The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Yet by 12 October there were reported to be 39,783 U.S. troops back in the Gulf, along with 659 aircraft and 28 ships. The RAF was flying a Hercules C-130 into Kuwait every two hours through the night, some of them carrying 155-mm artillery, and the first elements of 45 Royal Marine Commando had just walked off a Tristar. We had seen it all before: the sultry night, the C-130s’ propellers still racing on the tarmac, the accents of Sheffield and Oxford and Liverpool under the Gulf skies. Instead of “Operation Granby”—the 1990 British deployment to the Gulf—we now had Operation Driver, but the soldiers all carried the same little nuclear–chemical–biological warfare kits.

  And when the U.S. 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived to start live-fire training exercises, which location did they choose? The Mutla Ridge, of course. Many of the marines knew very well that this was the top of the “highway of death” where Iraq’s fleeing convoys had been roasted out of existence just over three and a half years earlier. The men of the 15th MEU, 130 of them, weighed down with heavy machine guns and anti-armour weapons, set up their tripods and blasted thousands of rounds of ammunition into the dunes just below the hill where the anonymous mass graves still lay beneath the sand. “A lot of our marines were here at the time and some of the men here know what happened,” Lieutenant Colonel Rick Barry said, enthusiastically adding that marine units helped to trap the retreating Iraqi convoys in 1991. In the new, ever more contagious language of marine-speak, Colonel Barry’s men talked of their amphibious helicopter-borne landings as an “evolution”—note the positive, progressive nature of that word—as a “sustainment exercise,” an “adventure” and, of course, a “photo-opportunity.”

  The television camera crews scrummed around the marines, cursing and pushing each other—though taking care to avoid any frames that showed that the marine “evolution” was a journalistic circus. And so the machine-gun cartridges skipped across the concrete revetments below Mutla Ridge as the marines charged through smoke grenades across the sand, whooping and shrieking at Saddam’s imaginary legions. Captain Stephen Sullivan, eyes turning into cracks against the piercing midday sun, tried to put it into a historical perspective which turned into a weird combination of morality and more marine-speak.

  “Since this country was basically raped and plundered just a couple [sic] of years ago,” he said, “and there’s a massive troop build-up on the border, that is a distinctive threat to this country and all the nations that represented the [allied] coalition. We are a forward deployed presence that’s routine. We think this yields stability with power projection to show our presence . . .” But did he not ask himself why his marine unit’s “power projection” didn’t get focused on Bosnia, where rape was now on a somewhat larger scale than it had been in Kuwait? Captain Sullivan didn’t hesitate for a moment. Bosnia came under the U.S. Mediterranean Command and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit was not tasked to cover the Mediterranean area. And that was that.

  There were times, reporting all this, when one wondered if insanity was not an advantage in reporting the Middle East. A day after the marines deployed at Mutla Ridge, U.S. defence secretary William Perry, a chunky, short figure in a pale brown uniform, marched across the tarmac at Kuwait airport to threaten Saddam with war if he did not withdraw his soldiers from southern Iraq. Then, just half an hour later, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, tall and dapper in a pale blue suit and tie, walked into the airport’s VIP lounge and threatened peace. Whom were we to believe? Mr. Perry, who bellowed that further American troop reinforcements would be sent to the Gulf, or Mr. Kozyrev, who said he’d just been told by Saddam that he would at last recognise the new frontiers of Kuwait? “I have brought good news to the people of Kuwait and to the whole Middle East,” Kozyrev whispered into the microphone. “Good news that this day the independence of Kuwait is reinforced.”

  Perhaps it was as well that the Cold War was over. Back in the days of Jimmy Carter, the U.S. defence secretary would have been urging peace while Leonid Brezhnev’s men would have been warning of war if America bombed Iraq. To add to this transformation came the assertion from Senator John H. Warner, the former chief of the U.S. Navy who was standing next to Perry. “The lessons learned from the Gulf War,” he said, “really made it possible for this swift deterrence to be put in place.” The real lesson of the Gulf War for more conservative Americans, of course, was that if Saddam Hussein’s regime had been toppled at the time, it wouldn’t be necessary to send all this “deterrence” back to the Middle East now.

  The growing regularity of attacks on Iraq did more than dull the senses of journalists; it gave a continuity to their story, so when the United States and Britain, the sole surviving allies of the 1991 war—the French had wisely pulled out of the “no-fly” zone bombardments—attacked Iraqi “military positions” over the next decade, their actions became routine, part of a pattern, a habit which, as the years went by, ceased to be a “news story” at all. The southern “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Shiites from Saddam, even though the Shiite insurgents of 1991 were long in their mass graves or still hiding in their refugee camps over the border in Iran. In the north, the “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Kurds from similar aggression; but the “safe haven” created by the allies of 1991 at least still existed there, even if it was not enough to save the Kurds of Irbil when Saddam sent his tanks into the city to break up a CIA-run operation in 1996.

  Nor did it save the Kurds from the Turks, as John Pilger was to reveal. In March 2001, RAF pilots flying out of the Turkish airbase at Batman complained that, far from protecting the Kurds, they were frequently ordered to return to their airfields to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the very people they were supposed to be protecting. British pilots returning to patrol the skies over northern Iraq— having been ordered to turn off their radar so they could not identify the Turkish targets—would see the devastation in Kurdish villages after the Turkish raids. U.S. pilots, also ordered back to base, would pass American-made “Turkish F-14s and F-16s inbound, loaded to the gills with munitions,” one pilot was to recall. “Then they’d come out half an hour later with their munitions expended.” On returning to their mission, the Americans would see “burning villages, lots of smoke and fire.” In 1995 and 1997, up to 50,000 Turkish troops with tanks, fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships attacked alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party bases in the “safe haven.”

  Despite much obfuscation by the Americans and the British—to the effect that the “no-fly” zones were part of, or supported by, UN Security Council Resolution 688—they had no UN legitimacy, nor were the zones ever discussed or approved by the United Nations. But they were to become the excuse for a continuing air war against Iraq, undeclared and largely unreported by the journalists who were so keen to focus on Saddam’s own provocations, especially when they involved his refusal to help—or his deliberate misleading of—the UNSCOM arms inspectors. The UN team had entered Iraq immediately after the 1991 ceasefire and was engaged in seeking out and destroying the chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons that Saddam had long sought and in some cases acquired. This was the same Saddam who had used gas against the Kurds of Halabja and hundreds of other villages—his equally ruthless gassing of the Iranian army was recalled less emotionally, if at all, in the West—and he had to be “defanged.” Within three years, the inspectors had achieved considerable success.

  Their operation, which was eventually to be compromised by the Americans themselves, has been catalogued in detail many times; but it is fascinating to compare these efforts with later attempts by the U.S. and British administrations to send UN inspectors back into Iraq in 2002—and then to persuade the world that Saddam was continuing to produce and hide weapons of mass destruction. By the end of April 1992, the al-Atheer nuclear weapons establishment in Iraq had been destroyed and the explosives-testing bunker filled with concrete, a process in which a thousand Iraqi workers were forced to help. In 1994, Rolf Ekeus, the head of UNSCOM, reported
that most of the information demanded of the Iraqis had been given and that weapons-monitoring systems were being set up. While Iraq was still trying to avoid handing material to the UN inspectors, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft—borrowed from the United States—had flown 201 missions over Iraq and UN helicopters had flown 273 missions to 395 suspected sites.

  Iraq claimed all the while that the inspectors were working not for the UN but for the CIA; UNSCOM, according to Saddam, was “an advertising agency” for Washington. He could hardly be blamed for this contention. The CIA had asked Congress for $12 million for covert operations in Iraq and the Iraqi authorities feared that the UN’s information would be used not just for further inspections but for missile-targeting next time the U.S. president wanted to fire cruise missiles at Baghdad. In May 1995, Ekeus expressed concern about 17 tons of missing material that could be used to manufacture biological weapons, but in August 1995, Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel Hassan and Lieutenant Colonel Saddam Kamel Hassan, two sons-in-law of Saddam Hussein, defected to Jordan, where they told UN inspectors—though this was not divulged until 2003—that all weapons of mass-destruction programmes in Iraq had been abandoned.

  Yet the Americans never accepted the UN’s assurances. While Saddam’s mukhabarat did frequently try to impede the work of the inspectors—UN inspector Scott Ritter’s Hollywood appearances at the most sensitive of Saddam’s security headquarters were proof enough of that—the U.S. government was constantly raising “evidence” from Iraqi defectors that nuclear production continued, that the Iraqis were burying biological bombs in the desert, that Saddam’s refusal to comply with all requests for information on chemical materials was proof of his dishonesty. Iraqi claims that many archives on such weapons had been destroyed in the 1991 uprising were dismissed—not always without reason—as obfuscation. But as the UN hunt for Iraq’s libraries of scientific research continued, Saddam came to the conclusion that the UN was now spying—on behalf of Iraq’s enemies—into the country’s military future as well as its past.

  Ritter’s experiences as a U.S. Marine Corps officer who had dismissed Schwarzkopf’s claims about Scud missile destruction while serving in Riyadh during the 1991 war were important. Even after promising that it had no interest in germ warfare in its first submission to the UN, Iraq had 90 gallons of a microorganism that causes gas gangrene, more than 2,000 gallons of anthrax, 5,125 gallons of botulinum toxin (which paralyses and strangles its victims) and 2.7 gallons of the toxin ricin. Iraq reluctantly admitted that it had produced VX nerve gas and up to 150 tons of sarin gas.

  Ritter’s own dramatic, successful and sometimes farcical confrontations with Saddam’s security men provide a chilling portrait of the regime, as well as a remarkable insight into the mind of an American weapons inspector.158 “The Iraqis, they’re like sharks,” he once famously remarked. “Fear is like blood. They smell it and they’ll come in at you. Once that game of intimidation starts, you’re never going to win . . . I am the alpha dog. I’m going in tail held high. If they growl at me, I’m gonna jump on ’em . . . When we go to a site, they’re gonna know we’re there, we’re gonna raise our tails and we’re gonna spray urine all over their walls .

  . .” Yet after six years, Ekeus had forced Saddam’s regime to destroy 40,000 chemical shells and other munitions, 700 tons of chemical agents, 48 long-range missiles, an anthrax factory, a nuclear centrifuge programme and 30 missile warheads. Journalists were invited to photograph a vast fleet of Scud missiles as they lay, broken-backed, on the desert floor.

  But like so many long-term operations of its kind, UNSCOM became contaminated. Ritter, who in 2002 would bravely and consistently—and correctly—claim that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction, had taken his information to the Israelis, proof positive for the Arabs that the UN was sharing its military secrets with Iraq’s only enemy in the Middle East. Ritter went so far as to tell the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israel had been helping the UN inspectors in Iraq from 1994 to 1998. “I can honestly say that if it weren’t for Israel, the commission wouldn’t have been able to carry out the anti-concealment effort,” he said. On 5 August 1998, Baghdad had suspended all cooperation with UNSCOM, claiming that it was being used by American intelligence agents. It said it would continue to cooperate with UN officials in Baghdad—but not with its U.S. members.

  The UN, without revealing the truth of Iraq’s claims, decided on 13 November to withdraw its entire seventy-eight-strong team from Baghdad. Saddam, the Western media announced, had “defied” the UN Security Council—which was true only if the Iraqi allegations were false. President Clinton did not wait to explain. “Operation Desert Fox”—the nickname of Hitler’s General Erwin Rommel, though that apparently didn’t occur to U.S. military planners—involved another bombardment of 200 cruise missiles against Iraq, killing 62 Iraqi soldiers and 82 civilians. U.S. jets carried out 622 sorties against 100 targets, dropping around 540 bombs. The British flew 28 Tornado sorties against 11 targets. The Iraqis were not the only ones to note that many of the bombed facilities—including two buildings where Saddam was believed to meet his mistresses—had recently been visited by the American inspectors of UNSCOM. In early January, UNICEF and the World Food Programme reported that the attack also flattened an agricultural school, damaged at least another dozen schools and hospitals and knocked out water supplies for 300,000 people in Baghdad.

