The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  The Australian Special Forces man saw things more globally. “Perhaps the Americans can start withdrawing if there’s another war—if they go to war in Iraq. But the U.S. can’t handle two wars at the same time. They would be over-stretched.” Prescient words for July 2002. So, it seemed, to end America’s “war against terror” in Afghanistan—a war that has left the drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control of the Afghan government, many al-Qaeda men on the loose and little peace in the country—we had to have another war in Iraq.

  All that year of 2002, I criss-crossed the Atlantic, reporting from the Middle East, lecturing in the United States, sometimes arriving in New York on a Friday evening only to be filing dispatches from Cairo the following Monday. Perhaps no one was travelling between East and West so often that year, and it was a paradoxical experience, the polemic of one continent about another—the American about the Arab or Middle Eastern—bearing as little relation to reality as the solecisms of Arab Muslims towards the world’s sole superpower. Both sides of the world appeared to have retreated into their own illusions and fears. It produced weird results.

  In Washington, before dawn on 11 September 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks, I flicked through six American television channels and saw the Twin Towers fall to the ground eighteen times. The few references to the suicide killers who committed the crime made not a single mention of the fact that they were Arabs. The previous week, The Washington Post and The New York Times went to agonising lengths to separate their Middle East coverage from the September 11th commemorations, as if they might be committing some form of sacrilege or be acting in bad taste if they did not. “The challenge for the administration is to offer a coherent and persuasive explanation of how the Iraq danger is connected to the 9/11 attacks” was about as far as the Washington Post got in smelling a rat—and this was only dropped into the seventh paragraph of an eight-paragraph editorial. All references to Palestine or illegal Jewish settlements or Israeli occupation of Arab land were simply erased from the public conscience that week. When Hanan Ashrawi, that most humane of Palestinian women, tried to speak at the University of Colorado during the week of September 11th, Jewish groups organised a massive demonstration against her. U.S. television simply did not acknowledge the Palestinian tragedy. But maybe all this no longer mattered. When Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could claim—as he did when asked for proof of Iraq’s nuclear potential—that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” we might as well have ended all moral debate. But when Rumsfeld referred to the “so-called occupied territories,” he revealed himself to be a very disreputable man.

  Strange events were now going on in the Middle East. Arab military intelligence reported the shifting of massive U.S. arms shipments around the region— not just to Qatar and Kuwait, but to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. American and Israeli military planners and intelligence analysts were said to have met twice in Tel Aviv to discuss the potential outcome of the next Middle East war. The destruction of Saddam and the break-up of Saudi Arabia—a likely scenario if Iraq crumbled, so the “experts” claimed—had long been two Israeli dreams. As the United States discovered during its fruitful period of neutrality between 1939 and 1941, war primes the pumps of the economy. Was that what was going on today—the preparation of a war to refloat the U.S. economy?

  Then in one brisk, neat letter to Kofi Annan, Saddam Hussein pulled the rug from right under George W. Bush’s feet. At the United Nations, Bush had been playing the unlikely role of the multilateralist, warning the world that Iraq had one last chance—through the UN—to avoid Armageddon. “If the Iraqi regime wishes peace,” he had told us all in the General Assembly, “it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related material.” So now Saddam welcomed the UN arms inspectors. No conditions. Just as Bush had demanded. Saddam would do everything he could to avoid war. Bush, it seemed, was doing everything he could to avoid peace.

  No wonder that the United States immediately began to speak of “false hopes.” No wonder, I wrote in The Independent, that the Americans were searching desperately for another casus belli “in an attempt to make sure that their next war keeps to its timetable.” But for now, the Americans had been stymied. It would take at least twenty-five days to put the UN inspection team together, another sixty for their preliminary assessment, then another sixty days for further inspections. Bush’s latest war had been delayed by more than five months. But a careful examination of the Bush UN speech showed that a free inspection of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was just one of six conditions which Iraq would have to meet if it “wishes peace.” The other Bush demands included an “end of all support for terrorism.” Did this mean the UN would now be urged to send inspectors to hunt for evidence inside Iraq for Saddam’s previous—or current— liaisons with guns-for-hire? Bush had also demanded that Iraq “cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans and others.” Notwithstanding the inclusion of Turkomans—worthy of protection indeed, though no doubt because they sat on very lucrative oil deposits—did this mean that the UN could demand human rights monitors inside Iraq? In reality, such a proposal would be both moral and highly ethical, but America’s Arab allies would profoundly hope that such monitors were not also dispatched to Riyadh, Cairo, Amman and other centres of gentle interrogation.

  Yet even if Saddam was prepared to accede to all these demands with a sincerity he had not shown in response to other UN resolutions, the Americans had made clear that sanctions would only be lifted—that Iraq’s isolation would only end— with “regime change.” For Bush’s sudden passion for international adherence to UN Security Council resolutions—an enthusiasm that never, of course, extended to Israel’s flouting of UN resolutions of equal importance—was in reality a manoeuvre to provide legitimacy for Washington’s planned invasion of Iraq.

  Tony Blair’s adherence to this cynical policy must remain one of the more mystifying elements in this chapter of Middle East tragedy. The coalescence of Bush’s born-again Christianity with Blair’s High Church pronouncements—and the unique combination of Blair’s own self-righteousness and legal casuistry— was to produce one of the strangest alliances of our times. The hollowness of the British political contribution—symbolised by the Downing Street “dossier” of 24 September 2002—should have made this obvious months before its warning of a “45-minute” WMD attack came to be debated in Parliament and in the later Hutton Report.

  I first read this document in Beirut and—as always in the Middle East—its contents appeared quite different to a reader 3,000 kilometres from London than they did to an MP in Westminster or an editor in what used to be called Fleet Street. I found it truly shocking—but not for any 45-minute warnings. Reading it, I wrote, “can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof—if the contents are true—that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam’s building of weapons of mass destruction are correct—and I will come to the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘coulds’ later—it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us—for nothing.” In May 1996, as we know, Madeleine Albright had told us that sanctions worked and prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction. Our then Tory government agreed, and Tony Blair toed the line. But when asked by an interviewer if the “price”—the death of half a million children—was worth it, she had replied to the world’s astonishment: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

  Now we were being told—if Blair was telling us the truth—that the price was not worth it. The purchase bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of children wasn’t worth a dime. For the Blair “dossier” was telling us
that, despite sanctions, Saddam was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction. All that nonsense about dual-use technology, the ban on children’s pencils—graphite could have a military use—and our refusal to allow Iraq to import equipment to restore the water-treatment plants that we bombed in the Gulf War, was a sham. This grievous conclusion was the only moral one to be drawn from the sixteen pages that supposedly detailed the chemical, biological and nuclear horrors that the Beast of Baghdad had in store for us. It was difficult, reading the full report, to know whether to laugh or cry. The degree of deceit and duplicity in its production spoke of the trickery that informed the Blair government and its treatment of MPs.

  Let us take just one example of the document’s dishonesty. On page 45, we were told—in a long chapter about Saddam’s human rights abuses—that “on March 1st, 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, riots broke out in the southern city of Basra, spreading quickly to other cities in Shia-dominated southern Iraq. The regime responded by killing thousands.” What’s wrong with this paragraph is the lie in the use of the word “riots.” These were not “riots.” They were part of a mass rebellion specifically called for by President Bush Junior’s father and by that CIA-RUN radio station in Saudi Arabia. The Shia Muslims of Iraq obeyed Bush Senior’s appeal. And were then left to their fate by the Americans and British, who they had been given every reason to believe would come to their aid. No wonder they died in their thousands. But all this was cut out from the Blair “dossier.”

  Indeed, anyone reading the weasel words of doubt that were insinuated throughout this text could only have profound concern about the basis on which Britain was to go to war. The Iraqi weapon programme was “almost certainly” seeking to enrich uranium. It “appears” that Iraq was attempting to acquire a magnet production line. There was evidence that Iraq had tried to acquire specialised aluminium tubes (used in the enrichment of uranium) but there was “no definitive intelligence” that it was destined for a nuclear programme. “If ” Iraq obtained fissile material, it could produce nuclear weapons in one or two years. It was “difficult to judge” whether al-Hussein missiles could be available for use. Efforts to regenerate the Iraqi missile programme “probably” began in 1995. And so the “dossier” went on. Yes, Saddam—we had to say this in every radio interview, every lecture, write it in every article in order to be heard—was a brutal, wicked tyrant. But were “almost certainly,” “appears,” “probably” and “if ” really the rallying call to send our Grenadiers off to the deserts of Kut-al-Amara?

  There was high praise in the document for UN weapons inspectors. And there was more trickery in the relevant chapter about them. It quoted Dr. Hans Blix, the executive chairman of the UN inspection commission, as saying that in the absence of (post-1998) inspections it was impossible to verify Iraqi disarma– ment compliance. But on 18 August 2002—scarcely a month before the Blair “dossier”—Blix had told the Associated Press that he couldn’t say with certainty that Baghdad possessed WMDs. This quotation, of course, was excised from the British government document. So there it was. If these pages of trickery were based on “probably” and “if,” we had no business going to war. If they were all true, we murdered half a million Iraqi children for nothing. How was that for a war crime?

