The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  In 2004, Amnesty International appealed for an investigation into the discovery of at least twelve mass graves found in Algeria since 1998, the latest of them on 29 July, “to establish the truth about these killings.” The world ignored Amnesty’s appeal. At the same time, U.S. Special Forces began operations in the southern Algerian deserts against al-Qaeda—alongside their Algerian opposite numbers. The very men who were suspected of crimes against humanity were now working with the Americans to hunt down those responsible for crimes against humanity. This military cooperation, the Pentagon declared, was part of “the war on terror.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Planet Damnation

  . . . war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts . . . incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

  —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

  CURLED UP IN THE EXTRA CREW SEAT, snug in the womb-like flight deck of the 707, lights down, the night a pageant of stars, the air-conditioning hushing through the vents, I look down onto the hot, darkened desert of Saudi Arabia as the fireflies zip past us. White, yellow, streaking gold, they flick around us at almost a thousand miles an hour—their maximum speed and ours in opposite directions—or they glide below us, mimicking our own progress east. The voices in my cans are bored, tired, sometimes irritated men with the accents of Texas, of Cairo, Gloucestershire and the Hejaz.

  “Mike two zero zero five.” A Midwest voice from out of the great black globe, desperately seeking guidance from a Saudi ground controller. “Requesting higher level to technical area.” Hushhhhhhhh, the air conditioner breathes. The Middle East Airlines pilot turns and grins at me. “He wants to climb en route to the Dhahran air base—I bet the Saudis turn him down.” Hushhhhhhhh. “No higher level available.” A Saudi voice, heavy accent bringing up the “b” in “available,” turning information into an order. Hushhhhhhhh. The 707 crew burst into laughter. “What did you expect?” The American: “Say again? Say again?” More laughter. The stewardess, her gold MEA uniform turned to hospital white in the dim cockpit light, hands me a glass of champagne. “Thought you might need it, Robert,” the Lebanese pilot says. “You’re going to be here for a long time, I think.”

  I sip from the cold glass. Champagne. France. Paris. Boulevards. And I look to the north, up into the darkness to where—as they say—“civilisation” began, to where the ancient Euphrates and Tigris join and curdle their way to the Gulf, and towards that preposterously rich little emirate into which the descendants of all those Sumerians and Umayyads and Seljuks and Abbasids and—yes, I suppose— the Mongols had just arrived with their T-72 tanks, their ZSU-23 tracked, mobile, radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, their Scuds and 155s and their Kalashnikovs and their claim that Kuwait was and still is the nineteenth province of Iraq. Five hundred kilometres south of the Kuwaiti border, the fireflies grow thicker.

  “Ascot.” Plummy, Home Counties. How typical of the Brits to code their aerial call to arms after a racetrack. Here are the descendants of General Maude’s men and Private Charles Dickens’s comrades preparing to liberate more Arabs from the successors of the people they “liberated” in 1917. “Ascot requesting twenty-one hundred.” A tiny yellow pinprick of light in front of us flares, dazzling, spitting past us at Darth Vader velocity. “See him, Robert?” Yes, I saw him, and I look at the radar screen that glows at me from the bottom of an ocean-green sea and I espy a happy little blip heading for Akrotiri. Even Cyprus seems like home now. I had just started a holiday in Paris when Saddam invaded Kuwait. I don’t even want the champagne. Fuck Saddam, I say to myself.

  The old Fisk prediction machine had failed. The glass ball had shown me nothing back in Beirut as I impatiently pounded out my pre-holiday stories of another childish dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over oil theft and overproduction. Hadn’t Kuwait funded Saddam’s war with Iran? True, I had asked in 1988, in one of those interminable centre-pagers that the Times editors liked to consume when conflicts ended, how Saddam now intended to employ his hardened legions. Then I had moved to The Independent and returned to the Hizballah’s struggle against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and the first Palestinian intifada. I stuffed photocopies of my last reports into my bag before I boarded the MEA flight:

  The Independent, July 19th, 1990. By Robert Fisk, Beirut. Kuwait’s rulers responded with alarm yesterday to Iraq’s renewed threats against them, calling an emergency meeting of parliament and dispatching the Kuwaiti foreign minister to appeal for help from Saudi Arabia . . . According to Tareq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, Kuwait had “violated” the Kuwaiti–Iraqi frontier and stolen oil worth $2.4 billion . . . Kuwait was cheating on the OPEC oil production quota system, he said, “in a premeditated and deliberate plan to weaken Iraq and undermine its economy and security.”125

  Premeditated. Deliberate. The Plot. The Baath party machine fed on plots and conspiracies, it wolfed them down, unforgiving, its appetite feeding on suspicion. Kuwait was committing “economic sabotage” against Iraq, Saddam claimed. I only have to read my own reports to see how stupid I was to set off for my Paris vacation. Fisk on 19 July, filing out of Beirut, I now note with remorse, had all the clues. “President Saddam Hussein spoke . . . of a ‘last resort’ against his neighbours, adding that ‘cutting necks’ was better than cutting standards of living.” Iraq faced foreign debt repayments of between $30 and $40 billion. None of the Gulf states, I added, “believe that the United States would interfere militarily to protect them from Iraq. At present, there are only seven American warships in the Gulf.” And that, we now know, is what Saddam believed, too. And so I flew off to Paris to be in the wrong place at the right time. Wasn’t I the same guy who’d been told the Israelis would invade West Beirut in September 1982, that there would be massacres in the camps—and then flown off to a holiday in Ireland? The Israelis wouldn’t attack because Fisk was going on holiday to Ireland. Saddam wouldn’t invade Kuwait because Lord Fisk was flying to Paris. 2 August 1990. “Iraqi forces have invaded Kuwait”—the BBC 8 a.m. news, just as I was heating the pains au chocolat.

  Maybe we had all fallen under Saddam’s spell—or Washington’s spell—in those last critical days before the invasion. Even after all Saddam’s threats against Kuwait, the Americans still thought of the Iraqi dictator as “their” man. Asked in an interview just four days before the invasion whether Saddam’s threats were not like those of Hitler on the eve of the Second World War, Richard Murphy, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, scorned such remarks as “too glib.” Saddam, he said, “is a rough, direct-talking leader who has not hesitated to use force . . . I think it needs a constant dialogue with the Iraqis . . . he acted out of frustration.” Murphy’s interview came four days after America’s ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, held her notorious meeting with Saddam in which she remarked that the dispute was “an Iraqi–Kuwaiti matter.” In later testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Glaspie suggested that the Iraqi transcript of this conversation had been doctored and that, after taking a call from President Mubarak of Egypt, Saddam had returned to their meeting and “promised not to use force, but to act within the diplomatic framework he had set up.”

  As usual, all the portents of disaster were there, had we, journalists as well as diplomats—Arab as well as Western—chosen to read them. A Bahraini minister would later admit to me that even he failed to realise the significance of the Iraqi leader’s words at an Arab summit less than three months before the invasion:

  The first sign of what Saddam Hussein was going to do was shown by him at the Baghdad summit in May . . . In a closed session of the summit, Saddam showed a signal that he was agitated at the state of his economy. “The drop in the price of oil is crippling us,” he said
. He said he could not survive if oil prices stayed where they were. I was there and we heard him say this, but we didn’t realise what it meant. It was King Hussein [of Jordan] who said in public that his country was desperate for economic help and that he needed economic assistance—that is what the world remembers. But they did not hear what Saddam Hussein said.

