The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  And when I went off to talk to the men who were in Abu Dhabi to turn a dollar on all these “equipments,” they were as innocent, as squeaky clean, as nice a bunch of middle-class family men as you could meet. You have to be polite, of course. They know all the arguments. Some of them have seen Major Barbara and smile bleakly when I mention Andrew Undershaft. At the Vickers pavilion stands Derek Turnbull from Blyth in Northumberland, watching a scale model of the Challenger 2E tank moving eternally round and round on a plastic stand. Ask him if he ever thinks about what all these weapons do to human beings and his response is immediate. “Anyone who says ‘no’ is a liar. Any civilised person who works in this business knows what the purposes are. But we’re more hidebound that anyone else. Large exports like this are strictly controlled by the British government. If we sat down with a map of the world in front of us and blanked out the countries we can’t sell to, there’s not much left . . .” The British government—and Vickers and Mr. Turnbull—was, it seems, following the advice of Shaw’s Lady Britomart, to “sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.”

  But then Mr. Turnbull added a strange remark. “You have to remember that a tank is to kill tanks, not people,” he said. “That’s the purpose of it.” Now Derek Turnbull is an intelligent as well as a friendly man. Is he really satisfied with a comment like that? Aren’t there humans—some mothers’ sons—inside the tank when it is “killed”? Does he really think they survive when a British shell chews its way through the armour? Turnbull has two children: Stephen, who is sixteen and studying sound engineering, and fourteen-year-old Craig, “who would probably make a good journalist.” And Blyth, where the Turnbulls have their home, is by chance the town in which I first worked as a reporter—for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle—and where I first saw the body of a murder victim, shot dead by a friend, so far as I remember, with a German or Italian pistol.

  Turnbull thinks about my question for a bit. He talks about the detachment that comes with military information technology. “Everyone comes to terms with it in their own way,” he says. “Most people talk about the engineering and the technology. It is mentioned from time to time.” The “it,” of course, is the infliction of death; although at no point does he use the word. Then it turns out that he was in Saudi Arabia for Vickers during the 1991 Gulf War, and that although he was not a soldier, he arrived at the infamous “Road of Death” south of Basra within two days of the mass slaughter of fleeing Iraqis by American and British pilots, looking down upon the killing fields—in which fleeing women also died—from the Mutla Ridge.

  Turnbull is thoughtful when he talks about this, reflecting upon his own reactions at the time, an armaments man looking at the end result of all his technology. “It was horrendous. But in a funny sort of way, I didn’t have the reaction I’d expected. You see, we’d driven up through Kuwait, and we’d driven through all the oil wells that had been set alight by the Iraqis. It was the most awful thing I’d ever seen. And by the time I’d gone through all this awful devastation, I wasn’t too shocked by the damage at Mutla.” We were silent for a while. The damage at Mutla was human as well as material. I remembered the Iraqi soldier I found squashed flat in the sand, his whole body just an inch thick. The burning oilfields were awesome; but human death was surely something different. Turnbull—and it must be said that he seemed to enjoy my questions—then turned into the archetypal arms salesman. “Look, Robert,” he said. “If the world was full of nice human beings who did civilised things, we wouldn’t need all this kit.”

  A few feet away—and this shows just how entangled armies and salesmen have become—was a British soldier, thirty-one-year-old tank crewman Sergeant Ashley Franks, a man who had driven, armed and commanded the Challenger but who missed the Gulf War. “I was in Northern Ireland,” he admits. “My tank went to the Gulf, but I didn’t. Shame, really.” But then his little lecture on the Challenger improvements—how Vickers must love this military assistance, I thought— begins to sound like the publicity manuals back in my hotel room. “The 2E has a different, upgraded power-pack; Challenger 2 was 1,200 horse-power but 2E is 1,500 horse-power. For a desert scenario, the extra horse-power is a must. Challenger 2 is lovely if you’ve never driven 2E. The other enhancement is that when Challenger 2 was in production, we were very limited in our thermal sighting system. Challenger 2E has independent thermal sightings for the gunner. With the battle management system, if one vehicle is laser-targeted, everyone knows that an enemy vehicle is targeting a tank. The battle-group commander also has at his disposal the same system. The beauty of it is that . . . another vehicle can take it [the enemy tank] on . . .” The British army sergeant’s language was now so familiar. “Power-pack,” “lovely,” “enhancement,” “independent,” “beauty.” It was as if Sergeant Franks was trying to sell me a new sports car—which in a sense I suppose he was.

  As he talked, the model tank twisted on its plastic axis and I could see, with all the clarity of a defence attaché, the commander of the new 2E pushing through the desert at speed—I’d sat atop a Challenger 2 in Saudi Arabia, doing just that, only days before the Gulf War—and I could understand the confidence of Sergeant Franks and his mates as their tank came under fire. But then I also recalled how Britain sold Chieftain tanks to the Shah of Iran and how, after his overthrow in 1979, the Islamic Republic used those same Chieftains against Iraq; and I could never shake off the vivid memory of climbing inside that Chieftain captured by the Iraqis in 1980, of turning my head to the right to find the skeletal remains of its Iranian gunner sitting in the seat beside me. He might have been Sergeant Franks’s age. The British government had approved the Chieftains’ sale to Iran. They ended up in the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini’s soldiers—and then in Saddam’s.

  But arms fairs are about buying, not dying. A few metres from Turnbull and Franks, I come across two handsome female Ukrainian army students brandishing their new diplomas in front of some nonplussed Arabs. Maria Verenis and Julia Bartashova were the very model of a modern major publicity campaign—Ukraine was selling tanks—while over in the American pavilion, an even more startling figure was making her way past the Winchester rifle stand. Ramona Doll was advertising body armour in a skin-tight, thigh-clutching steel blouse and trousers, complete with handgun and far too much lipstick. Not the flip side, but the very embodiment of all that macho rubbish in the missile brochures.

  Lieutenant General Mustafa Tlass would have appreciated her. I discovered Syria’s long-standing minister of defence being escorted around the Jordanian military pavilion by young King Abdullah of Jordan, the son of Britain’s late friend (and British arms purchaser), Plucky Little King Hussein. Tlass, peering into armoured vehicles and guns with still a bit of room left on his tunic for more medals, once declared his love for Gina Lollobrigida and wrote a poem in her honour. If only his soldiers on parade, he wrote to her in verse, could hold missiles that turned into tulips of love. But Syria’s SAM-6 missiles gathered rust and went the way of all munitions. The Americans drained their old M-48 tanks of oil and dumped them into the sea off Florida to form a coral reef. The Czechs used their T-55 tank barrels to make lamp-posts. Undershaft’s Salvation Army daughter Barbara would have approved.

  But the weapon that had long haunted my imagination—and that will come to be the villain of this chapter—is called Hellfire, an anti-armour weapon used for years by the Israelis in Lebanon and, more recently, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It was a Hellfire I, fired by an American-made Israeli Apache, which was targeted into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996, killing four children and two women on board. It was the remains of the improved Hellfire II that I found in a partially destroyed civilian home in the Christian village of Beit Jalla in the Israeli-occupied West Bank the previous November, fired at Palestinians by the Israelis after Palestinian gunmen shot at the Jewish settlement of Gilo—partly built on land seized from the Palestinians of Beit Jalla. The Hellfire occupi
ed pride of place on the Lockheed Martin stand and sixty-nine-year-old Vice President John Hurst was its expert. He said he hadn’t heard about the ambulance. Nor the houses of Beit Jalla. Lockheed’s top men in Israel, it turned out, were sometimes Israelis. Nettie Johnson—who admitted her company had omitted Israel from its clients in the official list handed out to the Arabs in Abu Dhabi—expressed her unease at all the talk about Israel.

  But about Hellfire, John Hurst sounded like a proud father. Rockwell had won the competition for the Hellfire air-to-ground missile in the Seventies but Hughes beat them on the Maverick programme. There was a whole history of the Hellfire, its succession to the TOW, Lockheed Martin’s development of a low-cost laser-seeker, the F-model (“a quick fix for reactive armour”), joint production between Lockheed (80 per cent) and Boeing (20 per cent) and now Lockheed’s 100 per cent production and the sale of Hellfire II to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Egypt . . . The U.S. government had to approve the buyer. This is history as arms manufacturers like to tell it, stripped of politics and death, full of percentages and development costs and deals.

  But Hurst had read Major Barbara—he mentioned Undershaft’s name before I did—and when I insisted on talking about the morality (or immorality) of his work, he had a “mission statement” all his own. On reflection, I think it was a creed. He wanted me to understand. “I’ve had great debates,” he said. “On a religious basis, too. Before this, I was the development director of Pershing II. I had the responsibility of selling Pershing II to the U.S. forces as well as other countries such as Germany which bought Pershing 1A.” He pauses here to see if I understand the implications; selling Pershing was selling nuclear war. There was a moral code, Hurst said. It was about “arming other countries to fight their own wars rather than sending our own soldiers to do it for them.”

  But he wanted to go further than that; so I sat in the Lockheed pavilion as John Hurst, forty-five years with Lockheed, outshafted Undershaft. “From a religious point of view, I’m a very strong Christian. I’m Episcopalian. You can look through the entire New Testament and you won’t find anything on defending yourself by zapping the other guy.” Yes, he acknowledged, there was a reference in Saint Paul to putting on “the armour of God.” But the Old Testament, that was something different. “There’s plenty there that says God wants us to defend ourselves against those that will strike us down. In the New Testament, it says the Lord wants us to preach His gospel—and we can’t very well do that if we’re dead. That’s not an aggressive posture . . . the guy that wants to hurt me has to think twice . . . the Lord wants us to defend ourselves and arm ourselves so that we can spread His Word.”

  This sounded less like morality than the Crusades, the exegesis of an armed missionary. Yes, Hurst is a family man, married to Letitia with four kids. His first son, John, quit his job at Marriott hotels, fell in love with a Budapest girl and married her; William is a marketing manager for Marriott in Orlando with two daughters; Byron is working on navy programmes for a consultancy company in Washington, D.C.; Carol is a schoolteacher with kids of her own. And of course I ask again. Children? Weapons? Death? “You have to think it through,” Hurst replies. “I knew people in the Pershing programme who quit the company. They couldn’t even think about nuclear warfare. You have to look at it from a strategic planner’s point of view—better Pershings in your backyard than an SS-20 on your roof. That’s what Alexander Haig said back then. And the Russians didn’t fire their SS-20s.”

  But death? I ask again. Death? “Right or wrong, I never associate it with what I’m doing. If I see a bomb go off and legs flying off, I never say to myself, ‘I could have been the cause of that.’ Because we’re trying to prevent that. Sometimes some ‘wacko’ wants to torch something . . . When a guy like [Saddam] Hussein pulls the plug like that, we have no recourse . . . [we say] ‘Here’s what happens when you do that—don’t do it again!’ ”

  But while the armourers peddled the linguistics of power, beauty, excellence, protection, reliability, potency and brawn, the gospel preached at Abu Dhabi had nothing to do with John Hurst’s god. It was ultimately about fear and threats: the fear of Iraq and Iran, the threat of Saddamite aggression, the constant, reiterated warnings that these gentle, soft, sandy, unspeakably wealthy Arab Gulf oil states must arm and rearm to defend themselves against chemical, biological or nuclear attack. This grim and entirely false scenario, of course, was to become wearily familiar eighteen months later when President Bush and Prime Minister Blair used exactly the same demons to propel us to war. But in Abu Dhabi in March 2001 they were introduced for entirely commercial gain: to terrify “our friends” in the Gulf, to persuade them that only by purchasing billions of dollars of weaponry could they be safe. In retrospect, these tactics were a dress rehearsal for the reuse of the same inaccurate material to justify our invasion of Iraq in 2003.

  How this gospel was defined—and preached—was all too evident in the large, air-conditioned hall on the other side of the arms bazaar. The “Gulf Defence Conference” was the place to learn about threats. On the very first day, there was Neil Patrick of the Royal United Services Institute, lecturing his audience about “countries of concern in the Gulf.” We heard all about Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile capability, Iraq’s potential capability to reconstruct mobile missile-launchers. “So what happens . . . when Iran goes nuclear?” the Arabs were asked.

  Mr. Patrick’s offerings were hedged with conditional clauses. But the message was clear enough. “The important thing is building a coalition with Gulf Arabs . . . building a coalition with the Americans and the European allies . . .” Osama bin Laden—“not by any means a one-man operator”—was a threat, along with criminals in the former Soviet Union and Russia’s possible transfer of high-tech weaponry to Iran.162 Across the Abu Dhabi arms bazaar, the warnings were pursued more crudely. At the British Aerospace stand (“BAE Systems provide you with the total package, tailored to your needs”), a massive video-production demonstrated how British military know-how could end a border dispute. The warring parties in this absurd film were “Orange” (the aggressor) and “Blue” (the victim), whose territory—and here was the clue—contained “oil and gas reserves in the border area.” Which of course meant Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and the Emirates. The only power sharing a common border with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was Iraq. So colour Saddam orange. Handed out to Arab visitors to the fair, Western military journals carried a parallel theme. “Now is the time for the Persian Gulf States to get serious about their collective security,” thundered Gannett’s Defense News of Springfield, Virginia. Threats to the area “underscore the importance of bolstering defensive systems across the Middle East’s soft underbelly, the Arabian peninsula . . . in the absence of greater cooperation, their security situation grows more tenuous by the day.”

  In vain did the Kuwait deputy chief of staff, Major General Fahad Ahmad al-Amir, tell delegates that Israel remained a threat to the Arabs, that “the security situation in the Gulf and the security situation in the Arab–Israeli conflict are linked.” Hopeless was his plea that “if we want to create a paradigm of peace in the Gulf region, we must have a paradigm of peace in Palestine.” Pointless was his warning that the fate of Jerusalem lay close to every Arab heart. The Emirates arms bazaar organisers had ignored the faxed appeals from Israeli arms manufacturers to exhibit in Abu Dhabi. But free copies of Jane’s Intelligence Review handed out to the arms boys contained an article with all the usual myths about the Arab–Israeli dispute. The illegal Jewish settlement built on Arab land at Har Homa was referred to only as a “disputed . . . project” (its Arab name of Jebel abu Ghoneim was omitted), the occupied Palestinian West Bank was given its Israeli name of Judaea and Samaria, while the latest death toll of 450 in the latest intifada failed to add that the vast majority of these victims were Palestinian Arabs. The article was written by David Eshel, a “defence analyst” who just happened to be a former Israeli army officer.

  Yes,
what was being preached at Abu Dhabi was the new George W. Bush doctrine: the threat comes from war criminal Saddam Hussein, not from peace-loving Israel. The Arabs need to defend themselves—quickly; a policy that necessitates the wholesale milking of the Arab Gulf’s wealth, the Arab squandering of billions of dollars on Western arms to protect the Gulf from the wreckage of Iraq and the chaos of Iran. The statistics told it all. In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to $92 billion. Since 1997, the Emirates alone had signed contracts worth more than $11 billion, adding 112 aircraft to their arsenal, comprising 80 F-16s from Lockheed Martin and 32 French Mirage 2000-9s. The figures are staggering, revolting. Between 1991 and 1993, the United States Military Training Mission was administering more than $31 billion in Saudi arms procurements from Washington and $27 billion in new U.S. acquisitions. The Saudi air force already possessed 72 American F-15 fighter-bombers, 114 British Tornadoes, 80 F-5s and 167 Boeing F-15s. At Idex, 800 exhibitors from forty-two countries displayed their weapons. The Russian military pavilion contained fifty Russian military enterprises selling tanks, armoured vehicles, surface-to-air missiles and warships. Incredibly, Philippe Roger, the French armament directorate’s international relations director, announced in Abu Dhabi that “while [Gulf] governments could consider using the higher receipts [from oil] for servicing their debt, we believe that higher allocations could go for defence-related spending . . .”

  And if the Arab people—as opposed to their rulers—objected to this insanity, there was even available, at the arms bazaar, the means to end their protest. South Africa’s Swartklip Products was advertising smoke generators for “large scale clearance operations,” a 37-mm baton round that “neutralises a rioter by delivering a hefty, non-lethal punch,” a smoke round to fire into buildings, and a 12-gauge shotgun baton to provide an “accurate means of disabling selected activists.”