  Yet each day, someone said something even more incredible—even more unimaginable—about President Bush’s obsession with war. In October, Bush was himself talking to an audience in Cincinnati about “nuclear holy warriors.” Forget for a moment that we still couldn’t prove Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. Forget that the latest Bush speech was just a rehash of all the “ifs” and “mays” and “coulds” in Tony Blair’s flimsy sixteen pages of allegations in his plainly dishonest “dossier.” We now had to fight “nuclear holy warriors.” That’s what we had to do to justify the whole charade through which we were being taken by the White House, by Downing Street, by all the decaying “experts” on terrorism and, alas, far too many journalists. Forget the fourteen Palestinians, including the twelve-year-old child, killed by Israel a few hours before Bush spoke in Cincinnati, forget that when American-made aircraft killed nine Palestinian children in July, along with one militant, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon—a “man of peace” in Bush’s words—described the slaughter as “a great success.” Israel was on our side in the “war on terror.” We had to remember to use the word “terror”—about Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Yassir Arafat, in fact about anyone who opposed Israel or America. Bush used the word in his Cincinnati speech thirty times in half an hour—that was one “terrorism” a minute.

  What we had to forget if we were to support this madness, needless to say, was that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It was essential to forget this for three reasons. First, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians—which was one of the reasons we were now supposed to go to war with him. Second, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the U.S. embassy—in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad. And third, because the envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. One might have thought it strange, in the course of one of his folksy press conferences, that Rumsfeld hadn’t chatted to us about this interesting tit-bit. You might think he would wish to enlighten us about the evil nature of the criminal with whom he so warmly shook hands. But no. Until questioned much later about whether he warned Saddam against the use of gas—he claimed he did, but this proved to be untrue—Rumsfeld was silent. As he was about his subsequent and equally friendly meeting with Tariq Aziz—which just happened to take place on the day in March 1984 that the UN released its damning report on Saddam’s use of poison gas against Iran.

  We had to forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds—when he “used gas against his own people” in the words of Messrs. Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al.— President Bush Senior provided Saddam with $500 million in U.S. government subsidies to buy American farm products. We had to forget that in the following year, after Saddam’s genocide was complete, the elder Bush doubled this subsidy to $1 billion, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious “dual-use” material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons. And of course, we had to forget about oil. Indeed, oil is the one commodity—and one of the few things that George Bush Junior knew something about, along with his ex-oil cronies Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and countless others in the administration— which was never mentioned. In all of Bush’s thirty minutes of anti-Iraq war talk in Cincinnati—leavened with just two minutes of how “I hope this will not require military action”—there wasn’t a single reference to the fact that Iraq might hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stood to gain billions of dollars in the event of a U.S. invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war. We had to ignore all this before we went to war. And that’s pretty much what we did.

  In the continuing war against al-Qaeda, Washington trumpeted its victories, even when they set new records in extrajudicial executions. A “Clean shot” was The Washington Post’s description of the murder of the al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen by a U.S. Predator unmanned aircraft in November 2002. The U.S. press used Israel’s own definition of such deaths as “targeted killing”—the BBC parroted the same words on 5 November. No one explained why these important al-Qaeda leaders could not have been arrested. Or tried before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation. Instead, the Americans released a clutch of Guantanamo “suspects,” one of whom—having been held for eleven months in solitary confinement and then returned to Afghanistan—turned out to be around one-hundred years old, and so senile that he couldn’t string a sentence together. Unsurprisingly, American intelligence never seemed aware of just how many of bin Laden’s associates it had been fighting in Af
ghanistan.194

  The very expression “targeted killing” had now become part of the lexicon of the “war on terror.” Ariel Sharon of Israel used the term. So too did the Russians in their renewed war on Chechnya. After the disastrous “rescue” of Moscow theatre hostages held by rebel Chechens in Moscow, Putin was supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya. In October 2002, Newsweek ran a brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a deeply moving account of Russian cruelty there, it told of a Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier began to rape her. “Hurry up, Kolya,” his friend shouted, “while she’s still warm.” But no matter. The “war on terror” meant that Kolya and the boys would be back in action soon, courtesy of Messrs. Putin, Bush and Blair.

  That very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who tried to warn the West of Israel’s massive nuclear war technology, imprisoned for twelve years of solitary confinement—and betrayed, so it appears, by Robert Maxwell—wrote a poem in his confinement. “I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver,” Vanunu wrote. “They said, ‘Do this, do that, don’t look left or right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.’”

  Kolya would have understood that. So would the U.S. Air Force officer “flying” the drone that killed the al-Qaeda men in Yemen. So would the Israeli pilot who bombed the apartment block in Gaza, killing nine small children as well as well as his Hamas target, the “operation” described by Sharon as “a great success.” Was this not part of the arrogance of colonial power? Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during the 1956–52 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting in October 2002 of his prowess at the guillotine. “You must never give the guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head around and that’s when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through his jaw, and you have to use a butcher’s knife to finish it off. It is an exorbitant power—to kill one’s fellow man.” So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom.