by Robert Fisk
130 Washing continuously in a shower was good advice for victims of a gas attack; the hat was an exotic addition unless it was an enclosed hood.
131 Simple. In June and August 1980, the UN Security Council declared Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem “null and void” under international law. In December 1981, the UN Security Council declared Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights “null and void” under international law. On 9 August 1990, the UN Security Council declared Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait “null and void” under international law. For the third declaration—but not for the first two—the West would insist on the strict application of “international law.” Arabs already knew, of course, that there was one rule of law for the Israelis, a quite different one for non-Israelis.
132 I visited the British unit on 26 October and every soldier I spoke to reminded me that as the Light Brigade, they charged into the valley of death at Balaclava exactly a hundred and thirty-six years and two days earlier. “It is one of the classics of British army tradition,” Lt. Col. Arthur Denaro admitted, “that we tend to celebrate defeats.” True to the statistics of imperial history, 35 per cent of the Hussars were from Ireland, which is why so many of the men preparing to fight Saddam had accents from Belfast, Derry, Dublin and Cork. Even their tanks bore the names of Irish towns.
133 This was the same Sheikh al-Owda whose release from custody bin Laden would demand when I met him in Afghanistan seven years later.
134 The question was also raised when Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir David Craig, the chief of the UK Defence Staff, visited the kingdom. Asked if any British officer would have a power of veto over an American decision, he replied, according to my notes at the time: “Well, I think that’s a difficult sort of way to put it because there is no question when you go to war, that you’re under command and you obey accordingly.” Stripped of its discretion, this meant that de la Billière would have to do as he was told once the shooting started.
135 The computer was returned by the patriotic thief, who left the following note with the machine: “Dear Sir, I am a common thief and I love my Queen and country. Whoever lost this should be bloody hung. Yours, Edwards.”
136 This was pushing the envelope of history a little far. Kuwait was part of the Ottoman governorate of Basra and the Turks regarded the Sabah family as Ottoman governors even after a new sheikh, Mubarak Sabah—who had killed his two half-brothers—agreed in 1899 to make Kuwait a protectorate of Britain for £15,000 a year. After the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, Iraq demanded a union with Kuwait and was only dissuaded from invading when British troops were rushed to the sheikhdom—much as U.S. forces flew to “save” Saudi Arabia in 1990.
137 The breakdown of this figure was as follows: non-repayable loans, $5,843,287,671.23; soft cash loans, $9,246,575,343.46; development loans, $95,890,410.95; military equipment and logistics, $3,739,184,077.85; petroleum, $6,751,159,583; industrial products for the reconstruction of Basra, $16,772,800; payments for industrial repairs, $20,266,667; trucks, tractors, caterpillars, asphalt rollers (270 vehicles), $21,333,333.50. The Saudi calculation was out by a $1.19.
138 It is instructive to compare this humane if cynical account of the BLU-82 with the gung-ho report by a Reuters correspondent on another American “super-weapon,” used in 1991 to destroy hardened underground bunkers. “The bomb, called a GBU-28, was five times more powerful than any non-nuclear weapon previously built. It was just hours old when dropped on Iraq’s strongest underground fortress and its designers had their fingers crossed that it would work. The new bomb, built at breakneck speed by Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. and Texas Instruments Inc. in an unprecedented team effort, was dropped from an F-111 onto a command complex at Al Taji airbase . . . the 4,700-pound superbomb—a howitzer barrel filled with explosives and guided by a laser—penetrated the massive concrete walls and blew up inside the bunker . . . ‘It’s a story of patriotism and unprecedented cooperation,’ said Merl Culp of Lockheed Corp . . . ”
139 The AWACS crewman noticed a profound difference between the Iraqi pilots’ behaviour during the 1991 war and “the smooth polished professionalism with which I heard these same pilots conducting strikes deep inside Iran scarcely three years previously. On one such mission the Iranians even managed to shoot one of them down, but they didn’t even discuss it other than to say that they didn’t have a ‘complete formation’ on the return trip.”
140 The Arabs spent $84 billion underwriting Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, the two melodramatically named phases of the 1990–91 Gulf crisis and war, according to an Arab economic report published in 1992. This was more than three times what the Saudis paid for Saddam’s eight-year war with Iran. Prince Khaled bin Sultan would calculate Saudi Arabia’s individual contribution to the 1991 conflict at more than $27.5 billion, slightly more than it gave Saddam. In all, the Arabs sustained a loss of $620 billion because of the Iraqi invasion and subsequent conflict. Kuwait had been the first to contribute to the war coffers when it agreed to pay part of the $6 billion for America’s initial military deployment in September 1991. Washington complained in August 1991 that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait still owed $7.5 billion to the United States for their share of Gulf War costs. By that stage, the two had respectively already contributed $1.7 billion and $12.5 billion. The Middle East may have proved a new economic reality in the world economy: that wars can be fought for profit as well as victory, a lesson that the invasion of Iraq might have reinforced until the occupation ended in disaster.
141 Israel was constantly boasting of its superior intelligence about the Iraqi regime—as it did in 2003 when it added to the fraudulent warnings about the weapons of mass destruction that no longer existed in Saddam’s arsenal. Although American officers told me in 1991 that Israel’s “intelligence” on the location of Scud batteries in the Iraqi desert invariably turned out to be wrong, it is interesting that de la Billière—believing that Israel would enter the war after Saddam’s provocative Scud attacks on Tel Aviv and other cities—“began to devise a plan whereby we would allocate their [Israeli] ground forces a sector of Iraq in which to operate exclusively.”
142 The most thorough investigation of this scandalous attack was conducted by the same man who revealed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in 2004: Seymour Hersh. As usual, the “pool” journalists failed to uncover the extent of the 24th Division’s killings and presented it as an Iraqi assault on the Americans.
143 Journalists would subject Iraqi armed forces to unprecedented metamorphoses in the quarter-century between 1980 and 2005. When they invaded Iran, many of the Iraqi army units were obsequiously referred to in the Western media as “crack troops”—they were, after all, attacking “expansionist” Iran. After the same army invaded “friendly” Kuwait ten years later, they became the “enemy,” often described—not without reason—as ruthless or cruel. Once Iraqis—including many of the same “enemy” troops defeated in the Kuwait liberation—turned on Saddam in 1991, they became “rebels.” But when the surviving ex-soldiers then rose up against the American occupation after 2003, they turned into “terrorists,” “die-hards” or— incredibly—“Saddam loyalists.” Later, perhaps because they attacked the world’s only superpower so ferociously, we gifted them with the title of “insurgents.”
144 Among the many thousands of Americans who were decorated for their role in the Kuwait liberation was a young gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle who received the Bronze Star and several other medals. Timothy McVeigh, a promising young soldier, then tried to join the U.S. Special Forces, but dropped out and left the army embittered on 31 December 1991. He was executed on 11 June 2001 for the 19 April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 167 Americans.
145 As so often, American “intelligence sources” had contributed to this mind-set. As early as 2 February, Douglas Jehl of the Los Angeles Times, a “pool” journalist with American forces in Saudi Arabia, was referring to “intelligence reports issued to commander
s last week warning that more than a dozen Palestinian terrorists were known to be operating in the sector now occupied by [the] 1st Armored Division.” These non-existent “terrorists” were linked by “most officers” with the disappearance of fifty American military vehicles from a U.S. base. How twelve Palestinians—or anyone else—could have stolen so many vehicles went unexplained. Jehl did suggest one possibility, far down in his dispatch: that U.S. soldiers were themselves stealing the trucks and Humvees to cannibalise for spare parts for their own vehicles.
146 There was no difficulty in gathering evidence of this. In Hawali, Sara Moussa told me how she watched her two sons, Tahseen and Amin, taken from their home on 1 March 1991 by six Kuwaitis armed with G-3 rifles. “They searched the house, they tied their hands and blindfolded them,” she said. “When they told the Kuwaitis not to touch their sisters, the gunmen beat them with their rifles. Then they put them both in the trunk of a car and drove them away. I have not seen them since.” Tamam Salman’s twenty-three-year-old son Ibrahim was taken by gunmen the same day, thrown into the trunk of a car and driven off. She said that when she asked a Kuwaiti policeman for help, he spat at her “because I am a Palestinian.” Other testimony to Kuwaiti persecution appeared in numerous European newspapers.
147 Unlike their government, Kuwaitis could show moving sympathy towards those who had also suffered. At Safwan stood a young Kuwaiti woman, Siham el-Marzouk, searching in vain among the wretched masses fleeing Iraq for her brother Faisal, kidnapped in the last days of the war. It was raining when she found a bedraggled Egyptian who had lived more than thirty years in Kuwait, working as a school caretaker, until abducted by the Iraqis. Now the Kuwaiti authorities would not let him return home. From bits of a shattered motorway intersection barrier, he had fashioned a hut to shield himself from the rain and pleaded for someone to tell the Egyptian ambassador in Kuwait of his plight, writing out the story of his grief on a piece of paper he had found in the sand, crying all the while. The Kuwaiti woman tried to comfort him, gave him food and money. When she saw a destitute Filipina woman, she took off her black woollen cloak and gave it to the refugee. Two days later, her kidnapped brother Faisal arrived safely at Safwan.
148 Al-Assadi’s purgatory had only just begun. At first housed in unsanitary refugee camps in southern Iran, he later moved to Qom, where he was associated with the Iraqi opposition Al-Wahda party. But the Iranian authorities suspected the group was an American espionage network and al-Assadi was beaten into videotaping a false confession that he was trying to overthrow the Iranian government. In 1996—five years after his escape from Basra—he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment but briefly freed, he said, when he agreed to collaborate with the Iranians. Given fifteen days’ leave from jail, he bribed his way across the border to Kurdish-held northern Iraq, received residency papers from Massoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party, then set off across the Tigris River to Syria and on to Lebanon, where the author met him in 1998 as he desperately sought UN assistance to travel to Europe. He eventually left for Finland to live with his brother.
149 Among the most interesting developments at the Beirut conference—in light of America’s later invasion and occupation of Iraq—was the performance of the secret anti-Saddam Dawa party. Widely regarded as the most influential Shia opposition group in the country—Saddam certainly thought so—its principal delegate from Tehran, Abu Bital al-Adib, promised to abide by a parliamentary constitution under which the party would stand in a general election. Coming from a group which—despite its own denials—had tried to kill the emir of Kuwait and had bombed the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, this desire for democracy was little short of extraordinary. U.S. hostages in Beirut were being held captive in return for the freeing of the Dawa men imprisoned after the attack on the emir. Yet when the United States was desperate to hold elections in Iraq in 2005, few parties were more enthusiastic to take part in the poll than the same Dawa party.
150 There were other eerie voices within the administration at this time. A Washington Post report on 14 April 1991 quoted an anonymous (of course) official saying that “the thing that could make it like Vietnam was to go into Iraq and get bogged down, establishing a new government, protecting a new government against a hostile population. That would be a recipe for disaster.” Ouch.
151 They did. For some unaccountable reason, Hodgson—a first-rate journalist and a good friend—failed to tell them.
152 The existence of Iraqi “raping rooms” became the object of an unnecessary controversy when the exiled writer Kanan Makiya claimed in 1993 that he had in his possession an official document which proved that rape was used as a political weapon. The card index, issued by the Iraqi “General Security Organisation,” contained the name Aziz Salih Ahmad and apparently described his activity as “Violation of Women’s Honour.” Several of Makiya’s critics—themselves no supporters of Saddam—claimed that he had misinterpreted the card and that the activity indicated Ahmad’s crime rather than his job; in other words, that this was a surveillance note written by the police rather than an employment card. The evidence suggests that Makiya’s critics are right. But ex-prisoners have described how female relatives of Saddam’s opponents were raped in front of them—my own first report on this during the Iran–Iraq War was the reason for that excoriating letter to The Times from the Iraqi ambassador in London—and I found evidence of the Dahuk police dungeons two years before Makiya produced the card index paper. However, whenever I later referred to rape in Iraqi prisons, I was accused of using Makiya as my source. An academic feud now obscured the reality of “raping rooms”—which did really exist in Saddam’s regime, however casually chosen the victims may have been.
153 This indifference to the Geneva Convention did not apply, however, when Iraq paraded captured British pilots on television during the war, some of whom appeared to have been beaten. American and British officials then insisted on absolute observance by the Baghdad regime of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners-of-war. Some pilots bore the marks of their emergency ejection from their aircraft, although RAF crews later gave graphic accounts of their mistreatment at the hands of Iraq’s security goons.
154 The evidence of massive human suffering was now overwhelming. A UN humanitarian panel on sanctions reported in 1999 that “the gravity of the humanitarian situation of the Iraqi people is indisputable and cannot be overstated. Irrespective of alleged attempts by the Iraq authorities to exaggerate the significance of certain facts for political propaganda purposes, the data from different sources as well as qualitative assessments of bona fide observers and sheer common sense analysis of economic variables converge and corroborate this evaluation.” UNICEF reported in August 1999 that “if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998” (emphasis in original).
