The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Watching the fountains of burning oil and the fires spreading across the lagoons, you could not avoid the conviction that the Gulf War had not ended. And that Saddam Hussein did not intend it to end when he was driven from Kuwait. The statistics changed each day, but by 5 August three American teams and a Canadian unit of firefighters had capped and controlled 274 of the 640 burning wells, most of them in the biggest fields of Burgan (total wells: 426), Maqwa (total wells: 148) and Ahmadi (total wells: 89). They were spraying tons of sea water onto the fires—using the original oil pipelines to pump the salt water back into the fields—to cool the superheated coking that had built up around the flames. The 115,000 barrels of oil that the Kuwaitis were now able to export each day almost all came from the Maqwa field. Yet more than 60 million barrels of oil and gas a day—from an original loss of more than 110 million each day—were still being burned away, transformed into the chemicals that were now poisoning the land and seas as far east as the Himalayas.

  Mahmoud Somali had been twenty-two years in the Kuwait Oil Company’s drilling department and had no illusions about what happened. “When the Iraqis came here in the first week of the occupation, soldiers and a lot of Iraqi civilian technicians arrived,” he said. “The soldiers did not allow us to go into the fields. The technicians, they wanted to start up the oil exportation again. They told us we must increase production. They wanted to export Kuwaiti oil. This was before the sanctions. Then one day, after the UN decided on sanctions, we had an accidental gas cut-out and the soldiers took me out to the field to repair it. When I got there, I saw at once a series of white wires running to the wells. They were very professional. The wires went down below the master valves so that if they wanted to blow them up, we couldn’t turn them off. And that’s what happened. Three months later, the Iraqi came who was in charge of the mines and he was the one who put the explosives down the wells . . . from the start, the Iraqis were thinking of destroying our oil.” Somali had few doubts that innocents were going to die from all this—of chemical poisoning, of cancer—not only in Kuwait but in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. “Probably yes, they will die,” he said amid the darkness of Burgan. “But who is going to take responsibility? Saddam?”

  The Kuwaitis claimed they were now exporting 115,000 barrels a day, a total that rose to 200,000 if you included the oil from the Neutral Zone. If the fires in the al-Maqwa and al-Ahmadi fields could be extinguished by the end of August, the emirate could be producing half a million barrels by the New Year of 1992, a victory of sorts, but nothing like Kuwait’s pre-invasion OPEC quota of 1.5 million barrels a day—and much less than its actual oil overproduction of 2 million barrels that provoked Saddam to invade. To defend this reconstituted source of wealth, the United States was now forced to maintain a combat brigade in Kuwait, which is why, at the Mutla Ridge, the same American M1A1 tanks I saw five months earlier were still patrolling the highway to Iraq.

  However strong the U.S. Air Force might remain in the Gulf, there was not much else on land to defend Kuwait. When the Saudis decided they no longer wanted Egyptian and Syrian troops on their soil, the whole projected edifice of an Arab Gulf security force collapsed. And the Kuwaitis could no more mount a defence of their emirate now than they could a year earlier. On this mournful anniversary, however, we were encouraged to look elsewhere, to the peace conference in Madrid that would end the Middle East conflict for ever. Here at last, it was suggested, we would see the real fruits of war, provided we could forget what war actually meant, if we could ignore the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead bulldozed into their mass graves by the allies, the thousands of Shiites who were put before Saddam’s mass execution squads, the epic tragedy of the Kurds. If we could accept that the New World Order was merely the Old World Order put on good behaviour, then maybe we could believe in the impossible.

  In one sense, a peace conference—or, more to the point and far more difficult, a peace settlement—would be a restoration of the integrity of the frontiers drawn up after the 1914–18 war, with the creation of the original 1948 Israel grafted onto it. It would be about a return to accepted borders. It was about the Old World Order. For that is what lay at the roots of Western policies in the Middle East. We should have realised this when the Americans allowed Saddam’s domestic opponents to be massacred. Faced with the alternative of allowing Iraq to disintegrate, or of permitting the people of Iraq to remake their own map of their part of the Middle East, the West opted for Saddam on good—or at least internationally harmless—behaviour.

  This is what the 1991 Gulf War should have taught us: that it was the West that was going to decide the future of the region, in however benign or disastrous a fashion, just as the Western superpowers had done for more than seventy years. Those regional leaders who stepped out of line—including Saddam—would pay the price, even if it was individually less terrible than the fate of those in the mass graves on Mutla Ridge.

  Against this frightening horizon, Kuwait’s own continuing pain—its demand for the return of 850 “missing” citizens who remained captive in Iraq—might have seemed diminutive, even irrelevant. But missing they were, and the “sighting” of these men and women—in many cases, seized by the Iraqis in the last hours of their occupation—was to be a bruising experience for thousands of Kuwaitis in the years to come. You only had to visit the gymnasium-size hall in which the Kuwaiti “National Committee for Missing Persons and POW Affairs” had installed itself in the suburb of Sabaha Salman to understand; it was filled with silence and photographs. Some were studio portraits of young men in white or brown robes, others of grinning students in black gowns nursing American college degrees. Around the walls there were pictures of officers in police uniforms, soldiers and doctors, children and women in scarves, re-photographed snapshots and cutaways of Kuwaitis at parties and weddings and anniversaries, smiling with all the wealthy, carefree confidence of pre-invasion Kuwait. No one wished to divide these pictures into the quick and the dead—although most were, already, in mass graves.

  As the years went by, these 850 souls became part of Kuwait’s raison d’être, its proof of victimhood, the vital statistic that would help to distract the world’s attention from the new life of misery that Iraqis were now entering north of the border. Their plight was emblazoned like an Olympics advertisement on the fuselage of Kuwait’s restored national airline. “Return our 850 POWs” was painted next to every aircraft passenger door. What were 850 missing Kuwaitis compared to 100,000 Iraqi dead? The Kuwaitis would politely reply that the Iraqis were the invaders while the 850 were innocent victims of that aggression.

  But by the mid-1990s, the horrors of Bosnia, the slaughter and mass rape of Muslims in the old Yugoslavia had also long surpassed the sufferings of Kuwait under Iraqi occupation. And Kuwait’s own act of “ethnic cleansing”—the expulsion of the 360,000 Palestinians from their homes after the liberation—had squandered much of the international sympathy that might have been forthcoming for the families of those Kuwaitis who were trucked off to prison in Basra and Baghdad, Nasiriyah and Samawa. In his autobiography, General Schwarzkopf admits that the return of Kuwaiti civilian prisoners from Iraq was the one ceasefire condition that Saddam Hussein’s generals refused to discuss—perhaps because they knew that most of them were already dead.

  In retrospect, General Schwarzkopf’s account of these hundreds of civilians is a story of painfully weak diplomacy on the part of the victorious allies. “We settled for his [an Iraqi general’s] assurance that anyone who had come to Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait would be free to approach the Red Cross and leave if he wanted,” Schwarzkopf wrote in his account of the February 1991 ceasefire negotiations. In fact, the ICRC did not receive a single communication from Kuwaitis, either in Baghdad or in their sub-office in Basra. Greatest concern was expressed for the 650 or so civilians—30 of them women—who were known to have been arrested in Kuwait during the occupation and who were later seen in prisons inside Iraq. Many of the Kuwaitis taken hostage in the last day
s of Iraqi rule saw these civilians in their Iraqi jails shortly before they themselves were freed, returning to Kuwait with first-hand evidence that the missing men and women were alive. But since February 1991, there had been no direct word from them, no handwritten messages, no access to their prisons for the Red Cross and only the occasional, months-old evidence that Kuwaitis remained alive in Iraq’s prisons.

  Two Egyptians, for instance, supposedly saw “Samira”—for the sake of her security, her family name was not given—on 1 August 1991, working alongside other female POWs in Baghdad. She had asked them to tell her mother she was still alive, that she was a cleaner in the Saadi hospital, living in the al-Qadimiya prison, ruled over by Uday Hussein, son of the president. That was all she told the two Egyptians, a message they faithfully delivered to the authorities in Kuwait. The twenty-nine-year-old—the snapshot in her file showed an attractive woman with bright brown hair and sparkling eyes—had been seen only once before, on 15 March 1991, when her message had been the same. Then there had been silence.

  Kuwaitis drew strength from the 2,000 Iranian POWs whom Iran had thought dead but who emerged alive from Saddam’s prisons after the end of the Iran–Iraq War in 1988. Saddam liked hostages, they reasoned. He knew how to use them. He had held thousands of Westerners captive after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But Kuwaiti prisoners held no interest for him. None of the 850 men and women—not even Samira—were ever seen alive again. Only after the Anglo-American invasion in 2003 did Kuwaitis know why. Amid the thousands of corpses dug up from the execution pits in the desert west of Hilla were dozens of men still carrying their Kuwaiti citizenship papers. So now Kuwait would have yet more names to add to their list of “martyrs” from the war, a small figure perhaps, but further proof that Arabs die at the hands of Arabs.

  North of the Kuwaiti border, however, there now lay a barren land of misery, fear and defeat, its power stations bombed out, its water purification systems shattered by allied explosives, its sewers overflowing into streets and houses. Western journalists taken on a UN helicopter across southern Iraq saw thousands of tank revetments and trenches, all now covered with grass and sand; the Iraqi army had spent its energies in destroying the uprising and preserving the regime—threatening its neighbours was no longer an option. Iraq was prostrate and its people, under the burden of UN sanctions that were first intended to persuade Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without a fight and then to destroy his regime—neither of which was accomplished—were about to embark on a slow mass death, made more terrible and more immoral because those sanctions were imposed by nations that regarded themselves as the most civilised on earth.

  Across southern Iraq, the Shiites lived in mortal peril of their lives, their sons and husbands and brothers already filling the execution grounds around Hilla and Nasiriyah. The great golden-domed mosque of the Imam Ali in Najaf was in partial ruins, its centuries-old blue marble tiles lying in heaps around the shrine, souvenirs for passing journalists and for Saddam’s Republican Guards who had blasted their way into the sacred buildings of Shiite Islam to kill the Iraqi insurgents seeking sanctuary there. Twelve years later, Shiite insurgents—in some cases the very men who had fought Saddam’s killers in 1991—were hiding in the very same shrine, this time from American army tank fire. In the north, the Kurds—now under American and British protection—lived amid the hundreds of villages that had been gassed and then systematically destroyed on Saddam’s orders. We had betrayed the Shiite rebellion. We had betrayed the Kurdish rebellion. Later—much later—when we came to destroy Saddam himself, we would expect them to be grateful to us. But they would remember.

  The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost thirteen years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures. Our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 closed the page—or so we hoped—on our treatment of the Iraqi people before that date, removed the stigma attached to the imprisonment of an entire nation and their steady debilitation and death under the UN sanctions regime. When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were “ghosted” out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was “freedom.”

  And indeed, when sanctions were first imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, there was little outcry; if they could induce Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without the need for war, then few would criticise them. Besides, before the liberation of Kuwait, Iraq’s power stations were still operating at full capacity and its economy, while crippled by the eight years of war with Iran, was capable of providing Iraqis with one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world. Rationing was introduced in Iraq in September 1990, but most Westerners—and most Arabs—assumed that once Saddam had withdrawn from Kuwait, hopefully before any hostilities took place, these sanctions would be lifted. As so often in the Middle East, a decision that initially appeared benign was to be quickly transformed into a weapon far more deadly than missiles or shells.

  UN Security Council Resolution 661 was passed on 6 August 1990, scarcely four days after Saddam’s army had crossed the Kuwaiti border, calling upon all states to prevent the import of “all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait” and to prohibit the supply of all goods except “supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs.” In retrospect, it is clear that the United States never had any faith that these sanctions— mild by comparison with the postwar restrictions—would persuade Saddam to order his forces out of Kuwait. Just as America and Britain would claim, twelve years later, that the UN arms inspectors could not be given the time to finish their work before the 2003 invasion, so the Americans gave up on the sanctions regime by the time their troops were in place for the liberation of Kuwait. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy concluded before the end of 1990 that “sanctions cannot be counted on to produce a sure result.” By 15 January 1991, British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd was announcing that Britain was resigned to fight for Kuwait because UN sanctions had had no “decisive effect” on Saddam’s capacity to wage war.

  Only after the war did the United States make it clear that there would be no lifting of sanctions until Saddam Hussein was gone. Sanctions would remain, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, “until there was a change of government in Iraq.” But the effect of sanctions was now catastrophic. In 1991 the Allies had crippled power stations and deliberately bombed water and sewage facilities—a decision that was bound to cause a humanitarian catastrophe among the civilians of Iraq. A Harvard team of lawyers and public health specialists, after visiting forty-six Iraqi hospitals and twenty-eight water and sewage facilities, stated in 1991 that deaths among children under five in Iraq had nearly quintupled, that almost a million were undernourished and 100,000 were starving to death. Their research found that 46,700 children under five had died from the combined effects of war and trade sanctions in the first seven months of 1991.

  As more and more Iraqis started to die—not only ravaged by the foul water they were forced to drink from bomb-damaged water-cleansing plants but increasingly prevented from acquiring the medicines they might need to recover—a UN commission redrew the country’s southern border to deprive it of part of the Rumeila oilfield and the naval base at Um Qasr, Iraq’s only access to the waters of the Gulf. The confiscated territory was given to Kuwait. Western leaders insisted that Saddam Hussein could use Iraq’s own resources to pay for humanitarian supplies, wilfully ignoring the fact that Iraqi financial assets had been blocked and oil sales prohibited. By the end of 1994, Iraqi inflation was running at 24,000 per cent a year and much of the population was destitute. On the streets of Baghdad, even the middle classes were selling their libraries for money to buy food. Volumes of Islamic theology, English editions of Shakespeare, medical treatises and academic these
s on Arab architecture ended up on the pavements of Mutanabi Street in Baghdad: paper for bread.

  By 1996, half a million Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. Madeleine Albright, who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave an infamous reply on 12 May that year when asked about sanctions on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes. Anchor Leslie Stahl put it to Albright: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Albright’s reply: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” In March 1997, Albright—now U.S. secretary of state—emphasised the impossibility of ending sanctions. “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions . . . And the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein’s intentions will never be peaceful.”

  In October 1996, Philippe Heffinck, the representative in Iraq for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), estimated that “around 4,500 children under the age of five are dying here every month from hunger and disease.” A year later, a joint study between the UN and the World Food Programme concluded that sanctions “significantly constrained Iraq’s ability to earn foreign currency needed to import sufficient quantities of food to meet needs.” On 26 November 1997, UNICEF was reporting that “32 per cent of children under the age of five, some 960,000 children, [are] chronically malnourished—a rise of 72 per cent since 1991. Almost one quarter . . . are underweight—twice as high as the levels found in neighbouring Jordan or Turkey.”