The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Already, U.S. forces were driving through Baghdad much as the Israelis once did in southern Lebanon, ordering motorists to stay away from their vehicles, threatening them with death. “Stay 50 yards away from this vehicle or deadly force will be used” was the printed warning in Arabic on the back of the American Humvees. Bremer banned a small-circulation Shiite magazine—run by Muqtada Sadr’s equally small party—for provoking sectarian tension and for comparing him to Saddam Hussein. So Sadr’s militia rose up against the Americans. Najaf was besieged, just as the British had besieged it more than eighty years earlier. Apache gunships fired into the Baghdad Shia slums of Shuala. Iraq’s cities were now hunting grounds for thieves and rapists. Its even older cities—the great archaeological treasures of Sumeria—were left unguarded, so an army of robbers had moved in to smash their way through their buried treasures to 3,000-year-old pots, turning the ancient sites into a land of craters, as if a B-52 had carpet-bombed the desert. After an international outcry following the theft of treasures from the Baghdad Museum, Washington sent an FBI–CIA team to investigate the robberies.206 But the postwar tearing apart of the Sumerian cities is on an infinitely greater scale. Historians may one day conclude that this mass destruction of mankind’s inheritance is among the most lasting tragedies of the Anglo–American “liberation” of Iraq.

  Watching America’s awesome control over this part of the world, its massive firepower, its bases and personnel across Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Doha, Oman, Yemen, Israel of course, and now Iraq, you can see how the Iraqis thought it through. A generation of teenagers, crucified in the eight-year war with Iran, had grown up knowing nothing but suffering and death. What did their lives count for now? And if the Sunnis among that generation should ever become allied with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, what destruction might they sow among the Americans and any who chose to help them? A reborn Iraqi army of the shadows, forged in the greatest of all Middle East wars, and an army of suicide bombers; this would be an enemy to challenge any superpower.

  Yet still the fantasy had to continue. Faced with ever greater armed resistance to their occupation, the Americans, it transpired, were admitting only a fraction of the attacks against their forces. Although the U.S. occupation authorities acknowledged ambushes in which their troops died, they were failing to report a mass of attacks and assaults against their patrols and bases in and around Baghdad. Yet the reality—largely unreported by the media—was that the Americans were no longer safe anywhere in Iraq: not at Baghdad airport, which they captured with so much fanfare in early April 2003, not at their military bases nor in the streets of central Baghdad nor in their vulnerable helicopters nor on the country roads. Helicopters were shot down over Fallujah, C-130s blasted out of the sky by missiles.

  And the United States responded in the way of all occupation armies. Its prison camps became places of shame. Prisoners—there were 11,300 by May 2003 in Iraq alone—were routinely beaten during interrogation. Thirty had died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2005, often after brutal interrogations. We like to think we only began to discover this when the vile photographs of Abu Ghraib were revealed to the world in 2004, but in my files I discover that my colleague Patrick Cockburn and I had been writing about torture and prison abuse in the late summer of 2003. “Sources” may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but my sources for the beatings in Iraq were impeccable. Now it was happening at U.S. military bases around Iraq. “Torture works,” an American Special Forces colonel boasted to a friend of mine.

  He was wrong. Torture creates resistance. Torture creates suicide bombers. Torture ends up by destroying the torturers. I remember the village of Khan Dari, where the first American to be blown up by a roadside bomb was killed in July 2003. His blood was still across the highway and the crowd was gloating over his death. And a man walked up to me who wanted to talk politics of a very violent kind. He had, he said, been a prisoner of the Americans and savagely beaten. “This is the way we deal with occupiers,” he said. “They came and said they were liberators but when we realised they were occupiers, we had to fight. We are people of steel. The Americans and all the other occupiers will burn.” Then came something as frightening as it was terrible. “I have a one-year-old daughter,” he said. “And I would happily put a bomb in her clothes and send her to the Americans to kill them.”

  Already, by late July 2003, Amnesty International’s investigators had amassed a damning file of evidence that Iraq’s Anglo–American occupiers were ill-treating or torturing prisoners, refusing to obey Iraqi court orders to release detainees, using excessive force on demonstrators, killing innocent civilians and passing their own laws to prevent newly constituted Iraqi courts from trying American or British soldiers for crimes committed in the country. Amnesty also discovered that large sums of money had gone missing after house raids by American troops, in one case receiving from the U.S. authorities an acceptance that an officer in the U.S. 101st Division had “removed” 3 million Iraqi dinars—$2,000—from an Iraqi family’s home. In another case, Amnesty found that an Iraqi labourer and father of three children, Radi Numa, died in British custody only hours after his arrest in the south of the country. On 10 May, British soldiers delivered a written note to the family’s home stating that he “suffered a heart attack while we were asking questions about his son. We took him to the military hospital, go to the hospital.” Unaware that he was dead, the Numa family went to the hospital only to be told he wasn’t there. They later found him in the mortuary where his unidentified corpse had been brought by Royal Military Police two days earlier. Baha Moussa, a young Basra hotel waiter, died in British military custody, reportedly beaten to death.

  On at least two occasions arrests were made in Iraq not by soldiers but by “U.S. nationals in plain clothes”—presumably CIA agents. Nasser Abdul Latif, a twenty-three-year-old physics student, for example, was shot on 12 June in a raid on his home “by armed men in plain clothes, who were apparently U.S. nationals.” Searching for a senior member of the Baath party, U.S. troops raided the home of Khreisan Aballey on 30 April and arrested him and his eighty-year-old father. His brother was shot—the family didn’t know if he was alive or dead—and Aballey, who claimed not to know the whereabouts of the Baathist official, was taken for interrogation. He said he was made to stand or kneel facing a wall for seven and a half days, hooded and handcuffed tightly with plastic strips. He reported that a U.S. soldier stamped on his foot and tore off one of his toenails.207

  Paul Bremer’s “Coalition Provisional Authority” (CPA)—a name that just reeked of apologies for its own existence—issued edicts like a Roman emperor with the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths at the gates of the capital. The Iraqi army would be disbanded, putting tens of thousands of armed men out of work. What did Bremer now think they were going to do in their spare time? Tons of razor wire now surrounded the marble Saddamite palace from which Bremer’s whiz-kids and anti-terror advisers tried to govern Iraq. The “coalition”—essentially America and its British ally during the war—seemed less and less provisional and equally less an authority as the weeks went by.

  The “Interim Council” and its twenty-five members, representing a dutiful balance between Iraq’s Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and secular population, was already the subject of the deepest cynicism. Its first act—at the behest of the Pentagon’s Shia accolyte Ahmed Chalabi—was to declare a national holiday for 9 April, marking the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Or at least, that is how it looked in the West. For Iraqis, their first new national holiday marked the first day of foreign occupation of their land. In the conference hall that now served as press centre for the occupation authorities in Baghdad, sets of handouts were laid carefully on a table for journalists to peruse. They read like a schizophrenic nightmare. “Al Saydia Public Health Clinic Grand Opening,” one would say. “Soldier Killed in Explosion” said the next. “Iraq National Vaccination Day for Children” said a third, jus
t an inch from another flyer recording the killing of two more U.S. troops.

  The Americans were buying time, making decisions on the hoof, failing to assess the effects of their every action. First it was Jay “pull-your-stomach-in-and-say-you’re-proud-to-be-an-American” Garner—the man I’d last met in Kurdistan in 1991—and then the famous “anti-terrorism” expert Paul Bremer who washed up in Baghdad to fire and then rehire Baath party university professors, and then, faced with one dead American a day, to rehire the murderous thugs of Saddam’s torture centres to help in the battle against “terrorism.” Sixteen of America’s thirty-three combat brigades were now in the cauldron of Iraq—five others were also deployed overseas—and the 82nd Airborne, only just out of Afghanistan, was about to be redeployed north of Baghdad. “Bring ’em on,” Bush had taunted America’s guerrilla enemies in June 2003. They took him at his word. There was so far not a shred of evidence that the latest Bush administration fantasy— “thousands” of foreign Islamist “jihadi” fighters streaming into Iraq to kill Americans—was true.

  But soon that fantasy would be made manifest. What would we be told then? Wasn’t Iraq invaded to destroy “terrorism” rather than to re-create it? We were told that Iraq was going to be transformed into a “democracy,” and suddenly it’s to be a battleground for another “war against terror.” America, Bush was now telling his people, “is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or . . . Los Angeles.” So that was it, then. Draw all these nasty “terrorists” into our much-loved, “liberated” Iraq, and they would obligingly leave the “homeland” alone.

  When the Twin Towers collapsed in New York, who had ever heard of Fallujah? When the killers of 11 September 2001 flew their plane into the Pentagon, who had heard of Ramadi? When the Lebanese hijacker flew his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would ever have believed that President George W. Bush would be announcing, in August 2003, a “new front line in the war on terror” as his troops embarked on a hopeless campaign against the guerrillas of Iraq? Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to arms against “terrorism” in “Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza”?

  Gaza? What did the miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? Nothing, of course. Nor did Iraq have anything whatever to do with 11 September 2001. Nor did September 11 change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people—and the sympathy of the rest of the world—to introduce a “world order” dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. The Iraqi “regime change,” as we now all knew, was planned as part of a Richard Perle/Paul Wolfowitz campaign document to would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. That Tony Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising what it represented—a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists—truly beggared belief.

  But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan—its American-paid warlords raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in their burqas, its opium production now making Afghanistan the world’s number one exporter, and its people sometimes killed at the rate of up to a hundred a week—was a “success,” something that Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld still boasted about. By 2005, the Taliban were back and so was al-Qaeda, killing American soldiers rather than Russians. Iraq—a midden of guerrilla hatred, popular resentment and incipient civil war—was also a “success.” Now Bush wanted $87 billion to keep Iraq running, he wanted to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a “talking shop” in 2002, he wanted scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to die in America’s occupation war, to share the burdens of occupation—though not, of course, the decision-making, which must remain Washington’s exclusive imperial preserve.

  What’s more, the world was supposed to accept the insane notion that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was part of this monstrous battle. It was the planet’s last war of colonisation, although all mention of the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza had been erased from the Middle East narrative in U.S. statements about the “war on terror,” the cosmic clash of religious extremism that President Bush invented after 11 September 2001. Could Israel’s interests be better served by so infantile a gesture from Bush? The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers and the grotesque implantation of Jews and Jews only in the colonies had now been set into this colossal struggle of “good” against “evil,” in which even Ariel Sharon was “a man of peace,” according to Mr. Bush.

  In the Pentagon, there was some sanity. They were re-showing Gillo Pontecorvo’s film of the French war in Algeria. The Battle of Algiers showed what happened both to the guerrillas of the FLN and to the French army when their war turned dirty. The flyers sent out to the Pentagon brass to watch this magnificent, painful film began with the words: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas . . .” And, they might have added, give encouragement to every resistance force in the Middle East. “If Israel’s superpower ally can be humbled by Arabs in Iraq,” a Palestinian official explained to me in one of the Beirut camps in 2003, “why should we give up our struggle against the Israelis, who cannot be as efficient soldiers as the Americans?”

  That’s the lesson the Algerians drew when they saw France’s mighty army surrendering at Dien Bien Phu. The French, like the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, had succeeded in murdering or “liquidating” many of the Algerians who might have negotiated a ceasefire with them. The search for an interlocuteur valablewas one of de Gaulle’s most difficult tasks when he decided to leave Algeria. But what could the Americans do? Their interlocuteur might have been the United Nations. But the UN had been struck off as a negotiator by the suicide bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad. So had the International Red Cross, also suicide-bombed. The insurgents were not interested in negotiations of any kind. Bush had declared “war without end.” And it looked as though Iraqis—along with ourselves—were going to be its principal victims.

  TO ABU GHRAIB PRISON. It is September 2003. It will be another seven months before the torture and abuse perpetrated by the Americans in Saddam’s old murder house are revealed. No talking to the prisoners, we are told. We can see them beyond the dirt lot, standing in the heat beside their sand-brown tents, the razor wire wrapped in sheaths around their compound. No pictures of the prisoners, we are told. Do not enter the compound. Do not go inside the wire. Of the up to 800 Iraqis held here, only a handful are “security detainees”—the rest are “criminal detainees”—but until now almost all of them have lived out here in the heat and dust and muck. Which is why the Americans were so pleased to see us at Saddam’s vile old prison. Their message? Things are getting better.

  Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, commander of the U.S. 800th Military Police Brigade, has cleaned up the burned and looted jail cells for hundreds of prisoners. A new medical section with stocks of medicines, X-ray machines and even a defibrillator has been installed for the prisoners. In the newly painted cells, there are blankets and toothpaste, toothbrush, soap and shampoo for every man, neatly placed for them—and for us, I suspect—on top of their prison blankets. These are the same cells in which the prisoners will later be held naked, or forced to wear women’s underclothes or bitten by dogs. This is the corridor in which a young American military policewoman will hold a naked prisoner on a dog leash, where Iraqi prisoners will be piled naked on top of each other on the floor. General Karpinski will later be the Pentagon’s fall-gal for what is happening here.

  General Karpinski was obviously a tough lady—she was an intelligence officer in 7th Special Forces at Fort Bragg and served as a “targeting officer” in Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990—but back in September 2003 she had a little difficulty at first
in recalling that there was a riot at the jail four months earlier in which U.S. troops used “lethal force” when protesting prisoners threw stones and tent-poles at American military policemen. The troops killed a teenage inmate. Most of the “security detainees”—the 800th MP Brigade’s publicity said that they have the responsibility of “caring” for prisoners rather than guarding them—were across at Baghdad airport where, General Karpinski said, there were men who “may be part of a resistance force.” Note the word “resistance,” rather than terrorist. Then when I asked if there were any Western prisoners being held, she said that she thought there were “six claiming to be American and two claiming to be from the UK.” General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, who would also be blamed for the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2005, will deny this within twenty-four hours. No explanation given.

  Then came the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison, a Dr. Majid. When I asked him what his job was when Saddam used the place as a torture and execution centre, he replied that he had been—er—the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison. Indeed, half his staff were running the medical centre at Abu Ghraib under the Saddam regime. “No, I didn’t ever attend the executions,” he said. “I couldn’t stand that. I sent my junior doctors to do the death certificates.” Except at night, of course, when the security services brought in political prisoners for hanging. Then Dr. Majid would receive an instruction saying “no death certificates.” The politicals were hanged at night. During the day, the doctor said, it was the “killers” who were hanged. Killers? Killers? What did his use of that word imply?