155 For example, the Iraqi National Spinal Cord Injuries Centre—set up with the help of a Danish team during the Iran–Iraq War to look after seriously wounded soldiers—lacked medicine and supplies throughout the period of sanctions. Staff were forced to re-sterilise gauze and catheters and were not permitted to receive new medical textbooks and journals.
156 There was to be a macabre return to this personal abuse against the Kuwaiti royal family at Saddam’s own macabre and American-arranged first trial hearing in Baghdad in 2004 when he accused the “animals” in the Kuwaiti government of trying to impoverish Iraqi women to become “whores.”
157 Even on The Independent on Sunday, where a nervous night sub-editor—seeing yet another “crisis” story on the agency wires on the night of 9 October—“pulled” my own sceptical report from the paper after the first edition for fear that war would have started by breakfast-time. It was the only occasion on which this happened to a report of mine in the paper, whose editors agreed next day that there was
n’t much point in asking a journalist to reflect his doubts about exaggerated reporting if those same exaggerations were to cause us to suppress the story.
158 The two best independent accounts of Ritter’s work and of the CIA’s infiltration of UNSCOM were published by The New Yorker: Peter J. Boyer’s “Scott Ritter’s Private War,” on 9 November 1998, from which the above quotation is taken, and Seymour M. Hersh’s “Saddam’s Best Friend: How the CIA made it a lot easier for the Iraqi leader to rearm,” on 5 April 1999.
159 Diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma three months earlier, he had received two cycles of cytotoxins. “But the third cycle is partial because he’s getting only cyclophosphamide adriamycin as a substitute for vincristine,” Dr. Ismael said. What Latif needed is produced by a company in Germany called Astra Medica. “We received twenty vials of this ten days ago. Before that, the patients’ families were buying it for 160,000 dinars—more than two years’ salary for many Iraqis. But still we can’t get enough. Latif needs the treatment as long as his malignancy continues.”
160 Readers wishing to learn more about DU munitions should refer to the voluminous reports of Swords into Ploughshares and—on the effect of pre-2003 sanctions as well as DU—to the regular bulletins of Voices in the Wilderness UK of 16b Cherwell Road, Oxford OX4 1BG.
161 This same scandalous indifference towards the effects of DU was to be repeated just over two years later when, in January 2001, reports began to emerge from Bosnia that hundreds of Serbs—living close to the site of U.S. Air Force depleted-uranium bombings in 1995—were suffering and dying from unexplained cancers. When I travelled to Bosnia to investigate these deaths, I found that up to 300 Serbian men, women and children living close to the site of a 1995 DU bombing of a military base in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici had died of cancers and leukaemias over the following five years—they lay next to each other in an extended graveyard at Bratunac in eastern Bosnia, the town to which they had travelled as refugees. One frozen winter’s morning in Bratunac, I interviewed twelve-year-old Sladjana Sarenac, who had picked up a bomb fragment outside her home in Hadjici. Her story was eerily and painfully familiar. “It glittered and I did what all children do,” she said. “I was six years old and I pretended to make cookies out of the bits of metal and soil in the garden. Within two months I got a kind of yellow sand under my fingernails and then the nails started to fall out.” Sladjana had been seriously ill ever since. Her nails had repeatedly fallen out of her fingers and toes, she had suffered internal bleeding, constant diarrhoea and vomiting, enduring a thirty-hour coma and a calvary of Yugoslav hospitals. It was the same old story. NATO said they had no evidence of the ill-effects of DU munitions in Bosnia but wanted to know if any existed; yet when offered the opportunity to investigate such reports, they showed no interest in doing so. On 17 January 2001, I appealed in The Independent for any NATO doctors in Bosnia to get in touch with me on my temporary Sarajevo telephone number, offering to take them to Bratunac and to introduce them to Sladjana. The phone never rang. The Iraqis were Muslims and the Serbs were Orthodox Christians—most of them hostile to Bosnia’s Muslim community—but they shared one characteristic: in 1991 and 1995, they were both, respectively, our “enemy” and thus could be ignored. Similarly, the UN was left to carry out an inconclusive survey of DU use during the 1999 Kosovo war after which the American military admitted that it had “lost count” of the number of DU rounds used during the NATO bombardment of Serbia. (See the author’s reports in The Independent, 4 October and 22 November 1999.)