The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  A few hours later, I called them. Virginia Johnson sounded very young. “I’m writing to him this very minute. Tell him I got his first letter. I write to him every day . . . ” I told Eggart’s family that he sent his love and needed cigarettes. Shewmaker’s mother wanted to know if he was in the front line. “Can you tell me, not exactly but roughly, if he’s near Kuwait?” I told her he was more than 50 miles from the Kuwaiti border. I did not tell her there was nothing but sand between him and the frontier.

  Saddam could be on one of Shewmaker’s planets. He holds a grotesque meeting with British hostages, pats a British child on the face and asks if he is drinking milk regularly—Saddam’s public statements show an obsession with milk—and he threatens Saudi Arabia with holy war and offers free oil to Third World countries. In Washington and London, these events are treated with contempt. In Morocco there are pro-Iraqi riots. In Algeria crowds turn up for spontaneous demonstrations—always a threat in the Arab world when they are real and not the government-sponsored variety—to support Iraq. Huge murals in Algiers depict Saddam’s Hussein missiles, the ones he threatens to fire at Israel—and which he will fire at Israel within months. Close to the Kuwaiti border, the U.S. 21st Special Operations Squadron—a supposedly secret force which has spent its time interviewing Kuwaiti refugees and whose insignia is a dust-devil emerging from a sandstorm—finds that vast areas of Kuwait City are not shown on their maps; Kuwait’s recent wealth created new streets and satellite towns far faster than any cartographer could record them.

  All day and all night, the great American convoys hum up the six-lane highway towards the Kuwaiti frontier with their armour and guns, troop transporters, bridge-building equipment, tanks and ammunition lorries, jeeps and petrol bowsers. A fleet of U.S. helicopters, dark green, lizard-like against the sand, follow the roads east, their loads of artillery, missiles and generators—even prefabricated buildings—slung beneath their bellies. The sheer scale of an advancing army possesses an energy and seriousness of purpose that no Hollywood director can reproduce. By late October, the multinational army was spread across the desert, the terrain now humped and distorted by thousands of armoured vehicles, command bivouacs, missile sites, encampments, camouflage-draped artillery emplacements, by fleets of bulldozers cutting revetments and bunkers into the powdered sand. The dust of a hundred new military roads hung in the air while beneath it, in the fog, sat the tens of thousands of soldiers who were supposed to be “defending” Saudi Arabia. How much longer can Bush and Thatcher claim that’s all we’re doing?

  So many Arab, Muslim armies now lay across the Saudi desert to create the theological foundation of our “coalition”—proof that this was not an oil-generated U.S. operation—that no sacrifice was too much for the West. When Saudi women believe that America’s presence in the kingdom represents a new freedom—and demonstrate against the country’s prohibition on women motorists by driving through Riyadh in their own cars—Washington stays silent as they are punished. The BBC pulls a videotape of British soldiers in the desert commemorating Remembrance Sunday on the seventy-second anniversary of the end of the First World War—lest the Saudis take offence at the sight of a Christian religious service on their Islamic soil. U.S. troops are told not to wear crucifixes or stars of David outside their uniforms.

  When Israeli police shot dead nineteen Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem in October, Saudi and other Arab newspapers reacted to the slaughter by speaking of a “massacre”—which it clearly was. U.S. secretary of state Baker was reduced to calling it a “tragedy.” Had soldiers of an Arab nation killed nineteen Jews—and how many times must one make these comparisons?—would Baker have called it a tragedy? Would anyone? The agencies would then rightly have talked of a “massacre” while the Arabs would have been reduced to pathetic appeals for “restraint”—the very same inappropriateness of response that President Bush demonstrated towards the dreadful events at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. There was no link at all, Baker was reduced to saying, between the “tragedy” in Jerusalem and the crisis in the Gulf. Yet the mere fact that he felt constrained to say this proved he knew it was untrue. America’s most important Middle East ally had just killed (or massacred) nineteen Palestinians in Islam’s third-holiest shrine while America’s second most important Middle East ally—Saudi Arabia, which contained Islam’s first and second holiest shrines—was encouraging America to attack the Arab armies of President Saddam. These were the double standards of the “New World Order” which President Bush was now espousing. Bush wanted to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. But he was not at all keen to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The two lands were not conquered in the same way—in 1967, Israel was under attack—but how could Washington now treat the two occupations in so different a fashion?131

  And how could we so easily turn our former Iraqi “allies”—the men we had so assiduously supported in their aggression against Iran—into our enemies? I was struck by this one cold night in the desert with the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, whose battle honours went back to one of Britain’s most flamboyant disasters.132 Trooper Kevin Stevely—who had never spoken to a Saudi but had shrewdly concluded that this was about oil rather than democracy—took me out aboard his Challenger tank amid the dunes. I liked scrambling into these personal worlds. Travelling with him on the turret, clinging to the hatch as the beast lunged through the sand, I discovered that Stevely commanded an entire ship. The Challenger, with highly-tuned suspension, dipped and yawed over the desert like a great vessel, its gun barrel the prow, the stinging sand from the tracks a substitute sea-spray, its passage as inevitable as a straight line on any navigation map. But when the soldiers settled down at their camp fires for the night, they liked to face west, long after the sun had gone down. Because the Iraqis—the enemy—were in the west.

