The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  201 You could observe this cockiness when Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, the jovial but far from funny information minister, spoke of Tony Blair. “I think the British nation has never been faced with a tragedy like this fellow.” Fellow. Ah yes, Sahaf knew how to mock the Brits. He would read out daily casualty reports which—given the years of controversy to come about the number of Iraqi civilian dead—now have an archival importance they did not possess at the time. On this, the third day of the invasion, he gave the following figures for dead and wounded: in Baghdad, 194 wounded; in Nineveh, 8 wounded; in Karbala 10 killed and 32 wounded; in Salahuddin, 2 killed and 22 wounded. In Najaf, the figures were 2 and 36; in Qadisiya, 4 and 13; in Basra, 14 and 122. In Babylon, the Iraqi government claimed 30 killed and 63 wounded. In all, 62 civilians had been killed so far.

  202 A Pentagon investigation showed that U.S. soldiers on the Jumhuriya Bridge thought they had identified an “enemy hunter/killer team on the balcony of a room on the upper floors of a large tan-colored building.” Reporters Without Borders carried out its own investigation into the Palestine Hotel deaths on 8 April 2003, interviewing both journalists and U.S. forces involved in the incident. It concluded that while the killings were not deliberate, the failure of U.S. commanders to inform their forces that the Palestine Hotel was a base of hundreds of journalists was “criminal” and that the U.S. Army had lied when it continued to insist that “direct firing” had come from the hotel when this was clearly untrue. The headquarters of Major General Blount “bore a heavy responsibility” for not providing information “that would have prevented the death of the journalists.” The question, the report said, “is whether this information was withheld deliberately, because of misunderstanding or by criminal negligence.” Regrettably, Reporters Without Borders did not investigate the attack on the Al-Jazeera office the same day.

  203 This appalling incident is recalled in David Zucchino’s Thunder Run: Three Days in the Battle for Baghdad (Atlantic Books, London, 2004), which covers the journey of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade from southern Iraq to Baghdad during the invasion. In this account of the motorway killings (pp. 231–46), Hubbard and his comrades are confronted by “suicide vehicles” on Highway 8 that were “relentless” and “kept speeding north.” Hubbard, the book says, “couldn’t comprehend the repeated, futile forays—each one ending in an eruption of flames and flying metal as one vehicle after another was destroyed by high-explosive rounds.” Zucchino quotes a young army private complaining that “Damn, we’re killing a lot of people here.” Another private “saw one of the first vehicles get hammered . . . He saw the car explode, and he saw human beings explode, too.” A few hours later, according to Zucchino, “from the west and north came suicide cars, nearly twenty of them by mid-afternoon.” Yet the book makes no reference to the large number of civilians who died under U.S. tank fire, many of whose bodies I had seen with my own eyes. If so large a number of suicide bombers were really deployed against the Americans on Highway 8, then this was a major turning point in the war—and a key to the forthcoming insurgency. But my own evidence as an eyewitness to the aftermath suggests that, while there clearly was a military ambush, most of the dead were civilians and that American fear of suicide bombers led them to fire at any vehicle which did not clear the road. As Hubbard told me, “a lot of people sped up . . . I had to protect my men.” Zucchino’s book, incidentally, gives a fairly convincing account of the military confusion surrounding the killing of the journalists at the Palestine Hotel (pp. 296–307), although it repeats the canard that gunmen were firing from the building. It is worth adding that if it is true, as Zucchino’s book says, that the 3rd Infantry Division endured “one of the most brutal and decisive battles in combat history” in Baghdad, then the Pentagon’s contention that Iraqi forces simply declined to fight and “melted away” in the capital is untrue.

  204 A report on the military assessment of “the lessons of the war with Iraq” in The New York Times on 20 July 2003 stated that the approval of Donald Rumsfeld was required if “any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed and all of them were approved.” So the Christian families of Mansour stood no chance.

  205 This one file of letters and court documents is now deposited—appropriately enough and courtesy of The Independent —in the royal Hashemite archives in Amman.

  206 In all, 15,000 objects were looted from the Baghdad Museum. Despite much fanfare by the Western authorities when some treasures were later recovered, 11,000 were still missing in June 2005, including the famous 3,500-year-old “Mona Lisa” ivory depicting the head of an Assyrian woman. Of the 4,000 artifacts discovered, 1,000 were found in the United States, 1,067 in Jordan, 600 in Italy and the remainder in countries neighbouring Iraq.

  207 By far the most damning document on U.S. treatment of prisoners—including their “rendition” to countries where they would also be tortured—is Amnesty International’s 200-page report published on 27 October 2004, United States of America: Human Dignity Denied; Torture and Accountability in the “War on Terror” (AMR51/145/2004).

  208 In a 21 May 2005 email to The Independent, Karpinski wrote that she had visited Guantánamo for “less than an entire day and I was there to resolve some issues between two officers, nothing related to the detention operations at all. I had access to all cellblocks at Abu Ghraib. When the prison compound was transferred to the Military Intelligence Commander in November 2003, my access remained unimpeded. The limitation was in the hours I was allowed to visit Abu Ghraib. I was not allowed to go out to Abu Ghraib during the hours of darkness . . . due to the increased danger of travelling at night . . .” Most of the mistreatment and torture at Abu Ghraib appears to occur at night.

  209 By midsummer 2005, disclosures of torture by U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were being made almost weekly. In The New York Times on 23 May, Bob Herbert described the military torturers as “sadists, perverts and criminals,” quoting the Times’s own report of 20 May of a U.S. Army document on torture in Afghanistan: “In sworn testimony to army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.” This original report, by Tim Golden, described how an innocent man was kicked a hundred times on the leg by guards and later died in his cell, handcuffed to the ceiling.

  210 For years, Americans—not least Tom Friedman—had been lecturing the Palestinians on the principles of non-violence, suggesting that a Gandhi-like approach to occupation might yield benefits. Arab pleading at The Hague proved, of course, that such peaceful protest did not amount to the proverbial hill of beans.

  211 This terrible period of Muslim–Christian history brought an end to a miniature caliphate during which scholars—Christians as well as Arabs and Jews—translated from Arabic some of the greatest works of classical literature which had been stored in Baghdad. The Edict of Expulsion was signed on 31 March 1492, and marked, for the Jews, their greatest disaster since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. It also gave rise to a long tradition of near-pornographic anti-Islamic tracts which presented the Prophet as the Antichrist.

  212 Bin Laden’s self-righteousness was such that he clearly could not grasp the response of Americans to his long address; the nation that was the victim of the 11 September 2001 crimes against humanity was not going to open a discussion on the al-Qaeda leader’s theories of bankrupting the United States by forcing them into wars. Bin Laden also named reporters on CNN and Time magazine who had quoted him as saying that if “defending oneself and punishing the aggressor” is terrorism, “then it is unavoidable for us.” He add
ed—and this is the kind of advertising a foreign correspondent doesn’t need—that “you can read it in . . . my interviews with Robert Fisk. The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at the White House . . . able to run an interview with him so that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?” Quite apart from bin Laden’s erroneous belief that I was a “compatriot” American—and I’m not sure I want to be a “co-religionist” of anyone—I could have done without bin Laden’s imprimatur on my work. And I certainly wasn’t going to play patsy by agreeing to act as al-Qaeda’s new interlocuteur valable.

  213 The flourishing new democracy that President George W. Bush identified in Afghanistan began to fragment as the old drug barons also took power in the government while the Taliban and al-Qaeda gradually returned to the country from which they had been ejected, attacking U.S. troops and pro-government Afghan soldiers. The elected president, Hamid Karzai, had been a paid consultant of Unocal, the Calfornian oil company which once negotiated with the Taliban for a trans-Afghan oil pipeline to Pakistan. America’s special envoy to Afghanistan was Zalmay Khalilzad, a former employee of Unocal. Once in power, Karzai and President Musharraf of Pakistan agreed to restart the pipeline project. It was the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv which shrewdly noted that “if one looks at the map of the big American bases created [in Afghanistan], one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected pipeline to the Indian Ocean.” By 2005, Afghanistan was exporting more opium than it had ever produced before. Even Karzai was forced to complain bitterly after revelations in 2005 that the Americans had treated their Afghan prisoners just as cruelly as their Iraqi victims.

  Notes

  Chapter Two: “They Shoot Russians”

  page 35 gave my father William a 360-page book: William Johnston, Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1900).

  38 An account of life in Kabul: Burnes, Cabool.

  38 Imperial Gazetteer of India: Afghanistan and Nepal, pp. 26–7.

  39 “It seemed to me so utterly wrong”: Sykes, Durand, p. 96.

  39 Yet Durand sent a letter: Ibid., p. 117, facsimile of handwritten letter from Durand to Ella Sykes, 26 January 1895. Durand included a poem he had composed on the death of one of the British cavalrymen in suitably Victorian verse: “Aye, we have found him, the fair young face/Turned to the pitiless Afghan skies . . . Lying above there, out on the plain/Where the desperate charge of our horsemen broke,/Foremost fighting, and foremost slain,/Gashed by many a murderous stroke.”

  39 an inquisitive and generous man: Ibid., p. 207.

  40 “unless you drive me into enmity”: Ibid., pp. 216–17.

  44 report from The Guardian: “Russia’s Pounds 350 Million back door” by Simon Winchester, 8 May 1978.

  45 some evidence that it was Amin: Griffiths, Afghanistan, p. 174.

  61 “it is a garden”: See Micheline Centreslivres-Demont, Popular Art in Afghanistan: Paintingson Trucks, Mosques and Tea-Houses (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1976).

  62 Within days of the Soviet invasion: Statement of Iranian foreign ministry, Tehran, 30 December 1979.

  62 he hoped his country would give: Interview with the author, Tehran, 9 July 1980.

  (n.) 68 From his executive office: The Times, 22 January 1980.

  69–70 “A weird, uncanny place”: Mills, Pathan Revolts , pp. 108–9.

  Chapter Three: The Choirs of Kandahar

  (n.) 71 As usual, Churchill: See Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), p. 156.

  (n.) 84 It was instructive: See, for example, Literaturnaya Gazeta, 20 February 1980, p. 9.

  88 had “for some reason” removed: I wrote exactly the same in my dispatch to my paper, as if this extraordinary event was scarcely worth recording. See The Times, 18 February 1980.

  90 around $35 billion—$2.5 billion: Griffiths, Afghanistan, pp. 182–3.

  90 Saudi Arabia, on its own admission: Anthony Hyman, “Arab Involvement in the Afghan War,” in The Beirut Review: A Journal on Lebanon and the Middle East, No. 7, Spring 1994, p. 78.

  90 25,000 Arabs saw service: Ibid., p. 79.

  (n.) 90 “Now that we have . . . ”: Letter from Douglas-Home to the author, 26 March 1980.

  Chapter Four: The Carpet-Weavers

  (n.) 95 “we are confronted”: Roosevelt, Countercoup, p. 18.

  97 “The outcome was inevitable”: Woodhouse, Something Ventured , p. 45.

  98 “democracy of Islam . . . popular eloquence”: Bill, The Eagle and the Lion, pp. 69–70, quoting L. P. Elwell-Sutton, Persian Oil: A Study in Power Politics (London: Laurence and Wishart, 1955), p. 195.

  (n.) 98 Not that the future Ayatollah: Bill, p. 69.

  98 “began a new era”: Ibid., p. 96.

  98 “That was a nice”: Woodhouse, p. 132.

  (n.) 99 One of its victims: Halliday, Iran, p. 87.

  101 the population of the city of Kerman: Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs , pp. 36–7.

  101 The Red Cross report: Rapport de synthèse faisant suite à la première série de visites des délégués du Comité International de la Croix Rouge à 3,087 détenus de sécurité dans 18 prisons Iraniennes, 1977.

  101 “we have no lessons to learn”: Sunday Times, 16 April 1978, interview with the Shah by Frank Giles, “Why Iran feels it needs no advice from the West on human rights.”

  103 “are a genuine popular revolution”: Edward Mortimer, “Iran: The greatest revolution since 1917,” Spectator, 17 February 1979.

  104 “my doctor has given me”: The longest English-language account in Tehran of Hoveyda’s initial court appearance appeared in Kayhan’s international edition of 17 March 1979.

  105 “The first bullets”: Shawcross, Shah’s Last Ride, p. 218.

  105 “I found that this”: Letter from author to Ivan Barnes, 30 March 1979.

  109 “This is what happens”: Shawcross, p. 317.

  113 U.S. diplomatic correspondence: These and subsequent quotations come from the 85 volumes of reconstructed American embassy traffic published in Tehran between 1979 and 1985. A summary of the involvement of Entezam and Bazargan can be found in Bill, pp. 290–3.

  114 “The CIA apparently believed”: Ebtekar, Takeover, p. 98.

  125 “the anti-Koranic ideas”: The Last Message: The Political and Divine Will of His Holiness Imam Khomeini (Tehran: The Imam Khomeini Cultural Institute, 1992). Khomeini wrote his will on 15 February 1983, six years before his death.

  127 “He was a study in concentration”: Ebtekar, p. 110.

  Chapter Five: The Path to War

  139 the “grim battle” for Baghdad: Letter to the author from Charles Dickens’s daughter Hilda Maddock, 28 October 2003.

  142 “we should be received”: Attiyah, Iraq, p. 108, quoting Sir Percy Cox in a letter to the Viceroy of India on 23 November 1914. For this and subsequent details of the British occupation of Iraq, I am indebted to Ghassan Attiyah’s magnificent work of research in both British and Iraqi archives of the period, a volume that should be read by all Western “statesmen” planning to invade Arab countries.

  142 “gaped emptily”: Attiyah, pp. 95–6, quoting Alois Musil, The Middle Euphrates: A Topographical Itinerary (New York: American Geographical Society, 1927), pp. 128–9.

  142 “There is no doubt”: The Sphere, London, 15 May 1915.

  144 “always entertained”: Attiyah, p. 104, quoting correspondence in British National Archives (NA) FO371/2775/187454.

  144 “some of the Holy”: Ibid., p. 105, quoting NA CAB 21/60.

  144 “clearly it is our right”: Ibid., p. 130, quoting a British Admiralty memorandum of 17 March 1915.

  144 “taking Mesopotamia”: Ibid., p. 130n, quoting Earl Asquith’s Memories and Reflections, 1852–1927, vol. II, P. 69 (London: Cassell, 1928).

&nbs
p; 144 Iraq would be governed: Ibid., p. 165, quoting NA FO371/3387/142404 (Cox).

  144 “a cabinet half of natives”: Ibid., p. 168, quoting NA FO371/4148/13298.

  144 “The stronger the hold”: Ibid., p. 166, quoting E. Burgoyne’s Gertrude Bell, from Her PersonalPapers, 1914–1926 (London: E. Benn, 1961), pp. 78–9.