by Robert Fisk
162 Only six months before the attacks on the United States, it is fascinating to see that bin Laden was regarded as a secondary threat, lumped in with Russian criminals and nuclear expertise from the former Soviet Union. Saddam’s regime—which had no weapons of mass destruction at all—was still touted as the greatest danger. Once Afghanistan was bombarded and Osama had escaped, the same scenario was reintroduced by Messrs. Bush and Blair in 2002. But then again, Osama bin Laden’s existence was not likely to generate the obscene profits in weapons sales procured at Abu Dhabi and other arms fairs in the Middle East.
163 Palestinians were still trying to discover the nature of a gas canister now regularly used by Israelis, containing what they called “brown smoke.” Obviously feared by Palestinian protesters, it was described as having a far more potent effect even than the Federal Laboratories Pennsylvania-made gas. At least one “brown smoke” gas canister which I examined in Bethlehem was covered in Hebrew markings and carried the code 323 1-99. It did not appear to be of U.S. manufacture.
164 During my investigations, I was given a genuine end-user certificate from the state of Oman in the Gulf, already signed by the authorities. If I had wished to transport arms to the Middle East, I had only to write in the weapons of my choice for the shipment to be “legal.”
165 Michael Hitchcock, a press officer for the Department of Trade and Industry, told me in 1987 that “our policy is we don’t discuss whether a company has applied and been granted a licence because it was for civil use. We would consult the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office if we thought it necessary.”
166 The Israelis learned how to sell weapons by learning how to change their shape. Their first conflict—their war of independence, which drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel—was fought with the help of two Sherman tanks, two elderly Cromwells and ten French tanks made around 1935. The Israelis modified the gun barrels to lengthen their range and fitted pieces of new armour to the structure. By the 1950s, they were still buying up battlefield junk from the wreckage of the Second World War, including tanks from Italy and even the Far East. Many were simply cannibalised to re-create whole working tanks for the country’s new army. Some of the Shermans, painstakingly upgraded, later fought in the 1967 Middle East war and even the 1973 conflict. They were then discarded—as gifts to Israel’s brutal proxy “South Lebanon Army” militia, and to Uganda.
167 Israel, according to former army officers in Tel Aviv, shipped 2,000 Kalashnikov rifles and hundreds of RPG-7 anti-tank rockets to Nicaragua in 1983, all captured from PLO guerrillas during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the previous year.
168 In 1994, the Cameron Commission of Inquiry was appointed to look into alleged arms transactions between Armscor, the South African state weapons procurement body, and Christian militia groups between 1983 and 1993. After the Lebanese war ended in 1990, the Phalange were accused of sending surplus arms to Croatia and Slovenia at the height of the Balkans conflict, an accusation that became all too credible when the Yugoslav navy, which was in Serbian hands, seized a vessel carrying the weapons through the Adriatic, stored them in a warehouse in the port of Bar and then sent a bill to the Phalange for storage charges. According to the Lebanese government, the weapons included four French-made Gazelle helicopter gunships, several patrol boats, artillery shells and multi-barrelled rocket-launchers.
169 I have referred readers in the Preface to my own book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the Nation; those who want to understand the wider context to the Israeli killing of almost 200 Lebanese civilians in April 1996, including the massacre at Qana, can turn to the new British and American editions of the book, especially pp. 669–89.
170 Irish UN troops in Bradchit concluded that the booby-trap had been laid by the Israelis to kill Hizballah guerrillas attempting to infiltrate the Israeli-occupied zone. The Israelis denied planting the bomb and—given the impossibility of proving that it was Israel’s handiwork—the guerrillas committed an act of folly by retaliating when they must have known this would unleash an Israeli bombardment of civilians in southern Lebanon.
171 Even tragedy can contain its own dark humour. Some days after the destruction of the ambulance, Lindval called me in Beirut to say that the Fijians had unearthed the second, unexploded Hellfire. “What on earth did you ask the Fijians to do with it?” he asked me. I had asked them to send me the metal code sheet from the fuselage. Lindval was not amused. “Seems they didn’t understand you, Robert,” he said. “They thought you wanted the entire missile—I found them loading it onto a truck to bring to you in Beirut.” I had a brief image of my landlord’s horrified face as the entire projectile was delivered by UN soldiers to my apartment door. Hopefully defused.
172 Doubly so for Boeing. The executive’s question was used as one of the headlines on my report in The Independent on Sunday on 18 May 1997.
173 The Defense Department’s inspector general later found that 188 Stinger missiles had “gone missing” from U.S. armouries during the 1991 Gulf conflict. In the same year, the U.S. military’s General Accounting Office admitted that another 2,185 missiles—Stingers, Dragons and Redeyes—had disappeared from European U.S. weapons storage sites. Where did they go?