  Within twenty-four hours of Saddam’s invasion, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia took the “historic decision”—this was the Saudi expression for such an unprecedented step—to invite the Americans to enter the land of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, to defend the kingdom. Arab Gulf ministers and businessmen believed that Fahd would, at most, ask for American air cover if his own over-equipped and under-trained forces had to defend Saudi Arabia, and that the Saudis would fund Arab guerrillas to assist Kuwaiti resistance to the Iraqi occupation, just as it had bankrolled Osama bin Laden’s Arab army against the Soviets in Afghanistan. But bin Laden’s offer of help was spurned—with what fateful consequences we might only imagine. After four decades of humiliation at the hands of Israel—America’s greatest ally in the Middle East—the Arabs would now watch these same Americans arrive on their sacred soil to “defend” them from another Arab leader. If King Fahd was “the custodian of the holy places,” the 82nd Airborne was now the custodian of “the custodian of the holy places.” To many Arabs, this sounded like blasphemy.

  In these early, boiling days of August, I went—as I so often did in the Gulf— to seek the wisdom of Ali Mahmoud, the Associated Press bureau chief in Bahrain, an Egyptian who had been imprisoned under Nasser126 but who possessed a dark prescience when it came to human folly in the Arab world. “No matter what the outcome, the harm is done,” he said. “The fact that the theocratic and nationalist regimes have invited the United States to the Middle East will long be resented and will never be condoned. When this crisis is over, the worst is yet to come.” And six years later, in Afghanistan, I would remember Ali’s words as bin Laden listed for me, one by one, the historical sins of the House of Saud.

  Saddam’s subsequent behaviour—his offer to withdraw from Kuwait if the Israelis withdrew from the occupied Palestinian territories, his seizure of thousands of foreign hostages in Iraq and Kuwait, his formal annexation of the emirate—appeared in the West to be a policy of naivety and illusion. But in the Arab world—to which Saddam was primarily addressing himself—it did not necessarily look like this. For Arabs, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land was as great an enormity—and far longer-lasting—as Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, where the occupiers were at least Arabs.127

  The television pictures of thousands of U.S. troops pouring from their aircraft amid the sandstorms of north-eastern Saudi Arabia would later become one of the most tedious images of the crisis, but in those first days of August 1990 the arrival of the 82nd Airborne and other American troops at Dhahran—about 1,100 kilometres from Mecca and over 300 kilometres from forward elements of the Iraqi invasion force—was the biggest and least-covered story in the world. A visa to the kingdom normally took weeks to obtain; in a secretive, xenophobic oligarchy like Saudi Arabia, which hid the Iraqi invasion from its own citizens for at least twenty-four hours, no state official would dream of allowing foreign journalists to witness an infidel force moving into so sacred a land.128

  Which is how I came to be hunched in the cockpit of MEA’s scheduled 707 flight to Dhahran. Joe Kai, one of the airline’s Beirut station staff and among its smartest managers, realised that even without a visa, an MEA passenger had transit rights through Saudi Arabia—providing he held a ticket with an onward connection to another Arab Gulf state. So he booked me via Saudi Arabia to the small Gulf emirate of Bahrain—and helped The Independent to scoop the world. I would have exactly five hours on the ground at Dhahran. “You’ll see the Americans, habibi,” Joe announced. “They’ll be all over the place.”

  They were. As my MEA flight touched down in Saudi Arabia, I could see dozens of American Bell/Agusta helicopter gunships clustered under the airbase arc lights, their rotor-blades tied back like fans, packed tight like a giant nest of insects, midnight black, awaiting transport north. A row of Galaxies was disgorging more helicopters and piles of white-tipped missiles. A desert-brown Hercules C-130, propellers throbbing, was loading up with missiles for its journey northwest towards the Saudi airfields near the border. Inside the terminal, the Saudis flicked through my passport, glanced without interest at my Bahrain ticket and told me to wait in the lounge.

  And as Joe said, they were all over the place, all those American crews of the U.S. 3rd Airlift Squadron with shoulder flashes which said “Safe, Swift, Sure.” Here we were, apparently on the brink of war, a Christian army landing in Islam’s most sensitive bit of real estate, with a message that had more to do with supermarket delivery times than theology. All this was quite lost on the clean-cut young men and women who stood on the tarmac, gazing east to watch another big Lockheed C-5B howl in from the dawn sky. Every fifteen minutes, the Galaxies arrived, their wheels shrieking under their load of Cobra gunships, their sinister 30-metre wings flopping and bouncing like old birds as they touched down in the desert heat.

  The Americans were cheerful, happy to talk, not at all fazed that a journalist had found them injecting their thousands of troops and choppers into Saudi Arabia. U.S. Air Force Major Curt Morris was waiting for the bus that would take him back to his Galaxy. “We stayed at a real nice hotel in town. We ate some good Arabic food last night. Yeah, we enjoyed it. And it’s been cool the last couple of days.” He smiled a lot. “In a couple of days, we’ll be back in your country—at Mildenhall—we’re looking forward to that.” Tourism. Cool weather, exotic food, home to southern England. On the other side of the airbase, Egyptian troops were filing down the steps of an Egyptair 737, the kind that normally takes holidaymakers to Luxor.

  The Saudis, at least, appeared to understand the ironies of the events that they were witnessing. Their airport militiamen were equipped with coal-black gas masks with little eyeholes. “America says she has come to protect us,” one of them—a thin young man with a pencil moustache—said to me as we watched an RAF transport aircraft land out of the dawn, “Would America have come to protect us if we had no oil?” I knew the answer, with the same certainty that Major Morris brought to his optimism. The Saudi policemen and soldiers I would meet in the coming months were no fools; if they were not university graduates, their religion taught them enough to exercise the greatest concern—if not downright suspicion—towards the dangerous leap of imagination that the American arrival in their country represented.

  American, Egyptian and Moroccan troops—from this very early stage, the U.S. forces managed to acquire religious camouflage from the most loyal of their Arab allies—were already being housed in makeshift camps far out in the desert. The border town of Khafji had been partly evacuated and turned into a barracks. So had Hafr al-Batn, the lorry-park town farther west where the territory of Saudi Arabia runs along the frontier of Iraq itself, whose airbase and residence blocks, built back in 1985 at a cost of $5 billion, could house 70,000 soldiers. So had the local Aramco oil workers’ camp. Major Morris stood next to a tall, blond female soldier, her hair in a chignon, another item of American culture with which to shock the Saudis. “I sure don’t want to think what will happen if our people have to wear their anti-gas clothes when the heat really gets up,” Morris said. “Oh boy, I tell you, people will die of heat-stroke in those things.”

  When my Gulf Air flight took off for Bahrain after dawn, I could see that the whole of the Dhahran airbase had been surrounded by batteries of silver-and-white missiles. From my passenger seat, I shot several pictures of the lines of Galaxies and their brood of helicopters. History in the Middle East was moving too quickly to be grasped. Was it like this, I wondered—and these were parallels of surprise rather than scale—when the British went to war in 1914? We had no idea then what chaos the imperial powers of Europe would visit upon themselves. Who would have tho
ught, just a fortnight ago, that Kuwait would disappear, that the British and Americans would be holding the line against Iraq in the sands upon which the Prophet Mohamed walked, that their battle, when it was joined, would lead them all the way—thirteen years later—to the most dangerous conflict the Middle East had witnessed since the fall of the Ottoman empire?

  From Bahrain, I hitched a ride over the Gulf with my old mates among the U.S. television network crews with whom, only a few years earlier, I had patrolled the hot, fish-crowded waters when Iraq was our friend, when Iraq could attack an American warship and get away with it. Only two years ago, I reflected as our little white commercial aircraft buzzed over the soft waves with their shoals of flying fish, Saddam was still our friend, still the “rough, direct-talking leader” who he was to remain until he decided to steal Kuwait. Only a few months earlier, when Mubarak had packed a bunch of senators off to see Saddam, they had agreed that the Iraqi dictator’s real problem was with the press. Much laughter. Yes, Saddam needed a public relations consultant. But now the PR men were employed by the Kuwaiti royal family and by the overweight commander of the Saudi “Allied Joint Forces Commander,” his Royal Highness Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, nephew of King Fahd and son of Prince Sultan, the Saudi defence minister.