The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Across the gently-moving waves we flew, over motorised dhows whose symmetry and curved prows demonstrated the fragility of another age and culture. But even travelling at more than 100 miles an hour above the water, the perspiration ran in streams down our faces and backs. After five or six hours in 130 degrees of heat, the sea and the sky became a yellow-grey fog in which only the sun retained its faded gold. How could anyone contemplate a war in this natural oven? The evidence was there. One hundred kilometres out of Dubai, we found the French frigate Commandant Ducuing taking on supplies from a freighter, a giant tricolour heaving from her stern, her deck-crew huddled around an anti-aircraft gun. The water played sunlight off its hull number—F795—and then it was lost in the mist. Turn 180 degrees in the haze and there is the Ducuing again, making steam, propellers frothing the grey sea green.

  Through the humidity glided other reminders of the Iraqi invasion to the northwest, empty oil tankers heading east out of the Gulf, a natural contradiction, since they should head west empty and leave east heavy with Kuwaiti crude, their Plimsoll line beneath the surface. The T. M. Regulus of Singapore, miserably high in the water, showing its rust-red hull, lay at anchor in the fog; even the old Kuwaiti tanker Chesapeake City , which—reflagged as an American tanker—had been a symbol of America’s protection from Iranian “aggression” in the tanker war only two years earlier, was riding the swell off Bahrain. In the banks of mist, we even found a cargo ship, its hold and decks piled high with Toyotas, yet more luxuries for the richest emirate in the Gulf, now fleeing for Hormuz and the open seas. The good days were over.

  Save for the few Western journalists marooned in Kuwait itself—Victor Mallet of the Financial Times was among them and emerged across the desert with a powerful story of brutality and fear129—the world’s reporters now filed from Baghdad or from the uninvaded cities of the Arab Gulf. From there, we tried to leaven the propaganda war with question marks, little hand grenades of doubt that might prompt the reader to ask as many questions as we did in the long dry evenings of steak and orange juice in Saudi Arabia. Kidnappers in Lebanon had long demanded the release of seventeen Shia Muslims imprisoned in Kuwait in return for American hostages, including my old friend Terry Anderson, AP’s bureau chief in Beirut. Two of the fifteen had been freed. All were members of the Islamic Dawa party. Had Iraq liberated the other fifteen? Answer: no, they had escaped. Thirteen years later, the Dawa would become a political party in “liberated” Iraq, demanding elections from the Americans who seemed oblivious to the fact that the Dawa members to whom they politely talked had been the “super-terrorists” of the 1980s. Diplomats said that Palestinians living in Kuwait had connived with the Iraqi intelligence service, supplying them with the home addresses of Kuwaiti officials prior to the invasion. Was the PLO helping Saddam to occupy Iraq? Answer: No, because some Palestinians even joined the slowly forming Kuwaiti resistance movement. But Iraqi-trained Palestinians had later been brought down from Baghdad and could be seen with guns on the streets of Kuwait. And what an opportunity this presented for the now-exiled Kuwaiti royal family—who could one day return to their emirate and demand the expulsion of the 300,000 Palestinian “traitors,” some of whom had been born there. Which is what they did.

  The Syrians sent a brigade of soldiers to join the Americans in Saudi Arabia, the “Vanguard of the Arab Nation” now aligning itself with the friends of Zionism—or so it seemed—against their Baathist enemies. And every day, the network crews and hundreds of other television teams from around the world were bussed out to the Dhahran airbase—to the same runways I had surveyed immediately after the invasion—to watch the Americans arrive, companies and battalions and regiments and brigades and divisions, tens of thousands of them to augment an army that would—by the new year of 1991—place half a million men and women against Saddam’s armies. In 1991 the United States thought it needed this many soldiers to liberate Kuwait. In 2003 the Pentagon calculated they would need less than half that number to capture and occupy the whole of Iraq. But in 2003, nobody made that comparison.

  If it wasn’t statistics we got, it was advice. RAF officers coaxed journalists on how to don their gas masks. They advised us to use the “buddy-buddy” system, whereby you helped your fellow scribe to fit the filter onto his mask but ensured your own was fitted first—while your colleague presumably suffocated to death. The whole wretched business involved “hunkering down”—a phrase I suspect the military got from the press—while gallons of Saddam’s vile cocktail clouded around us. A visit to the French Foreign Legion—red wine in the desert seemed a lot more sensible than a British ration of lukewarm water—convinced me that there were simpler methods of avoiding chemical extinction. A British member of the Legion’s Second Infantry Regiment from the East End of London told me that his unit—battle honours included the Marne—had its own unique operational instructions. “Basically,” he said, “when there’s a red gas alert, someone blows a whistle and we all pile on our lorries and drive like fuck out of the area.”

  This seemed to me eminently sensible. For more prosaic advice, we could turn to the Saudi Gazette, the newspaper that failed to inform its readers that 100,000 Iraqi troops had invaded Kuwait, shot the Emir’s brother and were standing on the borders of Saudi Arabia. “Do’s and don’ts in a gas attack,” read the headline—on page 3. This was to be one of the world’s most exclusive doctors’ advice columns, one that turned out to say as much about Saudi Arabia as it did about chemical warfare. And those who remembered that King Fahd had that very year laid responsibility for the death of more than 1,400 Muslim pilgrims in Mecca on “God’s will” would have found the initial advice faintly familiar.

  “If you are outside your home and in the open, you cannot do anything except to accept your destiny,” the article announced. If you were at home, on the other hand, “look out your windows for birds dropping from the trees, cats, dogs and people dropping and choking, cars crashing and general panic which are all signs of a gas attack. When you see such things happen, barricade doors and windows and let nobody in or out of the house.” Other helpful hints included the advice to “dress yourself to the hilt in long sleeves, socks and hat . . . cover your entire head with a wet towel or blanket . . . get into the shower and stay there.”130 But the Saudi Gazette was not a paper to frighten its readers. Its front page on 4 August 1990 contained a single, curious paragraph in bold type. “King Fahd and Bush exchanged views on the situation in the region in the light of current developments,” it said. That was the paper’s sole concession to reality. The “current development” was the Iraqi anschluss of Kuwait.

  The Americans were given cultural assistance. Some were eminently sensible: don’t drink alcohol, don’t show any interest in Arab women, don’t lose your temper. Others betrayed the real problems of America’s Middle East policy. The American army’s official guide to Saudi Arabia included a section headed “Sensitive areas” which urged U.S. personnel not to discuss “articles or stories which discuss the friendship ties between the U.S. and Israel,” “anti-Arab demonstrations or sentiment in the U.S.” or “support for Israeli actions and presence [!] in Lebanon.” The fact that this military guide could not even refer to Israel’s invasions or occupation in those words suggested that these subjects were even more “sensitive” for the Pentagon than they might have been for Arabs—who could discuss them. An earlier volume instructed U.S. personnel to avoid discussion of the “Jewish lobby and U.S. intelligence given to Israel”—a category that was meekly deleted by the Pentagon after the World Jewish Congress wrote to U.S. defence secretary Dick Cheney to express its “sense of distress” and “deep sense of hurt and anger” that U.S. troops were being asked to “submerge entirely those values of tolerance, pluralism, and open-mindedness that have made the U.S. a unique democratic society.” The Jewish lobby thus succeeded in erasing all discussion of the Jewish lobby.

  American soldiers were also urged to remember that “the Prophet Mohamed, founder of the Islam [
sic] religion, was born in Arabia in 570 AD . . . That fact has had a deep impact on Saudi Arabia, making it the recognized center of the Islamic religion.” I came across the Saudi version of this “guidance” late one night when I was travelling back to Dhahran from a visit to the Kuwaiti border and stopped at a petrol station. A Saudi army truck pulled up and two soldiers walked over to my car. “Sir, we want you to have these,” one of them said, handing me two pamphlets produced in English by the “World Assembly of Muslim Youth” and published by the “Islamic Dawa’a and Guidance Centre” in Dammam. The first document was entitled The Sword of Islam and claimed that the mere shine of this sword “eliminates falsehood just like light wipes away darkness.” It included a series of quotations from Westerners who had converted to Islam, including Cat Stevens—who was to be refused entry to the United States in 2004 on the totally false suspicion that he was involved in “terrorism”—whose name was now Yusuf Islam. “It will be wrong to judge Islam in the light of the behaviour of some bad Muslims who are always shown on the media,” the pamphlet quoted Stevens as saying. “It is like judging a car as a bad one if the driver of the car is drunk . . . ” The second pamphlet urged foreigners—“atheist or . . . agnostic . . . or a believer in democracy and freedom”—to study the life and teachings of the Prophet.

  “We give these to the Americans,” the Saudi soldier told me. A tall, thin man with a goatee beard, he saluted and turned back to his lorry. It was an American truck, of course, and they were carrying American Kevlar helmets and were under American command. Indeed, it seemed to be the fate of so many Muslims to live under this Western “canopy.” It is an irony that the Saudis—like the Iranians— have to live in a country of American-built expressways and toll booths, of U.S.built airbases where the helicopters and fighter-bombers are American, that they have to live in nations whose infrastructure is American, whose princes—or, in the case of Iran, revolutionaries—were in many cases educated in the United States and speak English with American accents. So when in the days immediately following the Iraqi invasion, President George Bush explained that his military deployment in Saudi Arabia was also intended to “safeguard the American way of life”—and he presumably wasn’t thinking of theocracy and Saudi head-chopping—he may have had a point.

  But Saudi Arabia did not wear only American clothes. The country was awash with British hardware—including more aircraft than the Saudis had qualified pilots to fly—thanks to the 1988 $23 billion Al-Yamamah arms contract which included the sale of 132 Tornado and Hawk aircraft and commissions which were allegedly given to British middlemen as well as members of the Saudi royal family. The British National Audit Office was to launch an investigation into this folly in 1989 but its report was officially suppressed—to avoid upsetting the Saudis, according to the British government. The prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been personally involved in the project to prevent French and American competition.

  Oil, of course, had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with the deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia. If General H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s contention boded ill for those who feared that rhetoric and reality were parting company in the Middle East, it had to be said that the general made his claim with real imagination. As supreme United States commander in the Gulf, he used language with the subtlety of a tank.

  “Absolutely not,” he roared at me when I was gullible enough to suggest that America’s enthusiasm to defend Saudi Arabia might have something to do with petroleum. “I don’t know why people keep bringing this up. I really don’t. If anyone has any question in their mind about what Iraq has done, I suggest they look for another line of work. What you’ve got here is a situation where not only is this a mugging—but a rape has occurred.” The American television crews had switched the cameras and sound recorders back on. Here was a general who not only talked in soldiers’ language—or what television crews thought was soldiers’ language—but obligingly spoke in sound bites, too. “It is an international rape of the first order,” he boomed on. “We all ‘tsk-tsk’ when some old lady is raped in New York and twenty-four people know about it and do nothing . . . it’s not just a question of oil. There’s not a single serviceman out there who thinks that—not any I’ve met.”

  So all that history of American support for Saddam—for his invasion of Iran, his chemical assaults on Iranians and Kurds, Washington’s blind eye to the torture chambers and the mass graves, all that “tsk-tsking” in the face of atrocities which the whole world knew about and did nothing about—didn’t happen. History started yesterday. It was time I looked for “another line of work.” Those of us who had met scarcely a serviceman who did not think this was about oil would have to hold our tongues in future. When we asked the general why America had not used its troops to prevent the mugging and rape of other Middle Eastern nations, we were told not to be hypothetical.

  General Schwarzkopf, a giant of a man with a barrel chest and a head the shape of an American football, loved all this. He, after all, was the general who’d served two combat tours in Vietnam, the second as 1st Battalion commander in the unhappy “Americal” Infantry Division whose units—not under Schwarzkopf’s command—were responsible for the My Lai massacre, a man who held fourteen military awards including the Distinguished Service Medal, three Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Purple Hearts. No one asked about his dad, of course, the other Norman Schwarzkopf who helped to destroy Iranian democracy in 1953, along with Kermit Roosevelt and “Monty” Woodhouse. Iraqi morale? he was asked. “Jesus, I hope it’s lousy! I hope they’re hungry. I hope they’re thirsty and I hope they’re running out of ammunition . . . I think they’re a bunch of thugs.” Any chance he thought the Iraqis would still invade Saudi Arabia? “The difference is we’re here now. If they fight, they’re going to have to fight me. It’s not a question of taking on some weak neighbour.” Mistake. The Saudis didn’t want to be regarded as a “weak neighbour.” They were strong, confident, able to defend themselves. Was not Lieutenant General Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz the commander of the “joint forces”?

  And indeed, as we delved through the military jungle that was entangling the Gulf, we discovered that in the month since U.S. forces started their deployment, not a single American tank crew or gunner had been permitted to test-fire their weapons. The Saudi authorities had refused to allow the Americans even to calibrate their guns—for fear that the sound might alarm the civilian population. Even the megalithic battleship USS Wisconsin , whose nine sixteen-inch guns could fire shells over more than 30 kilometres, was constrained to announce the time of its live-firing exercises to prevent panic on the Gulf coastline. At some points in the eastern desert, the U.S. 24th Infantry Division had to reposition its tanks lest their tracks damage camel-grazing fields.

  If the Saudis could temporarily emasculate the United States military, the Iraqi army was undergoing an interesting psychological transformation of its own. When it invaded Kuwait on 2 August, it was a million-strong, “battle-hardened” army which had “polished its offensive capability,” a “powerful battle force.” Now, however, Saudi and American officers drew inspiration from the stories of Kuwait’s wretched refugees; Iraqi troops were looting shops and homes, there had been rape and disciplinary hangings. British officers talked of the Iraqi army as a “shambles” with poor morale. “As far as we are concerned,” the captain of the British destroyer York told us, “there’s far too much hype about chemical warfare.” Yet by the beginning of November, the Desert Shield Order of Battle Handbook prepared by the U.S. Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence was again describing the Iraqi army as “one of the best-equipped and most combat experienced in the world . . . distinguished by its flexibility, unity of command and high level of mobility.”

  Maybe it depended on the audience. When General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the same supposedly liberal, thoughtful, eloquent secretary of state in the Bush Junior administration
a decade later—addressed marines aboard the Wisconsin on 14 September, he talked down to U.S. servicemen. Saddam was “this joker we’ve got up here in Baghdad,” to whom the world had said: “We can’t have this kind of crap any longer.” If somebody wanted to fight the United States, Powell instructed his men, “kick butt.” The Palestinians in Kuwait were meanwhile further denigrated by Alan Clark, the British junior minister, who claimed in Bahrain that they had created an “informal militia” in Kuwait. Many Palestinian “residents,” he claimed—untruthfully as it turned out—had “helped themselves to firearms.”

  In Dhahran the flight line was witness to every arrival, to the thousands of young Americans who clambered down the aircraft ramps clutching plastic bottles of water, stunned by the temperatures, suddenly realising that they had just met their first enemy, right here on the tarmac. Some wound scarves over their faces, wedging Ray-Bans between the scarves and their helmets so that they looked like a hundred-strong version of the Invisible Man. The airbase howled and screamed with turbine engines, with F-15s and F-16s and Galaxies and Hawks shimmering through the dust bowl beside the still untested Patriot anti-missile missiles.

  Journalists became part of this military deployment. They were brought to film these constant arrivals—initially, as Schwarzkopf admitted, to give the impression that there were more U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia than was the case—and to encourage the idea that American forces represented overwhelming strength. If war was to start, journalists would be allowed to accompany troops in “pools”— and reporters and their newspapers and television stations subsequently fought like tigers to join these “pools” in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield. The rest were supposed to abide by the rules of Captain Mike Sherman. Though a trifle shorter than the crusty old man who burned his way through Georgia, Sherman’s eyes possessed the same kind of penetrating, weary reproach that you could discover in the monochrome portraits of his ancestor, General William Tecumseh Sherman. This was not surprising because Captain Sherman commanded one of America’s most powerful weapons systems in the Gulf, a great beached whale of a vessel permanently anchored in a grotesquely decorated ballroom of dreams and expectations in the Dhahran International Hotel.