  It was the endgame, the final bankruptcy of Western policy towards Iraq, the very last throw of the dice. As the missiles were launched, President Clinton announced that Saddam had “disarmed the inspectors,” which was a lie, and Tony Blair, agonising about the lives of the “British forces” involved—all eighteen pilots—told us that “we act because we must.” In so infantile a manner did we go to war, although the semantics of its presentation bore some intriguing clues about our future military aggression in the region. There were no policies, no perspective and not the slightest hint as to what might happen after the bombardment ended. With no UN inspectors back in Iraq, what were we going to do? Declare eternal war on Iraq? In fact, that’s pretty much what we had already done—and would do for the next three years—though we didn’t say so at the time.

  We were “punishing” Saddam—or so Blair would have us believe at the time. Was there a computer that churned out this stuff? Maybe there was a cliché department at Downing Street that also provided British foreign secretary Robin Cook with Madeleine Albright’s tired phrase about how Saddam used gas “even against his own people.” For little had we cared when he used that gas against the Kurds of Halabja—because, at the time, those Kurds were allied to Iran and we, the West, were supporting Saddam’s invasion of Iran.

  The giveaway was the lack of any sane, long-term policy towards Iraq. Our patience, according to Messrs. Clinton and Blair, was exhausted. Saddam could not be trusted to keep his word—they had just realised! And so Saddam’s ability to “threaten his neighbours”—neighbours who didn’t actually want us to bomb Iraq—had to be “degraded.” We were now, presumably, bombing the weapons facilities that the inspectors could not find. But how? For if the inspectors couldn’t find the weapons, how come we knew where to fire the cruise missiles?

  There seemed to be no end to the fantasies in which we had to believe. Again, they appear, in retrospect, to be a dry-run for the phantom threat that Saddam represented in advance of the 2003 Anglo–American invasion. Saddam, we were told, could destroy the whole world, or—I enjoyed this particular conceit—could do so “twice over.” U.S. defence secretary William Cohen announced that there would be “serious consequences” for Iraq if it attacked Israel. Mr. Cohen, who was the American—not the Israeli—defence minister, did not explain what “consequences” there could be when we had already fired 200 missiles into Iraq. Then on 16 December 1998—and this was almost three years before the assaults on the United States—the Americans claimed that Osama bin Laden had been chatting on the phone to Saddam Hussein. In truth, bin Laden—who alway
s referred to Saddam with contempt in his conversations with me—was as likely to call up the Beast of Baghdad as he was President Clinton. Clinton said he wanted “democracy” in Iraq. But no questions were asked, no lies contradicted.

  Vice President Al Gore told Americans that this was a time for “national resolve and unity.” You might have thought the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor or that General MacArthur had just abandoned Bataan. When President Clinton faced the worst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. Faced with impeachment, he was now bombing Iraq. How far could a coincidence go? No wonder some of the UN inspectors called this “the War of Monica’s Skirt.” So two Christian armies—America’s and Britain’s—went to war with a Muslim nation, Iraq. With no goals but with an army of platitudes, they had abandoned the UN’s weapons control system and opened the door to an unlimited military offensive against Iraq. And nobody asked the obvious question: What happens next?

  In Washington, we were informed that the impeachment hearings against Clinton—for it was he, rather than Saddam, who was in danger of being “degraded”— were delayed because “American forces were in harm’s way.” In reality, the men firing missiles at Iraq from the safety of warships in the Gulf were about as much “in harm’s way” as a CNN newsreader. The only people in danger were the Iraqis. Yet when the RAF joined in the bombardment, we were treated to an excited newsreader on the BBC World Service announcing that British aircraft had been “in action” over Iraq—as if this was the Battle of Britain rather than the bombing of an Arab country already crushed by near-genocidal sanctions.