174 For the U.S. military, this was just a small provocation. It was the virtually unchallenged ability of Israel to rifle through U.S. military stocks that so upset serving and retired officers in the U.S. armed forces who, in the course of a two-week investigation by The Independent into arms transfers to Israel, spoke of their fury at watching thousands of tanks and armour taken from U.S. inventories over a period of twenty years, and transferred to Israel despite objections from the Department of Defense. In the late 1970s, according to one officer who was serving in northern Europe, senior U.S. military personnel objected to a vast quantity of armour being withdrawn from Germany for transfer to Israel. “I was in the headquarters in Germany with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and he went through the roof,” he told me. “We were ordered to hand over hundreds of tanks at very short notice—and this was at the height of the Cold War. We were opposite the Fulda Gap and the Warsaw Pact was on the other side and we were screaming that we were depleting our assets at a moment of high European tension. The general was saying ‘fuck them’—he used those words—but he was excluded from the decision. The Department of Defense was directed under orders to turn over the tanks. We didn’t do it voluntarily.” An air force officer recalled for me how, around the same period, he returned from leave to his naval air station in the United States to discover that half his squadron of aircraft were being repainted with Israeli markings. “We only had fifty per cent of our squadron left—I was flabbergasted,” he said. “I wasn’t consulted. I was told ‘They’ve got to go to Israel—we’re out of business for a while.’” Officially, arms transfers to Israel have to undergo a period of thirty days’ formal notice. Major U.S. defence equipment with a value of more than $14 million requires congressional notification—amounts of less than $14 million do not. “Anyone on the Hill knows that challenging any transfers to Israel is not going to help their political career,” a former American army officer commented to me. “The Israeli lobby is very, very powerful. It’s not going to be criticised.” In fact, after it used U.S. Navy anti-tank cluster bombs on civilian areas of west Beirut in 1982, Israel was taken to task in Washington. President Reagan briefly held up deliveries from Dover Air Force Base of U.S. F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers to Israel while congressional hearings investigated the use of the cluster bombs in Lebanon. But even after classified material was edited out of their final report, the State Department refused to publish the full findings on the grounds that the entire sessions were “classified.” “Classified” was a word that occurred fairly often in Washington when I asked about weapons transfers. The congressional branch of the National Archives contains numerous references to classified “legally approved transfers” to Israel. But they are not open to public inspection. No one in Washin
gton was able to explain to me in June 1997, for example, why Israel needed—and had been given—98,000 new artillery shells from U.S. stocks. An American defence “analyst”—a breed that would normally court publicity but in this case did not— remarked to me that “an awful lot of shells are transferred to Israel and nobody knows a hell of a lot about it. The military here is downsizing and wants to get rid of some ordnance because it’s old. But an equal amount of good material just leaves our stocks for Israel without a by-your-leave. It goes through the legal channels but no one reports it, no one questions it, no one asks where it’s used or how it’s used. And if it kills innocent folk, do you think the Clinton administration is going to make a song and dance about it? They’ll say that criticising Israel may ‘damage the peace process.’ Every assurance has been given to Israel that it will not be touched.”
175 A British diplomat would remark in 1983 that to witness the king’s unhappy personal life was “a deeply saddening experience.” Even then, he regarded Hussein as a sick man, suffering a heart condition and exhausted after nine hours of negotiations with Yassir Arafat. The king’s fear at the time was that the Israelis would annex the West Bank and drive tens of thousands of Palestinians eastwards across the Jordan River. The same diplomat told me that “the Israelis would prefer a radical Palestinian state in Jordan to a friendly Western state under the Hashemites on the grounds that no one would expect them to make concessions to an extremist PLO nation on the east bank but that America would constantly be demanding negotiations with Hussein if Jordan survived in its present form.” He was constantly at a loss, he said, to know why the Americans failed to understand what was going on in the Middle East. “They have enormous resources for tapping information, but they never seem to interpret it correctly.” Not much was to change in the next twenty years.
176 There was nothing new in Hussein’s propensity to shock. In 1987, just after the revelation that Dr. Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary General and then president of Austria, had been an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht’s brutal Army Group “E” in Bosnia during the Second World War—a role he had hitherto carefully concealed—the king invited Waldheim on a state visit to Jordan. Hussein took his guest by helicopter to the heights of Um Quiess to overlook the Israeli-occupied West Bank, awarded him the Hussein bin Ali medal—named after his grandfather—and praised Waldheim for his patriotism, integrity, wisdom and “noble human values.” Watching him inspect a Jordanian guard of honour at Amman airport, I couldn’t help noticing Waldheim’s heels snapping smartly to attention, arms straight and head bowed, when saluted by the commander of the Royal Guard. German army discipline obviously ran deep.
177 In 2004, King Abdullah would in turn dismiss Hamzah as crown prince.
178 For an account of the killings and destruction of Hama, see the author’s Pity the Nation, pp. 181–87.
179 Tveit even found an ex-Phalangist militiaman who took him up a hillside east of Beirut and pointed to a former Christian Phalangist barracks, describing how 300 Palestinians whom the Israelis handed over to them after the camp massacre had been imprisoned in the barracks in a series of containers. The Phalangists had tried to use their Israeli-provided prisoners as hostages for Christians whom they believed to be in Muslim militia hands. But there had been no prisoner swap, so three weeks after the Sabra and Chatila mass murder, these 300 Palestinians were taken from the containers and machine-gunned to death in a mass grave. The grave, the Phalangist told Tveit, was beside a chapel in the barracks of what was now a Lebanese army base.
180 In the hours after the attacks, these were the first, highly exaggerated, casualty figures.
181 Arab elections are among the quaintest of the Middle East’s attempts to reproduce the Western-style “democracy” they claim they already possess. In 1993, for example, Mubarak “won” 96.3 per cent of the vote for his third six-year term in office (his fourth six-year victory in 1999 brought him a measly 93.79 per cent). His predecessor, Anwar Sadat, claimed a thumping 99.95 per cent victory for political reform in a 1974 referendum. Saddam Hussein supposedly gained 99.96 per cent for his presidency in 1993—the identity of the errant 0.04 per cent of disloyal voters was not disclosed, although they had obviously thought better by 2002 when Saddam’s minions announced a clear 100 per cent vote. In 1999, Hafez Assad of Syria scored what the official Syrian news agency called a “slashing victory” of 99.987 per cent for a new seven-year term in office—a mere 219 citizens voted against him—though he did not live to complete it. After this, Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s 73.8 per cent victory in Algeria in 1999 and Mahmoud Abbas’s 62.3 per cent as Palestinian president in 2005 were persuasive enough to believe. In 1992, a popular joke in Damascus had it that George Bush Senior, facing defeat at the polls in the United States, asked the Syrian security services to arrange an Assad-style victory for the Republicans; they did, and Americans duly voted 99 per cent—for Assad.
182 This may, however, be a poor translation from the Koran, in which we find in Sura 6, ayah 32: “And this world’s life is not but a play and an idle sport, and certainly the abode of the hereafter is better than those who guard [against evil].” Sura 6, ayah 70 advises: “And leave those who have taken their religion for a play and an idle sport and whom this world’s life has deceived . . .”
183 The plans for an assault on Afghanistan had bitter historical precedents. Tom Graham, V.C., the novel that so influenced Bill Fisk just before the First World War, was about the Great Game, which was supposed to be about frontiers—about keeping a British-controlled Afghanistan between the Indian empire and the Russian border—but it was a history of betrayals. Those we thought were on our side turned out to be against us. Until 1878, we had thought the Amir Sher Ali Khan of Kabul was our friend, ready to fight for the British empire—just as a man called Osama bin Laden would later fight the Russians on “our” behalf—but he forbade passage to British troops and encouraged the robbery of British merchants. He had “openly and assiduously endeavoured . . . to stir up religious hatred against the English,” our declaration of war had announced on 21 November 1878. The Amir’s aiding and abetting of the murder of the British Embassy staff was “a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people,” Sir Frederick Roberts announced in 1879 when the British occupied Kabul. The Amir’s followers “should not escape . . . penalty and . . . the punishment inflicted should be such as will be felt and remembered . . . All persons convicted of bearing a part [in the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts.” This truly Victorian warning was a preamble to the words we were now hearing from Bush.
184 The ritual of head-chopping was most graphically described by an expatriate Irishman who witnessed a triple execution in Jeddah in 1997. “Standing to the left of the first prisoner, and a little behind him, the executioner focused on his quarry . . . I watched as the sword was drawn back with the right hand. A one-handed back-swing of a golf club came to mind . . . The down-swing begins. How can he do it from that angle? . . . the blade met the neck and cut through it like . . . a heavy cleaver cutting through a melon . . . a crisp, moist smack. The head fell and rolled a little. The torso slumped neatly. I see now why they tied wrists to feet . . . the brain had no time to tell the heart to stop, and the final beat pumped a gush of blood out of the headless torso onto the plinth.”
185 I later reflected on the odd fact that while my passport and credit cards and money—of obvious use to refugees—had been left in my bag, my contacts book had been among the items taken. Two days later I returned to Kila Abdulla, met the sheikh of the village and offered $100— a very large amount for anyone in that region of Baluchistan—for the return of my all-valuable journalist’s book of names and numbers. It was never produced. Had it been thrown away? Or had someone else bought it?