  The “them” and “us” mentality was as natural as it was infectious. Ten years ago—almost to the very day—“they,” the Iraqis, were storming into the Iranian city of Khorramshahr, cowering in the ruins of its burning houses under mortar fire. And I had been with those Iraqis. “We” had been together then, sharing the same dangers, hiding in the same military positions. Jon Snow and I had placed our trust in those Iraqi commandos and “our Major” who helped to rescue the Britons on board the Al-Tanin in the Shatt al-Arab river. They had been friends, part of “us.” When Jon set off on his truly perilous night-time rescue mission to the ship, there was no doubt who “we” were. Yes, “they” had then been “we.” And now, sitting with these British soldiers, the “we” had become “they” and Trooper Stevely was wondering if “they” would drop chemicals on “us.” And no doubt, I thought, somewhere across that great, frightening chasm of sand in front of “us”— which in reality could be no more than 300 kilometres—were some of the veterans of Khorramshahr, including “our Major” whom Jon and I had so profusely thanked those ten years ago.

  If we forgot the humanity of the Iraqis, it was equally easy for us to ignore the feelings of the Saudis and the passions which “our” presence was going to unleash in their society. Too often, in those last months before Kuwait’s liberation, the Saudis had become bit players in our drama, attendant lords who were supposed to mouth the right words of support and loyalty towards us, and hatred of the Iraqi leadership. When in August 1990 the defence minister, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, insisted that no offensive would ever be mounted from Saudi territory against “our Iraqi brothers,” President Bush summoned Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, to explain this deviation from the script. Similar consternation was caused when Prince Sultan suggested in late October that while Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia would support “any rightful Iraqi territorial claims” to the emirate.

  In late November 1990, I took a call in my Dhahran hotel from the sheikh of a nearby mosque whom I had, from time to time over the previous months, dropped by to talk to. When I arrived at the empty school beside his mosque, the sheikh was clearly a
gitated about something he had been discussing with a group of bearded, middle-aged men who were sitting in white robes around a back room. I thought he wanted to discuss the prospects for war, but what he asked was: “When are the Americans leaving?”

  The sheikh was no radical. His sermons, broadcast over loudspeakers from the ugly concrete minaret beside his mosque, repeated the need for calm amid crisis. They were about the Prophet’s conviction that trust in God affords protection for all true believers. Even now, fifteen years later, he must remain anonymous because—despite President Bush’s contention at the time that he was defending “freedom” in the Gulf—Saudi Arabia was not and is not and never will be a democracy.

  “When the Americans came here, we were frightened of Saddam,” the sheikh said. “But now they have been here for more than three months, and nothing has happened. Our government has said that the Americans would leave the moment this crisis was over. We believed this. We still believe this. But I think we believe this because we want to believe it.” The sheikh had heard all the rumours. Saudi businessmen in Jeddah were quietly boasting that they had secured five-year contracts for leasing land to the U.S. military forces stationed in the kingdom. In Dhahran, the Americans were said to have taken two-year contracts on car parks, warehouses and transport facilities. Their sea-lift ships were bringing in construction equipment as well as weapons.

  To outsiders—to the Americans and British—the strains within Saudi society were not obvious. Each day, the Saudi press wearily trumpeted President Bush’s resolve to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. When Bush visited Saudi Arabia in November 1990, local entrepreneurs took full-page advertisements in the Riyadh newspapers to extol his decision to send American forces “to preserve, protect and defend peace and freedom in this part of the world.” But other, potentially far more important, messages were now being heard in Saudi Arabia.

  Religious tapes were being distributed in which preachers expressed growing concern about the presence of Westerners in Islamic lands. Government-approved shops had for years handed out audio-cassettes of sermons by Muslim scholars, but Saudi police withdrew six tapes from circulation in the first three months of the U.S. deployment for their “subversive” content. Some of these newly censored sermons reminded Saudis of their country’s previous relations with Iraq, when Saddam was officially regarded as the embodiment of Arab nationalism and virtue and when his cruelty—well documented in the West if greeted with silence by Western governments—was ignored by the Saudi royal family. Other tapes were fiercely critical of Saudi Arabia’s allies, especially President Hafez Assad of Syria. Many hundreds of Syrian refugees from the brutally suppressed 1982 Hama uprising—when Assad’s army crushed the savage Sunni Muslim revolt—now lived in Saudi Arabia and their memories had deeply influenced members of the religious hierarchy.

