. We told the Iraqis that we Egyptians are a proud people, a dignified people, we must have respect. The Iraqis had to come to us in person and they did. They got the shells and they received our combat experience.”

  54 Far from gloating over the attack, the Irani
an “war information headquarters” in Tehran called it a “serious and dangerous trap” laid by the Iraqis to draw Washington and Moscow into the war.

  55 In an emotional interview in which he kept breaking into tears—to the consternation of his press secretary, Anne O’Leary—U.S. ambassador to Bahrain Sam Zakhem insisted to me that “we never before had reason to feel the Iraqis would attack an American ship . . . our people feel it was a mistake. We paid very dearly for that mistake because the nature of the American people is to give others the benefit of the doubt.” If the Soviet Union wished to prove its own good intentions in the Gulf, Zakhem said, it could “stop the flow of arms of the eastern bloc nations to Iran . . . It’s Iran which has refused to come to the negotiating table.” So Iraq was “friendly”— and Iran had to be deprived of weapons to defend itself.

  56 Foreign correspondents on assignment add datelines to their names so that readers immediately know from where they are reporting. Sending dispatches from the oceans of the world is more problematical. I dutifully—and accurately—gave my dateline in the Gulf as “51 degrees 40 mins E, 26 degrees 40 mins N.” The sub-editors of The Times changed this, with my permission, to “At Sea”—which pretty much summed up how most of us felt about the story.

  57 James Cameron, one of my great journalistic heroes, describes precisely the same phenomenon in his brilliant account of the Korean War landing at Inchon in 1950. In the middle of the military landing craft heading for shore, he wrote, was “a wandering boat marked in great letters: ‘PRESS,’ full of agitated and contending correspondents, all of us trying to give an impression of determination to land in Wave One, while seeking desperately to contrive some reputable method of being found in Wave Fifty.”

  58 Anderson would be held in Lebanon for almost seven years. He has recounted his ordeal in Den of Lions (Hodder, 1994). The author’s account of Anderson’s captivity can be found in Pity the Nation, pp. 584–627, 654–62.

  59 Chalabi would be convicted in Amman in 1992 for a $60 million banking fraud—which he denied after fleeing Jordan in the trunk of a friend’s car—and eleven years later, the same Chalabi, now leader of the CIA-funded Iraqi National Congress, was the Pentagon’s choice as the post-Saddam leader of Iraq. He was unceremoniously dropped after a public opinion poll suggested that only 2 per cent of Iraqis supported him. By 2005, however, he had become a deputy prime minister of “new” Iraq.

  60 The most comprehensive account of North’s life and career, though it makes some naive errors about the Middle East and adopts a pro-Israeli view of the region, is Ben Bradlee Junior’s Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North (Grafton Books, London, 1988).

  61 And not just because more Western nations were taking Iraq’s side in the war. At least 317 Iranians had been killed during the annual haj at Mecca on 31 July 1987, shot down—so Iran claimed—by Saudi police. Initial reports suggested that the pilgrims were battered and crushed in a stampede through the narrow, oppressive streets near the great mosque as an Iranian political demonstration became fused with religious emotion and anger at the presence of black-uniformed Saudi security police. In 1986, the Saudis said they had discovered explosives in the bags of 113 male and female Iranian pilgrims, but they had received a promise from President Ali Khamenei that this would not be repeated in 1987.

  62 A measure of the Iranian victory may be gained from the number of senior officers captured in the attack. Among them were Col. Yassir al-Soufi, commander of the 94th Infantry Brigade, Lt. Col. Mohamed Reza Jaffar Abbas of the 7th Corps’ Rangers Special Forces, Staff Lt. Col. Walid Alwan Hamadi, second-in-command of the 95th Infantry Brigade, Lt. Col. Madjid al-Obeydi, second-in-command of the 20th Artillery regiment, Lt. Col. Selim Hammoud Arabi, commander of the 16th Artillery Regiment and Lt. Col. Jaber Hassan al-Amari, commander of the 3rd Infantry battalion, 19th Brigade. From their names, at least three of these officers were Shia Muslims.

  63 A captured pilot from the Iraqi 49th Air Force squadron at Nasiriyah, Abdul Ali Mohamed Fahd, said that Iran’s air defences had improved significantly over the previous eleven months and forced Iraqi bombers to fly at much higher altitudes. His MiG-23 was apparently shot down by one of Oliver North’s Hawk missiles. The same pilot also claimed that Soviet, French and Indian technicians were advising the Iraqi squadrons at Nasiriyah and that the Iraqis often used a Kuwaiti airbase to refuel during their bombing missions against Iranian oil tankers.

  64 The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, had initially guaranteed their authenticity. I was passing by the foreign desk in London en route back to Beirut when the Reuters “bulletin” bell began to ping in the wire room and Ivan Barnes seized the copy. “Ah-ha!” he bellowed. “The diaries are forgeries!” The West German government, as it then was, stated that a forensic analysis confirmed the documents were postwar.

  “Why don’t you go and tell Charlie?” Ivan suggested. “I think Murdoch’s with him at the moment.” Barnes, who like me had always suspected the diaries were false, sat back with a wolfish smile on his face. “Let me know how they react,” he said. I padded round to the editor’s office and there was Charles Douglas-Home behind his desk and, on a sofa to his right, Rupert Murdoch. “Well?” Charlie asked. We had all been expecting a statement from the German government that morning. “They say they’re forgeries, Charlie,” I said, looking at the editor and pretending to ignore the owner of the newspaper. Charlie looked at his boss and so did I. “Well, there you go,” Murdoch giggled after scarcely a moment of reflection. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” That, I tell Grigg, also pretty much sums up American policy in the Middle East.

  65 Storm Center: The USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655, co-authored by Rogers and his wife, Sharon, and published by the Naval Institute Press at Annapolis, was later the subject of fierce debate among other U.S. naval officers, including the commander of the USS Sides.

  66 The Vincennes was named after the south-western Indiana city whose French-built fort was captured by American forces under George Rogers Clark in 1779. The ill-fated Stark bore the name of General John Stark, who fought at Bunker Hill in 1775.

  67 “Monsieur Gayant, seigneur de Cantin, nommé Jehan Gelon, délivra au IXe siècle la Ville de Douai assiégée par les Northmans” (Gayant, Lord of Cantin, who was called Jehan Gelon, freed the City of Douai which was under siege by the Norsemen in the ninth century). Bill, who always carried a small French dictionary with him as a soldier, wrote sadly on the back of the card: “Don’t know what this means.”

  68 The politics of partition necessitate some statistics here. The 36th (Ulster) Division were almost all Protestants from the nine northernmost counties of Ireland—six of them now constituting Northern Ireland—who would have had no sympathy with the 1916 Dublin Rising. Their appalling casualties of 32,186 killed, wounded and missing were inflicted on the Somme and at Ypres. The 10th and 16th Irish Divisions, most of whom were Irish Catholics—many born in Britain—fought in Gaza and Palestine as well as the Somme and Flanders. Together, they lost 37,761 killed, wounded and missing. In all, 35,000 Irishmen are estimated to have been killed in the 1914–18 war.

  69 After I first wrote about my father’s billets in Louvencourt in The Independent, I received a letter from a reader who said she now owned the château. She was British and told me that many of the officers had carved their names on the table and walls in the basement. Bill’s name, of course, was not among them.

  70 The Armenians, descended from ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD 301, and had to defend their faith against the Persians, who were Zoroastrian before becoming Muslim, and then the Arabs. The Turks arrived from central Asia in the eleventh century. Armenia and Greece were both Christian nations within the Ottoman empire.

  71 When Enver held the city of Edirne during the calamitous Balkan wars, thousands of babies were named after the future mass murderer; Enver Hoxha, the mad dictator of Albania, was one, Anwar Sadat,
the sane dictator of Egypt, another.

  72 The powerful Anglo-Armenian Association lobby group had been founded by Lord Bryce in 1890 and maintained constant pressure on the British government to ensure equal rights for Armenians within the Ottoman empire. A special supplement to the Anglo-Armenian Gazette of April 1895, in the possession of the author, contains a harrowing account of the massacre of Armenians at Sasun, a tub-thumping message of support from Lord Gladstone—“mere words, coming from the Turk, are not worth the breath spent in uttering them”—and a demand for a European-officered gendarmerie to protect “Armenian Christians.” Their religion, rather than their minority status in the empire, was clearly the spur to British sentiment.

  73 At a conference in Beirut in 2001, Professor Wolfgang Wippermann of the Free University of Berlin introduced evidence that many German officers witnessed the Armenian massacres without intervening or helping the victims.

  74 Strangely enough, the French national airline Air France had no qualms about discussing the Armenian bloodbath. In 1999, its own onboard airline magazine ran an article about a photographic exhibition of the mass killings, referring to “the genocide, still denied by the Turks today.” Yet Air France continued to be allowed to fly unhindered to Turkey.

  75 Rivka Cohen, the Israeli ambassador in Yerevan, said on 5 March 2002 that while the Armenian genocide was “a tragedy,” the (Jewish) Holocaust “was a unique phenomenon, since it had always been planned and aimed to destroy the whole nation.” Understandably, the Armenian government in Yerevan issued a diplomatic note of protest.

  76 There are no conspiracies on The Independent’s copydesk; just a tough, no-nonsense rule that our articles follow a grammatical “house” style and conform to what is called “normal usage.” And the Jewish Holocaust, through “normal usage,” takes a capital “H.” Other holocausts don’t. No one is quite sure why—the same practice is followed in newspapers and books all over the world, although it was the centre of a row in the United States, where Harvard turned down a professorial “Chair of Holocaust and Cognate Studies” because academics rightly objected to the genocide of other peoples—including the Armenians—being heaped in a bin called “cognate.” But none of this answered the questions of my Armenian friend. To have told him his people didn’t qualify for a capital “H” would have been as shameful as it would have been insulting.