The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  When I called up a Saudi journalist friend and told him that Downing Street was claiming the attack on Iraq was intended to protect the Arab Gulf, he shouted one word down the phone to me: Zbeili! Zbeili is Arabic for “garbage.” “Why do you want to kill more of those poor people?” he asked. The British were trying to present this bombing offensive on Iraq in all its old 1991 Gulf War purity. Iraq’s neighbours were under threat and must be safeguarded from its weapons of mass destruction. But with the exception of Kuwait—some of whose citizens had repeated their now familiar routine of fleeing over the Saudi border—the Arab Gulf states wanted none of the West’s protection, especially when this “protection” involved even further destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure.

  For the Basra oil refinery was one of the Anglo–American targets. Clinton and Blair had promised that only military targets would be hit, but the refinery had allegedly been used to smuggle oil and thus became a “military target.” Maybe we would soon be told that oil refineries were weapons of mass destruction. What they most certainly were, of course, was a means of producing oil income to pay for the Oil-for-Food programme that was supposed to lessen the effect of UN sanctions. But it was not this blatant manipulation of words that angered the Arabs. What infuriated them—and non-Arab Muslims—was the hopelessly one-sided and hypocritical way in which we tried to justify the attack on Iraq.

  Just going through the 1998 list of excuses for belligerency was enough. According to Clinton and Blair, Saddam Hussein (1) was refusing to abide by countless United Nations Security Council resolutions; (2) continued to build weapons of mass destruction; (3) blocked the work of UNSCOM arms inspectors; (4) abused human rights; (5) had used poison gas “on his own people.” Now we all knew that Saddam Hussein was awful; not as bad as Hitler and Stalin but probably worse than Laurent Kabila and certainly worse than Muammar Ghadafi and quite possibly worse than Slobodan Milošević.

  But who else qualified in 1998 for the first crime? Israel and Serbia. Who qualified for the second? Iran, Israel, Syria, Pakistan, India and North Korea. Crime number 3 was exclusive because there was no UNSCOM to inspect other countries’ weapons of mass destruction. But qualifying for crime number 4? Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey . . . Crime number 5? Only Iraq—with a caveat: for still no Western leader would admit that Saddam killed far more Iranians than he did Iraqi Kurds at a time when the State Department and the British Foreign Office were supporting Iraq.

  So what were we doing bombing Iraq? Back in February 1998, we wanted to bomb Iraq when Saddam prevented UN arms inspectors from entering his palaces. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan produced a “memorandum of understanding” to allow the UN to make a one-time inspection, in the company of foreign diplomats, of these supposed symbols of Iraqi sovereignty. But once Saddam objected to the American UN inspectors, it was “chocks away”: he now almost certainly wished to be bombed—because he had given up any hope of sanctions being lifted and knew that the Arab world would sympathise with Iraq. Journalists became frightened of the figure of half a million children dead under sanctions; it was safer to debate the rights and wrongs of killing eighty-two civilians in the December air raids. Arabs did not see events in so distorted a way. However deplorable their regimes, they were possessed of an overwhelming sense of fury and humiliation; the conviction that the raids on Baghdad were all staged to avoid Clinton’s impeachment seemed to place events beyond the immoral.

  Then—and only then, in the New Year, in the first week of January 1999, less than three weeks after the attacks were staged on Iraq because Saddam had “blocked” the UNSCOM teams—came the revelation. American arms inspectors were spies. CIA men had been planted among the UN teams—along with MI6 agents from Britain, if a report in The Independent was correct—and the UN was forced to admit that “UNSCOM directly facilitated the creation of an intelligence collection system for the United States in violation of its mandate.” U.S. agents had installed a “black box” eavesdropping system into UNSCOM’s Baghdad headquarters that intercepted Saddam Hussein’s presidential communications network. Operation Shake the Tree was supposed to uncover the regime’s weapons concealment system, but UN officials quickly realised that the SIGINT operation run by the CIA’s Near East Division—which was led by Ritter’s nemesis Steve Richter—was not sharing its intelligence information with UNSCOM. The UN arms mission to Iraq had become a U.S. spying operation against the regime. Few bothered to recall that Saddam’s reasons for expelling the U.S. inspectors—the official cause of the December bombardment—had now been proved true. But UNSCOM was finished.

  The military assault on Iraq was not. For with little publicity—and amid virtual indifference in Western capitals—U.S. and British aircraft staged well over seventy air strikes against Iraq in just five weeks during January and February 1999, inflicting more damage than the pre-Christmas Anglo–American bombardment. Pilots flying out of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were now given new rules of engagement that allowed them to open fire on Iraqi installations even if their aircraft were not directly threatened. The air offensive was carefully calibrated to avoid criticism or public debate, although it coincided with further attempts by Washington to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.

  At my home in Beirut that great rain-washed winter, I spent hours searching through back copies of the Arab and British press for details of these raids. I visited Tewfiq Mishlawi, a veteran Palestinian-Lebanese journalist whose daily MiddleEast Reporter was meticulous in recording each Western air attack on Iraq—and its political consequences in the Arab world—and found that his own archives were filled with small, often apparently inconsequential quotations from Western military spokesmen. Yet, sitting in his cold drab offices near the centre of Beirut, I placed these paragraphs of copy next to one another and found myself reading a coherent and all too disturbing account of a near-secret war. One-inch news items—nibs, as we call them in the trade—would turn into longer stories as I photocopied them and pinned them, one after the other, into my file. The file began to thicken. Every hour, I would have to open a new folder for the next stack of cuttings.

  Iraqi missile sites were being attacked without warning and radar stations targeted solely because their presence—rather than any offensive activity—was said to menace American forces in the Gulf. In early February, for example, U.S. aircraft bombed a CSSC-3 “Seersucker” anti-ship missile battery on the Fao peninsula which, according to a spokesman, “could [sic] have threatened shipping in the Gulf.” Military sources said that there was no evidence the missiles were about to be fired, although American and British government officials continued to maintain for more than a year afterwards that pilots responded only to specific threats against their aircraft. In an article in The Independent on 7 August 2000, for instance, Foreign Office minister Peter Hain—the same Peter Hain who had condemned Halliday and von Sponeck for their outspoken criticism of UN sanctions—wrote that “there have been about 850 direct threats against our aircrew in the past year and a half, including missile attacks and heavy anti-aircraft fire. Our pilots have taken action only to defend themselves against this kind of attack” (my emphasis).

  This was obviously untrue. But by attacking Iraq every day while issuing only routine information about the targets, American and British officials had also ensured that their salami bombardment attracted little or no interest in the press; newspapers now frequently carried little more than four lines about air-strikes that would have captured front-page headlines a year earlier. Only when U.S. missiles hit civilian areas was the mildest criticism heard. Often, these attacks turned out to be even more bloody than the Iraqis admitted at the time. When an American AGM-130 missile exploded in a Basra housing complex, initial reports spoke of eleven civilian casualties, although a total of sixteen died on that day and almost a hundred were wounded. Von Sponeck, who was still the UN humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad at the time, stated that two missiles hit civilian areas 30 kilometres apar
t, the first in Basra—where a woman and five children were among the dead—and the second in the village of Abu Khassib, where five women and five children were killed. In other words, most of the victims were children; a Pentagon spokesman later admitted the Basra attack, responding to the casualties with the words: “I want to repeat that we are not targeting civilians.”

  The 1999 air offensive had begun at the New Year with five American attacks in two weeks and was followed on 11 January when U.S. aircraft attacked Iraqi missile sites from air bases in Turkey. Almost daily air raids continued to the end of January, by which time British fighter-bombers were joining U.S. planes in the attacks. On 31 January, eight British and American jets were bombing “communications facilities” in southern Iraq. A statement from the Americans on 4 February that U.S. and British planes had by then destroyed forty missile batteries—adding that this alone caused greater damage than was caused to Iraq in the whole December air bombardment—passed without comment. Neither Washington nor London explained whether the attacks had UN backing—they did not—and a warning by Britain’s socialist elder statesman, Tony Benn, went unheeded.

  On 11 February, General Sir Michael Rose, Britain’s former UN force commander in Bosnia, condemned the offensive in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute. “The continual TV images of the West’s high-technology systems causing death and destruction to people in the Third World will not be tolerated for ever by civilised people,” he said. But his remarks were largely ignored. Instead, U.S. officials continued their fruitless attempts to form a united Iraqi opposition to Saddam and to seek Arab support for their plans. By declaring the Western “nofly ” zones invalid—which they were in international law—Saddam could encourage his air defences to fire at U.S. and British aircraft. He even offered a reward of $14,000 for ground-to-air missile crews who shot down raiding aircraft. It went unclaimed; Iraq’s air defence batteries were hopelessly inferior to American and British technology.

  Yet still this near-secret war went on. In Baghdad, six more civilian deaths were announced—one in an air raid near Najaf on 10 February 1999, and five more, with twenty-two wounded, in southern Iraq five days later. After The Independentpublished the details of this war-by-disinterest, I continued my trawl through the daily Arab press. On 22 February, for example, it was reported that U.S. and British jets had attacked an Iraqi missile site and two communications bases near Amara and Tallil. On 1 March, American jets dropped more than thirty 2,000-pound and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on radio relay sites, “communications targets and air defence guns” in northern Iraq. Defence Secretary Cohen said the same day that U.S. pilots had been given “greater flexibility” in their attacks. When an air raid disrupted Iraqi oil exports to Turkey, the executive director of the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme, Benon Sevan, complained that there was already a $900 million shortfall between expected revenues and what was needed to fund the humanitarian programme under sanctions, and that continued raids could frustrate efforts to supply food and medicines to Iraqi civilians. Like Benn and Rose, he was ignored.

  But Arab press reports on the U.S. and British attacks proved that Rose’s warnings were accurate. Even Qatar, a long-standing ally of Washington, opposed the campaign. “We do not wish to see Iraq bombed daily or these attacks which are being made on the no-fly zones,” Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, told Cohen on 9 March. Esmat Abdul-Meguid, the Arab League secretary general, demanded an end to the air raids. The Kosovo war—in which both the Americans and the British could take on the role of protector of Muslims— further helped to smother the Iraq war. On 2 April, the Iraqis stated that aircraft had destroyed a control centre at the oil-pumping station at Mina al-Bakr.

  There was no end to this. On 6 April, the Pentagon announced a joint Anglo-American attack on a surface-to-air missile battery near Faysaliyah. Three civilians were reported killed in raids in Iraqi Kurdistan on 8 May, another twelve killed in Mosul five days later. And so it went on. By August 1999, even The New York Times had noticed that an Iraqi shooting war was continuing behind the backs of the American public, reporting on 13 August that American and British pilots had fired more than 1,100 missiles against 359 targets in the previous eight months, flying about two-thirds as many missions as NATO pilots conducted over Yugoslavia during the seventy-eight-day bombardment that spring. And the response to all this from the State Department? Spokesman James Rubin said that “ultimately responsibility for these events . . . lies with Saddam Hussein.”

  Throughout the year, the Americans and British continued to nibble away at Iraq’s infrastructure and what was left of its defences, a war of attrition whose regularity had reduced the almost daily raids to a non-story. But not in the Arab world. Newspapers throughout the Gulf damned the assault with equal regularity; Saudi officials privately noted that the air bombardment was causing increasing fury among the young and more religious citizens of the kingdom. General Rose had warned that this violence would not be “tolerated for ever.” Yet how would the Arabs respond? What weapons did they have in their arsenal to redress the imbalance of power between East and West, save for the planes and tanks we sold their dictators to increase our own wealth?

  THERE WAS ONE FINAL SCOURGE to be visited upon the Iraqi people, however, a foul cocktail in which both our gunfire and our sanctions played an intimate, horrific role, one that would contaminate Iraqis for years to come, perhaps for generations. In historical terms, it may one day be identified as our most callous crime against the Middle East, against Arabs, against children. It manifested itself in abscesses, in massive tumours, in gangrene, internal bleeding and child mastectomies and shrunken heads and deformities and thousands of tiny graves.

  I first heard that Iraqis might be suffering from a strange new cancer “epidemic” while visiting the Syrian capital of Damascus in the summer of 1997. An Iraqi opposition leader, a Shiite cleric who made his way to Iran after the failed Shiite uprising of 1991 and had then travelled to Syria, told me that Iraqi ex-soldiers seeking refuge in camps in southern Iran were being diagnosed with an unusual number of cancers; most had fought in the 1991 tank battles south-west of Basra, their armour struck repeatedly by American depleted-uranium shells. The cleric spoke, too, of Iraqi children in the Iranian camps who had also fallen ill. If this was true—and these children would also have come from southern Iraq—then what was the state of health of children in Basra today? What were these mysterious cancers?

  When I arrived in Baghdad in early 1998, I was confronted almost at once by unexpected cases of cancer. An Iraqi family I had known for years had lost three of its members to leukaemia in two years. The family had a history of smoking. But the middle-aged lady who greeted me at the door was, unusually for her, wearing a scarf over her head. She had just been diagnosed with cancer—and she had never smoked. Then there was the government official whose two children had just been sent to hospital with an unknown lung complaint—which subsequently turned out to be cancer. Another Iraqi acquaintance told me of a neighbour’s baby that developed a “shining” in one of her eyes. Doctors had taken the eye out so that the cancer should not spread.

  It took several days before I grasped what this meant: that something terrible might have happened towards the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Some Iraqis blamed the oil fires which had burned during and after the war, releasing curtains of smoke that hung over the country for weeks, producing a carcinogenic smog over Baghdad and other large cities. Others suspected that Saddam’s bomb-blasted chemical weapons factories might be to blame. But increasingly, we found that those most at risk came from areas where allied aircraft—and in the far south, tanks—had used large quantities of depleted-uranium munitions. DU shells are made from the waste product of the nuclear industry, a hard alloy that is tougher than tungsten and that ignites into an aerosol uranium “spray” after punching through the armour of tanks and personnel carriers. As I expected, the Americans and the British maintained that these munitions could not
be the cause of cancer.

  This was not an easy story to investigate. Unlike bomb fragments with their tell-tale computerised codes, DU munitions—while easy to identify because they left a penetrator “head” in or near their target—could not be physically linked to the leukaemias afflicting so many thousands of Iraqis, other than by a careful analysis of the location of these cancer “explosions” and interviews with dozens of patients. Some of the children I spoke to, for example, were not even born in 1991; but invariably, I would find that their fathers or mothers had been close to allied air or tank attacks. There was another difficulty in reporting this story which I and my colleagues, Lara Marlowe, now of the Irish Times , and Alex Thomson of Britain’s Channel 4 television—who worked with me on my first investigation—encountered the moment we visited Iraq’s dilapidated and often dirty hospitals.

  Cancer wards are shocking, child cancer wards more so, places that should not—if life and youth have meaning—exist on this earth. But child cancer wards for those who die from the diseases of war are an abomination. For what slowly became evident was that an unknown chemical plague was spreading across southern Mesopotamia, a nightmare trail of leukaemia and stomach cancer that was claiming the lives of thousands of Iraqi children as well as adults living near the war zones of the 1991 Gulf conflict.

  They smiled as they were dying, these children. Ali Hillal was eight when I met him in the Mansour hospital in Baghdad. He lived next to a television station and several factories at Diyala, repeatedly bombed by allied aircraft. He was the fifth child of a family that had no history of cancers. Now he had a tumour in his brain. Dr. Ali Ismael recalled how malnourished the little boy was when he first arrived at the hospital. “First he had the mumps, then he had swelling in his chest and abdomen,” he said. “Now the tumour has reached his brain. When the condition reaches this point, the prognosis is very poor.” Ali Hillal’s mother, Fatima, recalled the bombings. “There was a strange smell, a burning, choking smell, something like insecticide,” she told me. “Yesterday, he had a very severe headache,” Dr. Ismael said, smiling at the child. “He was screaming. When I gave him an injection between his vertebrae, he told me he knew the pain of the needle, but that he would be very quiet because he knows I want what is best for him.”