CHAPTER FIFTEEN
. . . war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts . . . incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.
—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
CURLED UP IN THE EXTRA CREW SEAT, snug in the womb-like flight deck of the 707, lights down, the night a pageant of stars, the air-conditioning hushing through the vents, I look down onto the hot, darkened desert of Saudi Arabia as the fireflies zip past us. White, yellow, streaking gold, they flick around us at almost a thousand miles an hour—their maximum speed and ours in opposite directions—or they glide below us, mimicking our own progress east. The voices in my cans are bored, tired, sometimes irritated men with the accents of Texas, of Cairo, Gloucestershire and the Hejaz.
“Mike two zero zero five.” A Midwest voice from out of the great black globe, desperately seeking guidance from a Saudi ground controller. “Requesting higher level to technical area.” Hushhhhhhhh, the air conditioner breathes. The Middle East Airlines pilot turns and grins at me. “He wants to climb en route to the Dhahran air base—I bet the Saudis turn him down.” Hushhhhhhhh. “No higher level available.” A Saudi voice, heavy accent bringing up the “b” in “available,” turning information into an order. Hushhhhhhhh. The 707 crew burst into laughter. “What did you expect?” The American: “Say again? Say again?” More laughter. The stewardess, her gold MEA uniform turned to hospital white in the dim cockpit light, hands me a glass of champagne. “Thought you might need it, Robert,” the Lebanese pilot says. “You’re going to be here for a long time, I think.”
I sip from the cold glass. Champagne. France. Paris. Boulevards. And I look to the north, up into the darkness to where—as they say—“civilisation” began, to where the ancient Euphrates and Tigris join and curdle their way to the Gulf, and towards that preposterously rich little emirate into which the descendants of all those Sumerians and Umayyads and Seljuks and Abbasids and—yes, I suppose— the Mongols had just arrived with their T-72 tanks, their ZSU-23 tracked, mobile, radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, their Scuds and 155s and their Kalashnikovs and their claim that Kuwait was and still is the nineteenth province of Iraq. Five hundred kilometres south of the Kuwaiti border, the fireflies grow thicker.
“Ascot.” Plummy, Home Counties. How typical of the Brits to code their aerial call to arms after a racetrack. Here are the descendants of General Maude’s men and Private Charles Dickens’s comrades preparing to liberate more Arabs from the successors of the people they “liberated” in 1917. “Ascot requesting twenty-one hundred.” A tiny yellow pinprick of light in front of us flares, dazzling, spitting past us at Darth Vader velocity. “See him, Robert?” Yes, I saw him, and I look at the radar screen that glows at me from the bottom of an ocean-green sea and I espy a happy little blip heading for Akrotiri. Even Cyprus seems like home now. I had just started a holiday in Paris when Saddam invaded Kuwait. I don’t even want the champagne. Fuck Saddam, I say to myself.
The old Fisk prediction machine had failed. The glass ball had shown me nothing back in Beirut as I impatiently pounded out my pre-holiday stories of another childish dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over oil theft and overproduction. Hadn’t Kuwait funded Saddam’s war with Iran? True, I had asked in 1988, in one of those interminable centre-pagers that the Times editors liked to consume when conflicts ended, how Saddam now intended to employ his hardened legions. Then I had moved to The Independent and returned to the Hizballah’s struggle against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and the first Palestinian intifada. I stuffed photocopies of my last reports into my bag before I boarded the MEA flight:
The Independent, July 19th, 1990. By Robert Fisk, Beirut. Kuwait’s rulers responded with alarm yesterday to Iraq’s renewed threats against them, calling an emergency meeting of parliament and dispatching the Kuwaiti foreign minister to appeal for help from Saudi Arabia . . . According to Tareq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, Kuwait had “violated” the Kuwaiti–Iraqi frontier and stolen oil worth $2.4 billion . . . Kuwait was cheating on the OPEC oil production quota system, he said, “in a premeditated and deliberate plan to weaken Iraq and undermine its economy and security.”125
Premeditated. Deliberate. The Plot. The Baath party machine fed on plots and conspiracies, it wolfed them down, unforgiving, its appetite feeding on suspicion. Kuwait was committing “economic sabotage” against Iraq, Saddam claimed. I only have to read my own reports to see how stupid I was to set off for my Paris vacation. Fisk on 19 July, filing out of Beirut, I now note with remorse, had all the clues. “President Saddam Hussein spoke . . . of a ‘last resort’ against his neighbours, adding that ‘cutting necks’ was better than cutting standards of living.” Iraq faced foreign debt repayments of between $30 and $40 billion. None of the Gulf states, I added, “believe that the United States would interfere militarily to protect them from Iraq. At present, there are only seven American warships in the Gulf.” And that, we now know, is what Saddam believed, too. And so I flew off to Paris to be in the wrong place at the right time. Wasn’t I the same guy who’d been told the Israelis would invade West Beirut in September 1982, that there would be massacres in the camps—and then flown off to a holiday in Ireland? The Israelis wouldn’t attack because Fisk was going on holiday to Ireland. Saddam wouldn’t invade Kuwait because Lord Fisk was flying to Paris. 2 August 1990. “Iraqi forces have invaded Kuwait”—the BBC 8 a.m. news, just as I was heating the pains au chocolat.
Maybe we had all fallen under Saddam’s spell—or Washington’s spell—in those last critical days before the invasion. Even after all Saddam’s threats against Kuwait, the Americans still thought of the Iraqi dictator as “their” man. Asked in an interview just four days before the invasion whether Saddam’s threats were not like those of Hitler on the eve of the Second World War, Richard Murphy, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, scorned such remarks as “too glib.” Saddam, he said, “is a rough, direct-talking leader who has not hesitated to use force . . . I think it needs a constant dialogue with the Iraqis . . . he acted out of frustration.” Murphy’s interview came four days after America’s ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, held her notorious meeting with Saddam in which she remarked that the dispute was “an Iraqi–Kuwaiti matter.” In later testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Glaspie suggested that the Iraqi transcript of this conversation had been doctored and that, after taking a call from President Mubarak of Egypt, Saddam had returned to their meeting and “promised not to use force, but to act within the diplomatic framework he had set up.”
As usual, all the portents of disaster were there, had we, journalists as well as diplomats—Arab as well as Western—chosen to read them. A Bahraini minister would later admit to me that even he failed to realise the significance of the Iraqi leader’s words at an Arab summit less than three months before the invasion:
The first sign of what Saddam Hussein was going to do was shown by him at the Baghdad summit in May . . . In a closed session of the summit, Saddam showed a signal that he was agitated at the state of his economy. “The drop in the price of oil is crippling us,” he said. He said he could not survive if oil prices stayed where they were. I was there and we heard him say this, but we didn’t realise what it meant. It was King Hussein [of Jordan] who said in public that his country was desperate for economic help and that he needed economic assistance—that is what the world remembers. But they did not hear what Saddam Hussein said.
Within twenty-four hours of Saddam’s invasion, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia took the “historic decision”—this was the Saudi expression for such an unprecedented step—to invite the Americans to enter the land of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, to defend the kingdom. Arab Gulf ministers and businessmen believed that Fahd would, at most, ask for American air cover if his own over-equipped and under-trained forces had to defend Saudi Arabia, and that the Saudis would fund Arab guerrillas to assist Kuwaiti resistance to the Iraqi occupation, just as it had bankrolled Osama bin Laden’s Arab army against the Soviets in Afghanistan. But bin Laden’s offer of help was spurned—with what fateful consequences we might only imagine. After four decades of humiliation at the hands of Israel—America’s greatest ally in the Middle East—the Arabs would now watch these same Americans arrive on their sacred soil to “defend” them from another Arab leader. If King Fahd was “the custodian of the holy places,” the 82nd Airborne was now the custodian of “the custodian of the holy places.” To many Arabs, this sounded like blasphemy.
In these early, boiling days of August, I went—as I so often did in the Gulf— to seek the wisdom of Ali Mahmoud, the Associated Press bureau chief in Bahrain, an Egyptian who had been imprisoned under Nasser126 but who possessed a dark prescience when it came to human folly in the Arab world. “No matter what the outcome, the harm is done,” he said. “The fact that the theocratic and nationalist regimes have invited the United States to the Middle East will long be resented and will never be condoned. When this crisis is over, the worst is yet to come.” And six years later, in Afghanistan, I would remember Ali’s words as bin Laden listed for me, one by one, the historical sins of the House of Saud.
Saddam’s subsequent behaviour—his offer to withdraw from Kuwait if the Israelis withdrew from the occupied Palestinian territories, his seizure of thousands of foreign hostages in Iraq and Kuwait, his formal annexation of the emirate—appeared in the West to be a policy of naivety and illusion. But in the Arab world—to which Saddam was primarily addressing himself—it did not necessarily look like this. For Arabs, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land was as great an enormity—and far longer-lasting—as Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, where the occupiers were at least Arabs.127
The television pictures of thousands of U.S. troops pouring from their aircraft amid the sandstorms of north-eastern Saudi Arabia would later become one of the most tedious images of the crisis, but in those first days of August 1990 the arrival of the 82nd Airborne and other American troops at Dhahran—about 1,100 kilometres from Mecca and over 300 kilometres from forward elements of the Iraqi invasion force—was the biggest and least-covered story in the world. A visa to the kingdom normally took weeks to obtain; in a secretive, xenophobic oligarchy like Saudi Arabia, which hid the Iraqi invasion from its own citizens for at least twenty-four hours, no state official would dream of allowing foreign journalists to witness an infidel force moving into so sacred a land.128
Which is how I came to be hunched in the cockpit of MEA’s scheduled 707 flight to Dhahran. Joe Kai, one of the airline’s Beirut station staff and among its smartest managers, realised that even without a visa, an MEA passenger had transit rights through Saudi Arabia—providing he held a ticket with an onward connection to another Arab Gulf state. So he booked me via Saudi Arabia to the small Gulf emirate of Bahrain—and helped The Independent to scoop the world. I would have exactly five hours on the ground at Dhahran. “You’ll see the Americans, habibi,” Joe announced. “They’ll be all over the place.”
They were. As my MEA flight touched down in Saudi Arabia, I could see dozens of American Bell/Agusta helicopter gunships clustered under the airbase arc lights, their rotor-blades tied back like fans, packed tight like a giant nest of insects, midnight black, awaiting transport north. A row of Galaxies was disgorging more helicopters and piles of white-tipped missiles. A desert-brown Hercules C-130, propellers throbbing, was loading up with missiles for its journey northwest towards the Saudi airfields near the border. Inside the terminal, the Saudis flicked through my passport, glanced without interest at my Bahrain ticket and told me to wait in the lounge.
And as Joe said, they were all over the place, all those American crews of the U.S. 3rd Airlift Squadron with shoulder flashes which said “Safe, Swift, Sure.” Here we were, apparently on the brink of war, a Christian army landing in Islam’s most sensitive bit of real estate, with a message that had more to do with supermarket delivery times than theology. All this was quite lost on the clean-cut young men and women who stood on the tarmac, gazing east to watch another big Lockheed C-5B howl in from the dawn sky. Every fifteen minutes, the Galaxies arrived, their wheels shrieking under their load of Cobra gunships, their sinister 30-metre wings flopping and bouncing like old birds as they touched down in the desert heat.
The Americans were cheerful, happy to talk, not at all fazed that a journalist had found them injecting their thousands of troops and choppers into Saudi Arabia. U.S. Air Force Major Curt Morris was waiting for the bus that would take him back to his Galaxy. “We stayed at a real nice hotel in town. We ate some good Arabic food last night. Yeah, we enjoyed it. And it’s been cool the last couple of days.” He smiled a lot. “In a couple of days, we’ll be back in your country—at Mildenhall—we’re looking forward to that.” Tourism. Cool weather, exotic food, home to southern England. On the other side of the airbase, Egyptian troops were filing down the steps of an Egyptair 737, the kind that normally takes holidaymakers to Luxor.
The Saudis, at least, appeared to understand the ironies of the events that they were witnessing. Their airport militiamen were equipped with coal-black gas masks with little eyeholes. “America says she has come to protect us,” one of them—a thin young man with a pencil moustache—said to me as we watched an RAF transport aircraft land out of the dawn, “Would America have come to protect us if we had no oil?” I knew the answer, with the same certainty that Major Morris brought to his optimism. The Saudi policemen and soldiers I would meet in the coming months were no fools; if they were not university graduates, their religion taught them enough to exercise the greatest concern—if not downright suspicion—towards the dangerous leap of imagination that the American arrival in their country represented.
American, Egyptian and Moroccan troops—from this very early stage, the U.S. forces managed to acquire religious camouflage from the most loyal of their Arab allies—were already being housed in makeshift camps far out in the desert. The border town of Khafji had been partly evacuated and turned into a barracks. So had Hafr al-Batn, the lorry-park town farther west where the territory of Saudi Arabia runs along the frontier of Iraq itself, whose airbase and residence blocks, built back in 1985 at a cost of $5 billion, could house 70,000 soldiers. So had the local Aramco oil workers’ camp. Major Morris stood next to a tall, blond female soldier, her hair in a chignon, another item of American culture with which to shock the Saudis. “I sure don’t want to think what will happen if our people have to wear their anti-gas clothes when the heat really gets up,” Morris said. “Oh boy, I tell you, people will die of heat-stroke in those things.”
When my Gulf Air flight took off for Bahrain after dawn, I could see that the whole of the Dhahran airbase had been surrounded by batteries of silver-and-white missiles. From my passenger seat, I shot several pictures of the lines of Galaxies and their brood of helicopters. History in the Middle East was moving too quickly to be grasped. Was it like this, I wondered—and these were parallels of surprise rather than scale—when the British went to war in 1914? We had no idea then what chaos the imperial powers of Europe would visit upon themselves. Who would have thought, just a fortnight ago, that Kuwait would disappear, that the British and Americans would be holding the line against Iraq in the sands upon which the Prophet Mohamed walked, that their battle, when it was joined, would lead them all the way—thirteen years later—to the most dangerous conflict the Middle East had witnessed since the fall of the Ottoman empire?
From Bahrain, I hitched a ride over the Gulf with my old mates among the U.S. television network crews with whom, only a few years earlier, I had patrolled the hot, fish-crowded waters when Iraq was our friend, when Iraq could attack an American warship and get away with it. Only two years ago, I reflected as our little white commercial aircraft buzzed over the soft waves with their shoals of flying fish, Saddam was still our friend, still the “rough, direct-talking leader” who he was to remain until he decided to steal Kuwait. Only a few months earlier, when Mubarak had packed a bunch of senators off to see Saddam, they had agreed that the Iraqi dictator’s real problem was with the press. Much laughter. Yes, Saddam needed a public relations consultant. But now the PR men were employed by the Kuwaiti royal family and by the overweight commander of the Saudi “Allied Joint Forces Commander,” his Royal Highness Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, nephew of King Fahd and son of Prince Sultan, the Saudi defence minister.
Across the gently-moving waves we flew, over motorised dhows whose symmetry and curved prows demonstrated the fragility of another age and culture. But even travelling at more than 100 miles an hour above the water, the perspiration ran in streams down our faces and backs. After five or six hours in 130 degrees of heat, the sea and the sky became a yellow-grey fog in which only the sun retained its faded gold. How could anyone contemplate a war in this natural oven? The evidence was there. One hundred kilometres out of Dubai, we found the French frigate Commandant Ducuing taking on supplies from a freighter, a giant tricolour heaving from her stern, her deck-crew huddled around an anti-aircraft gun. The water played sunlight off its hull number—F795—and then it was lost in the mist. Turn 180 degrees in the haze and there is the Ducuing again, making steam, propellers frothing the grey sea green.
Through the humidity glided other reminders of the Iraqi invasion to the northwest, empty oil tankers heading east out of the Gulf, a natural contradiction, since they should head west empty and leave east heavy with Kuwaiti crude, their Plimsoll line beneath the surface. The T. M. Regulus of Singapore, miserably high in the water, showing its rust-red hull, lay at anchor in the fog; even the old Kuwaiti tanker Chesapeake City , which—reflagged as an American tanker—had been a symbol of America’s protection from Iranian “aggression” in the tanker war only two years earlier, was riding the swell off Bahrain. In the banks of mist, we even found a cargo ship, its hold and decks piled high with Toyotas, yet more luxuries for the richest emirate in the Gulf, now fleeing for Hormuz and the open seas. The good days were over.
Save for the few Western journalists marooned in Kuwait itself—Victor Mallet of the Financial Times was among them and emerged across the desert with a powerful story of brutality and fear129—the world’s reporters now filed from Baghdad or from the uninvaded cities of the Arab Gulf. From there, we tried to leaven the propaganda war with question marks, little hand grenades of doubt that might prompt the reader to ask as many questions as we did in the long dry evenings of steak and orange juice in Saudi Arabia. Kidnappers in Lebanon had long demanded the release of seventeen Shia Muslims imprisoned in Kuwait in return for American hostages, including my old friend Terry Anderson, AP’s bureau chief in Beirut. Two of the fifteen had been freed. All were members of the Islamic Dawa party. Had Iraq liberated the other fifteen? Answer: no, they had escaped. Thirteen years later, the Dawa would become a political party in “liberated” Iraq, demanding elections from the Americans who seemed oblivious to the fact that the Dawa members to whom they politely talked had been the “super-terrorists” of the 1980s. Diplomats said that Palestinians living in Kuwait had connived with the Iraqi intelligence service, supplying them with the home addresses of Kuwaiti officials prior to the invasion. Was the PLO helping Saddam to occupy Iraq? Answer: No, because some Palestinians even joined the slowly forming Kuwaiti resistance movement. But Iraqi-trained Palestinians had later been brought down from Baghdad and could be seen with guns on the streets of Kuwait. And what an opportunity this presented for the now-exiled Kuwaiti royal family—who could one day return to their emirate and demand the expulsion of the 300,000 Palestinian “traitors,” some of whom had been born there. Which is what they did.
The Syrians sent a brigade of soldiers to join the Americans in Saudi Arabia, the “Vanguard of the Arab Nation” now aligning itself with the friends of Zionism—or so it seemed—against their Baathist enemies. And every day, the network crews and hundreds of other television teams from around the world were bussed out to the Dhahran airbase—to the same runways I had surveyed immediately after the invasion—to watch the Americans arrive, companies and battalions and regiments and brigades and divisions, tens of thousands of them to augment an army that would—by the new year of 1991—place half a million men and women against Saddam’s armies. In 1991 the United States thought it needed this many soldiers to liberate Kuwait. In 2003 the Pentagon calculated they would need less than half that number to capture and occupy the whole of Iraq. But in 2003, nobody made that comparison.
If it wasn’t statistics we got, it was advice. RAF officers coaxed journalists on how to don their gas masks. They advised us to use the “buddy-buddy” system, whereby you helped your fellow scribe to fit the filter onto his mask but ensured your own was fitted first—while your colleague presumably suffocated to death. The whole wretched business involved “hunkering down”—a phrase I suspect the military got from the press—while gallons of Saddam’s vile cocktail clouded around us. A visit to the French Foreign Legion—red wine in the desert seemed a lot more sensible than a British ration of lukewarm water—convinced me that there were simpler methods of avoiding chemical extinction. A British member of the Legion’s Second Infantry Regiment from the East End of London told me that his unit—battle honours included the Marne—had its own unique operational instructions. “Basically,” he said, “when there’s a red gas alert, someone blows a whistle and we all pile on our lorries and drive like fuck out of the area.”
This seemed to me eminently sensible. For more prosaic advice, we could turn to the Saudi Gazette, the newspaper that failed to inform its readers that 100,000 Iraqi troops had invaded Kuwait, shot the Emir’s brother and were standing on the borders of Saudi Arabia. “Do’s and don’ts in a gas attack,” read the headline—on page 3. This was to be one of the world’s most exclusive doctors’ advice columns, one that turned out to say as much about Saudi Arabia as it did about chemical warfare. And those who remembered that King Fahd had that very year laid responsibility for the death of more than 1,400 Muslim pilgrims in Mecca on “God’s will” would have found the initial advice faintly familiar.
“If you are outside your home and in the open, you cannot do anything except to accept your destiny,” the article announced. If you were at home, on the other hand, “look out your windows for birds dropping from the trees, cats, dogs and people dropping and choking, cars crashing and general panic which are all signs of a gas attack. When you see such things happen, barricade doors and windows and let nobody in or out of the house.” Other helpful hints included the advice to “dress yourself to the hilt in long sleeves, socks and hat . . . cover your entire head with a wet towel or blanket . . . get into the shower and stay there.”130 But the Saudi Gazette was not a paper to frighten its readers. Its front page on 4 August 1990 contained a single, curious paragraph in bold type. “King Fahd and Bush exchanged views on the situation in the region in the light of current developments,” it said. That was the paper’s sole concession to reality. The “current development” was the Iraqi anschluss of Kuwait.
The Americans were given cultural assistance. Some were eminently sensible: don’t drink alcohol, don’t show any interest in Arab women, don’t lose your temper. Others betrayed the real problems of America’s Middle East policy. The American army’s official guide to Saudi Arabia included a section headed “Sensitive areas” which urged U.S. personnel not to discuss “articles or stories which discuss the friendship ties between the U.S. and Israel,” “anti-Arab demonstrations or sentiment in the U.S.” or “support for Israeli actions and presence [!] in Lebanon.” The fact that this military guide could not even refer to Israel’s invasions or occupation in those words suggested that these subjects were even more “sensitive” for the Pentagon than they might have been for Arabs—who coulddiscuss them. An earlier volume instructed U.S. personnel to avoid discussion of the “Jewish lobby and U.S. intelligence given to Israel”—a category that was meekly deleted by the Pentagon after the World Jewish Congress wrote to U.S. defence secretary Dick Cheney to express its “sense of distress” and “deep sense of hurt and anger” that U.S. troops were being asked to “submerge entirely those values of tolerance, pluralism, and open-mindedness that have made the U.S. a unique democratic society.” The Jewish lobby thus succeeded in erasing all discussion of the Jewish lobby.
American soldiers were also urged to remember that “the Prophet Mohamed, founder of the Islam [sic] religion, was born in Arabia in 570 AD . . . That fact has had a deep impact on Saudi Arabia, making it the recognized center of the Islamic religion.” I came across the Saudi version of this “guidance” late one night when I was travelling back to Dhahran from a visit to the Kuwaiti border and stopped at a petrol station. A Saudi army truck pulled up and two soldiers walked over to my car. “Sir, we want you to have these,” one of them said, handing me two pamphlets produced in English by the “World Assembly of Muslim Youth” and published by the “Islamic Dawa’a and Guidance Centre” in Dammam. The first document was entitled The Sword of Islam and claimed that the mere shine of this sword “eliminates falsehood just like light wipes away darkness.” It included a series of quotations from Westerners who had converted to Islam, including Cat Stevens—who was to be refused entry to the United States in 2004 on the totally false suspicion that he was involved in “terrorism”—whose name was now Yusuf Islam. “It will be wrong to judge Islam in the light of the behaviour of some bad Muslims who are always shown on the media,” the pamphlet quoted Stevens as saying. “It is like judging a car as a bad one if the driver of the car is drunk . . . ” The second pamphlet urged foreigners—“atheist or . . . agnostic . . . or a believer in democracy and freedom”—to study the life and teachings of the Prophet.
“We give these to the Americans,” the Saudi soldier told me. A tall, thin man with a goatee beard, he saluted and turned back to his lorry. It was an American truck, of course, and they were carrying American Kevlar helmets and were under American command. Indeed, it seemed to be the fate of so many Muslims to live under this Western “canopy.” It is an irony that the Saudis—like the Iranians— have to live in a country of American-built expressways and toll booths, of U.S.built airbases where the helicopters and fighter-bombers are American, that they have to live in nations whose infrastructure is American, whose princes—or, in the case of Iran, revolutionaries—were in many cases educated in the United States and speak English with American accents. So when in the days immediately following the Iraqi invasion, President George Bush explained that his military deployment in Saudi Arabia was also intended to “safeguard the American way of life”—and he presumably wasn’t thinking of theocracy and Saudi head-chopping—he may have had a point.
But Saudi Arabia did not wear only American clothes. The country was awash with British hardware—including more aircraft than the Saudis had qualified pilots to fly—thanks to the 1988 $23 billion Al-Yamamah arms contract which included the sale of 132 Tornado and Hawk aircraft and commissions which were allegedly given to British middlemen as well as members of the Saudi royal family. The British National Audit Office was to launch an investigation into this folly in 1989 but its report was officially suppressed—to avoid upsetting the Saudis, according to the British government. The prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been personally involved in the project to prevent French and American competition.
Oil, of course, had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with the deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia. If General H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s contention boded ill for those who feared that rhetoric and reality were parting company in the Middle East, it had to be said that the general made his claim with real imagination. As supreme United States commander in the Gulf, he used language with the subtlety of a tank.
“Absolutely not,” he roared at me when I was gullible enough to suggest that America’s enthusiasm to defend Saudi Arabia might have something to do with petroleum. “I don’t know why people keep bringing this up. I really don’t. If anyone has any question in their mind about what Iraq has done, I suggest they look for another line of work. What you’ve got here is a situation where not only is this a mugging—but a rape has occurred.” The American television crews had switched the cameras and sound recorders back on. Here was a general who not only talked in soldiers’ language—or what television crews thought was soldiers’ language—but obligingly spoke in sound bites, too. “It is an international rape of the first order,” he boomed on. “We all ‘tsk-tsk’ when some old lady is raped in New York and twenty-four people know about it and do nothing . . . it’s not just a question of oil. There’s not a single serviceman out there who thinks that—not any I’ve met.”
So all that history of American support for Saddam—for his invasion of Iran, his chemical assaults on Iranians and Kurds, Washington’s blind eye to the torture chambers and the mass graves, all that “tsk-tsking” in the face of atrocities which the whole world knew about and did nothing about—didn’t happen. History started yesterday. It was time I looked for “another line of work.” Those of us who had met scarcely a serviceman who did not think this was about oil would have to hold our tongues in future. When we asked the general why America had not used its troops to prevent the mugging and rape of other Middle Eastern nations, we were told not to be hypothetical.
General Schwarzkopf, a giant of a man with a barrel chest and a head the shape of an American football, loved all this. He, after all, was the general who’d served two combat tours in Vietnam, the second as 1st Battalion commander in the unhappy “Americal” Infantry Division whose units—not under Schwarzkopf’s command—were responsible for the My Lai massacre, a man who held fourteen military awards including the Distinguished Service Medal, three Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Purple Hearts. No one asked about his dad, of course, the other Norman Schwarzkopf who helped to destroy Iranian democracy in 1953, along with Kermit Roosevelt and “Monty” Woodhouse. Iraqi morale? he was asked. “Jesus, I hope it’s lousy! I hope they’re hungry. I hope they’re thirsty and I hope they’re running out of ammunition . . . I think they’re a bunch of thugs.” Any chance he thought the Iraqis would still invade Saudi Arabia? “The difference is we’re here now. If they fight, they’re going to have to fight me. It’s not a question of taking on some weak neighbour.” Mistake. The Saudis didn’t want to be regarded as a “weak neighbour.” They were strong, confident, able to defend themselves. Was not Lieutenant General Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz the commander of the “joint forces”?
And indeed, as we delved through the military jungle that was entangling the Gulf, we discovered that in the month since U.S. forces started their deployment, not a single American tank crew or gunner had been permitted to test-fire their weapons. The Saudi authorities had refused to allow the Americans even to calibrate their guns—for fear that the sound might alarm the civilian population. Even the megalithic battleship USS Wisconsin , whose nine sixteen-inch guns could fire shells over more than 30 kilometres, was constrained to announce the time of its live-firing exercises to prevent panic on the Gulf coastline. At some points in the eastern desert, the U.S. 24th Infantry Division had to reposition its tanks lest their tracks damage camel-grazing fields.
If the Saudis could temporarily emasculate the United States military, the Iraqi army was undergoing an interesting psychological transformation of its own. When it invaded Kuwait on 2 August, it was a million-strong, “battle-hardened” army which had “polished its offensive capability,” a “powerful battle force.” Now, however, Saudi and American officers drew inspiration from the stories of Kuwait’s wretched refugees; Iraqi troops were looting shops and homes, there had been rape and disciplinary hangings. British officers talked of the Iraqi army as a “shambles” with poor morale. “As far as we are concerned,” the captain of the British destroyer York told us, “there’s far too much hype about chemical warfare.” Yet by the beginning of November, the Desert Shield Order of Battle Handbook prepared by the U.S. Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence was again describing the Iraqi army as “one of the best-equipped and most combat experienced in the world . . . distinguished by its flexibility, unity of command and high level of mobility.”
Maybe it depended on the audience. When General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the same supposedly liberal, thoughtful, eloquent secretary of state in the Bush Junior administration a decade later—addressed marines aboard the Wisconsin on 14 September, he talked down to U.S. servicemen. Saddam was “this joker we’ve got up here in Baghdad,” to whom the world had said: “We can’t have this kind of crap any longer.” If somebody wanted to fight the United States, Powell instructed his men, “kick butt.” The Palestinians in Kuwait were meanwhile further denigrated by Alan Clark, the British junior minister, who claimed in Bahrain that they had created an “informal militia” in Kuwait. Many Palestinian “residents,” he claimed—untruthfully as it turned out—had “helped themselves to firearms.”
In Dhahran the flight line was witness to every arrival, to the thousands of young Americans who clambered down the aircraft ramps clutching plastic bottles of water, stunned by the temperatures, suddenly realising that they had just met their first enemy, right here on the tarmac. Some wound scarves over their faces, wedging Ray-Bans between the scarves and their helmets so that they looked like a hundred-strong version of the Invisible Man. The airbase howled and screamed with turbine engines, with F-15s and F-16s and Galaxies and Hawks shimmering through the dust bowl beside the still untested Patriot anti-missile missiles.
Journalists became part of this military deployment. They were brought to film these constant arrivals—initially, as Schwarzkopf admitted, to give the impression that there were more U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia than was the case—and to encourage the idea that American forces represented overwhelming strength. If war was to start, journalists would be allowed to accompany troops in “pools”— and reporters and their newspapers and television stations subsequently fought like tigers to join these “pools” in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield. The rest were supposed to abide by the rules of Captain Mike Sherman. Though a trifle shorter than the crusty old man who burned his way through Georgia, Sherman’s eyes possessed the same kind of penetrating, weary reproach that you could discover in the monochrome portraits of his ancestor, General William Tecumseh Sherman. This was not surprising because Captain Sherman commanded one of America’s most powerful weapons systems in the Gulf, a great beached whale of a vessel permanently anchored in a grotesquely decorated ballroom of dreams and expectations in the Dhahran International Hotel.
Even to say that the ballroom was in Dhahran was enough to earn one of Captain Sherman’s famous “letters of admonition.” For there were rules aboard his ship and the journalists who enjoyed its warlike facilities were expected to obey them. “Violations of ground rules” by any of the 1,300 newspaper and television folk who had signed up to cover the war—including the identification of military bases, even Dhahran, which Iraqi pilots used during the Iran–Iraq War (though Sherman was unaware of this)—would be “dealt with on a case-by-case basis.” There was something of the schoolmaster in all this, for Captain Sherman’s command—officially known as the Joint Information Bureau or “JIB”—was itself an education. It provoked, confused, infuriated and misled.
In the old days, back in mid-August when war seemed closer, Sherman ran the JIB with only six military officers, corralled behind a stable-like door of the hotel. In an identical room beside them sat two representatives of the Saudi information ministry. But as America’s military goals widened—as President Bush’s decision to liberate Kuwait was transformed into a decision to destroy Saddam Hussein— so Captain Sherman’s ship turned into a behemoth and moved upstairs, beneath a roof of giant blue and gold eggshell design, into a bigger ballroom of high-pile carpets, telephone bells, word processors, kitbags, rifles, notebooks and more information than any sane person would ever need to obtain about the mechanics of killing fellow human beings.
On the right, behind a long wooden arras, sat the representatives of the Western military alliance, thirty uniformed officers from the U.S. Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force and—new crew members aboard Sherman’s hulk—a team of British defence ministry functionaries. On the other side of the ballroom, with fewer computers and more telephones, sat eighteen Saudis, each dressed in red kuffiah and white dishdash robe. At an isolated desk, there also sat a representative of Kuwait’s government-in-exile, dispensing coloured snapshots of torture victims. Like girls and boys at dancing class, the Westerners rarely crossed the ballroom to talk to their Saudi opposite numbers. Only the journalists moved between these two cultures, perhaps 6 metres separating the power of the West from the cradle of Islam. At opposite ends of the ballroom were two massive television sets. At the Arab end, Saudi television broadcast football matches and prayers. At the U.S. end, CNN portrayed the American way of life. The Saudis much preferred CNN.
Within this emporium of war, journalists from fifty nations could seek information about Patriot missiles, arrange an overnight visit to the 82nd Airborne, set up breakfast with fighter pilots from an RAF Tornado squadron, demand to know the range of an F-15, the explosive power of a Sidewinder or the calibre of a Challenger tank barrel. They could sign up for buses and planes to take them to U.S. battleships, Egyptian armoured brigades, Syrian commandos, the U.S. 101st Infantry Division, the American 1st Cavalry or the Puerto Rico reservists. The Saudis would even escort reporters to the Hofuf camel market.
It took a few days before one realised that while this might seem exciting, there was also something very disturbing about the JIB. All the promises of military potential, the inescapable firepower, the expressions of confidence, the superiority of technique and equipment, took on a subliminal quality. For while you might learn all you wished about the squash head of a 155-mm shell or the properties of a cluster bomb, you were not permitted to dwell upon the results of its use. What happens when the shell or the Sidewinder explodes? There was much talk of “neutralising” targets and the “loss of assets” and the way in which “enemy” units would be “negativised.” You might demand a visit to the British 7th Armoured Brigade, but not to a mortuary. Requests to visit medical facilities were politely granted. Ask about the body-bags arriving in Dhahran and a reporter was quietly told that his question was “morbid.” For this was war without risks, war made acceptable. It was clean war—not war as hell, but war without responsibility, in which the tide of information stopped abruptly at the moment of impact. Like sex without orgasm, the USS Jib was easy to view, drama and entertainment suitable for all the family. If you believed in the JIB, there was nothing X-rated about the future.
It was Saddam Hussein who had cornered the market in death. The Iraqis dispensed no information about their military machine, there were no facility trips to the Republican Guard. But over the airwaves each night, it was Saddam who talked of the desert turning into a graveyard, of bones bleaching in the sun, or corpses rotting in the heat. Iraqi radio described the putrefaction of death as the ultimate cost of war for the United States, martyrdom as the highest price for Iraqi patriotism. The Americans talked about confidence, the Iraqis about worms.
But if Captain Sherman was now marketing war, we journalists were its salesmen. Observe my colleagues in the ballroom of expectation. Several of them have taken to wearing military fatigues. The man from Gannett News Service is purchasing military name-tags to stitch onto his clothes. A lady from the Voice of Columbia (S.C.) Television station has turned up in the JIB kitted out entirely in U.S. combat dress. Lou Fontana of WIS TV, South Carolina, wears boots camouflaged with paintings of dead leaves, purchased for the desert at Barron’s Outfitters. (Anyone who has glanced at a desert—even looked at a desert in a picture—will be aware that there are no leaves in the sand, no trees, no nothing.)
Behind the arras, Captain Sherman’s men and women, some of them journalists in civilian life, feel more at home with the press than with the military. Sherman himself is based in California and was naval adviser to the television version of Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance. Naval First Lieutenant Charles Hoskinson took a college major in Middle East studies but regards his true vocation as journalism, reporting on education and politics for The Daily Reflector of Greenville, North Carolina. I keep meeting marines who want to write stories. The reporters in uniform and the soldiers with journalism in their veins suggest a symbiotic, even osmotic relationship. Half the reporters in Saudi Arabia, it seems, want to be soldiers. Half the soldiers want to be in the news business.
The rest were mouldering away in the desert, feeding on meals-ready-to-eat and copies of Stars and Stripes and wondering, many of them, how they came to sign up for a college education only to find themselves on the “big beach” waiting to fight a man whom many of them had never heard of until a couple of weeks before leaving home. Every time I could, I would wheedle a ride into the desert, official or unofficial, with soldiers I made friends with in Dhahran or on official junkets run by Captain Sherman and his fellow entertainers or with the French journalists who—with an admirable freedom of spirit—refused to abide by the rules and simply drove off into the sand in search of pictures and interviews with soldiers of any description, American, British, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Syrian, Saudi, even Pakistani. Yes, the Gulf contingents contained their own Asian expatriate soldiers, the military version of all those millions of Pakistani, Filipino, Sri Lankan and Indian maids who slaved across the Arabian peninsula for Arab masters and mistresses.
The sand was their enemy as it was ours. The sun shone like a sword and the sand invaded us. It was the same sand, hot and dry and sticky, that had prickled its way into our lives in the Iran–Iraq War, sugar-thick or fine as ground salt, brown and white and grey, clinging to the hairs in our ears, lodged between our toes, moist and scratchy between our thighs, blasted like a viscous spray into our faces, slithering up between eyelids and eyes, a wind described in P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste, the book my dad gave me as a boy, which is “not so much a sand-storm, but a mist or fog or dust as fine as flour, filling the eyes, the lungs, the pores of the skin, the nose and throat; getting into the locks of rifles, the works of watches, defiling water, food . . . rendering life a burden and a curse.”
I looked for Wilfred Owen—even the occasional Rupert Brooke—out in the desert, forgetting that Brooke was a virgin soldier and that Owen’s poetry was forged in war, not in the highway supermarkets between Dhahran and Khafji where the soldiers queued for milk shakes and Cadbury chocolates and vanilla ices and stood in the forecourt with their mobile phones talking to Cedar Rapids or Bristol and bitching about the mail and the lack of booze and women and the presence of the scorpions—big snappy things that arrived at night to replace the torment of heat with the torment of freshly torn skin—and the lack of news. We played on all this, of course, we scribes. We took newspapers with us, heaps of them, and phones so that the soldiers, if we caught them on the motorway where the mobiles were in range, could call home free of charge and—when they did so—we felt their discipline and their orders slipping away as we became their friends, to whom they could disclose their fears and their loneliness and the shocking unpreparedness of soldiers who might have to go to war. How many times was I asked by marines or infantry or ambulance drivers if they could beg, borrow or buy my maps? Soldiers without maps, soldiers with no idea where they were in this ocean of grit, the sand moving at such speed over the landscape that the gales blew it in dust across Iran and Turkmenistan, staining the Mediterranean brown, heaping it up during the khamsin winds on my own balcony in Beirut, drifting it over Greece and southern Italy and deep into those parts of Europe that Arab invasions never reached.
There are no poets in Bravo Company of the U.S. 24th Mechanized Infantry Division. They admit that their letters home are full of boredom and descriptions of the heat. They read a bit, sleep a bit, work a lot, mostly at night when the air cools. They live in a world of oppressive silence, so that you can hear Private Andrew Shewmaker rummaging around deep inside the hot bowels of his M-1 tank. When he climbs out of the turret, he is clutching a folded sheet of brown cardboard. He leans his right elbow on the gun barrel and scuffs the glistening, sugary sand away with his left hand before sitting on the scorched outer casing of the armour. He unfolds the cardboard with great care, as if it is a love letter.
Running across it is a set of straight lines, intersecting and dividing in a series of perfectly drawn circles. Each circle possesses a name. Saturn, Pluto, Uranus, Mercury, Earth. At the top, in biro, an almost childish hand—it is Private Shewmaker’s—has underlined the words “Planet Damnation.” It’s his idea. All you need is a dice. “I wanted to keep the guys from being bored,” he says in a shy, embarrassed way. “We each start off in a spaceship from Planet Earth and have to travel far through space. At each planet—at Mars, say—we have to take on fuel. But distances are so great that we start running short. You have to try and reach just one more planet before you run out of gas and then you can refuel. The last person to keep going, he wins. The rest lose.”
Private Shewmaker does not realise, I think, that he has captured the lives of his tank crew on this creased, rectangular sheet of cardboard. Isolation, the desperate need for fuel, fear of the unknown. On the tank around him, and sitting in the sand beside its tracks, Shewmaker’s friends listen intently as he explains the board-game. In the eleven days since they settled into this immense, lonely planet, they have received no letters from home, no newspapers, no hot meals. Many of them have no maps. When they talk, they do so in a monologue, having thought a lot and spoken little since they arrived. On the other side of the gun barrel, Sergeant Darrin Johnson is sitting on his haunches, eyes focused on that point in the desert where the sand is so white and the blue sky so pale that the two become one. Not once does he look at you when he speaks. He has been married for just twenty days.
“Her name’s Virginia, I love her. I guess there’s nothing unusual about her— except that she wears blue contact lenses.” The other men laugh nervously. “I’ve known her for ten months. She was working in Hardee’s fast food when I met her. We were going to get married on my birthday on September twenty-third. I was alerted at Fort Stewart on August seventh and we both decided then to get married right away. We had the ceremony at her mom’s home. Her people were there, my mother couldn’t make it. I had eight or nine days with her.” Sergeant Johnson was still staring at the missing horizon, his thoughts far beyond it. “She came to say goodbye to me at the airport and I’m luckier than some. There’s a guy over there”—he waves his hand across the scrubland to the west—“who only had three or four hours with his new wife. He got married at lunchtime the day we left. I’ve written two letters to Virginia so far. What did I tell her? That I was OK and that they probably wouldn’t do anything.”
The “they” was Sergeant Johnson’s concession to Saddam Hussein and President Bush. But what he told his young wife was a lie. “To keep her from being upset,” he says. Sergeant Johnson believes that “they” will indeed “do something.” “It looks like it’s going to happen,” he says. “But if we do have a war, I hope it’s over soon. Getting wounded comes into my mind a lot. Yes, I think about it a lot. I guess I feel safe in our tank, I feel I’ll survive in there. I’ve been in tanks for seven years and I know what it will do.”
When I climb into his tank, it does not feel very safe. On one side is a worn black plastic seat—Sergeant Johnson’s position to the left of the gun breech—and on the right is Private Shewmaker’s platform, with his gas mask slung over the back. It is perhaps six feet from wall to wall. The thermometer on the ammunition locker reads 125 degrees. When the tank is moving, it climbs to 135. When I haul myself back out of their fragile spaceship, the men are holding their hands to their faces to shield them from the blowtorch wind. The desert here is spiked with broken, dried-up bushes. Spread out in the sand beneath their thick camouflage netting, Bravo Company’s tanks look like giant, long-dead spiders whose webs have decayed and overgrown them, congealing them into the desert floor.
But there is no protection from the sand. Its grains fly into our hair like insects, into our ears and mouths and noses. When I close my jaws, I can feel the sand crunching between my teeth. When I sweat behind the tank, the perspiration leaves sand tracks down my face. Shewmaker and Johnson and their comrades are in full battledress, most of them wearing their helmets. There are no showers.
There are thin lines between cynicism and duty, between complaint and courage, lines which are not as straight as those on Private Shewmaker’s board-game. Specialist Cleveland Carter from Georgia has little heart for this adventure in the Middle East. “I like the army, don’t get me wrong. But I never thought I’d come here. This is none of my business—Ay-rabs, you know—but since I’m told to do this job, I do it. I’m a soldier. But I’d like some of those Congressmen to come out here, with all that patriotism, to feel the heat in the desert. It doesn’t seem right to me. I’d rather folks paid more for their oil, than pay for their oil with my life.”
The generals may be roaring for battle, but the young American soldiers I was talking to were not gung-ho for war. Sergeant Parrott, a thin, reedy tank-loader from Texas, says he is wasting his time in the desert. He joined the army for a college scholarship, not to fight in Saudi Arabia. They talk about the chances of war in few words. Private Shewmaker also joined the army to finish a college degree. “But I always wanted to be in the army, you know. I used to love all those movies. I used to watch so many films about the Second World War. I loved Patton, you know? I always wanted to be in tanks after that.” He is twenty years old. Most of the 24th’s battalion commanders are Vietnam veterans. Most of their men were five-year-olds when the war ended in Indochina.
The politics of oil have not infected them all. Johnson thinks that “if the Saudis are our friends, then we’ve a duty to protect them.” Sergeant Jeff Eggart believes that “the Saudis needed our help, we promised it and we’ve got to provide it.” Two of the soldiers talk about their duty to obey the president. After a while, “duty” begins to occur in all their explanations for being in the desert. They do not demonstrate any hatred towards the Iraqis. Their enemies are a little nearer. “The scorpions come out at night,” Johnson says. “Dozens of them. There are snakes, too, you can see their tracks in the sand. So we can’t sleep down there. We all have to sleep up here, on blankets because the metal is so hot, curled round the turret of our tank.”
Two midnight-black A-10 jets fly over us, the famous—or infamous—“Tank Buster” that is supposed to protect Private Shewmaker and his friends from the Iraqi armour; clinging to the underbelly of each of the two aircraft is a yellow-painted missile. The soldiers do not even look up. “If they’re ours, I don’t care,” Eggart says. “I know how to recognise theirs, the MiG-23s, the Mirages. But I don’t think the Iraqis would use chemical weapons. I tell my wife that in my letters to her. I say that the longer this delay lasts before a war, the less chance they’ll use chemicals. It’s just my logic. I don’t know why.”
Two years ago, Private Shewmaker got engaged to his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Heidi. “We were going to be married soon, but I had not seen her for five months when I was sent here. All I could do was call her on the phone and say goodbye. I left straight from barracks at Fort Stewart. I’ve written her but have no letter back yet, nothing from my Mom. I think about them at night. I sit on the tank and look at the stars. I thought up my game about the planets that way.”
The tankers have neither battle experience nor prescience. Private Shewmaker and the other members of his crew seemed dulled by the heat. Shewmaker did not even have a radio on which he could listen to the BBC. “What’s happening out there?” Shewmaker and Johnson and their friends chorused when I was leaving them. I told them there had been a summit between Bush and Gorbachev, about Iraq’s release of some women and child hostages, about the growing tragedy of refugees on the Iraqi–Jordanian border. Just briefly, they caught sight of the outside world and their response was immediate. “Will you call my wife?” Sergeant Johnson asked. Shewmaker wanted me to phone his mother. And the other soldiers scribbled into my notebook the numbers of their families 8,000 miles away, further than any line on Shewmaker’s board-game.
A few hours later, I called them. Virginia Johnson sounded very young. “I’m writing to him this very minute. Tell him I got his first letter. I write to him every day . . . ” I told Eggart’s family that he sent his love and needed cigarettes. Shewmaker’s mother wanted to know if he was in the front line. “Can you tell me, not exactly but roughly, if he’s near Kuwait?” I told her he was more than 50 miles from the Kuwaiti border. I did not tell her there was nothing but sand between him and the frontier.
Saddam could be on one of Shewmaker’s planets. He holds a grotesque meeting with British hostages, pats a British child on the face and asks if he is drinking milk regularly—Saddam’s public statements show an obsession with milk—and he threatens Saudi Arabia with holy war and offers free oil to Third World countries. In Washington and London, these events are treated with contempt. In Morocco there are pro-Iraqi riots. In Algeria crowds turn up for spontaneous demonstrations—always a threat in the Arab world when they are real and not the government-sponsored variety—to support Iraq. Huge murals in Algiers depict Saddam’s Hussein missiles, the ones he threatens to fire at Israel—and which he will fire at Israel within months. Close to the Kuwaiti border, the U.S. 21st Special Operations Squadron—a supposedly secret force which has spent its time interviewing Kuwaiti refugees and whose insignia is a dust-devil emerging from a sandstorm—finds that vast areas of Kuwait City are not shown on their maps; Kuwait’s recent wealth created new streets and satellite towns far faster than any cartographer could record them.
All day and all night, the great American convoys hum up the six-lane highway towards the Kuwaiti frontier with their armour and guns, troop transporters, bridge-building equipment, tanks and ammunition lorries, jeeps and petrol bowsers. A fleet of U.S. helicopters, dark green, lizard-like against the sand, follow the roads east, their loads of artillery, missiles and generators—even prefabricated buildings—slung beneath their bellies. The sheer scale of an advancing army possesses an energy and seriousness of purpose that no Hollywood director can reproduce. By late October, the multinational army was spread across the desert, the terrain now humped and distorted by thousands of armoured vehicles, command bivouacs, missile sites, encampments, camouflage-draped artillery emplacements, by fleets of bulldozers cutting revetments and bunkers into the powdered sand. The dust of a hundred new military roads hung in the air while beneath it, in the fog, sat the tens of thousands of soldiers who were supposed to be “defending” Saudi Arabia. How much longer can Bush and Thatcher claim that’s all we’re doing?
So many Arab, Muslim armies now lay across the Saudi desert to create the theological foundation of our “coalition”—proof that this was not an oil-generated U.S. operation—that no sacrifice was too much for the West. When Saudi women believe that America’s presence in the kingdom represents a new freedom—and demonstrate against the country’s prohibition on women motorists by driving through Riyadh in their own cars—Washington stays silent as they are punished. The BBC pulls a videotape of British soldiers in the desert commemorating Remembrance Sunday on the seventy-second anniversary of the end of the First World War—lest the Saudis take offence at the sight of a Christian religious service on their Islamic soil. U.S. troops are told not to wear crucifixes or stars of David outside their uniforms.
When Israeli police shot dead nineteen Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem in October, Saudi and other Arab newspapers reacted to the slaughter by speaking of a “massacre”—which it clearly was. U.S. secretary of state Baker was reduced to calling it a “tragedy.” Had soldiers of an Arab nation killed nineteen Jews—and how many times must one make these comparisons?—would Baker have called it a tragedy? Would anyone? The agencies would then rightly have talked of a “massacre” while the Arabs would have been reduced to pathetic appeals for “restraint”—the very same inappropriateness of response that President Bush demonstrated towards the dreadful events at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. There was no link at all, Baker was reduced to saying, between the “tragedy” in Jerusalem and the crisis in the Gulf. Yet the mere fact that he felt constrained to say this proved he knew it was untrue. America’s most important Middle East ally had just killed (or massacred) nineteen Palestinians in Islam’s third-holiest shrine while America’s second most important Middle East ally—Saudi Arabia, which contained Islam’s first and second holiest shrines—was encouraging America to attack the Arab armies of President Saddam. These were the double standards of the “New World Order” which President Bush was now espousing. Bush wanted to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. But he was not at all keen to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The two lands were not conquered in the same way—in 1967, Israel was under attack—but how could Washington now treat the two occupations in so different a fashion?131
And how could we so easily turn our former Iraqi “allies”—the men we had so assiduously supported in their aggression against Iran—into our enemies? I was struck by this one cold night in the desert with the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, whose battle honours went back to one of Britain’s most flamboyant disasters.132 Trooper Kevin Stevely—who had never spoken to a Saudi but had shrewdly concluded that this was about oil rather than democracy—took me out aboard his Challenger tank amid the dunes. I liked scrambling into these personal worlds. Travelling with him on the turret, clinging to the hatch as the beast lunged through the sand, I discovered that Stevely commanded an entire ship. The Challenger, with highly-tuned suspension, dipped and yawed over the desert like a great vessel, its gun barrel the prow, the stinging sand from the tracks a substitute sea-spray, its passage as inevitable as a straight line on any navigation map. But when the soldiers settled down at their camp fires for the night, they liked to face west, long after the sun had gone down. Because the Iraqis—the enemy—were in the west.
The “them” and “us” mentality was as natural as it was infectious. Ten years ago—almost to the very day—“they,” the Iraqis, were storming into the Iranian city of Khorramshahr, cowering in the ruins of its burning houses under mortar fire. And I had been with those Iraqis. “We” had been together then, sharing the same dangers, hiding in the same military positions. Jon Snow and I had placed our trust in those Iraqi commandos and “our Major” who helped to rescue the Britons on board the Al-Tanin in the Shatt al-Arab river. They had been friends, part of “us.” When Jon set off on his truly perilous night-time rescue mission to the ship, there was no doubt who “we” were. Yes, “they” had then been “we.” And now, sitting with these British soldiers, the “we” had become “they” and Trooper Stevely was wondering if “they” would drop chemicals on “us.” And no doubt, I thought, somewhere across that great, frightening chasm of sand in front of “us”— which in reality could be no more than 300 kilometres—were some of the veterans of Khorramshahr, including “our Major” whom Jon and I had so profusely thanked those ten years ago.
If we forgot the humanity of the Iraqis, it was equally easy for us to ignore the feelings of the Saudis and the passions which “our” presence was going to unleash in their society. Too often, in those last months before Kuwait’s liberation, the Saudis had become bit players in our drama, attendant lords who were supposed to mouth the right words of support and loyalty towards us, and hatred of the Iraqi leadership. When in August 1990 the defence minister, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, insisted that no offensive would ever be mounted from Saudi territory against “our Iraqi brothers,” President Bush summoned Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, to explain this deviation from the script. Similar consternation was caused when Prince Sultan suggested in late October that while Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia would support “any rightful Iraqi territorial claims” to the emirate.
In late November 1990, I took a call in my Dhahran hotel from the sheikh of a nearby mosque whom I had, from time to time over the previous months, dropped by to talk to. When I arrived at the empty school beside his mosque, the sheikh was clearly agitated about something he had been discussing with a group of bearded, middle-aged men who were sitting in white robes around a back room. I thought he wanted to discuss the prospects for war, but what he asked was: “When are the Americans leaving?”
The sheikh was no radical. His sermons, broadcast over loudspeakers from the ugly concrete minaret beside his mosque, repeated the need for calm amid crisis. They were about the Prophet’s conviction that trust in God affords protection for all true believers. Even now, fifteen years later, he must remain anonymous because—despite President Bush’s contention at the time that he was defending “freedom” in the Gulf—Saudi Arabia was not and is not and never will be a democracy.
“When the Americans came here, we were frightened of Saddam,” the sheikh said. “But now they have been here for more than three months, and nothing has happened. Our government has said that the Americans would leave the moment this crisis was over. We believed this. We still believe this. But I think we believe this because we want to believe it.” The sheikh had heard all the rumours. Saudi businessmen in Jeddah were quietly boasting that they had secured five-year contracts for leasing land to the U.S. military forces stationed in the kingdom. In Dhahran, the Americans were said to have taken two-year contracts on car parks, warehouses and transport facilities. Their sea-lift ships were bringing in construction equipment as well as weapons.
To outsiders—to the Americans and British—the strains within Saudi society were not obvious. Each day, the Saudi press wearily trumpeted President Bush’s resolve to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. When Bush visited Saudi Arabia in November 1990, local entrepreneurs took full-page advertisements in the Riyadh newspapers to extol his decision to send American forces “to preserve, protect and defend peace and freedom in this part of the world.” But other, potentially far more important, messages were now being heard in Saudi Arabia.
Religious tapes were being distributed in which preachers expressed growing concern about the presence of Westerners in Islamic lands. Government-approved shops had for years handed out audio-cassettes of sermons by Muslim scholars, but Saudi police withdrew six tapes from circulation in the first three months of the U.S. deployment for their “subversive” content. Some of these newly censored sermons reminded Saudis of their country’s previous relations with Iraq, when Saddam was officially regarded as the embodiment of Arab nationalism and virtue and when his cruelty—well documented in the West if greeted with silence by Western governments—was ignored by the Saudi royal family. Other tapes were fiercely critical of Saudi Arabia’s allies, especially President Hafez Assad of Syria. Many hundreds of Syrian refugees from the brutally suppressed 1982 Hama uprising—when Assad’s army crushed the savage Sunni Muslim revolt—now lived in Saudi Arabia and their memories had deeply influenced members of the religious hierarchy.
One preacher, Sulieman al-Owda, produced a taped sermon known as “The Fall of Nations.” While ostensibly a philosophical oration on the reasons for the decay of nation-states, it identified corruption, nepotism and lack of free expression—the lack of a shuraconsultative council—as key causes of national collapse. Listeners immediately understood that he was talking about the House of Saud. Shortly after this tape was banned, King Fahd announced—for the third time in as many years—that plans for just such a council were in “their final stages.” Al-Owda, who was dean of the Mohamed bin Saud University of Qassim, gave his lecture in early September 1990 and tapes of the sermon were immediately seized.133
Against this, Saudis heard only the platitudes of their own princes, the interminable promises of freedom and protection from Western leaders, and statements by those who would define Christian philosophy as a vehicle to render any future war morally acceptable. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced that it would be a “just war” while other clerics mouthed the same nonsense that would be used to launch the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 1990 the Reverend Edward Norman, the dean of chapel of Christ Church College in Canterbury, proclaimed that Iraq needed to be destroyed as a nuclear threat while sustained as “a country whose contribution to the world and Arab society could be of immense value.” Soon, he wrote:
her nuclear weapons will be in place, and Iraq has the capability to deliver them . . . Military force now, with all the admitted suffering and loss of life it will produce, is by any standards morally preferable to the loss of life which would result from a future nuclear conflict in the Middle East . . . The loss of lives in a war now will save the loss of millions of lives in a few years’ time. That, surely, is a profoundly Christian conclusion . . . A society which puts material welfare and human comfort above the pursuit of higher and more durable values is not a noble prospect, and is, anyway, one that is likely to be overrun by those who actually believe in their values.
Quite apart from its uncannily identical justifications for the next war but one against Iraq, the last third of this arrogant thesis might have been uttered by Osama bin Laden.
But there was another quaint parallel to the 2003 invasion of Iraq: the unequal relationship between Washington and London. While the support expressed by Margaret Thatcher—and later John Major—for the liberation of Kuwait bore little of the grovelling, pseudo-spiritual enthusiasm of Tony Blair for the invasion of Iraq, Britain’s role as an obedient servant of Washington’s military decision-making was clear long before the 1991 war began. On the ground, the Anglo-American alliance looked impressive. A 7th Armoured Brigade liaison officer was now based inside the desert tactical headquarters of General Michael Myatt, commander of the U.S. 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Marines and British troops performed joint defence and attack exercises under the eyes of Brigadier Patrick Cordingley, the British commander. Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billière, the overall British commander in the Gulf, discussed and agreed to a series of offensive scenarios with Schwarzkopf in Riyadh. British tanks would play an integral role in U.S. marine offensive operations.
But the moment a conflict began, Britain would effectively lose its decision-making capability. Planning was one thing, execution quite another; national command in time of war would turn the multinational force into a shambles. Britain’s position in the command-and-control chain was put most revealingly by de la Billière during a visit to Saudi Arabia by British defence secretary Tom King on 14 November, when he acknowledged the symbolic role of the Saudis and the military role of the Americans. “The commander in chief is Prince Khaled . . . his authority and that of General Schwarzkopf meets my requirements . . . for what the British services get involved in. The British ground forces and the British air forces are under the TACON [tactical control] of the Americans.”134
But my own sources within the Anglo-American command suggested that the relationship between the British and Americans was not as close—or as trusting— as the world was led to believe. This was particularly clear when word reached me during my Christmas holidays in Paris that a thief had stolen a briefcase and computer containing Gulf War briefing plans from an unmarked RAF car at Acton in West London. The documents were being carried, according to my source, in the hands of a senior RAF officer—subsequently revealed to be Wing Commander David Farquhar, the personal staff officer to Sir Patrick Hine, who was de la Billière’s immediate superior—and were taken from the vehicle by a thief as Farquhar stopped to look at a second-hand car in an Acton showroom. The thief had thrown away documents—discovered a few hours later—but had kept the computer to sell, unaware that it contained military information. Far more serious, according to my source, was that the British had not told the Americans of the theft.
I called The Independent with this extraordinary story, only to be told that the British government had issued a “D-notice” on the information in the hope of preventing its disclosure in the press—and that our acting editor, Matthew Symonds, had agreed to abide by the request and keep the story secret. Symonds was one of the three founders of The Independent who had, in the most unlikely venture of its kind in the history of British journalism, set up a newspaper that would not be swayed by the power of press barons or governments. Andreas Whittam Smith never bowed to pressure, but Symonds, who had begun to show an embarrassingly romantic enthusiasm for war, failed to realise that the “D-notice” had primarily been issued not for “security” reasons but to prevent the Americans’ hearing of the theft. So I mentioned the affair to a colleague on the Irish Times, which— printed in the Irish Republic and therefore not obliged to snap to attention when the British military establishment roars—immediately published the report of the theft. “I wouldn’t have let the ‘D-notice’ stop us,” Andreas exclaimed to me when he returned to the office from his own holiday and when I was back in Saudi Arabia.
It revealed an interesting rift in the management of my paper, which Andreas himself explained in our Sunday magazine six years later. The one thing he regretted, he said:
is being persuaded by him [Symonds], against my own views, about the Gulf war. I wish I had run the paper as being anti-war, but Matthew and everybody else persuaded me not to do this, because they didn’t agree with my view.
Far more interesting was my informant’s contention that the real reason for the D-notice was to conceal the theft from Britain’s American allies. In his own account of the Gulf War, de la Billière admits that the Americans had indeed been left in ignorance by the British and that the Irish Times’s disclosure—which, under different editorship that week, would have appeared in The Independent—created just the political embarrassment that newspapers were normally in the business of revealing:
This news put me in a devilishly awkward position. What was I to tell Norman Schwarzkopf? If I said nothing, he would certainly hear about the theft from somewhere else. I suggested that as the matter was of such crucial importance, Paddy [Hine] himself should fly out to brief the CinC personally and this he agreed to do. At the same time, the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Vincent, flew to Washington to brief Colin Powell, so dangerous did the whole incident seem and so potentially destructive of Anglo-American relations.
Schwarzkopf “seemed relaxed” at the news, according to de la Billière, although the latter’s contemporary notes reveal another little secret hitherto kept from Washington. “Cock-up No 2,” de la Billière wrote, “is when I’m told to tell NS [Norman Schwarzkopf] we are with him all the way, whatever happens, and he finds out Brit ministers will not delegate ROE [rules of engagement] for me to release aircraft for rapid response to a pre-emptive Iraqi strike . . . ”135
It was an unsettling Christmas. My friend and colleague Terry Anderson was still a hostage in Lebanon, held by men who were demanding the release of those Dawa party prisoners in Kuwait—if, indeed, they were still in jail. Because I was able to maintain some slight contact with Terry via his kidnappers, I flew to New York to talk to Terry’s boss at AP, Louis D. Boccardi—a small, dapper man with the disconcerting habit of talking to visitors while playing taped music very loudly in his office—and to Terry’s close friend, Don Mell. Mell, or Donald C. Mell the Third as we were constrained to call him, had been Terry’s photo editor in Beirut and took me out for a memorable turkey dinner in the Rainbow Room of the GE building in Manhattan. I say “memorable” although, like most of Mell’s dinners in Beirut, it was difficult to remember the last part of it. While not as slim as he was in his nimble wartime days in Lebanon, Mell had the disconcerting ability to attract throngs of gorgeous waitresses the moment he entered the restaurant, an effect he greeted with a wicked smile.
“Fisky, there’s going to be a war and the old U-S-of-A will win, as usual,” he said once we’d sat down. “Remember Lebanon? Remember what a giant fuck-up that was? Well, I’m sure we’ll do just as well in Iraq.” He might have been talking of events thirteen years later, although, for tens of thousands of Iraqis—at least half a million if we were to include the long-term aftermath of the 1991 war—his assessment would be all too accurate. Mell was also travelling back to the Gulf for the liberation of Kuwait—we didn’t doubt that this would be accomplished—and we drank champagne together over the Manhattan skyline. The Empire State Building was patriotically illuminated in red, white and blue and the World Trade Center simmered at the tip of Manhattan. Mell and I both agreed that the impact of America’s actions in the Middle East would eventually come to haunt the West— we even talked about this over dinner—although we never guessed that the explosion was less than eleven years and less than four miles away.
I arrived back to a cold, damp, bleak Saudi Arabia. The three hundred thousandth Kuwaiti refugee had long ago crossed the border—the Iraqis had reduced the indigenous population of their “nineteenth province” to two-thirds of its pre-invasion level—and King Fahd and Saddam Hussein were engaged in a bitterly personal dispute in which both God and Satan were invoked. It related directly to Saudi Arabia’s original support for Iraq’s 1980 aggression against Iran. Saddam had complained of Fahd’s meanness at this time—an extraordinary insult to any Arab, let alone a Saudi—and Fahd’s response was as devastating in its exposure of their quarrel as it was revealing in its detail of just how much the Saudis had spent in their attempt to destroy Iran a decade before:
Why did you not fulfil your promise to me and Egyptian President Hosni Moubarak that you would not launch an aggression in Kuwait? After only a few days from your pledge, you committed the most vicious crime in the history of mankind when you crept in with your army in the darkness and shed blood and expelled an entire nation [in]to the desert in violation of all norms and values . . . you have . . . insisted on continuing aggression, claiming that Kuwait was part of Iraq. God knows that Kuwait was never under the Iraqi rule and the members of the family of Sabah were rulers of Kuwait since about 250 years.136 . . . Who authorised you to kill [a] million Iranian and Iraqi Muslims? . . . Who authorised you to occupy Kuwait and kill its sons, rape its women, loot its property and destroy its landmarks? No doubt Satan and your covetousness have urged you to do so at the expense of the Arab Gulf countries which were proud of the Iraqi army.
It was instructive that King Fahd should have blamed Saddam for a million Muslim lives lost during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War—since Saudi Arabia had been Iraq’s principal bankroller in that war—but the details of just how much money the Saudis had been prepared to spend on Saddam’s behalf in that conflict were as shameful as they were revealing:
You said in your message that we had only extended to you $11.53 million to contribute to [the] reconstruction of al-Basra in addition to one million dinar[s] worth of equipment to reconstruct Fao.
But we would like to make [the] facts clear:
Oh Ruler of Iraq, the Kingdom extended to your country $25,734,469,885. 80¢.
The implications of this took some time to sink in. Saudi Arabia, whose king called himself the custodian of Mecca and Medina, had given Saddam $25 billion to fight and kill fellow Muslims in Iran.137 The Americans had supplied the intelligence and some of the chemicals (along with the Germans). The Russians gave most of the armour. But the Saudis largely supplied the cash. I mused for some seconds on the eighty cents tacked on the end of the bill, an addition which suggested that a truly eccentric mind was at work in the Saudi royal treasury.
ONE OF THE DHAHRAN AIRPORT Saudi immigration officers had invited us to dinner in his desert tent, and it seemed a good place to watch the sands of peace run out in Geneva. Mohamed poured the hot, over-sweet tea. Abdullah handed round the plates of grapes, bananas and carrots. James Baker flickered on a black-and-white screen in the corner of the Arab tent. It was a strangely comforting place to hear the news. There we were, surrounded by six Saudis in their white-and-brown robes and kuffiah headdress, lying on brightly coloured carpets, our shoulders hunched against camel saddles, munching away on spiced chicken and shish kebab as the path to war was laid out before us. When Baker suddenly looked up and began with those all important words—“Regrettably, ladies and gentlemen,” dreadful, hollow words which should have frightened us all—the Saudis merely glanced at the screen with the same attention they would later apply to a videotape of a dance band.
And when the U.S. secretary of state, his image floating up and down on the big old screen, pronounced his fatal judgement—“in over six hours, I heard nothing that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever”—only Mohamed’s younger brother paid attention. He raised his hands level with his shoulders like a man in the act of surrender. “So it will be war,” he said. “What can we do?”
This must have been how the tribes regarded impending disaster hundreds of years ago, lying on their carpets, tearing the legs off a roast chicken under the protection of a cloth roof. In front of us, a charcoal brazier glowed, its iron legs buried deep in the sand. Mohamed and Abdullah passed around more tea and fruit; the others paid more attention to Baker now. Khaled, a thin youth with a pointed beard, clucked his tongue. “On the day this starts,” he said, “I shall pack up and leave.”
Mohamed had rigged up his television set to a home-made aerial which sucked in CNN’s live broadcast from the Geneva press conference. The signal was poor but we could read the words “Intercontinental Hotel, Geneva” on the lectern in front of Baker, and listen to his explanation of why he would not accept “linkage” between the Gulf crisis and the Arab–Israeli conflict. To a Westerner, Baker made sense. He insisted that Iraq was opposed by “twenty-eight nations” rather than by the United States. “Now the choice lies with the Iraqi leadership.” But when Tariq Aziz appeared on the television, his Arab accent drawing the attention of all in our little tent, Baker’s words seemed somehow less convincing, not because Iraq had right on its side—everyone agreed that Saddam Hussein was a bad man—but because Baker was an American and Aziz, like the six Saudis, an Arab.
Why, I asked Mohamed, had the Saudis for so long been Saddam Hussein’s closest friends? Had they really trusted him and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz? Had they not believed the reports of Iraq’s use of poison gas in the war against Iran? Or had they been friends because Saddam was an Arab or, more to the point, a strong Arab whose power was feared as well as respected? It was Abdullah who replied. “We were never told bad things about Saddam,” he said. “We were told in our newspapers—by our government—that he was a good man. Governments always say what they want their people to understand. That is what happens here. We were not told the truth.” Then he paused for a few seconds. “But I will do anything my government tells me.”
One of the Saudis walked into the tent with a tray of whisky bottles, perhaps half a dozen of them, which Mohamed proceeded to pour into pint-size mugs. Jameson, Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniel’s, I couldn’t believe this. “We confiscate them from the passengers who try to smuggle alcohol into the airport,” Mohamed beamed. Given the vast quantities his guests were now drinking, glugging the stuff back as if it was juice instead of liquor, I realised that Saudi Arabia’s strict antialcohol laws had as much to do with consumption as they did with religion. Saudis didn’t know how to drink.
I knew something was wrong when I asked Abdullah if he really thought the Americans would leave Saudi Arabia. At this, Khaled suddenly stood up and announced angrily: “I will not stay here in this tent if you continue this conversation.” It was a dark, unnerving moment, as if the disaster presaged on that flickering screen had at last penetrated the minds of the six Saudis, creating some kind of disorder in the tent. Mohamed asked if the Kurds should have a state. “Why should they?” Khaled asked, his face flushed.
He did actually leave the tent, his robes flowing at his heels, until Mohamed went to persuade him to return. Another man arrived, along with his wife, an unprecedented breach of custom and etiquette and—many Saudis would say— morality. She was a dark-haired woman with a gentle smile who did not wear a veil but sat silently beside her husband at one side of the tent, clutching a black gown around her shoulders. The men talked vigorously, Mohamed all the time asserting that he would not leave his home if there was a war. “Where would I go?” he asked. “What is the point? The war can go anywhere.”
On the screen, Dan Rather was telling us now of the probability of war. He spoke of massive bombardments of Iraqi forces, of devastating air strikes, of “neutralising” Iraq’s military potential. Sitting amid these Saudis, his words seemed obscene, unnatural. He was a Westerner, talking with promiscuous ease about the possible violent death of thousands of Arab Muslims at the hands of America. The Saudis listened to this with great discomfort. So did I. Imbibing the poisoned fruits of the West, they were about to experience its killer instincts.
They might have spoken of this had there not come from behind us, through the tent’s fragile green wall, a growl of sound, long, persistent, gradually increasing in depth and intensity. We all knew what it was. Its howl penetrated every corner of the tent, drowning out Rather’s voice, making the picture jump nervously until our ears were swamped with the sound. We were all familiar with it. One of President Bush’s great C-5 military transports on the final approach to the nearest airbase, 30 metres over our heads, filling our vulnerable tent with its decibels.
In the last days before the onslaught, it was still possible to drive up the highway to the Kuwaiti border. They were days of gales and irony. The stormclouds gusted in over the coast and fanned the white smoke that trailed in a friendly way from the chimneys of the Kuwaiti power station. You could see it all quite clearly from the Saudi frontier, the pale white generating station and its twin chimneys still providing electricity to Iraq’s occupying soldiers and their captive citizens on the other side of the border. It spoke of normality, of life going on as usual.
Down the hill from the deserted customs shed, I found a Pakistani at the till of his grocery store, its shelves half empty. No point in restocking just now, he told me. Round the corner in the playpark by the sea, a man in a white robe stood with his black-veiled wife and their tiny child. Change their clothing and it could be any rainy day on the seafront at Margate or Coney Island. No sign of Iraq’s half-million soldiers on the other side of the frontier. And on this side, only a fat Westerner with grey hair in a pick-up truck—Vietnam generation, unable to hide his paunch under a parka jacket—stared towards Kuwait to represent the half-million Americans and their allies.
I walked around Khafji, but the integrity of the Arab quarrel was elusive. Most of the women and children had fled but a few Saudi soldiers were phoning home from the local post office, a war film playing on the television set in the lounge of the Khafji Beach Hotel, watched intently by a policeman. I had to drive down the bypass before I found a three-vehicle U.S. army patrol, its soldiers helmeted and perched high in their armoured vehicles, obeying the speed limit, halting at the traffic lights. For months I had watched the armour streaming up this highway. Like the Kuwaiti power station, it had become a sight so familiar that it had acquired its own permanence. I could imagine that in another six months, even in a year’s time, the tanks and guns would still be advancing up this road, that Bush would still be threatening to evict Iraq from Kuwait, that the power station would still be emitting its white smoke, as if the preparations for war were eternal, like the desert.
On the day before Schwarzkopf commenced his bombardment of Iraq—“I have already issued the terrible orders that will let the monster loose,” he wrote to his wife on 17 January 1991—American journalists seemed almost disappointed. Like the British press, the big American papers had been telling their readers—up to the point where war really was imminent and a certain reticence became obligatory—that the fighting would be a pushover. “K” Day for the headline writers was a relief. When Baker and Tariq Aziz were still talking, there was an almost palpable sense of unease among some of the American media experts. Peace fears loomed. But once Baker admitted failure, they were happy. War hopes rose. This was not mere cynicism. One U.S. radio reporter warned his listeners in the first week of January that the Gulf crisis was “sliding” towards a settlement. Like Shewmaker’s hero General Patton—who ended up admiring the beauty of war and distrusting the horrors of peace—many of the reporters had psyched themselves into a state of mind in which peace was immoral and war represented goodness.
Nor, at first, did it seem there was much place in this new war for print reporters. We all knew that the air bombardment of Iraq would begin after Saddam refused a United Nations deadline to withdraw from Kuwait. So when my phone rang in the early hours of 17 January and a young journalist on The Independent’s night shift snapped that “CNN are showing the first bombs dropping on Baghdad—when can you file?” I told him that I was watching the same pictures in Dhahran and that we knew the bombs would drop this morning. The real story, I said, was that the most powerful armies in Christendom were now poised to fight the largest military force in the Muslim world. “So when can you file on this?” the voice asked again. I already have, I said. The Christian–Muslim “clash of arms” had been on our front page the previous day.
But I drove across to the airbase at Dhahran and there were the American jets taking off by the squadron, bomb-heavy and leaving a trail of gold-and-purple exhaust fires across the sky. It made good television, an Eastman Color insert into the pale electric greens of CNN’s Baghdad anti-aircraft fire and distant explosions. In the early hours of that same morning, twelve Saudi fighter-bombers also took off from an airbase in the Eastern Province to attack Iraq. The decision to dispatch the Tornadoes on their sorties—they were purchased as part of the Saudi–British Al-Yamamah project—was taken personally by King Fahd and warmly applauded by President Bush. No attention was paid to the fact—no reporter mentioned—that at dawn, eleven of the twelve jets returned with their bombs still attached to their wings, their pilots saying they failed to find their targets. The twelfth plane unloaded its ordnance over the western Iraqi desert. But did they really lose their way?
The following night, a further seven Saudi-piloted Tornadoes took to the air from the same base, en route for western Iraq. Of these planes, no fewer than six failed to drop their bombs. But appearances had been preserved. The pilots were duly paraded before the press. The Saudis were fighting. President Bush could claim that Arab as well as Western forces were at war with Iraq. You only had to look at the Tornadoes to see the irony involved. The tail of each fighter-bomber displayed the Saudi flag, upon which was inscribed in Arabic the first words of the Koran. “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his Prophet.” Thus did the first sura of Islam’s holiest book constitute the battle flag of the Arabs who had gone to war against another Muslim nation. “Yes, Iraq is Arab,” one of the Saudi pilots explained to me before leaving on a third sortie. “But when a brother Arab attacks you, he is your enemy. Saddam is our enemy now.”
Or so it appeared. One day after the beginning of the bombardment—calling this blitzkrieg a war was pushing the margins of reality a little far at that stage— Fahd himself announced that the battle constituted “the sword and voice of truth” and that God would “register victory for His army.” The House of Saud had now committed itself irrevocably to the Western military forces. King Fahd remained overall commander of the “joint forces,” another of the quaint epithets behind which America’s overwhelming strength within the alliance was supposed to be hidden. The Saudis thought they had muzzled criticism of the Americans from their own religious hierarchy, allowing sheikhs to vent their anger on domestic targets—upon women drivers, for example—and generously acting as hosts to the distraught if intensely arrogant Kuwaiti royal family.
As the “war” progressed—as the pictures of bombers streaking across Saudi Arabia and the skies above Kuwait became routine—those of us who did not join the infamous “pools” discovered a conflict that did not fit so easily into the television studios, with their super-patriotic anchormen, their verbose ex-generals, their model tanks and their bloodless sandpits. Saudi military checkpoints were ordered to prohibit all journalists from travelling towards the border unless they had signed up for the military “pool” and censorship. So along with a bunch of recalcitrant French reporters and photographers, I dressed myself up in the camouflaged anti-gas kit which The Independent had purchased for its staff and stuck on my head a large British steel helmet. This was a gift from Major Alan Barnes, a sympathetic and highly subversive member of the British army’s education corps. His selection of First World War poetry, apparently nicked from an army library, travelled with me throughout the conflict. The French contrived to dress up in the sloppy battledress of their own national army—Gitanes dangling from lower lips only enhanced their cover—while in my airless anti-gas cape and Barnes’s commando-style helmet, I was able to pass myself off as a vaguely bored liaison officer. The key to success, we quickly discovered, was to approach each checkpoint without looking at the soldiers guarding the road. Our lack of courtesy proved we were genuine.
By the time I reached Khafji in this way, the Saudi border town had been transformed. A towering column of smoke rose 3 kilometres high over the abandoned streets. Iraqi shells—forty in all, fired from a 130-mm gun in a clump of trees on the Kuwaiti side of the frontier—had found their target. Flames bubbled around the base of the smoke inside the Arabian oil company’s storage depot, crimson and yellow, taunting U.S. Marine Sergeant Bill Iiams and his nine men who stood in the sand, dismantling their long-range radio aerials and preparing, without much enthusiasm, to enter the town. A transistor radio was broadcasting from the back of his Humvee, from which came the voice of a Washington reporter extolling the track record of the U.S. Air Force. Marine Rafee Saba, a twenty-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, with a disconcerting Yorkshire accent—he had spent his childhood in Sheffield—was more interested in the radio than in the evidence that the Iraqis just might be able to hit back. “Only one plane lost in one thousand sorties,” he shouted. “Can you beat that?”
Sergeant Iiams was still watching the fires from the oil terminal and the canopy of smoke that was now spreading 15 kilometres out to sea. “No one’s attending the fire, are they?” he asked. My French colleagues and I had already done the rounds of Khafji and knew more than the marines. No, we said, no one had called the fire brigade. In fact, there was not a soul in Khafji to lift a telephone. The entire population—every family, the owner of the barber’s shop, the Pakistani store owner, the managers of the town’s three restaurants, the staff of the local hotel, even the local Khafji constabulary—had fled.
And we had already discovered Khafji’s unhappy secret. Street after street bore the evidence of panic: clothes lying in the middle of the road where they had fallen from trucks and jeeps, limousines left unlocked, a police car abandoned in the main highway, its driver’s door open. When we drove right down to the Kuwaiti border, well within range of the Iraqi gun-line, we found the Saudi army’s positions unmanned, their sandbagged emplacements empty, their tents deserted. Only a lone Saudi National Guard patrol—three tall young men with very long beards and red berets—was left to represent the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
They were proud men who shook our hands because they were pleased to see friendly faces so close to the Iraqis. How many Iraqis there were beyond the trees it was impossible to say, but their shells had tracked across the town in a straight line, next to the empty customs post, through the wall of a garden, in the middle of a street, until one of the last rounds hit the oil terminal and provided this scruffy place with its landmark plume of smoke. Not long after the shelling, we watched a helicopter fly up the coast and fire two missiles into the trees and the artillery stopped firing. There were other fires, deep inside Kuwait. Perhaps 25 kilometres from us, an immense curtain of smoke, kilometres in length and height, rose magisterially into the pale winter sky. It must have been an ammunition dump or a petrol store which the Americans had set alight.
The French were good in the desert. Some of my French reporter colleagues had served in their army in Africa and used compasses to move off the highway and drive through the sand to avoid the American checkpoints that wouldn’t be fooled by our outlandish military clothes. A journalist from the French military magazine Raids was later bombed by one of his own country’s Mirage aircraft; the ordnance failed to explode, so he lifted the unexploded bomb onto the back of his jeep and took it off to a French airbase to complain.
The wet sand clung to our tyres and turned the roads into mud-rinks. The soldiers were cold. The troops of the U.S. 24th Mechanized Infantry Division sat on their vehicles in their rainproof ponchos, slapping their sides for warmth. Across the mud, the British were huddled in their trucks with blankets or sitting in tents with an oil stove sputtering between them. No one could believe that the temperature would fall to almost zero in the Saudi desert. The wind came from the southwest, blasting over the sodden mass of grey earth, filling the sabkha depressions with water, turning the oil-soaked supply routes into death traps. A Humvee lay almost unrecognisable in the sand after its collision with a truck. A massive American M1A1 battle tank lay upside down in the desert, its turret and barrel half buried in the mud, a lone soldier watching over its vast hulk.
Far out across the desert, we could hear the thumps and bangs of U.S. Marine batteries shelling the Iraqis. But the gathering of allied armies—how quickly we had begun to use the word “Allies” as if this was the eve of D-Day—bore little relation to the comfortable, efficient scenarios outlined by the American and British commanders in Riyadh. Construction work on supply routes was hopelessly behind schedule, six-hour traffic jams had built up in the mudpits around divisional headquarters and many junior officers were leading their units to the front lines without maps. The entire British 32nd Field Hospital drove all the way to the Kuwaiti frontier without a single map and were trying to negotiate their way through the last Saudi patrol east of Khafji—and straight into the arms of the Iraqis—until we alerted a group of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who turned them round.
They were lucky they did not turn up in the early hours of 30 January 1991, when an Iraqi mechanised column of tanks and armoured personnel carriers— alerted no doubt that their target was undefended—crossed the border and entered Khafji from the west, capturing the town and, in a separate engagement to the south-west, killing twelve U.S. marines. Exactly two weeks after the Americans announced that the liberation of Kuwait had “begun,” American troops were now fighting—and dying—to liberate a corner of Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t meant to be this way.
By the time I reached the edge of Khafji next morning, a blanket of dense, oily fog hung over the frontier as American 155-mm guns banged shells into the streets around the oil storage depot. I found Marine Corps Sergeant John Post, a tall man with a big bushy moustache, recording “hostile” incoming fire on his sand-sprinkled, crackling radio near the American guns as mortars exploded inside the town, a faint white wisp of smoke showing their fall of shot. A broken water tower, smashed away by shells after someone concluded that the Iraqis had put a forward observer on top, stood out against the grey backcloth of smoke. “I don’t know why we let the Iraqis go into Khafji in the first place,” Post said. “But this is a Saudi operation and the Iraqis are still in there—maybe two hundred of them. They’re said to be Iraqi special forces. I guess the Saudis got several hundred prisoners— I’ve counted twelve busloads of them so far with Saudi guards at both ends of each bus. But the Iraqis are fighters.”
All night, flares had hung over Khafji and its stubborn defenders. A Harrier had swooped out of the east and bombed near the seafront. We made a call to the Khafji Beach Hotel, to be greeted by an Iraqi soldier who announced his support for “Arabism” and issued a string of oaths into the receiver, deprecating “Hosni Mubarak and the so-called Custodian of the Two Holy Places.” Sergeant Post, with fourteen years in the Marine Corps, shook his head and leaned against his Humvee, the squat, crablike version of the jeep which the Americans had now brought into battle for the first time, a TOW missile-launcher mounted on its back. They were to become part of American life in the decade to come. As usual, there was a transistor playing on top of the vehicle, a combination of pop music—which the marines enjoyed and which competed with the din of artillery fire—and news reports of 300 Iraqi dead in Khafji and 500 Iraqi prisoners, which the marines enjoyed even more.
The Saudis were fighting in the town, although many of their reinforcements, it quickly transpired, were Qatari—some of them Pakistani soldiers on loan to the government of Qatar—and on the highway I caught sight of a heavy transporter bearing the wreckage of a Qatari army tank, a shell hole clean through its rear-mounted engine. There was another rumble. Sergeant Post shook his head again. “Those B-52s are laying it on over there in Kuwait,” he said. “Can you imagine what it must be like under that?” No, it was impossible to conceive of the carnage going on across the border, under that terrible black cloud. Hours earlier, in the night 240 kilometres away, I had heard the earthquake of the B-52s. The desert carried the sound much further, a deep, distant drum roll, a minute and a half in length.
Iraqis were dying only 25 kilometres away, in their hundreds, but the euphoria of power had already gifted the Americans with a certain jubilation which, I suggested in a report that night, “will earn them more enemies in the Middle East in the years to come.” On the ground, the marines were more prosaic. Captain John Borth, Post’s commanding officer, viewed it all with the eyes of a man who had seen only the few kilometres of land around him. “If Saddam can take an empty town like Khafji—big deal,” he said. “He’s losing a lot of men to take a town that has no significance. I’m sure if we’d been more concerned about it, we’d have done a lot more.” Perhaps. But Khafji did matter a lot. It was in Saudi Arabia. It was one of the kingdom’s biggest towns. Schwarzkopf contemptuously and wrongly referred to it as a “village” when he originally reported the Iraqi attack. It was a town. It was therefore essential for the Allies to announce its recapture— which British prime minister John Major, having evicted Mrs. Thatcher from Downing Street, did while Iraqi troops were still fighting in the streets.
In the end, it had to be a famous Saudi victory. The “martyrs of Khafji”—the eighteen soldiers and national guardsmen killed in its recapture—were now immortalised by Crown Prince Abdullah as “the symbol of valour and courage in the minds of generations to come. What they have gained is a great honour for this country and their families.” Saudi television neglected to point out that this “honour” would have been unnecessary had Saudi and American soldiers defended Khafji in the first place; they also spared readers the videotape of the shrivelled, carbonised bodies of the kingdom’s “martyrs,” lying in the ash of their personnel carriers. Amid the wreckage of the town to which its population returned, I heard no rejoicing. Why, the shopkeepers asked us, were the Americans not now liberating Kuwait? Instead, they were witnessing, live on their television sets, the destruction of Iraq. When I tried to explain to a Saudi clothing importer that the liberation of Kuwait was obviously going to be preceded by bombing, his response was immediate. “But the bridges, the electricity, the oil in Iraq, the people in the hospitals . . . Why must the Americans do this?”
It was a question asked with ever-increasing frequency. It was pointless for the Americans to explain that the more they bombed those “cockroaches,” the less would be the human cost to the allied forces—including the Arab armies— when they at last advanced upon Kuwait. On CNN, an ever more potent and therefore dangerous medium for the local population, Saudis heard that the killing and wounding of Iraqi civilians—of Arabs, most of them Muslims—constituted “collateral damage” in a “target-rich environment,” phrases that possessed a personal as well as an obscene edge when viewers were of the same faith as the victims.
The role of journalism in the 1991 Gulf War was as cheap as it was dishonest. If the relationship between reporters and soldiers was osmotic, it was also, on the journalists’ part, parasitical. We fed off war. We wanted to become part of it. An American colonel commanding the U.S. airbase in Bahrain decided to honour the “pool” reporters who had been attached to his fighter-bomber squadrons since the day war broke out. They had not flown in any aircraft. They had braved no ground fire. Save for a few false Scud alerts, they had done nothing more than repeat the clichés of the returning pilots and their commanders. But the base commander produced for each of them a small American flag which, he said, had been carried in the cockpits of the very first U.S. jets to bomb Baghdad. “You are warriors too,” he told the journalists as he handed them their flags.
The incident said a lot about the new, cosy, damaging relationship between reporters and the military, one that would be honed and chiselled and polished in time for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. So thorough had been the preparation for this war, so dependent had journalists become upon information dispensed by the Western military authorities, so enamoured of their technology, that press and television reporters found themselves trapped by their own childish enthusiasm.
For most of the journalists in the Gulf—and for most of the Western soldiers— war was an unknown quantity, exciting as well as frightening, historic as well as deadly. The notion that this was a “just war”—as Archbishop Robert Runcie and President Bush would have had us believe—presented us all with a moral context for our presence. If Saddam Hussein was the Hitler of the Middle East— worse than Hitler in Bush’s flawed historical analysis—then it was inevitable that our reporting of the conflict would acquire an undertow of righteousness, even romanticism.
Thus when RAF fighter pilots took off from a Gulf airbase in late January 1991, a young British reporter told her audience that “their bravery knows no bounds.” When U.S. navy jets took off from the carrier USS John F. Kennedy at the start of the war—in a campaign which was to cause many civilian casualties— a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer filed a “pool” dispatch from the ship describing how “Thursday morning was one of those moments suspended in time . . . paving the way for a dawn of hope.” Journalists were now talking of Iraq as “the enemy,” as if they themselves had gone to war—which, unfortunately, they had.
Their language was often that of the 1940s, when Hitler’s armies had reached the Pas de Calais and were poised to invade Britain. Journalists in army costume and helmets were attempting to adopt the gravitas of Edward R. Murrow and Richard Dimbleby. The “pool” reporters were not under air attack like Murrow. They were not flying on missions over “enemy” territory as Dimbleby had done on the Hamburg firestorm raid. But they were preparing the world for “the biggest tank battle since World War Two” and “the largest amphibious operation since D-Day or Korea.” There was to be no major tank battle and no amphibious operation at all. But the armies constituted “the Allies,” with that reassuring echo of the wartime alliance which overthrew Hitler—and in which Saddam’s hero, Stalin, played arguably the leading role.
This nonsense was as dangerous as it was misleading. When the three largest Christian armies in the world were launching a war against a Muslim nation from another Muslim nation which contained Islam’s two holiest shrines, this was no time to draw parallels with the Second World War. If Ed Murrow were alive today, he would have been among the few reporters in Baghdad—like my colleague Patrick Cockburn of The Independent—describing the effects of American air raids on civilians. This bombardment could well presage the start of renewed hatred between the West and the Arab world, but our reporting did not begin to reflect this.
It is not easy for journalists to exercise self-criticism when they are reporting history. And to cast doubt on the word of American or British officers in the Gulf was to invite almost immediate condemnation. Those of us who reported the human suffering caused by Israeli air raids on Beirut in 1982 were libelled as anti-Semitic. Any expression of real scepticism about American military claims in the Gulf thus provoked parallel accusations. Had we taken Saddam’s side? Did we not realise that Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990?
There could not be a reporter in Saudi Arabia who did not realise that Saddam Hussein was a brutal, wicked dictator who ruled through terror. There could be no doubt about the savagery of his army in occupied Kuwait. Reporters who wandered off to investigate military affairs in Saudi Arabia risked at worst deportation. The last journalist who did that in Baghdad had been hanged. Long before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, we were reporting on his atrocities—unlike the Saudi royal family who were bankrolling his dreadful regime, and the U.S. government who were supporting it.
Yet most of the journalists in military “pools” were now wearing the uniform of their Western protectors. They relied upon the soldiers around them for advice. Fearful of a conflict on land, they naturally looked to the soldiers for comfort. They dug trenches with their protectors. They lined up submissively with the soldiers for the frightful cocktail of pills and injections—against anthrax, against bubonic plague—which the Western armies wished to pump into them. I advised one close colleague to have nothing to do with this witches’ brew—now widely believed to be, along with depleted uranium munitions, a cause of the debilitating and sometimes fatal “Gulf War Syndrome”—and to this day she is grateful to me. These journalists were dependent on the troops for communications, perhaps for their lives. And there was thus a profound desire to fit in, to “work the system,” a frequent and growing absence of critical faculties.
This was painfully illustrated for me when the Iraqis took Khafji. The “pool” reporters were at first kept up to 25 kilometres from the fighting and—misled by their U.S. military “minders”—filed stories incorrectly stating that the town had been recaptured. But when I travelled independently to the town to investigate, an American NBC reporter who was a member of the “pool” confronted me. “You asshole,” he shouted at me. “You’ll prevent us from working. You’re not allowed here. Get out. Go back to fucking Dhahran.” He then betrayed me to an American marine “public affairs” officer who announced to me: “You’re not allowed to talk to U.S. marines and they’re not allowed to talk to you.”
It was a very disturbing moment. By travelling to Khafji, The Independent discovered that the Iraqis were still fighting in the town when the British prime minister was claiming outside Downing Street that it had been liberated. For the American reporter, however, the privileges of the “pool” and the military rules attached to it were more important than the right of a journalist to do his job. I named the NBC journalist in The Independent—and in an interview with The New York Times—and he was withdrawn from the Middle East. But the American authorities had been able to set reporters against reporters, to divide journalists on the grounds that those who tried to work outside the “pool”—“freelancers,” as the U.S. military misleadingly called them—would destroy the opportunities of those who were working—under heavy censorship restrictions—within it. That is why, when an enterprising reporter from the Sunday Times of London managed to find the Staffordshire Regiment in the desert in late January 1991, he was met by an angry British officer who said that if he didn’t leave, “you’ll ruin it for the others.”
The “others,” however, already had problems. When American correspondents on the carrier Saratoga quoted the exact words of air force pilots, they found that the captain and other senior officers deleted all swearwords and changed some of the quotations before sending on their dispatches after a delay of twelve hours. On the Kennedy, news agency “pool” reporters recorded how U.S. pilots watched pornographic videos in order to relax—or to become aroused—before their bombing missions. This was struck from their reports.
At one of the two American airbases in Bahrain, a vast banner was suspended inside an aircraft hangar. It depicted an American “Superman” holding in his arms a limp, terrified Arab with a hooked nose. The existence of this banner, with its racist overtones, went unreported by the “pool” journalists on the base. A “pool” television crew did record Marine Lieutenant Colonel Dick White when he described what it was like to see Iraqi troops in Kuwait running for their lives. His words are worth repeating. “It was like turning on the kitchen light late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying,” he said. “We finally got them out where we could find them and kill them.” These astonishing remarks did not elicit a single question from the “pool” reporter, although there was certainly one that was worth putting to the colonel: What was the “New World Order” worth when an American officer, after only three weeks of bombing, compared his Arab enemies to insects?
Journalists even felt the Iraqis had not been punished enough and sought to falsify the record of the war to prove it, suggesting that the land liberation of Kuwait, which took just over four days, constituted the entire conflict. In The Washington Post, Jim Hoagland was to write that “except for the 100 hours of Desert Storm in 1991, the United States and its allies have treated Saddam’s regime as an acceptable evil.” In the same paper, Richard Cohen joined Hoagland in the amelioration of history by telling readers that “the war lasted, you will recall, just one hundred hours.” As Arab-American activist Sam Husseini would point out, “forgotten were the nearly 40 days and 40 nights that the U.S. rained down 80,000 tons of explosives on Iraq—more than all the conventional bombing of Europe in World War II.”
But long before this war had concluded with the wholesale slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops—and in the disgrace of our betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of brave Iraqis who rose against Saddam at our request—journalists had become mere cyphers, mouthpieces of the generals, discreetly avoiding any moral questions, switching off their cameras—as we would later witness—when the horrors of war became too obvious. Journalists connived in the war, supported it, became part of it. Immaturity, inexperience, upbringing: you can choose any excuse you want. But they created war without death. They lied.
The questions that the Saudis asked were in many ways more relevant than those put by the tamed reporters. “What is the New World Order?” a Saudi preacher asked me. Order is something the Saudis like the sound of. The world is an entity from which many Saudis are isolated. But “new” is a word which for Gulf Arabs had a dangerous ring about it. I tried to explain what President Bush might have meant by the phrase, referring to the context in which it first appeared. The Cold War was over, Eastern Europe was free. The Americans thought that these winds should blow through the Middle East as well. Dictators were no longer going to be tolerated—certainly not dictators who opposed the wishes of the United States. In retrospect, I realise now, I was explaining the official ideology of Bush Junior; I was just a decade too soon.
Given their concerns about any “new” world order, let alone the “American way of life,” it was a natural step for King Fahd to demand that Saddam Hussein should “return to God’s order”—a distinctly theological version of the Bush vision—and add that “we invoke God that He might register victory for His army.” In Baghdad, Saddam had himself sought God’s inspiration against the forces of “Satan and his hirelings.” Having adopted the persona of the twelfth-century Kurdish warrior Saladin, he tried to speak with the same voice. “Satan will be vanquished,” he said three days after the start of the bombardment of Iraq. The quotation was almost word-perfect. Faced by the French crusaders at the battle of Hittin on 4 July 1187, al-Malik al-Afdal, Saladin’s own son, records how his father rallied his Muslim troops with the battle cry: “Satan must not win.” Bush in turn asked God to protect America’s soldiers in the Gulf. But he had already placed the conflict on quasi-theological, moral grounds when he addressed a meeting of Christian religious leaders in the United States, declaring that the Gulf conflict was “between good and evil, right and wrong.” The ideological foundation of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was thus laid down before the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.
THE SIX O’CLOCK FOLLIES on 13 February 1991 had never started so late, but no one was surprised. There was a problem to contend with, as every journalist in Riyadh knew. How would Brigadier General Richard Neal, the U.S. deputy director of operations, respond to the killing of more than four hundred innocent Iraqi civilians in the Amariya air-raid shelter in Baghdad?
Would he begin by announcing an investigation into what appeared to be a devastating tragedy, the accidental bombing of a shelter packed with civilians, an expression of regret if the Baghdad reports turned out to be true? Or would he claim that the deaths occurred in a hardened military bunker, that the target was “legitimate,” and that he had no idea how civilians came to be there?
The latter reply was precisely what Neal gave, proving to millions of Arabs that the Americans were heartless as well as all-powerful. He even boasted of his pilots’ prowess in firing missiles down the bunker’s air shaft. The Arabs must have drawn in their breath. Indeed, the general chose to spend more than ten minutes recording the day’s military activity—the number of air sorties, of Iraqi aircraft claimed to have been destroyed on the ground and of oil wells set alight—before mentioning the hundreds of deaths in Baghdad as a coda, as if it was the last thing anyone was likely to be interested in. A “bunker strike” was what he called it. “I’m here to tell you it was a military bunker—it was a command-and-control facility . . . it was a hardened shelter . . . there is no explanation at this time why there were civilians in this bunker.”
Once he had finished, the general found himself—to borrow his own war-speak—in a question-rich environment. What happened? General Neal’s replies were calculated to reassure the Allies that their military tactics remained as ethical as ever—and were bound to inspire indignation in much of the Arab world. Neal talked about America’s “active bunker-busting campaign.” The shelter/bunker was a military target—it had been on the Allies” target list for some days. Military signals had come from it. He said it had been painted with camouflage, although under later questioning he admitted that “I was only told this when I came in.” The Americans had meant to hit it, he said. “These young pilots don’t go out by the seat of their pants . . . this air campaign was scrupulously targeted. The folks spent a lot of time on it.”
Hitherto, the general had uttered not one expression of regret. Only when asked if there might be some such gesture of sorrow did he reply: “You’re damn right . . . but I would add that this was a legitimate target. But if four hundred civilians, as reported, were killed, logic would tell you that of course the American public and the coalition forces are saddened by the fact . . . if in fact . . . there were civilians, if in fact it did occur, it is a tragedy.” If, if, if. It was a military target. It was “legitimate.” They were great pilots. It was a “command-and-control facility.” But it wasn’t.
The truth—hidden at Neal’s press conference—was revealed to me within twenty-four hours in a suburban villa on the outskirts of Riyadh. The Americans believed that the bunker was used by senior members of the Iraqi Baath party and their families and friends. They regularly bombed bunkers where they assumed civilians associated with the regime were sleeping. The bombing of targets where women and children were staying was routine. My source was impeccable—a former American air force general who was now the senior targeting officer for the Royal Saudi Air Force. He examined the USAF photo-reconnaissance and satellite imagery each day. He knew the Amariya bunker.
When I visited him for morning coffee, he was in a state of great distress. One of the two American laser-guided missiles had travelled down the Baghdad bunker’s air-ventilation shaft, he said. The other had hit a dirt patch outside, causing damage to surrounding buildings. “All the Saudis are furious about this,” he said. “The Arabs in the Coalition are saying that Iraq will be effectively destroyed if these bombings continue. The infrastructure is being deliberately degraded— infrastructure for civilians as well as military—but this bombing was a serious error.”
Sipping my coffee, taking notes, watching the pain on this man’s face, I could only ponder the chasm between the deliberate, brutal nature of the American bombing campaign and the soft-focus, equally deliberate perversion of the truth imbibed and swallowed and duly regurgitated by the media. Far from the “target-rich environment” that Neal and his fellow generals claimed, the Americans and British were now flying between 150 and 200 sorties every day over Baghdad alone, and pilots were reporting that they were bombing the same targets five or six times, even after the structures had been virtually destroyed. The general spoke slowly, deprecating the activities of the air force he once served—though never, of course, the pilots—and had witnessed the arguments between Lieutenant General Charles Horner, commander of allied air forces in the Gulf, and Lieutenant General Ahmed el-Baheri, commander of the Saudi air force:
There is a great deal of feeling among Saudis in the MODA [the Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation] because of the Baghdad bombing. They are distraught over the continued bombing. They are very concerned that Iraq should not be destroyed—they are thinking about the postwar era— and the Saudis didn’t want to go along with the Washington statement that the bunker was a “legitimate military target.” “Chuck” Horner is in favour of the continuing bombing of Baghdad. He’s a technology guy. He’s a nice guy. General Baheri feels we should get on with the ground war. Neal talked about camouflage on the roof of the bunker. But I am not of the belief that any of the bunkers around Baghdad have camouflage on them. There is said to have been barbed wire there but that’s normal in Baghdad. We’ve been told that wire is sometimes put up to control crowds, that there is barbed wire near bakers” shops to prevent riots. There’s not a single soul in the American military who believes that this was a command-and-control bunker. Senior commanders in the field do not report to command-and-control bunkers in Baghdad. The military did believe it contained soldiers. We thought it was a military personnel bunker. Any military bunker is assumed to have some civilians in it. We have attacked bunkers where we assume there are women and children who are members of the families of military personnel who are allowed in the military bunkers. The shelters are totally worthless against LGBs [laser-guided bombs]— just think of the kinetic energy of a bomb dropped at mach speed.
I could think of that energy very easily. I would visit that bunker in the Amariya suburb of Baghdad many times in the years to come. It would become a shrine, its blackened walls smothered with photographs of the 400 and more women and children and babies who died there. It had been used as a shelter each night for local families—there were no Baath party officials among them—and the two missiles fired at the structure burned them all alive. On some parts of the walls, flesh adhered for years afterwards. Other concrete surfaces were found to be imprinted with the shapes of the human beings who were liquefied in a millisecond at the moment the American missiles exploded. Hiroshima-like, they would leave their memory as a shadow on the walls.
The general drank more coffee than I—he had seen the satellite pictures and he must have understood the degree of superhuman pain that the victims underwent—but he remained locked into the tactical issues of the air bombardment. The best military sources, even when they unmask military lies, do not always say what we want to hear. If the bombs were killing the innocent in Baghdad, the general also lamented the wastefulness of the munitions:
We are committed to a 40 per cent reduction in Iraqi troops in the KTO [Kuwaiti Theatre of Operations]. We should maximise our weaponry to better effect. We’re past the point of diminishing returns in the Baghdad bombings. The lucrative targets are in Kuwait. We can assume we are killing a lot of their frontline troops. It’s a crap shoot. But we shouldn’t be bombing in Baghdad. A bombing campaign like that tends to run itself out. After the bunker hit, we’re going to get nervous about continuing the Baghdad bombing campaign. President Bush had a free hand until yesterday’s hit. He doesn’t have that any more. Now he’s in a box. I think this accelerates a ground war . . . The pilot of the aircraft who did this will know it was him. But it wasn’t his fault. Saddam Hussein does put children in military bunkers and he is to blame for this irresponsibility. But we were wrong too. Kelly [Lieutenant General Thomas Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff] is a personable guy, he’s a nice person, I know him, but he’s so intoxicated with this damned air war technology that he went on television and said he was “comfortable” about the targeting. We could, by genuinely expressing our sorrow, do something to repair this.
The Amariya bunker was only the bloodiest of civilian bombings. On 3 February, jets—believed to be British—killed 47 civilians and wounded a further 102 when they destroyed a river bridge crowded with pedestrians in Nasiriyah. Most of the victims fell into the Euphrates. On 14 February, British bombers attacked a motorway bridge in the western city of Fallujah—twelve years later it would be the centre of resistance to the American occupation of Iraq—but missed the bridge and hit an apartment block and a crowded market, killing dozens of civilians.
Reporters often justify their own unique form of self-censorship—their uncritical repetition of the statements of generals and major generals—on the grounds that their “access” to senior military officials must be kept open, that this access gives them information that might otherwise be denied their readers. In Northern Ireland and in the Middle East—both among Arab or Iranian military officers and American and British forces—I have found the opposite to be the case. The more journalists challenge authority, the more the military whistleblowers want to talk to them. My files contain hundreds of messages or letters from officers of almost every army operating in the Middle East. One set came from a linguist serving with a U.S. AWACS crew monitoring intelligence over the Gulf before and during the 1991 conflict. His own recollections created for me an intriguing new dimension to the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. He wrote that at an official “Commander’s Call” in October 1990:
. . . it thoroughly sickened me that, apart from our immediate reason for being in Saudi Arabia (dubious though it was), a lot of high-ranking people had a completely separate agenda, and far reaching plans for after the war . . . certain elements within the military had in mind from the very beginning the intention to keep our presence there long after the war was over.
The AWACS officer was far more sickened by the testing of a massive new bomb against Iraqi troops:
One of the most exciting times for the briefers was when, in an absolutely textbook case of overkill, the U.S. Air Force decided to drop the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb right on the Republican Guard. They actually dropped four of them over two nights. It was a psychological (PSYOPS) operation, conducted by the Special Ops guys. The bomb in question is the BLU-82, commonly referred to as the “Daisy Cutter.” It is a 15,000-lb. bomb that is dropped on a pallet out of a C-130 like a cargo bundle. In this case two MC-130s dropped two of them in two locations simultaneously. This was followed by another MC-130 dropping leaflets telling the Iraqis that they would get the same thing the next night and that they should all surrender. The next night they dropped two more along with more leaflets saying we told you so. Since they were dropped in twos, the briefers wasted no time in coining the term “Blues brothers” for these bombs. Touching, isn’t it?138
Crews on the AWACS reconnaissance planes during the 1991 Gulf War would fly in complete darkness, the one window at the back of the aircraft covered to prevent glare on their computer screens. Each crewman or -woman sat at a “rack” that included a large graphics screen with a map of the Gulf area; the plane was equipped with data links over which crew members received radar tracks from other AWACS, E2Cs and ground radar. Crews could watch the strike “packages”—another of the military’s hygienic phrases—as they entered Iraq and Kuwait, hit their targets and returned as little arrow-shaped symbols on the screen. My source was tasked “to make sure the Iraqi Air Force never had a chance” and his description of this ruthless operation shows just how sophisticated American surveillance technology had become:
If they even so much as keyed a microphone, I would know who they were, what type of aircraft they were in, where they were, where they were going, and what they were going to do. During the first three or four days of the air campaign, lots of Iraqi pilots at least tried to make a show of defending their country. As soon as they made their first radio call, I would radio the AWACS and tell them number and type of aircraft, location, direction, and altitude, and the AWACS would immediately send coalition fighters after them. The reality of what was happening came through my earphones, as the Iraqi pilots became almost immediately disoriented, confused, terrified, and finally, silent. I truly felt sorry for them. They would all be talking over one another on the same frequency to the point that their ground controller couldn’t get through to them to warn them of approaching coalition fighters.139
“THEY ARE BURNING OUR OILFIELDS,” the Kuwaiti official said down the phone. The evidence was incontrovertible. Only 100 kilometres north of Riyadh, we could see it along the horizon, the penumbra of a dark, forbidding cloud that stretched across the far edge of the bright desert. An hour later, 150 kilometres further north, and it towered over us, reaching out towards the sun, turning the sand into a white, pasty colour. The drivers on the highway north were all looking at it, as if from the immensity of darkness they expected some sign, unconscious of the fact that the cloud was the sign. The Iraqis were scorching the earth, just as they had promised to do. The Americans had helped, by dropping fuel-air explosives on oil wells in Kuwait as well as Iraq. Now the shadow of Kuwait’s destruction was spreading over the north-east of Saudi Arabia.
It was an open secret that the Americans and the British would soon lunge deep into western Iraq—well over 250 kilometres—in the opening offensive to liberate the emirate. This preparedness was obvious on the highway now. It was almost empty. The tanks and howitzers and missile batteries were already over the skyline, beneath that great darkness. Only ammunition and fuel trucks now sped up the roads to the border. Camels grazed on the thickets between the dunes, bored policemen did not bother to check our papers.
The “pool” reporters were now marooned with “their” military units—all of them waiting to move forward in the night, north and then east into Kuwait City or right on across the Iraqi frontier and up towards the Euphrates River. The straight road up the coast from Khafji—the quickest way to reach Kuwait in peacetime— was regarded as a death trap, mined and closely defended by Iraq’s best troops. American planners had decided that the Kuwaiti army itself—and their Saudi allies—would have the dubious honour of taking this highway and liberating the Kuwaiti capital. So with something close to trepidation, I hitched a ride with Sky Television and a unit of Kuwaiti commandos who could not wait to drive up that unpleasant, sinister road. There would be oil-filled trenches and berms set on fire to burn us alive, kilometres of interconnected minefields to blow us to bits, enfilading rifle fire from Iraqi emplacements, dug-in T-72 tanks to blast our vehicles off the highway. Or so we were told.
In the pre-dawn darkness on the morning of 25 February, the Sky crew and I drank tea with all the enthusiasm my dad must have felt on the Somme in 1918. Then we swung in behind a Kuwaiti petrol tanker and ground through the rubble of the Saudi customs post and suddenly, as the sun struck through the wadis, we crossed the infamous berms. Half-filled with black sludge, the ditches and earthworks ran guiltily across the Kuwaiti desert, the sand dark and soggy with oil. We were supposed to have been incinerated. But there were no cremation trenches, no snipers, no activated minefields, just mile after mile of burned out Iraqi armour and ammunition trucks ripped apart by precision bombs. The Iraqis had already fled.
I breathed in the dawn air. It was as if God had given us a second life. We wound through kilometre after kilometre of Saudi and Kuwaiti convoys—Arab troops with just a few U.S. Special Forces Humvees cutting through the desert alongside us, their radio aerials adorned with the red, green, white and black flags of Kuwait. “Kuwait City,” the road signs beckoned to us. By the time we stopped beneath lowering clouds of burning oil, the air pressure changing with the blast of artillery shells, the prize was only 70 kilometres away, the suburbs only 50 kilometres, half an hour’s drive. In the dreary town of Azour, where the Americans were firing at the few Iraqi infantrymen who failed to join the rout, stood Colonel Fouad Haddad of the Kuwaiti army’s 9th Battalion, his massive beard and shades almost obscuring his smile. “I feel I am dreaming,” he said.
We felt like that, too. After so many months and so much planning—and, let us be frank, ruthlessness—the “Allied” armies had broken through the Iraqis in just a few hours and we had sped down the highway like kings. The Iraqis destroyed the telephone lines in Kuwait but my Saudi mobile still maintained a fractured signal west of Azour. I called the foreign desk of The Independent. Harvey Morris wasn’t surprised. Richard Dowden, our most daring foreign correspondent, had long ago found himself confronted by Iraqi soldiers who asked him to take them prisoner. Reports from the west spoke of Iraqis surrendering by the thousand. After promising the “Mother of All Battles,” Saddam had ordered his army to retreat out of Kuwait, like a child grown bored with a familiar game, tired of the bombing and rhetoric, anxious to start a new epic, create a new narrative of empty courage.
How long, I wondered, before Baghdad told us of the unquenchable resolve of the Iraqis never to surrender to the United States, how Iraq alone had faced the world’s only superpower, how their occupation of Kuwait, however temporary, had been a historic Iraqi victory? About a week, in fact. And munching an unspeakable American military chocolate bar in the cover of a Special Forces Humvee, I remembered how Khorramshahr was going to be defended in 1984, a Stalingrad of fortitude against the Iranian hordes; until one day seven years ago Saddam had woken up and decided to withdraw his army from the city it had captured with so much blood in 1980. Kuwait was a repeat of Khorramshahr. For the second time, what was billed as one of the great battles of Iraqi history was simply erased from the history books. A new script would begin tomorrow.
Beside the Kuwait City highway were piles of unexploded anti-personnel mines and broken Iraqi trucks whose contents of unused rocket-propelled grenades and boxes of machine-gun ammunition and brass cartridges sparkled in the sand. Electricity pylons had been torn down. There were expensive cars, turned over on their roofs, wheels ripped off. Crude piping lay everywhere across the desert, reeking of fuel oil; there were liquid-filled trenches, acres of black scum. Could they not have been set alight? Or were the Americans too quick for them? Or had Saddam just given up? What had the Iraqis done? It was like a dead land.
And in Kuwait City, we asked a far more devastating question: What kind of people would do this? Day had been turned into night, so thick was the canopy of smoke, the nation’s oil wells burning gold and orange along the black-fringed horizon, and so we had—again I must use the example of that most sadistic of medieval cultural images—Hieronymus Bosch; courtesy, this time, of the Iraqi army. Five years later, the Chinese would complain of the pollution and black snow on Mount Everest caused by Kuwait’s oil fires.
The Iraqis had even used the modern equivalent of a torture wheel. All day, Kuwaiti men, young and old, approached our car with their terrible stories. “They twisted my son on a pole and broke his legs with pieces of wood,” a stooped old man said. “They thought he was in the resistance. Now they have taken him away, with all the others, as a human shield.” Then there was Heather Rennison, an Englishwoman married to a Kuwaiti. “A cousin of my mother-in-law was arrested. She was only nineteen and they found two-way radios in her bedroom. Three days later they came to her home to ask her parents for clothes and blankets. So her parents thought she would be all right. Then the Iraqis hanged her and dumped her body outside her home. There were burns from electricity on her arms and legs. Of course, the Iraqis kept the clothes and blankets.”
Perhaps one needed to walk the pavements of Kuwait City to understand the extent of what the Iraqis did, that it really did amount to a war crime. “I will show you the mosque where they shot eleven men on Friday,” a bearded man shouted to us from a car. The Abdullah Othman mosque stands in the Palestinian Hawali quarter. The bearded man pointed to a yellow wall. “The Iraqis said that all those at prayer would be taken away—kidnapped—and eleven men stayed in the mosque and refused to go. So they brought them here, blindfolded them, made them stand with their backs to the wall and shot them in the face.” The bullets that passed through the worshippers’ heads were now embedded in the yellow wall. “Don’t be surprised,” the man said. “I had two neighbours who the Iraqis thought were in the resistance. So they pushed them into drains, closed the grille, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. Their families buried them later—you can’t leave bodies in drains.”
The figure of 5,000 Kuwaiti men abducted in the last hours before Iraq’s retreat seems fantastic until you find—as I did that day—that the first three families who offered me lifts to various locations in Kuwait City had all lost sons as hostages. The young men had simply been ordered into Iraqi army buses as they walked to work. Three thousand men and women were murdered here, the Kuwaitis also tell you. Who could do this?
It is comforting, in trying to record a reign of terror, to search for some logical reason; long-standing hatred perhaps, or some aberrant unit of the Iraqi secret police. But this would be fanciful. What was one to think when one walked, as I did, through the smoking embers of the National Museum, fired by the Iraqis on Tuesday? Or the gutted interior of the parliament? Or the still burning library in the Sief Palace—its magnificent golden clock tower smashed by a tank shell— when I found, lying on a chair, the remains of a book published by the government of India, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi? What kind of people burn museums and libraries? Fast-forward. Would I not be writing these same words, 800 kilometres north of here, in Baghdad, in almost exactly twelve years from now?
Outside the museum, Kuwait’s collection of antique wooden boats had been burned to cinders. The “Islamic house” lay in ruins. The walls of the emir of Kuwait’s Dasman Palace were torn down with explosions and bulldozers. The Iraqis used tanks to shoot at the parliament. The great hotels had been systematically fired. The Iraqis planted explosives in the bedrooms of the Meridien. It was like a medieval army that conquered, looted and then burned even on an individual level. Boat owners found their yachts stolen or sunk in the marinas. Shopkeepers found their stores burned if they could not be looted. At an abandoned anti-aircraft gun on the coast—where the Iraqis mined the beaches against a non-existent U.S. marine amphibious landing—I came across piles of brand-new women’s shoes, made in France, none of them matching, all wrapped inside Iraqi army blankets along with body-building magazines. Why did they do this, these soldiers? Why had they stolen an exhibition display of women’s eye shadow? There were cartridge cases across the forecourt of the museum, bullet-holes in the cracked walls of the building that once contained Kuwait’s finest—and long ago looted— national treasures. What was he thinking, this soldier, when he opened fire on a museum?
The seafront restaurants had been torn down, the high, glass-covered landmark water towers machine-gunned. At Al-Ahmadi, the Iraqis set off explosives every hour at the two oil farms, each containing twenty tanks. The fine old British “White House” there was burned down along with the control room that operated the oil pipelines.
I suppose one sensed in Kuwait that something very wicked and—here it comes—something at times very evil had visited this city. Not just an occupation army, not even the Iraqi Baath party apparatus, but something that intrinsically links dictatorship and corruption. “Down with the dirty Fahd, Sabah and Hosni,” said a blood-red graffiti on the wall of one of the burned palaces. “Long live Saddam Hussein.” In the little, looted museum of Kuwaiti peasant art, I found a poster of Saddam stapled to a wall. “Most victorious of all Arabs, the great leader Saddam Hussein—God bless him,” the caption said.
Whoever uttered such prayers? Colonel Mustafa Awadi of the Kuwaiti resistance movement offered to show me. On a bleak housing estate in the suburb of Quwain, he took me to a school—the Iraqis used schools as interrogation centres—and in a classroom he introduced me to sixteen Iraqi soldiers. They sat on the floor, legs crossed, mustachioed, miserable, ordinary men with tired, dirty faces and grimy uniforms. “They were happy to surrender,” the colonel said. “See? We even give them food and tea. I promise they will be handed over unharmed to the Kuwaiti army.” Two of the men had been wounded in the face—their bandages were fresh—and they all smiled when I greeted them and when they heard me tell the colonel in Arabic that I would mention their presence to the Red Cross. One could not help but feel sorry for these defeated teenagers with their sad smiles. So what kind of men raped Kuwait?
And what—here, at last, was my opportunity—was it like under our bombardment, under the laser-guided munitions and the GBUs and the “Daisy Cutters”? What was it like to be an Iraqi soldier attacked by the Americans? “The Americans and British both bombed us,” Mohamed said. “We knew all the planes—Tornado, Jaguar, B-52, F-16, F-15—and we knew what was going to happen.” Mohamed was a thirty-three-year-old Iraqi reservist, one of the oldest of the men, and his fellow prisoners nodded in agreement as he described their suffering. He moved his left hand in a fast, sweeping movement from left to right. “All over the explosions went, one big bomb and lots of smaller bombs, everywhere, like this.” Mohamed was describing the effect of a cluster bomb.
After all the briefings and the bomb-aimer’s video films, here at last was what it was like on the Other Side, in the words of those who tried to survive in the “target-rich environment.” Schwarzkopf had described the Iraqis as poorly fed, living in fear of their own execution squads. On the evidence of Mohamed and his comrades, it was true. Not one of the Iraqi soldiers I spoke to had eaten anything but rice and bad bread for months. All talked with disgust of the kuwat al-khassa, the “special guards.”
According to Ali, a twenty-two-year-old private from Diwaniya, it was the kuwat al-khassa that controlled the death squads. “They came to see us at the front at Wafra [in Kuwait] and told us what they would do to us. One of them said that if we ran away, we knew what would happen to us and he invited one of us to go and look at the bodies of fifty soldiers who had been executed. None of us would go to look at them. But later—a few days ago, at the end of the war—one of my friends, Salaam Hannoun, a soldier from Amara, ran away. They caught him and brought him back and made us watch his execution. He waited for his death and cursed Saddam Hussein. Then they shot him. He was twenty-three.”
Mohamed’s description of the death squads was terrifying. “They were all members of the party. They change their names so they can never be identified. If a man is Mohamed, they call him Hussein. They have no emotion. They have no mercy.” The executions did not deter Ali. “Ten of us tried to run away at the end, under the bombing,” he said. “We were caught and our hands were tied and they put blindfolds on us. They said they would kill us. But then the order to withdraw came and they needed us to help drive the trucks out of Kuwait. So after a while, a captain came and said: ‘Release them.’ ”
If the difference between life and death in the Iraqi lines was a matter of tactical convenience, the soldiers appreciated the dangers of the Allied bombing. “At night, during the bombing, we always hid in our shelters in the sand,” Mohamed said. “We hid there all the time, waiting for the bombing to end and for the ground attack. One of my friends, Abbas, from Baghdad, was thirsty one night when they were dropping cluster bombs on us. He kept complaining that he needed water. We said to him: ‘Don’t go out there—it’s too dangerous.’ The water was kept in another shelter only ten metres from us. Abbas left despite our warnings and immediately a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head and killed him. We had to leave him there. He was not buried.”
Ghassan, a thirty-year-old Iraqi reservist from Nasiriyah, complained that there had been little chance of surrendering to the Allies although, three days ago, he and his comrades had handed themselves over to the Kuwaiti resistance. “After we read the leaflets dropped on us, we wanted to run away. We kept the leaflets with us all the time and we made some white flags to wave at helicopters if they came. But there were too many mines in front of us to run—and at the start, we were forty kilometres from the border.” The Iraqis said they had received only water, rice and bread “mixed with small pieces of sawdust” since they were posted to Kuwait. In Iraq, they said, their military rations had been five kilos of flour a month and three pieces of bread a day.
Several of the prisoners spoke with emotion of bereavement and suffering within their own families in Iraq. Adnan’s eight-month-old baby boy was suffering from acute diarrhoea and a high temperature when he last saw him; his family could not obtain medicines from the doctor, he said, because of the UN blockade, and he did not know if the child was still alive. Ghassan’s sister Nidal died two days after giving birth because two hospitals were unable to provide her with oxygen—again, he said, because of the blockade. This was the first evidence I found—even before the liberation of Kuwait—that the UN sanctions were lethal.
Shortages at home, death squads, starvation diets and twenty-four-hour bombing at the front destroyed the morale of the sixteen soldiers who spoke to me. One of them spoke bitterly of Saddam Hussein, no doubt hoping to impress his Kuwaiti captors but unafraid that his comrades might betray him later. “I want to go back to an Iraq where there is no Saddam Hussein,” he said. It was a wish devoutly held by many millions of Iraqis. Just a day earlier, we—the West—had urged the people of Iraq to bring this about, to rise up and destroy the tyrant.
How easily we did this. How natural it seemed. We had, after all, gone to war in alliance with “the Arabs.” Good men and true of the Christian and Islamic faiths had fought together against Saddam. This was the image portrayed when Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled, the “commander-in-chief of all foreign forces,” sat down at Safwan on 3 March 1991 to arrange the Iraqi ceasefire—and allowed Saddam to keep his helicopters and surviving Republican Guard divisions intact. In the years that followed, the memoirs of those who supposedly led this war proved that the alliance was a sham—and that our reporting of the conflict was as deeply flawed as the men who fought it.
Prince Khaled used to employ an American public relations company to manage his press conferences. Deep in the high-pile-carpeted interior of the Saudi defence ministry, an Irish-American of massive build—a certain Mr. Lynch from Chicago—would stand just behind Prince Khaled, choosing which journalists should be permitted to ask questions and suggesting to the rather portly Saudi commander how he should reply. It was, to put it mildly, an unbecoming performance. Prince Khaled would beam into the television cameras and pour out his effusive thanks to the American people for sending their sons to defend his land while Mr. Lynch nodded sagely at his shoulder. The prince’s presentation was made all the more extraordinary by a hairline so thick and low that he appeared to have recently undergone a hair implant. His thin moustache added an even more surreal touch, making him look unhappily like those bewhiskered gentlemen who in silent movies used to tie ladies to railway lines in front of express trains.
King Fahd’s decision to invite American troops to Saudi Arabia had been “one of the most courageous of his life,” Khaled told us. He himself saw nothing wrong with this invitation to the foreign “guests.” America would respect the laws of Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia respected the United States. “Respect” was the word the Saudis always used. The foreigners would respect Islam and would respect the Arabs. And of course, Arabs would respect America. Khaled expressed his “respect” for Schwarzkopf, and Schwarzkopf duly disclosed his own “respect” for Khaled’s generalship. It sometimes seemed that there was no end to this mutual admiration, even when Saudi troops fled their posts at Khafji. After the Saudis and Qataris and their Pakistani mercenaries fought their way back into the town, there was the ever-smiling prince, now sporting a bright blue Kevlar helmet adorned with transfers of a general’s four stars, declaring his pride in his army and their American allies.
Imagine, therefore, Khaled’s surprise when, browsing through Schwarzkopf’s autobiography a year later, he found that the American commander’s “respect” for him was not quite as deeply held as he apparently thought. Khaled, according to Schwarzkopf, complained that American troops were wearing T-shirts bearing a map of Saudi Arabia (maps were “classified”), that a rabbi had boasted of blowing the Rosh Hashanah ram’s horn on Islamic soil (the rabbi was in America and quoted in an Israeli newspaper), that the Americans were bringing “dancing girls” into Dhahran; Khaled wanted the Americans to launch their ground offensive from Turkey rather than Saudi Arabia and told Schwarzkopf that the Syrians didn’t want to fight. Khaled was chosen for his job, Schwarzkopf wrote, by two American generals.
The Saudis should have expected such treatment. In the months that followed the liberation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia emerged as America’s main financial client in the Middle East, a vassal state supporting the finances of Washington’s poorer allies in the region—Egypt, for example—and buying off the suspicions of those less enthusiastic about American policy, especially Syria. In return for American firepower and political support, Saudi Arabia became Washington’s bankroller.
Predictably, an embittered Prince Khaled launched a series of attacks on the “respected” Schwarzkopf, accusing him of concocting stories and distorting facts “to give himself all the credit for the victory over Iraq while running down just about everyone else.” Poor Khaled. Did he really believe that the Americans would accept him as a four-star general alongside the Schwarzkopfs and the de la Billières? Typically, he failed to object to one of the most offensive passages in Schwarzkopf’s book, perhaps because he failed to understand its implications. Readers are invited to spot the insult:
Khalid [sic] was ideal; he’d been educated at Sandhurst, the British military school, had attended the U.S. Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, held a master’s degree in political science from Auburn University, and was the highest ranking prince in the Saudi Armed Forces. His military credentials were nowhere near as important as his princely blood, since almost all power in Saudi Arabia resides in an inner circle of the royal family. Simply put, unlike the other generals, Khalid had the authority to write cheques.
Cheques for transportation. Cheques for water. Cheques for fuel. This is why Prince Khaled was important. For the Gulf War, after massive arms purchases from the West had discredited George Bush’s promise to reduce the level of weapons in the Middle East, ended as a net profit to the Western alliance, fought by young men from Detroit and Glasgow but paid for by Prince Khaled’s uncle and king, the “Custodian of the Two Holy Places.” Could two such partners show each other anything more than mercantile respect?140
Curiously, the commanders of the two largest Western armies in the Gulf spent a good deal of their memoirs trying to persuade us that they do “respect” the Arabs and the Muslim Middle East. Visiting the Gulf as head of the U.S. Central Command in 1989, Schwarzkopf claimed to admire the Arab way of life, hunting with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in the Emirates, even dressing up in Kuwaiti robes for dinner. His Arab counterparts welcomed him into their palaces and mosques, Schwarzkopf wrote, “now that they knew of my fascination with their culture.”
General Sir Peter de la Billière seemed even more smitten with Arab “culture.” “I liked and respected Arabs and understood their way of life,” he wrote. “I came to appreciate the Arabs well, to appreciate their fine culture.” A few pages later, he is boasting again of “my understanding of Arabs and their way of life.” Yet a good part of de la Billière’s previous service in the Middle East had involved hunting down Arabs as an officer in the SAS. In Oman, he says, he failed to “eliminate” or capture the three dissident Arab leaders but succeeded in forcing them into exile. At Wadi Rawdah, the SAS attacked two guerrilla strongholds and “effectively put them out of business.” Oddly, de la Billière does not choose to mention the Iranian embassy siege in London when the SAS—of which he was then director—broke into the building, rescued the civilian captives held there and then proceeded to execute all but one of the Arab hostage-holders.
Perhaps it was necessary, so many months after the Gulf War, to romanticise the relationship between the West and the Arabs, between Christians and Muslims, unconsciously to simplify and reconstruct the reasons why the Western armies embarked on their crusade to save the biggest oil lake in the world and to prevent Saddam from becoming the largest controller of the world’s oil. Schwarzkopf, who at least understood the need for America to maintain its relations with the Arab world, stated that one of the war’s aims was to “eliminate Iraq’s ability to threaten the Arab world.” Millions of Arabs suspected that the war—and the invasion of Iraq twelve years later—was to eliminate Iraq’s ability to threaten Israel, which, given the enormous effort to destroy the mobile Iraqi Scud-launchers which were firing at Israel, may not have been far from the truth.141
Neither Schwarzkopf nor de la Billière chose to mention the killing of hundreds of Palestinians in Kuwait and the “ethnic cleansing” of tens of thousands of others by the Kuwaitis that followed the war. Schwarzkopf has only three references to Palestinians in his book, the second of which shows an insensitivity that might well have provoked Khaled. It records a conversation between the general and the prince in October 1990, after Israeli police shot down twenty-one Palestinian civilians in Jerusalem. Schwarzkopf says he “cautioned General Khalid not to be too quick to condemn America’s historic support of Israel, particularly just after the American people have absorbed ten accidental deaths incurred while defending Saudi Arabia.” That Schwarzkopf could compare military accidents— however tragic—with what was, in effect, a massacre shows just how removed from reality was his “fascination with Arab culture.”
Both men thunder their condemnation of Saddam’s iniquities, although even here de la Billière’s history is skewed. At one point, he talks of Saddam’s war against “expansionist Iran” when in fact it was Saddam who was expansionist. It was Iraq that invaded Iran in 1980, not the other way round. So much for understanding “the Arab way of life.” If “respect” there was for the Arabs and Muslims, however, it was squandered when de la Billière made his jubilant demand at the war’s end—as the corpses of tens of thousands of Iraqi Muslim soldiers lay across Kuwait and Iraq, many of them thrown unidentified into mass graves—that British people should “get out there and ring the church bells.” However unconscious he may have been of its content or effect, could there have been a clearer revelation of Christian triumphalism over Islam?
But even de la Billière’s outrageous self-promotion does not touch Prince Khaled. For when the latter’s own memoirs duly appeared in 1995, he felt able to tell his readers that the approval of his application to enter the war college at Maxwell Air Force Base suggested that “God [was] guiding my career to prepare me for what was to come.” He is “touched” when Chinese diplomats compare him to Henry Kissinger. Before the war, Khaled slept in a room beneath the Saudi defence ministry. “I suffered from loneliness,” the general who called his book Desert Warrior tells us. “ . . . To calm myself and to take my mind off the war, I developed a night-time addiction to American TV comedies. After chortling over one of these for half an hour, I would fall peacefully to sleep.”
It got worse. Arguing with the French defence minister, Prince Khaled indirectly compares himself to Churchill, whose Cross of Lorraine (de Gaulle) was also hard to bear. He fusses because Schwarzkopf’s chair is bigger than his, insists that Schwarzkopf must visit his office for meetings rather than the other way round, and describes the Khafji fighting as “a pivotal battle of the war.” His task, Khaled solemnly informs us, was “more difficult and complicated” than Schwarzkopf’s. Khaled cannot kneel when he accepts an honour from Queen Elizabeth and goes on to pick up Légions d’Honneur and other decorations from France, Bahrain, Hungary, Kuwait, Morocco, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Senegal and, of course, Saudi Arabia. This was, the general informs us, “something of a record . . . for an Arab soldier in war,” adding happily that “I would like to thank those who gave me a medal.” Is this really what soldiering is all about?
Khaled tells us about the need to protect Saudi Arabia’s unique culture and “traditions.” The latter, though he doesn’t say so, include lopping off the heads of criminals—shooting in the back of the head if the condemned prisoner is a woman—and virtual apartheid for the entire female population of the kingdom. Khaled spends two pages dictating the need for loyalty to the royal family—the system by which 5,000 or so princes, including himself, dominate a land of around 9 million people after inviting the Americans to protect them. Khaled’s own father, Prince Sultan, he constantly reminds us, was defence minister and played a role “as important as that of Defence Secretary Cheney in the United States.” Yet it was Prince Sultan who suggested as America prepared for war that the West should perhaps do a deal with Saddam after all.
In Khaled’s sahara of a book, there are occasionally revealing moments; how the Iraqi intelligence service infiltrated the postwar Iraqi refugee camps in Saudi Arabia, for example, and Schwarzkopf’s stunning lapse at Safwan when he gave the Iraqis permission to use helicopter gunships after the ceasefire. “Absolutely no problem,” the American told the amazed Iraqi generals. “ . . . this is a very important point, and I want to make sure that’s recorded, that military helicopters can fly over Iraq . . . ” Thank you, the Iraqis said. And went on to slaughter the Shia of Basra and the Kurds of the north.
The good prince quotes Clausewitz, but had to take a holiday after the war “to recover my composure after the stress of the great events in which I had played a part.” He often suffered, it transpires, “from nightmares about fighting, about death . . . Had I done a good job? I leave this to the judgement of my contemporaries—and to history.”
AS PRINCE KHALED WAS RECOVERING from the war and preparing for his holidays, the wreckage of the Iraqi army was streaming home, still under ferocious attack by the Americans. After the ceasefire, for example, General Barry McCaffrey’s 24th U.S. Infantry Division staged a four-hour assault against retreating Iraqis near the Euphrates River, destroying more than 750 vehicles, including a busload of women and children, and killing thousands of soldiers. An Apache helicopter crewman was heard yelling “Say hello to Allah” as he launched a Hellfire missile at them. Not a single American was killed.142 Western news agency journalists in Baghdad interviewed fleeing soldiers who described the horrific battlefield massacres. “It was dark,” one Iraqi told the Associated Press. “I was stepping on bodies, arms, legs and heads of dead soldiers.” Another described how “we were taken in army trucks and cars from the battlefield, and scores of dead bodies covered the 12-lane highway. We would not stop to pick up the living wounded. We ran for our lives.”
In the years to come, I would meet many of the Iraqi soldiers who survived those terrible last days. Lieutenant Ehsan al-Safi was a junior officer in the Iraqi 15th Engineering Brigade when he and a friend found themselves under American air attack on a Kuwait bridge. “Covered in flesh” from other soldiers, they lay on the ground as two more Iraqis leaped to safety from their armoured personnel carrier. The blast of the American bomb hurled the abandoned vehicle forward towards el-Safi’s friend. When he got to his feet, he grabbed his friend’s arm “but there was nobody attached to it.” On two wide parallel highways north of Kuwait, the Iraqis were burned alive in convoy traffic jams. Many of them were conscripts. Some survivors whom I met came from the Kurdish and Turkoman communities in Iraq, a number were Armenians, one of whom had grandparents murdered in the 1915 genocide. One Kurd to whom I spoke had endured the firestorm on the highway and escaped back to Iraq, only to find himself homeless in the mountains of the far north when the Kurdish uprising—encouraged by the Americans—was crushed by Saddam.
SADDAM’S ROAD TO RUIN stretches for 100 kilometres up the highway from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border at Safwan. It is a road of horror, destruction and shame; horror because of the hundreds of mutilated corpses lining its route, destruction because of the thousands of Iraqi tanks and armoured vehicles that lie charred or abandoned there, shame because in retreat Saddam’s soldiers piled their armour with loot. Shame, too, because we punished them all with indiscriminate, unnecessary death.
The dead are strewn across the road only 8 kilometres out of Kuwait City and you see them still as you approach the Iraqi frontier where the burning oil wells are squirting fire into the sky. It is, of course, the horror that strikes you first. Scarcely 25 kilometres north of the city, the body of an Iraqi general lies half out of his stolen limousine, his lips apart, his hands suspended above the roadway. You can see his general’s insignia on his stained uniform. He had driven into the back of an armoured vehicle in the great rout. Farther up the road, corpses lay across the highway beside tanks and army trucks. One Iraqi had collapsed over the carriageway, curled up, his arms beside his face, a neat moustache beneath a heavy head with its back blown away.
Only when ambulance drivers arrived and moved his body did we realise that his left leg had also gone. In a lorry which had received a direct hit from the air, two carbonised soldiers still sat in the cab, their skulls staring forward up the road towards the country they never reached. Kuwaiti civilians stood over the bodies laughing, taking pictures of the Iraqis’ mortal remains.
The wholesale destruction begins another 25 kilometres on, beneath a motorway bridge that stands at the bottom of a low hill called Mutla. It was here, trapped by American and British bombing of the road at the top of the hill, that the Iraqis perished in their hundreds, probably their thousands. Panic-stricken they must have been, as they jammed themselves in their vehicles, twenty abreast, a vast column 6 kilometres long, picked off by the American and British pilots. There were tanks and stolen police cars, artillery and fire engines and looted limousines, amphibious vehicles, bulldozers and trucks. I lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smouldering wreckage or slumped face-down in the sand. In scale and humiliation, it was, I suppose, a little like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. There must have been all of two divisions spread up this road.
Napoleon’s army left Moscow burning and Saddam’s army tried to burn Kuwait, but the French did not carry back this much loot. Amid the guns and armour, I found heaps of embroidered carpets, worry beads, pearl necklaces, a truckload of air conditioners, new men’s shirts, women’s shoes, perfume, cushions, children’s games, a pile of hardback Korans on top of five stolen clocks. There were crude rubber gas masks and anti-gas boots—the Iraqis had prepared themselves for chemical warfare of a kind—and thousands of rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, shells and bayonets.
My car bumped over unspent grenades and rifle barrels. I discovered several tanks and armoured vehicles abandoned in such terror that the keys were in the ignition, the engines still running. I found one that was loaded with suitcases full of matches, rugs, food mixers and lipstick. A child’s musical box lay in the sand still playing “and a happy new year, and a happy new year . . . ” Iraqi equipment— daggers, belts, berets and helmets—lay everywhere with their owners’ names written on the straps.
On top of one armoured vehicle, its engine still idling, I found the helmets of Lieutenant Rabah Homeida and Private Jamal Abdullah. They had stood no chance, for in front of their vehicle lay another 3 kilometres of burned Iraqi military traffic, at the end of which stood a squad of American soldiers from the U.S. 2nd Armored Division whose motto—Hell on Wheels—appropriately summed up the fate of the thousands in the ghoulish traffic jam below. No film could do credit to this chaos. It was both surreal and pathetic. Saddam Hussein called it an “orderly withdrawal.”
Around the carnage and dust drove two British Land Rovers of the 26th Field Regiment Royal Artillery, a giant Union flag floating above both of them. It was Staff Sergeant Bob Halls and Gunner Barry Baxter who showed us the track through the sand to reach the Mutla Ridge, picking their way past unexploded cluster bombs and live shells. “You can’t really take in what war does till you’ve seen it,” Baxter says to me. “Why did this happen? Saddam’s forces are nothing to be reckoned with, are they? They didn’t want to go to war. They just wanted to put their hands up. They are our enemy but they didn’t want to be in the war in the first place. They are a sorry sight to see.”
They were. The prisoners we saw—remnants of the world’s fourth-largest army—were unshaven and exhausted, herded by soldiers of the 16th/5th Lancers, trudging through the desert, throwing personal arms onto a pile of weapons 4 or 5 metres high, guarded by U.S. troops. All the way to the Iraqi border, we found the detritus of the Iraqi retreat, tanks and armour across the road, on their backs in ditches, scattered over the flat desert on either side. Some were still burning. The Americans and British looked at all this with a mixture of awe and relief.
Lieutenants Andrew Nye and Roy Monk of C Company, 1st Battalion, the Staffordshire Regiment, had spent part of the morning burying the dead. They included women and children, Iraqis or Kuwaitis or Egyptian refugees fleeing the battlefront and caught in the last American and British air attacks. Lt. Nye had lost one of his own men in the fighting. “One of our blokes was killed,” he said. “He was hit in the chest by a rocket-propelled grenade after some Iraqis had raised the white flag. It may be that some of the Iraqis didn’t know others had surrendered. By then we had grown so used to the prisoners, we had seen so many of them and heard about the huge numbers of POWs on the radio. You have to feel this to believe it. There are booby-traps here and the Iraqis who died on this road were stripping Kuwait City. But I shudder to think what it would have been like in their position.”
We did. Imagining death—the end of life—can leave one gasping with horror at the vacuum, with the nothingness to follow. But to become one with these burned creatures at the moment of immolation, the seconds of indescribable pain, the brief awareness, theknowing of such suffering, this was surely too much. Yet we looked into these carbonised faces. I sought something from them, I suppose, some terrible mystery which I was not entitled to search for and which they were not entitled to reveal.
My AWACS friend was flying the day after the highway of death had been bombed. “I remember,” he wrote to me six years later:
. . . how absolutely ecstatic the briefer was when telling us how “the JSTARS had spotted a whole convoy up near Safwan and had called the ABCCC who called in the A-10s who just had a field day!” Apparently, after incinerating a few U.S. Marine Bradleys and at least one British APC, the A-10 pilots had finally improved their aim.
Much later, we would discover that even the pilots had been sickened—far too late—by their own vile handiwork. “Low pilot morale” was the way it was put, and the British foreign secretary said as much six months later. His words carry infinitely more meaning today than they did then, because his warnings—of what would have happened if “we” had not stopped in Kuwait, of the dangers awaiting “us” if “we” went all the way to Baghdad—connect directly with the disaster in which “our” armies now find themselves in Iraq. If ever the ghosts of the future could come to haunt us, many must have been the phantoms who came back down the years to gaze upon the Mutla Ridge on those cold and overcast days of 1991. Some people, British foreign secretary Hurd said,
argue that the coalition should have carried the fight to Baghdad and demanded Saddam’s head. In fact, once the Iraqi forces had effectively lost their capacity to defend themselves, many pilots were reluctant to continue the fight . . . First, the coalition explicitly limited its objectives to those set out in the UN resolutions, which related to the liberation of Kuwait. Second, had we gone to Baghdad we would have found ourselves forced to choose and then sustain a new Iraqi government.
This, Hurd said, would have drawn “allied troops” into the “morass of Iraqi politics,” risking “our” lives and public support for the mission.
LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of 2 March 1991, my old friend Alex Thomson of ITV and I drove from the “highway of death,” north up the road to Safwan and beyond, to a place where the Iraqi dead lay in profusion over the desert floor. Packs of dogs had got among them, tearing the limbs apart, ripping at clothes to gnaw at stomachs and thighs. The dogs fought each other for this nightmare feast. Some had already run off with severed body parts. One dog had an arm in its mouth and raced across the sand, the fingers of a dead hand trailing cruelly through the muck. Thomson’s crew dutifully filmed this obscenity. Alex, who was to write one of the most critical studies of the media in this war, looked at me coldly. “Never get on the air of course,” he said. “Just for the archives.”
And that was it. When journalists wished to film the war, they chafed at the restrictions placed upon them; but when the war was officially over and the restrictions lifted and they could film anything they wanted, they did not, after all, want to show what conflict was like. I noticed how the Iraqis who had comparatively clean deaths—those who were obliging enough to die in one piece and collapse picturesquely, lying like fallen warriors by the roadside—would turn up on television screens, briefly of course, to symbolise the “human cost” of war. But the world was not allowed to see what we saw, the burned, eviscerated souls, the chopped-off, monstrous heads, the scavenging animals. Thus did we help to make war acceptable. We connived at war, supported it, became part of it.
Back in Kuwait that night, I filed my dispatch to The Independent , tired and depressed and angry at my own profession. To the end of my report on the Iraqi dead, I added, almost as an afterthought, two paragraphs about Egyptian guest workers who were fleeing the chaos to the north:
As we neared the Iraqi frontier, Egyptian refugees began to straggle down the highway, some weighed down with blankets and begging for water, others pushing their surviving possessions in rusting supermarket trollies, a few asking for cigarettes. Many were too tired to talk, having walked 60 miles from Basra.
“They shoot all Egyptian people in Iraq,” one of them said, but would not add to that chilling remark. A group of American soldiers said they had heard the Iraqis were shooting at refugees on the border.
I called the paper’s foreign desk an hour later to ask if Harvey Morris had any questions about my report. “Ah-ha, I was interested in the last two paragraphs,” he said. “I suppose you realise what you are reporting, don’t you? The rising has started.”
How typical that I should have failed to realise what this meant. Now that the Gulf War was officially over, the real bloodbath was about to begin.