  One preacher, Sulieman al-Owda, produced a taped sermon known as “The Fall of Nations.” While ostensibly a philosophical oration on the reasons for the decay of nation-states, it identified corruption, nepotism and lack of free expression—the lack of a shura consultative council—as key causes of national collapse. Listeners immediately understood that he was talking about the House of Saud. Shortly after this tape was banned, King Fahd announced—for the third time in as many years—that plans for just such a council were in “their final stages.” Al-Owda, who was dean of the Mohamed bin Saud University of Qassim, gave his lecture in early September 1990 and tapes of the sermon were immediately seized.133

  Against this, Saudis heard only the platitudes of their own princes, the interminable promises of freedom and protection from Western leaders, and statements by those who would define Christian philosophy as a vehicle to render any future war morally acceptable. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced that it would be a “just war” while other clerics mouthed the same nonsense that would be used to launch the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 1990 the Reverend Edward Norman, the dean of chapel of Christ Church College in Canterbury, proclaimed that Iraq needed to be destroyed as a nuclear threat while sustained as “a country whose contribution to the world and Arab society could be of immense value.” Soon, he wrote:

  her nuclear weapons will be in place, and Iraq has the capability to deliver them . . . Military force now, with all the admitted suffering and loss of life it will produce, is by any standards morally preferable to the loss of life which would result from a future nuclear conflict in the Middle East . . . The loss of lives in a war now will save the loss of millions of lives in a few years’ time. That, surely, is a profoundly Christian conclusion . . . A society which puts material welfare and human comfort above the pursuit of higher and more durable values is not a noble prospect, and is, anyway, one that is likely to be overrun by those who actually believe in their values.

  Quite apart from its uncannily identical justifications for the next war but one against Iraq, the last third of this arrogant thesis might have been uttered by Osama bin Laden.

  But there was another quaint parallel to the 2003 invasion of Iraq: the unequal relationship between Washington and London. While the support expressed by Margaret Thatcher—and later John Major—for the liberation of Kuwait bore little of the grovelling, pseudo-spiritual enthusiasm of Tony Blair for the invasion of Iraq, Britain’s role as an obedient servant of Washington’s military decision-making was clear long before the 1991 war began. On the ground, the Anglo-American alliance looked impressive. A 7th Armoured Brigade liaison officer was now based inside the desert tactical headquarters of General Michael Myatt, commander of the U.S. 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Marines and British troops performed joint defence and attack exercises under the eyes of Brigadier Patrick Cordingley, the British commander. Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billière, the overall British commander in the Gulf, discussed and agreed to a series of offensive scenarios with Schwarzkopf in Riyadh. British tanks would play an integral role in U.S. marine offensive operations.

  But the moment a conflict began, Britain would effectively lose its decision-making capability. Planning was one thing, execution quite another; national command in time of war would turn the multinational force into a shambles. Britain’s position in the command-and-control chain was put most revealingly by de la Billière during a visit to Saudi Arabia by British defence secretary Tom King on 14 November, when he acknowledged the symbolic role of the Saudis and the military role of the Americans. “The commander in chief is Prince Khaled . . . his authority and that of General Schwarzkopf meets my requirements . . . for what the British services get involved in. The British ground forces and the British air forces are under the TACON [tactical control] of the Americans.”134

  But my own sources within the Anglo-American command suggested that the relationship between the British and Americans was not as close—or as trusting— as the world was led to believe. This was particularly clear when word reached me during my Christmas holidays in Paris that a thief had stolen a briefcase and computer containing Gulf War briefing plans from an unmarked RAF car at Acton in West London. The documents were being carried, according to my source, in the hands of a senior RAF officer—subsequently revealed to be Wing Commander David Farquhar, the personal staff officer to Sir Patrick Hine, who was de la Billière’s immediate superior—and were taken from the vehicle by a thief as Farquhar stopped to look at a second-hand car in an Acton showroom. The thief had thrown away documents—discovered a few hours later—but had kept the computer to sell, unaware that it contained military information. Far more serious, according to my source, was that the British had not told the Americans of the theft.

  I called The Independent with this extraordinary story, only to be told that the British government had issued a “D-notice” on the information in the hope of preventing its disclosure in the press—and that our acting editor, Matthew Symonds, had agreed to abide by the request and keep the story secret. Symonds was one of the three founders of The Independent who had, in the most unlikely venture of its kind in the histor
y of British journalism, set up a newspaper that would not be swayed by the power of press barons or governments. Andreas Whittam Smith never bowed to pressure, but Symonds, who had begun to show an embarrassingly romantic enthusiasm for war, failed to realise that the “D-notice” had primarily been issued not for “security” reasons but to prevent the Americans’ hearing of the theft. So I mentioned the affair to a colleague on the Irish Times, which— printed in the Irish Republic and therefore not obliged to snap to attention when the British military establishment roars—immediately published the report of the theft. “I wouldn’t have let the ‘D-notice’ stop us,” Andreas exclaimed to me when he returned to the office from his own holiday and when I was back in Saudi Arabia.

  It revealed an interesting rift in the management of my paper, which Andreas himself explained in our Sunday magazine six years later. The one thing he regretted, he said:

  is being persuaded by him [Symonds], against my own views, about the Gulf war. I wish I had run the paper as being anti-war, but Matthew and everybody else persuaded me not to do this, because they didn’t agree with my view.

  Far more interesting was my informant’s contention that the real reason for the D-notice was to conceal the theft from Britain’s American allies. In his own account of the Gulf War, de la Billière admits that the Americans had indeed been left in ignorance by the British and that the Irish Times’s disclosure—which, under different editorship that week, would have appeared in The Independent—created just the political embarrassment that newspapers were normally in the business of revealing: