The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Grind down the people to this abject level and survival is more important than revolution. Unless you choose highway robbery. I’m not talking of the kind practised at the Babeesh, but on the long motorways west to Jordan or south to Basra. “That’s where they shot the Jordanian,” my driver said to me 100 kilometres out of Baghdad on the Amman road, a carefree reference to the diplomat who chose to travel after dark and paid the price. You don’t drive to Basra overnight for fear of deserting soldiers, so the rumour goes, who’ve turned to banditry to keep their families alive. By night, the gunmen lurk, by day the village women who sell themselves for “temporary marriage” and a few more dinars. The latter I didn’t believe.

  Until I left Basra one hot afternoon and drove out through the slums with their own lakes of sewage—warmer than the Baghdad variety, for the Gulf temperatures drive up the heat of every liquid—and saw a crazed mass of men and women, tearing at their faces with their nails, carrying in front of them the body of a child, pushing it into a battered orange and white taxi on the main road. And a young man, maybe only 16, suddenly jumped into the sewage lake beside the highway and plastered his body in filth, screaming and raging and smacking his hands into the green water so that it splattered all the mourners with filth.

  To what does poverty and hunger drive a people? I soon found out. Seventy miles north of Basra, where the road mirages in the heat between the endless encampments of Saddam’s legions who are suppressing the Marsh Arabs, a group of girls could be seen, dressed in red turbans and black dresses, their faces cowled like Touaregs, dancing—actually twirling themselves round and round—in the fast lane of the motorway until we drew to a halt. One of them approached the driver’s window, her eyes soft, her voice rasping. “Come buy our fish,” she whispered. “Come see our fish and you will want to buy them.”

  She pronounced the Arab word for fish—sumak— with a hiss, and the driver giggled in a cruel, lascivious way. She was maybe 16 and she was selling not fish but herself. And when they realised we were not customers, the fish girls of Iraq twirled back into the motorway lane to offer themselves in front of a speeding Jordanian truck. Yes, you can forget the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, let alone the destruction of his magnificent palaces and ornamental lakes and colonnaded halls. But I do wonder how the Iraqis in President Street can resist the temptation of breaking through the windows of the Babeesh restaurant and tearing its customers to pieces, perhaps even choosing the odd remaining foreign limb to supplement their diet.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Now Thrive the Armourers . . .

  LADY BRITOMART: There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.

  UNDERSHAFT (determinedly): No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an armourer . . . To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes . . .

  —George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara, Act III

  JUST BEFORE I ENTER the 24,000-square-foot exhibition centre close to Abu Dhabi airport, I receive an elaborate invitation on vellum parchment. “Under the patronage of His Highness Lt. General Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed al Nahyan,” it says, “it is the pleasure of His Highness Sheikh Falah Bin Zayed al Nahyan, Chairman of Ghantout Racing and Polo Club, to cordially invite you for The Final of the Idex Al Basti Polo Tournament at 7.30pm followed by dinner . . . Formal Dress.” A few minutes after I have cleared the security gates, I am offered a fine Persian silk carpet—from Qom, I recall—and, at a mercifully smaller price, a set of Arab brass cooking utensils and coffee pots. There are tea stands and flowers, purple and gold and green in the early spring heat. The Arabs wear their white robes with dignity, the Western visitors dark blue suits and ties, their wives, bright, tightfitting dresses, often with those slightly silly racing hats that come with purple stalks and fake blooms on top. Several of the ladies drop off to look at the jewellery shop with its gold bangles and rings. One of Sheikh Mohamed’s military pipe bands plays English and Scottish marches. Smartly attired Indian and Pakistani workers labour to erect Arab tents before the midday sun reaches its height.

  What was it George Bernard Shaw’s armourer, Andrew Undershaft, told his daughter in Major Barbara when she visited his massive arms factory at Perivale St. Andrews? “Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification . . . they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness.” And he was right. Polo, silk carpets, coffee pots, flowers, a highlander’s lament and tea and jewellery while the natives protect pink faces from the oriental sun. It is as civilised as fine art; which is what the sale of weapons has become for the world’s armourers.

  For behind the tents and trinket shops and the pipe band in this vast compound in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, there lay on display some of the most sophisticated and most lethal ordnance ever made by man, so new you could smell the fresh paint gleaming in the sun, so clean, so artistically bold in their design that you might never guess their purpose. And each time I wandered over to examine a French missile, a German tank, an American Hellfire rocket, a British armoured vehicle, a Dutch self-propelled gun, a shelf of Italian pistols, a Russian automatic rifle, a South African army video-screen of crimson explosions, up would come a charming gentleman in another of those dark blue suits, a merchant of death brandishing a file of glossy, expensively produced brochures, offering a powerful handshake and another cup of tea.

  Occasionally, they were a bit portly—selling death on a large scale means a lot of hospitality—and often they carried a small purple or blue flower in their button hole. Ballistics was their fascination. “As the day warms up, a bullet flies faster,” a cheerful Australian confided to me. “In the evening, the air grows heavier and the bullet goes more slowly.” Smiling field marshals and jolly generals from across the Arab world drifted through the arms pavilions, peering through sniper rifles, clambering like schoolchildren onto howitzers and tanks, running their hands repeatedly along the sleek missile tubes, masturbating the instruments of death.

  I have to admit a grim fascination of my own in all this, a professional interest. It is the spring of 2001. For twenty-five years now, the crudest and most fabulously designed bullets, rockets, missiles, tank shells, artillery rounds and grenades have been hurled in my direction by some of the nastiest and most “moral” armies on earth. Israelis with American Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, Syrians with Russian T-72 tanks, RAF pilots with American cluster bombs, Afghan mujahedin with Russian AK-47 rifles, Russians with Hind helicopter gunships, Iraqis and Azerbaijanis with Russian-manufactured Scud rockets and Iranians with U.S.-made sniper rifles and Americans with Boeing fighter-bombers and battleships whose shells were the size of Volkswagens: they have all sent their produce swishing in my direction. Even as I walk between the immaculate stands of this exhibition, the tinnitus hisses viciously in my ears from that Iraqi 155-mm gun that so seriously damaged my hearing back in 1980. In a quarter of a century, I’ve seen thousands of corpses—women and children as well as men—blasted, shredded, eviscerated, disembowelled, beheaded, lobotomised, castrated and otherwise annihilated by the multi-billion-dollar arms industry. Almost all of them were Muslims. This is a symbol of our triumph over the Middle East in Abu Dhabi this hot March day of 2001, our ability to kill Muslims—and to help Muslims kill other Muslims—with our weapons. They have no weapons that can touch us. Not yet. Not for another six months.

  I regularly prowled the arms bazaars of the Middle East, seeking an answer to the same old questions. Who are the men who produce this vile equipment? How can they justify their trade? How will the victims respond to this pulverisation of their lives? What language can compass science
and death and capital gains on such a scale? For there is, I was to discover in Abu Dhabi, an integral, frightening correlation between linguistics and guns, between grammar and rockets. It’s all about words. Thus I circle the arms-sellers’ pavilions with a large canvas bag and a kleptomaniac’s desire to hoard every brochure, pamphlet, book and magazine from Americans, Russians, British, Chinese, French, Swedes, Dutch, Italians, Jordanians and Iranians, squirrelling away thousands of pages of the stuff. “Take some more,” a Pakistani arms technician shouts to me as I scoop cardboard cutouts of general-purpose bombs and ship-borne missiles into my bag. And back in my tiny hotel room, I rifle through the lot.

  The Russians are the mildest in their language. “You will feel protected by our smart weapons’ shield,” promises Russia’s KEP Instrument Design Bureau. Uralvagoncavod’s latest T-90 tank—the descendant of all those old Warsaw Pact T-55 clunkers—is advertised simply as “the Best.” The State Enterprise Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant’s anti-aircraft missiles give an “awesome punch” to their buyers. The British are smoother. Vickers Defence Systems are trying to flog the new Challenger 2E, “optimised to represent the best balance of fightability, firepower and mobility . . . its ability to deliver combat effectiveness . . . has been proven . . .” Well yes, I recall. The earlier Challenger 2 was used by our chaps in the Gulf. And the Challengers fired, I remember, depleted uranium munitions. “Proven” indeed.

  Australian Defence Industries—by a bizarre arms globalisation, they are now part of the French manufacturer Thales—are selling a “live fire defence training system” which includes “a ruggedised portable unit.” This is taken right to the battlefield so that soldiers can practise shooting computerised human beings in between killing real ones. “Target movers”—a real favourite of mine, these—were “able to respond to programmable functions, including ‘appear on command’ . . . ‘fall when hit,’ ‘reappear after hit,’ ‘hold up to accept and count automatic fire’ and ‘bob’”—to “cycle up and down as desired until hit.” A huge Australian later demonstrates this fearful little toy for me. The computerised dead on the screen are obliging. They really do pop up when I ask them to. I kill them. Then they are resurrected so that I can shoot them again and again, cycling up and down as desired.

  The Italians like their verbal trumpets. Beretta firearms provide “quality without compromise,” “experience, innovation, respect for tradition . . . the Beretta tradition of excellence.” The compact size and “potent calibres” of Beretta’s new 9000 S-TYPE F pistols are “developed to deserve your trust.” Benelli, which like Beretta makes hunting guns, promotes its animal killer as “black, aggressive, highly technological.” Benelli’s pump-action shotgun is described as “gutsy in character.” Finland’s Sako 75 hunting gun manufacturers boast that their designers have been asked a simple question: “What would you do if given the resources to design the rifle of your dreams, the new ultimate rifle for the new millennium?” And later, of course, just a few months later, I will look at this question again and wonder what Osama bin Laden would have said—or did say—if or when he was asked to design the weapon of his dreams, the new ultimate weapon for the new millennium.

  “Excellence” crops up again and again in the brochures. Oshkosh of Wilmington manufactures military trucks with “a tradition of excellence,” the company’s produce “grounded in history, focused on another century . . .” Then comes Boeing’s Apache Longbow attack helicopter. “It’s easy to talk about performance,” their ad runs. “Only Apache Longbow delivers.” The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company are among the few to let the cat out of the bag. “True respect,” their advertising brags, “can only be earned by making superior weapons systems. Only by owning them.”

  In 1905, Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft said exactly that. Asked whether he would choose honour, justice, truth, love and mercy, or money and gunpowder, Undershaft replies: “Money and gunpowder; for without enough of both, you cannot afford the others.” After a while, I begin to feel a little sick. There is something infinitely sad and impotent about the frightful language of the merchants of death, their circumlocutions and macho words balanced by the qualities the weapons are designed to eliminate, their admission that guns mean power, the final definition of “excellence.” But worse is to come.

  Bofors (from peace-loving, Nobel-awarding Sweden) is a “provider of technologies for a safer future . . . reliable and innovative.” Pakistan Ordnance Factories make ammunition “chiselled to perfection.” Mowag (from peace-loving, cuckoo-clock Switzerland) manufactures a Piranha III armoured personnel carrier with a “family concept for many mission role variants.” But Lockheed Martin of Dallas scoops them all with a “winning portfolio” of missiles and bombers; the “timeless” F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter; new target-acquisition systems that are “the brains and brawn” of Lockheed’s Apache helicopters; the F-22 Raptor, “a new breed of superfighter” that will “dominate the skies” and bring “unequalled capability” to U.S. fighter pilots; the Javelin “fire-and-forget” missile that will give “maximum gunner survivability”; and the new multiple-launch rocket system that the Iraqis, in their terror, called “steel rain” in 1991—Lockheed actually quotes the Iraqis—and which gives its users a “shoot and scoot” capability. “Shoot and scoot” was General Norman Schwarzkopf’s sneering description of the supposedly cowardly Iraqi Scud missile gunners—no reminder of that here.

  And so the glossy magazines pile up on my bedroom floor. It is a linguistic journey into a fantasy world. Half the words used by the arms-sellers—protection, reliability, optimisation, excellence, family, history, respect, trust, timelessness and perfection—invoked human virtues, even the achievements of the spirit. The other half—punch, gutsy, performance, experience, potency, fightability, brawn and breed—were words of naked aggression, a hopelessly infantile male sexuality to prove that might is right. The Americans named their weapons—the Apache helicopter, the Arrowhead navigation system, the Kiowa multiple launch platform, the Hawkeye infrared sensors—after a Native American population that their nation had laid waste. Or the Western manufacturers called them raptors or piranhas. The only thing they didn’t mention was death.

  Perhaps amnesia has something to do with it. At an arms fair in Dubai on 12 November 1993, I spent three hours watching guests—European ladies in gowns and miniskirts along with government agents and Arab potentates— passing the Hughes missile stand where a photograph showed an American Ticonderoga-class warship firing a missile into the sky. It was an identical missile, fired by a Ticonderoga-class anti-air warfare cruiser equipped with a “combat-proven” Aegis “battle management” system—the USS Vincennes, equipped with that very same Aegis system—that brought down the Iranian Airbus on 3 July 1988, killing all 290 passengers and crew. No mention of that at the pavilion, of course. I still have my notes of my brief conversation at the stand with Bruce Fields of Hughes International Programme Development. “Yes, it was one of our standard missiles,” he said. “I didn’t want them to use any photographs of a Ticonderoga-class ship in our publicity this week. It was only when I got here that I saw this picture on our wall. Fortunately, we’re not passing it out with our publicity.” I watched a trail of smiling dignitaries, thoughtful Arab defence ministry officials and U.S. defence attachés inspecting the hardware, and finally—threading his way between British fighter-bombers and Royal Navy missiles—our very own Charles, Prince of Wales.

  There were flowers everywhere, as if this were a wedding rather than an arms bazaar. Roses, lilies, birds of paradise, chrysanthemums, all potted neatly between the missiles. But the brightest flower to be seen in Dubai was as artificial as it was ironic; the blood-red poppy of Flanders. Did the captains of British aviation industry, the British ambassador and consuls—did Prince Charles himself, who wore a poppy on the lapel of his grey suit—grasp this paradox?

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row,

  That mar
k our place . . .

  When he wrote those lines during the second battle of Ypres in 1915, the Canadian doctor John McCrae could not have known the use to which those Flanders poppies would be put more than seventy years later. For a week in Dubai that November of 1993, those red poppies could be seen dancing on the breasts of men as they admired the latest in “Combat Support Weapons,” Apaches, Pumas, Harriers, Lynxes, F-18s and the new Mirage 2000.

  Even the Honoured Dead didn’t get a look in at Abu Dhabi eight years later. Save for that brief, fearful mention of “steel rain,” the extinction of life did not exist. Talk about “kill factors” referred only to the killing of machines, of tanks and ships. Even “war” is a banned word. It’s defence. As in Ministry of Defence. As in “International Defence Exhibition” (Idex), which is what the whole Abu Dhabi jamboree was called. There was one odd moment when, at the arms fair’s opening press conference in the compound, I asked Sultan Suwaidi, the Idex director, why the United Arab Emirates—a peaceful, small but wealthy Muslim country—was running an arms bazaar for weapons that might be used to kill fellow Muslims. There was a long, meaningful pause, during which Sultan Suwaidi looked intently at me. “These equipments are not in any way the creators of wars or the decision-makers of the wars,” he said. “It is the strategy of countries which decide whether to use these equipments against Muslims or others. In no way are we here provoking or supporting wars or offensive actions . . . We are a peaceful country. Our boss [the ruler of the Emirates] is known as one of the most peaceful leaders in the world.”