CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My home is dark, the heart of my garden and the desert is dark, . . . every corner of this ruined city is black. The sky is tired; the sun has given up. Like a prison cell, the travelling moon is dark.
—Quhar Ausi, Darkness (Tareeq), 1990
ON THE HEIGHTS OF THE MUTLA RIDGE, a tattered, cheap bouquet of artificial roses, bleached white by the sun, thrashes in the wind, still fixed to a rusting metal pipe that stands upright in the sand. It is 2 August 1991, a year to the day after Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait. The plastic rose is the only memorial to the slaughter that took place here, a lone act of gentleness by an American soldier— for it was the Americans I saw here five months ago, heaping the mangled corpses into the pit, scarves over their mouths, an army bulldozer widening the mass grave. The sand, shawling over the desert—cutting into your face and hands if you stand facing the wind—has now covered the two mounds of dirt that the bulldozer created. Only those twin piles—and those pathetic fake roses—mark the last resting place of Saddam’s legions.
How many died here? Who were those Iraqis whose stiffened, shabby remains we found lying around their burned-out tanks and trucks and looted buses, guns and armoured carriers after the American and British jets had trapped them at night in their flight from Kuwait? When it comes to this particular cull, you can forget the Geneva Convention and that clause about the exchange of lists showing “the particulars of the dead interred therein.” On the highway below their graves, the rusting armour and the stolen cars are still there, covered now in the graffiti of the victors, cheerful jokes for Mom and Pa, American unit slogans and interminable, grotesquely obscene remarks—not so much about Iraq and Saddam but about women, humiliating and disturbing, as if the conquerors needed to associate sex with violent death.
Just as the sand has subtly changed the landscape at each end of the mass grave, time changes our perception of such events. At the time of their death, we had just witnessed the evidence of Iraqi savagery in the newly liberated city of Kuwait. We had visited the Iraqi torture chambers, seen the mutilated bodies of Kuwaiti men and women, the destruction of Kuwait’s palaces and oil wells. In among the doomed convoys at Mutla, we had found plunder on a medieval scale. I had seen hundreds of dead here; there must have been thousands. The Kuwaitis talk about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed in the desert. Some say 200,000. Shouldn’t we have been referring back then, not to the “Highway of Death”—the popular headline around the world—but to the Massacre at Mutla Ridge?
The plunder has long since been re-looted. But there are still ghosts in the desert. Beside the wreckage of an Iraqi truck—battalion insignia, a blue square beside a white triangle, for armies are about bureaucracy as well as death—I tug at the spines of shredded files and exercise books, three-quarters buried in the sand, detritus of the defeated Iraqi army’s administration, faithfully loaded in the hours before its destruction on 28 February 1991. At first, the sand will not yield these papers so I trowel with my fingers in the muck and dig and pull at these archives with my nails. In my hands, I hold a company inventory that lists the soldiers of this battalion by name, Muslim Arabs, Kurds, Christians, even Armenians. “Abdul Rida Rahim Ahmed, motorcycle dispatch rider, born 1954, primary school education, Arab Muslim, home: Basra. Mandil Ahmed Qadis Mustafa al-Koli, motorcycle dispatch rider, born 1952, Kurdish Muslim, home: Al-Ta’amim. Gunner Ali Hussein Hamza, artillery, born 1949, primary school education, Arab Muslim, home: Qadisiya . . .”
Are these the men lying now on the Mutla heights? Not only names, I find nightmares beneath the desert. I see the edge of a larger book, almost buried, and get down on my knees and seize the edge of it and tug from side to side, feeling my knees sinking into the sand until the volume suddenly slips out into my hands. I open the pages and specks of sand begin to heap up in the spine; these are the handwritten notes of an anonymous Iraqi Baath party functionary attached to an unknown military unit, recording the minutes of a meeting between Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi minister of industry on 28 February 1990, a year to the day before his army was destroyed in this very desert. I am squatting on my haunches, but when I see Saddam’s name, I sit back on the sand and nurse the book in my lap. It actually quotes Saddam, hubristic but already feeling the financial constraints that led him to invade Kuwait just over five months later. “We will give the people 20 dinars each for every bomb that is manufactured inside Iraq,” the tattered notebook records Saddam as saying. “Make our factories produce 5,000 bombs every day. Let our local industries compete with each other so that they can compete with the international arms industry. We have to save millions of dollars in military spending . . . so let’s spend a little bit more on our local manufacturing so that we can reach the point where we will be completely independent of the international market . . .”
Militarily independent. Saddam’s New World Order. From beneath the sands of the Kuwaiti desert these words came to me, and with what irony. For it was not Iraq’s toiling masses but the Western world that created Saddam’s military power, that furnished his republic of terror with credits and food and with the very means of his own destruction. It was Britain that was still sending nuclear substances to Baghdad, even as Saddam was planning his monumental output of domesticallyproduced weapons. It was America that provided funds and the Soviets who gave Saddam the tanks and armour that were now decaying on the Mutla Ridge. No wonder Saddam still lied to the United Nations about what was left of his armoury. The more powerful he could remain, the longer he could survive President Bush’s version of the New World Order, an international system in which aggression would in theory no longer pay dividends and where arms were no longer supposed to be supplied with such promiscuity to the nations of the Middle East. Perhaps— and this would be the darkest of all nightmares—Saddam might still succeed.
Who, after all, now remembered George Bush’s assurance to the people of Iraq that it was not them but their leader with whom he was in conflict? “We have no argument with the people of Iraq,” he insisted on 15 February 1991. “Our differences are with that brutal dictator in Baghdad.” Yet while the people of Iraq were now dying of sickness and starvation caused by the war, Saddam’s brutal regime had survived. Indeed, when the Iraqi people tried to destroy Saddam, the Americans and their allies permitted him to destroy his people and to emerge with his ultimate proclamation on this very week of the anniversary of his invasion, that Iraq had won a “great historical duel”—since victory should not be regarded “as a fight between one army and several others.” This was not a view that would commend itself to the ghosts of Mutla Ridge.
Nor to the Saudi and Kuwaiti ruling families who also survived the conflict intact. Yet they had cause for satisfaction. Forgotten now were the hopes of the educated Saudi middle classes that America’s military presence in the Gulf would liberalise their nation and make their royal family more amenable to collective leadership. In the aftermath of Saddam’s humiliation, Saudi Arabia had become more, not less, conservative, its mutawin morality police more powerful, its military establishment stronger despite all the talk of disarmament. For the Pentagon now said that it planned to sell the Saudis laser-guided components, 2,100 cluster bombs and 770 Sparrow air-to-air missiles at a cost of $365 million. The White House had already told Congress of its plans to sell an additional $473 million of jeeps and military support services to Saudi Arabia. Since the liberation of Kuwait, Washington had disclosed plans to send a total of $4.2 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Oman and Turkey—the latter receiving eighty F-16 fighter-bombers. So much for the disarming of the Middle East. The Saudis and their allies were now receiving the sort of largesse that Saddam obtained just over a year earlier.
We had come a long way since George Bush proposed to the post-Kuwait liberation world, on 29 May 1991, that there should be a Middle East arms control initiative that would “slow and then reverse the build-up of unnecessary and destabilising weapons” in the region. Less than three months earlier, he had vouchsafed the thought that “it would be tragic if the nations of the Middle East and Persian Gulf were now, in the wake of war, to embark on a new arms race.” Yet just over two years later, Kuwait was buying 236 U.S. M1A2 Abrams tanks at a cost of $2 billion. Saudi Arabia was buying $7.5 billion worth of British Tornadoes and spending a further $3.9 billion on French frigates after the previous year’s announcement of an awesome $9 billion purchase of American F-15XP fighter jets. To understand these figures, one had to remember the total Saudi financial support for the Palestinian–Israeli Gaza–Jericho accord: a mere $100 million. The United Arab Emirates, which in 1993 was buying $3.5 billion of French Leclerc tanks, had pledged just $25 million to the Palestinians. The U.S. sold well over $28 billion of arms in the two years following the 1991 Gulf War, of which the Saudis accounted for $17 billion. Sales of weapons to the Middle East in 1993 were running at $46 million a day.
Yet the treatment of the Iraqi dead lay heavily upon those whose duty it is to ensure that the “rules of war” are obeyed by the victors. Already, stories were coming out of Washington that 10,000 Iraqi soldiers had been buried alive near the Saudi frontier when the American army first stormed over the border into Kuwait. Faced with the alternative of fighting their way into the network of trenches and bunkers which the Iraqi forces had dug into the desert, or of bulldozing the sand over them—literally smothering them as they stood ready to fight—the United States understandably decided on the latter option. Was entombment alive any worse for the Iraqis than being annihilated by shellfire—especially when U.S. casualties would be higher in open fighting?
A semantic game was played by the Americans. Most of the Iraqi dead, claimed those inevitably anonymous “military sources”—in this case, to the Reuters news agency—would have died during the five weeks of air attacks that preceded the four-day ground conflict. They would have been buried by their comrades. The total number of Iraqi occupation troops, originally put at half a million, might have been exaggerated. Iraqi divisions, normally up to 12,000 strong, might have been 50 per cent depleted before they arrived in Kuwait. At least 62,000 Iraqis, hungry and fearful, surrendered to the Allies. All officers would say was that “large numbers” of Iraqis were killed in the war. Which meant—and was no doubt intended to mean—nothing.
For no U.S. officer saw fit to mark the vast graves into which the Americans and British had committed the Iraqi dead, or to pass on the information to the International Committee of the Red Cross as the Allies were bound to do under international law. In late May 1991, Dr. Jeannik Dami, a Swiss doctor for the ICRC in Kuwait, was called to examine the bodies of nine unburied Iraqi soldiers lying in the desert near the headquarters of the Kuwaiti army’s 6th Brigade not far from the Iraqi border. She found that the remains of the dead Iraqis were badly decomposed but that a further thirteen Iraqi corpses had been buried a few yards away beneath a wooden stake, upon which was written in English the single word “Unknown.”
It was highly misleading. All but one of these buried bodies were dressed in the remains of Iraqi army uniforms. And on eight of them, Dr. Dami found identification papers or “dog-tags” with their names. They were not “unknown” at all. Most of the corpses had been interred in U.S. military body bags and one of them—a twenty-seven-year-old Iraqi conscript named Jabr Elwan Qidar—had his legs tied together with rope. The only body not in uniform was that of a woman.
What was even more remarkable about Dr. Dami’s discovery was that this was the first time the Red Cross had been able to inspect the graves of dead Iraqi soldiers. Three months had passed since the end of “Operation Desert Storm”—and the American estimates of Iraqi dead had already reached 100,000—yet the Red Cross had obtained access to the graves of only twenty-one Iraqis. In total violation of Article 17 of the Geneva Conventions, Allied and Arab coalition forces failed to provide even the vaguest statistics of the Iraqi death toll. The American military authorities gave neither the names of their tens of thousands of dead enemies nor the location of mass graves in which they were buried to the International Red Cross. What this true figure was—and why the Allies failed to disclose it— was to remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the 1991 Gulf War.
Saddam Hussein, of course, was in no position to complain about breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Allied prisoners-of-war were tortured by the Iraqis; and Saddam’s Baathist regime, as everyone knew, routinely tortured and executed its political opponents. Saddam’s use of poison gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers and then Kurdish civilians and his butchering of Shiite rebels during the postwar rising in March 1991 marked one of the vilest human rights records in the world.
Yet the Geneva Conventions state that “parties to [a] conflict shall ensure that burial or cremation of the dead, carried out individually as far as circumstances permit, is preceded by a careful examination . . . of the bodies, with a view to confirming death, establishing identity and enabling a report to be made . . . They shall further ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected . . . properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found.” Under the convention, armies are required to organise a graves registration service that will exchange “lists showing the exact location and markings of the graves together with particulars of the dead interred therein.”
The 1991 Gulf War Allies ignored every one of these basic rules. After the liberation of Kuwait, General Schwarzkopf brusquely dismissed questions about Iraqi fatalities with the rejoinder that he was “not in the business of body counts.” Yet under the Geneva Conventions, generals—even American generals—had to ensure that bodies were indeed counted. True, Iraqi troops had committed what might well classify as war crimes during their occupation of Kuwait, but even Hitler’s SS soldiers who were killed fighting the Americans around Bastogne in 1944 were identified and buried in marked graves.
As usual, we had to turn to humanitarian workers—speaking anonymously lest they lose what little moral power they had with the victorious armies—to find out what the Red Cross felt. “They are bloody angry and I don’t blame them,” a British doctor told me. “What’s really puzzling is that the Americans know where a lot of mass graves are and must have files on how many Iraqis they buried in each grave. They are hiding the figures. The Red Cross knows this, but they can’t get the allied powers to come up with a single figure. Why not? Well, either the Americans killed far fewer than they claim—maybe only ten or twenty thousand; in which case people are going to ask if their victory was as big as they claimed. Low casualty figures would explain why Saddam had enough soldiers left to crush two big uprisings in Iraq the moment the allied advance stopped. Or maybe the Americans killed too many, say more than two hundred thousand—and they’re worried the Arabs would be disgusted at, say, the slaughter of a quarter of a million fellow Arabs.”
Christophe Girod, the senior ICRC delegate in Kuwait, confirmed to me on 4 August 1991 that the Red Cross had twice asked the U.S. embassy for details of the Iraqi dead without receiving any information. The Red Cross was told to seek details directly from the Pentagon. But the Pentagon proved equally unhelpful. “We are still waiting for a reply from the allies about the location of mass graves, the numbers of dead and, hopefully, names and details,” Girod said. “It is their obligation to give us this information under Article 17 of the Geneva Conventions and we hope they will provide it.” Some hope. The Americans never supplied any of these locations, statistics or names.153 It was to become a habit. In 2003, the United States and Britain showed equally little interest in recording details of enemy dead—or, for that matter, the civilians killed in their invasion—although they were rigorous, as they were in the 1991 Gulf War, in listing the American, British and other Western, or “coalition,” soldiers killed in action.
“Our” dead—the heroes, the Westerners who died for “freedom,” “democracy” or whatever other benefit we planned to impose on the losers—were sacrosanct. In 1991, the Americans lost 125 soldiers, their allies around 70. Their names would live for evermore, just like those on the Lutyens memorials along the old Western Front in France in Bill Fisk’s war. There would be religious services to honour them, interviews with wives and children, parents and fiancées. There would be— in both wars—controversy about the accidental killing of British troops by trigger-happy Americans. But we would know who they were. Our dead would have identities, families, public mourning. They were individuals, even in death. The Iraqi dead were an amorphous mass, as nondescript as the graves into which they were shovelled. They were the occupiers of Kuwait—or, later, the “remnants” or “terrorists” who insisted on fighting the invaders of their country in 2003—and they did not deserve a memorial. In this, the Americans were ably assisted by Saddam’s regime. For the Baath party in Baghdad had no desire to reveal to the world the extent of the country’s military defeat and would give no indication of the scale of their own casualties. As the Americans had pointed out, many hundreds of Iraqi soldiers died under allied air bombardment before the land offensive. Saddam was happy for their names and numbers to remain unknown, just as he was indifferent to the rest of his “martyrs” in the Kuwait war. The Americans and the Iraqis thus shared a happy coincidence of intention. Both sides wanted to keep the Iraqi dead a secret.
Towards the end of the first week of August 1991, Christophe Girod drove me up to the Mutla Ridge so that I could identify for him the mass grave I had come across the previous February. The artificial rose was there and Girod immediately noted the ramparts of sand thrown up by the bulldozer when it covered over the bodies. Dozens of corpses were subsequently exhumed there and returned to Iraq. But it was the only grave I could still find. At other locations I had jotted into my notebook back in February, the wind had changed the landscape. Flat terrain beside the highway to Iraq had been turned into sand dunes, the hump of individual graves in the soil had been smoothed into the desert floor by the spring gales.
But American and British units had participated in thousands of hasty burials in this desert in February 1991. I saw at least seven of them myself, young soldiers staggering under the weight of soggy, corpse-filled blankets, digging into the sand and dumping their burden in the holes they had made. All over the land north of Kuwait City, this ritual took place. Kuwaiti Red Crescent workers, some of whom helped to clear the dead from the Mutla Ridge and the other largely unexplored “highway of death” to the east of it, were involved in the same process. The Kuwaitis later told Western aid workers that dozens of victims of these allied air attacks were innocent Kuwaiti civilians being taken to Iraq as hostages by the retreating Iraqi army.
As for the Red Cross, they repatriated the twenty-one dead Iraqi soldiers to Baghdad. Dr. Dami found that the corpses had not been buried—as they should have been according to their religious rites—facing Mecca. They had been interred two at a time with identity papers between the body bags. In several of their uniforms, she found personal papers and diaries which, under the Geneva Conventions, should have been returned to their next-of-kin. On one page of a diary belonging to Burhan Ahmed Faraj was the name Burhan Hamad Faraj—the nephew of the buried soldier—through whom the Iraqis were able to inform the dead man’s closest relatives. Other names found on the bodies and handed to the Iraqis by the Red Cross included Mussair Jabr Hamdi, Musalam Ismail Ibrahim, Ahmed Fahd Malalla and Hassan Daoud Salman. One of the bodies had a bottle of perfume in a pocket, probably looted in Kuwait. Why Jabr Elwan Qidar’s legs were tied together was never explained.
Had the Red Cross not exhumed their remains, these soldiers would have been, as British world war headstones used to record, “known unto God.” Yet they did not even have known graves. As for the dead woman, her body was taken to Kuwait City, where the authorities said they could identify her from her fingerprints. She was a former resident of Kuwait. When I asked a Kuwaiti aid official for her identity, his voice filled with contempt. “They said she was an Iraqi whore,” he replied.
The only serious attempt to estimate overall casualties was made by Beth Osborne Daponte, the U.S. Census Bureau demographer assigned to gather statistics on the number of Iraqis killed during the war. Her figures suggested that 86,000 men, 40,000 women and 32,000 children died at the hands of American-led coalition forces, during the American-inspired insurgencies that followed and from immediate postwar deprivation. Daponte was fired. The bureau then rescinded her dismissal but rewrote her report, lowering the death toll and deleting the fatalities of women and children. A subsequent Pentagon official history omitted a chapter on casualties and made no mention of Iraqi deaths.
Needless to say, the massive bloodletting that these military operations involved was never allowed to spoil the “big picture,” the war aims that Western leaders and editorial writers could point to as proof that this had been a “good” war with God on their side—though which God was invoked was a moot point. Kuwait’s royal family was restored to power, just as President Bush had promised it would be. And no one who entered the Kuwaiti capital on the day of its liberation— as I and my colleagues did—could doubt that its freedom was devoutly to be wished. Had Saddam succeeded in holding on to his “nineteenth province,” it would have been a disaster for the region and for the international system of nation-states.
Yet in Kuwait, as in Saudi Arabia—and in Iraq, for that matter—the aftermath of the ground fighting was not participation in a New World Order but a restoration of the status quo. The Arab rulers were back within their respective, British-drawn borders. Those Kuwaitis who refused to leave during the occupation and who had endured horrifying personal risk for their country found that those who had fled Kuwait, including the royal family, were brought back to rule them. The emir and his entourage, who suffered exile in the most luxurious hotel in Taif, had returned to tell the Kuwaitis who stayed—and who sometimes resisted with great courage—that they could not have democracy just yet.
Most scandalous of all in Kuwaiti domestic politics was to be the expulsion of 360,000 Palestinians over the next two years, an act of “ethnic cleansing” unparalleled in the Middle East since the massacres that accompanied the Palestinian flight from Israeli forces in 1948. The UN Security Council did not even bother to discuss this outrage, nor to question the Kuwaitis about their miserable excuse for such treatment of their fellow Arabs: that some Palestinians had collaborated with Iraq during the occupation. Up the long road towards Basra each day, I would watch the overloaded trucks and pick-ups carrying the Palestinians into yet another exile—through Iraq to Jordan—without even the luxury of selling the homes and property which they had owned for decades in Kuwait. “They will throw me out before you return,” Sulieman Khalidi, a Palestinian friend in Kuwait, told me in 1992. “Give me a call if you like, but I don’t think I’ll be here to answer the phone.” In January 1993, I called Khalidi as I had promised. And as he had promised, he was not there. “Yes, he was living in this house but he left for Jordan,” a woman answered irritably. “No, he is not coming back. Yes, I am Kuwaiti.”
Less epic in scale but almost equally scandalous was the plight of the Kuwaiti Bedouin troops who refused to run away on 2 August 1990, who chose to fight the Iraqi invaders and who were taken prisoners-of-war by Saddam’s army. These thousands of young men did not hold Kuwaiti citizenship, yet they fought for the emirate. But now, while most of the Kuwaiti officers who fled were reinstalled in their posts, Kuwait refused to allow these loyal Bedouin soldiers to return from their Iraqi imprisonment. Hundreds more were held in an internment camp at Abdali on the Kuwaiti–Iraqi border, having been freed from their Iraqi jails during the Shiite uprising but rejected by the nation for which they fought, Kuwaiti patriots now held prisoner by the Kuwaiti soldiers who took to their heels in their country’s hour of need.
One broiling morning, I drove up to Abdali. It was a disgrace. It wasn’t the latrines, whose stench pervaded the place. Nor the sandstorms that howled across its wastes, turning its occupants into white and grey shadows. Nor even the shacks of cloth and corrugated iron and old tin sheets whose constant demented rattle turned a conversation into a shouting match. It was the fact that the inhabitants of this awful place—all 1,173 of them—appeared to be decent and honest Kuwaitis who had been left to rot here because they were never given citizenship and happened to be on the wrong side of the Gulf War front line when President Bush announced his ceasefire the previous February.
Many of them were Kuwaiti policemen with years of service to the emir, who were arrested during the occupation and taken hostage to Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Others were the wives and children of Kuwaiti policemen who were searching for missing relatives in Iraq when the Americans arrived at the border town of Abdali five months earlier and who were then refused permission to return to their homes in Kuwait—even though their families were waiting for them there. A few were Kuwaitis without citizenship who made the mistake of trying to buy food with Iraqi currency after the liberation—and who were shipped up to this desolate place by the emir’s security police.
The prisoners’ fate was to belong to the bidoon—the “withouts”—the quarter of a million Kuwaitis whose failure to register as citizens, or whose parents’ failure to register, after the emirate’s independence in 1920 left them loyal but stateless citizens of a country that would not give them a passport. Now that Kuwait was liberated and now that the Sabah family wanted to reduce the number of non-Kuwaiti citizens, the bidoon—along with Kuwaiti-born Palestinians, and large numbers of other Arabs who made their homes in the emirate decades ago—were being accused of collaboration with the Iraqi occupiers.
And so, choking in the gales of sand in the south-eastern corner of Abdali camp, I found—behind a protective sheet of rusting iron—the bearded figure of Saba Abu Nasr al-Kaldi, clerk at the interior ministry and well-known Kuwaiti artist until 2 August 1990. “I never tried to go to my office when the Iraqis came, because I knew they were arresting government officials,” he told me. “But I did draw posters for the Kuwaiti resistance and someone informed on me and the Iraqis took me from my home. I was taken to the Salahiyeh police station where I was beaten but I refused to tell them anything. So they let me go home. But a month later, they took me again and put me on a convoy of buses with four hundred other bidoon to a military barracks at Amara, inside Iraq. We were held prisoner there for three months. When the Americans began to bomb, we were moved to Diwaniya. We had little food. We were filthy. I wondered if I would see my home again.”
Al-Kaldi and his fellow “withouts” were freed during the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq, awoken to their imminent freedom when shoals of bullets smashed through the windows of their cells. From his prison, al-Kaldi said, he walked with forty other Kuwaitis for ten days over desert and scrubland, eating tomatoes and dates, sleeping at night in wrecked Iraqi mosques, empty dugouts or in the shadow of abandoned Iraqi tanks. His narrative—of rotting Iraqi corpses along the roadsides and the constant explosion of underground munitions as he made his way south—was as frightening as it was convincing. “One night, we slept on a hill called Tell el-Lahm and there were terrible explosions,” he said. “The ground moved beneath us all the time and shells went over us. God saved us. Can you know how we felt to reach Kuwait, to know that we would see our families again? But the Kuwaiti government were here and they stopped us. They said ‘You are bidoon.’ So we stayed here, and stayed and stayed.”
The Kuwaiti authorities claimed that many bidoon joined the Iraqi “Popular Army” after the occupation. And when the Kuwaiti government announced in July 1991 that it would hang anyone who had joined Iraq’s “voluntary” units, more than 3,000 “withouts”—including women and children—abandoned the Abdali camp and walked back to Iraq. More than 1,000, however, stayed put, arguing that they had never helped the Iraqis, and that those who signed up with the occupiers did so through coercion and never turned up for work. “It was a lie by the Iraqis to call these people a ‘volunteer’ army,” one of the bidoon at Abdali said. “They were no more members of the Iraqi army than the foreign hostages in Iraq were ‘guests.’”
The bidoon of Abdali all carried their official Kuwaiti papers—the policemen showed me laminated government cards with photographs in which they were dressed in smart blue police uniforms—and the Red Cross workers who ran the camp, mostly from America and Europe, did not doubt their authenticity. It was of little use. “All of us want to return to our homes where we were born, where we lived and worked before this terrible war,” al-Kaldi said. “What is our crime? What is the crime of the children here? Nobody cares about us.” In his captivity, al-Kaldi drew a series of sad and beautiful sketches of life during the war. The most moving showed a bidoon family burying their policeman son, murdered by the Iraqis during the occupation. A boy near the grave is waving goodbye towards the distant city of Kuwait, identifiable by its water towers. “You see what is happening?” al-Kaldi asked me. “The bidoon can die here, but they will not be allowed to live here.”
But if the geographical restoration of Kuwait to its rulers was a measure of the war’s worth, its oil fires cast more than a physical shadow over the land. The destruction of the wells remained Saddam’s greatest crime in the emirate, their continued burning proof that the war had not yet ended. I had to fly over them to realise the enormity of what had happened. From the air, it was possible to see lakes of oil, hundreds of square kilometres of sludge, the white of the sands turned to blackness. In a hundred years, the evidence will still be there to see. The desert has changed colour for generations to come. Arriving in Kuwait on one of MEA’s elderly Boeing 707 airliners, I could physically feel the extent of the damage. Sitting on the plane’s flight deck, I watched the pilot twisting his aircraft around the oil clouds as if he were performing at an air display. But when we actually hit one of the black columns of smoke on final approach, the old airliner bucked in the sky, juddering and shaking as it smashed into the haze of sulphur.
Standing next to the fires, the very ground vibrated beneath my feet, their roar awesome and elemental. The Kuwaitis were more than willing to take reporters to these scenes of Saddam’s environmental and economic crimes. We would drive in our own cars out of Kuwait City that dazzling, cooking August to be confronted by fires so bright they hurt our eyes, the heat so powerful that every few seconds we would instinctively turn round to cool the left or right side of our faces and arms. “The Iraqi who did this arrived about three months after the invasion,” Mahmoud Somali told us as we stood beside one of these thundering, squirting torches of oil, the smoke above us so thick that I could not have seen my own notebook but for the golden fires. “He was a very ordinary sort of guy, I’ve even forgotten his name. He was very friendly to us, not hostile at all. He chatted a lot, had coffee with us in the Ahmadi canteen each day. He said he was a good Muslim and every Friday he went to the mosque. But then he put the mines down the wells and he told us this was his duty, that he had to do his duty.”
Was this the banality of evil, this man with the forgettable name—an official from the Iraqi oil company, most of the Kuwaitis at Ahmadi now believed—who dutifully, efficiently, committed what must qualify as a war crime as well as an environmental catastrophe? For let us not deny his professionalism. Of Kuwait’s 940 or so producing oil wells, he set off mines in 732, turning 640 of them into basins of fire. Stand beside the burning lagoons of the Burgan oil field even now— more than five months after the coffee-drinking Iraqi with his religious observances had left—and you could only wonder at the implications of his act.
The clichés were long ago exhausted: the fires of hell, darkness at high noon. All had an element of truth about them. Across the black lakes, reflecting the fine, brown-gold light of the fires, the curtains of smoke that smothered the sun—a button of pale yellow light immediately above us—were almost as frightening as the thunder of the burning wells. At Burgan, I scribbled these observations into my notebook until I realised that the pages were becoming spotty and then soaked in a slippery brown substance that was settling on our clothes, our shoes, faces and hair. We were breathing crude oil. We coughed for hours afterwards. It was then that it dawned on me: Saddam Hussein did use chemical warfare.
What, after all, were a few mustard gas shells compared to the 2 million tons of carbon dioxide and 5,000 tons of soot spurting into the sky over Kuwait every day, drifting as gently as any sarin or tabun across the Gulf? Everyone was a witness. Mr. Somali’s daughter was asthmatic, and he had to move accommodation to protect her lungs every time the wind changed. Down at the al-Ahmadi headquarters, an Iranian drilling team had arrived to help the Kuwaitis put out their fires, serious, inevitably bearded, genuinely shocked men who had never seen anything on this scale, not even in the eight years of Iraqi destruction in their own country.
“Of course it is an environmental disaster, and not just here,” Homayoun Motier, the drilling engineer from the National Iranian Oil Company, said to me. “I come from Ahwaz and this smoke has covered us there—there is pollution from these fires all across southern Iran. Do you realise that there is soot all over our Zagros mountains a thousand kilometres away? I have seen it there. It lies in layers beneath the snow, frozen in layer after layer.” Later, as the Iraqi invasion receded, the Americans and the British would paint Iran in the same dangerous colours as Iraq—partly to persuade the Arabs to buy more weapons—and Iran would be touted as the next aggressor, the next threat to the Arab Gulf states, just as it had been in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution. And the work of Homayoun Motier and his men would be forgotten.
Watching the fountains of burning oil and the fires spreading across the lagoons, you could not avoid the conviction that the Gulf War had not ended. And that Saddam Hussein did not intend it to end when he was driven from Kuwait. The statistics changed each day, but by 5 August three American teams and a Canadian unit of firefighters had capped and controlled 274 of the 640 burning wells, most of them in the biggest fields of Burgan (total wells: 426), Maqwa (total wells: 148) and Ahmadi (total wells: 89). They were spraying tons of sea water onto the fires—using the original oil pipelines to pump the salt water back into the fields—to cool the superheated coking that had built up around the flames. The 115,000 barrels of oil that the Kuwaitis were now able to export each day almost all came from the Maqwa field. Yet more than 60 million barrels of oil and gas a day—from an original loss of more than 110 million each day—were still being burned away, transformed into the chemicals that were now poisoning the land and seas as far east as the Himalayas.
Mahmoud Somali had been twenty-two years in the Kuwait Oil Company’s drilling department and had no illusions about what happened. “When the Iraqis came here in the first week of the occupation, soldiers and a lot of Iraqi civilian technicians arrived,” he said. “The soldiers did not allow us to go into the fields. The technicians, they wanted to start up the oil exportation again. They told us we must increase production. They wanted to export Kuwaiti oil. This was before the sanctions. Then one day, after the UN decided on sanctions, we had an accidental gas cut-out and the soldiers took me out to the field to repair it. When I got there, I saw at once a series of white wires running to the wells. They were very professional. The wires went down below the master valves so that if they wanted to blow them up, we couldn’t turn them off. And that’s what happened. Three months later, the Iraqi came who was in charge of the mines and he was the one who put the explosives down the wells . . . from the start, the Iraqis were thinking of destroying our oil.” Somali had few doubts that innocents were going to die from all this—of chemical poisoning, of cancer—not only in Kuwait but in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. “Probably yes, they will die,” he said amid the darkness of Burgan. “But who is going to take responsibility? Saddam?”
The Kuwaitis claimed they were now exporting 115,000 barrels a day, a total that rose to 200,000 if you included the oil from the Neutral Zone. If the fires in the al-Maqwa and al-Ahmadi fields could be extinguished by the end of August, the emirate could be producing half a million barrels by the New Year of 1992, a victory of sorts, but nothing like Kuwait’s pre-invasion OPEC quota of 1.5 million barrels a day—and much less than its actual oil overproduction of 2 million barrels that provoked Saddam to invade. To defend this reconstituted source of wealth, the United States was now forced to maintain a combat brigade in Kuwait, which is why, at the Mutla Ridge, the same American M1A1 tanks I saw five months earlier were still patrolling the highway to Iraq.
However strong the U.S. Air Force might remain in the Gulf, there was not much else on land to defend Kuwait. When the Saudis decided they no longer wanted Egyptian and Syrian troops on their soil, the whole projected edifice of an Arab Gulf security force collapsed. And the Kuwaitis could no more mount a defence of their emirate now than they could a year earlier. On this mournful anniversary, however, we were encouraged to look elsewhere, to the peace conference in Madrid that would end the Middle East conflict for ever. Here at last, it was suggested, we would see the real fruits of war, provided we could forget what war actually meant, if we could ignore the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead bulldozed into their mass graves by the allies, the thousands of Shiites who were put before Saddam’s mass execution squads, the epic tragedy of the Kurds. If we could accept that the New World Order was merely the Old World Order put on good behaviour, then maybe we could believe in the impossible.
In one sense, a peace conference—or, more to the point and far more difficult, a peace settlement—would be a restoration of the integrity of the frontiers drawn up after the 1914–18 war, with the creation of the original 1948 Israel grafted onto it. It would be about a return to accepted borders. It was about the Old World Order. For that is what lay at the roots of Western policies in the Middle East. We should have realised this when the Americans allowed Saddam’s domestic opponents to be massacred. Faced with the alternative of allowing Iraq to disintegrate, or of permitting the people of Iraq to remake their own map of their part of the Middle East, the West opted for Saddam on good—or at least internationally harmless—behaviour.
This is what the 1991 Gulf War should have taught us: that it was the West that was going to decide the future of the region, in however benign or disastrous a fashion, just as the Western superpowers had done for more than seventy years. Those regional leaders who stepped out of line—including Saddam—would pay the price, even if it was individually less terrible than the fate of those in the mass graves on Mutla Ridge.
Against this frightening horizon, Kuwait’s own continuing pain—its demand for the return of 850 “missing” citizens who remained captive in Iraq—might have seemed diminutive, even irrelevant. But missing they were, and the “sighting” of these men and women—in many cases, seized by the Iraqis in the last hours of their occupation—was to be a bruising experience for thousands of Kuwaitis in the years to come. You only had to visit the gymnasium-size hall in which the Kuwaiti “National Committee for Missing Persons and POW Affairs” had installed itself in the suburb of Sabaha Salman to understand; it was filled with silence and photographs. Some were studio portraits of young men in white or brown robes, others of grinning students in black gowns nursing American college degrees. Around the walls there were pictures of officers in police uniforms, soldiers and doctors, children and women in scarves, re-photographed snapshots and cutaways of Kuwaitis at parties and weddings and anniversaries, smiling with all the wealthy, carefree confidence of pre-invasion Kuwait. No one wished to divide these pictures into the quick and the dead—although most were, already, in mass graves.
As the years went by, these 850 souls became part of Kuwait’s raison d’être, its proof of victimhood, the vital statistic that would help to distract the world’s attention from the new life of misery that Iraqis were now entering north of the border. Their plight was emblazoned like an Olympics advertisement on the fuselage of Kuwait’s restored national airline. “Return our 850 POWs” was painted next to every aircraft passenger door. What were 850 missing Kuwaitis compared to 100,000 Iraqi dead? The Kuwaitis would politely reply that the Iraqis were the invaders while the 850 were innocent victims of that aggression.
But by the mid-1990s, the horrors of Bosnia, the slaughter and mass rape of Muslims in the old Yugoslavia had also long surpassed the sufferings of Kuwait under Iraqi occupation. And Kuwait’s own act of “ethnic cleansing”—the expulsion of the 360,000 Palestinians from their homes after the liberation—had squandered much of the international sympathy that might have been forthcoming for the families of those Kuwaitis who were trucked off to prison in Basra and Baghdad, Nasiriyah and Samawa. In his autobiography, General Schwarzkopf admits that the return of Kuwaiti civilian prisoners from Iraq was the one ceasefire condition that Saddam Hussein’s generals refused to discuss—perhaps because they knew that most of them were already dead.
In retrospect, General Schwarzkopf’s account of these hundreds of civilians is a story of painfully weak diplomacy on the part of the victorious allies. “We settled for his [an Iraqi general’s] assurance that anyone who had come to Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait would be free to approach the Red Cross and leave if he wanted,” Schwarzkopf wrote in his account of the February 1991 ceasefire negotiations. In fact, the ICRC did not receive a single communication from Kuwaitis, either in Baghdad or in their sub-office in Basra. Greatest concern was expressed for the 650 or so civilians—30 of them women—who were known to have been arrested in Kuwait during the occupation and who were later seen in prisons inside Iraq. Many of the Kuwaitis taken hostage in the last days of Iraqi rule saw these civilians in their Iraqi jails shortly before they themselves were freed, returning to Kuwait with first-hand evidence that the missing men and women were alive. But since February 1991, there had been no direct word from them, no handwritten messages, no access to their prisons for the Red Cross and only the occasional, months-old evidence that Kuwaitis remained alive in Iraq’s prisons.
Two Egyptians, for instance, supposedly saw “Samira”—for the sake of her security, her family name was not given—on 1 August 1991, working alongside other female POWs in Baghdad. She had asked them to tell her mother she was still alive, that she was a cleaner in the Saadi hospital, living in the al-Qadimiya prison, ruled over by Uday Hussein, son of the president. That was all she told the two Egyptians, a message they faithfully delivered to the authorities in Kuwait. The twenty-nine-year-old—the snapshot in her file showed an attractive woman with bright brown hair and sparkling eyes—had been seen only once before, on 15 March 1991, when her message had been the same. Then there had been silence.
Kuwaitis drew strength from the 2,000 Iranian POWs whom Iran had thought dead but who emerged alive from Saddam’s prisons after the end of the Iran–Iraq War in 1988. Saddam liked hostages, they reasoned. He knew how to use them. He had held thousands of Westerners captive after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But Kuwaiti prisoners held no interest for him. None of the 850 men and women—not even Samira—were ever seen alive again. Only after the Anglo-American invasion in 2003 did Kuwaitis know why. Amid the thousands of corpses dug up from the execution pits in the desert west of Hilla were dozens of men still carrying their Kuwaiti citizenship papers. So now Kuwait would have yet more names to add to their list of “martyrs” from the war, a small figure perhaps, but further proof that Arabs die at the hands of Arabs.
North of the Kuwaiti border, however, there now lay a barren land of misery, fear and defeat, its power stations bombed out, its water purification systems shattered by allied explosives, its sewers overflowing into streets and houses. Western journalists taken on a UN helicopter across southern Iraq saw thousands of tank revetments and trenches, all now covered with grass and sand; the Iraqi army had spent its energies in destroying the uprising and preserving the regime—threatening its neighbours was no longer an option. Iraq was prostrate and its people, under the burden of UN sanctions that were first intended to persuade Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without a fight and then to destroy his regime—neither of which was accomplished—were about to embark on a slow mass death, made more terrible and more immoral because those sanctions were imposed by nations that regarded themselves as the most civilised on earth.
Across southern Iraq, the Shiites lived in mortal peril of their lives, their sons and husbands and brothers already filling the execution grounds around Hilla and Nasiriyah. The great golden-domed mosque of the Imam Ali in Najaf was in partial ruins, its centuries-old blue marble tiles lying in heaps around the shrine, souvenirs for passing journalists and for Saddam’s Republican Guards who had blasted their way into the sacred buildings of Shiite Islam to kill the Iraqi insurgents seeking sanctuary there. Twelve years later, Shiite insurgents—in some cases the very men who had fought Saddam’s killers in 1991—were hiding in the very same shrine, this time from American army tank fire. In the north, the Kurds—now under American and British protection—lived amid the hundreds of villages that had been gassed and then systematically destroyed on Saddam’s orders. We had betrayed the Shiite rebellion. We had betrayed the Kurdish rebellion. Later—much later—when we came to destroy Saddam himself, we would expect them to be grateful to us. But they would remember.
The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost thirteen years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures. Our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 closed the page—or so we hoped—on our treatment of the Iraqi people before that date, removed the stigma attached to the imprisonment of an entire nation and their steady debilitation and death under the UN sanctions regime. When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were “ghosted” out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was “freedom.”
And indeed, when sanctions were first imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, there was little outcry; if they could induce Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without the need for war, then few would criticise them. Besides, before the liberation of Kuwait, Iraq’s power stations were still operating at full capacity and its economy, while crippled by the eight years of war with Iran, was capable of providing Iraqis with one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world. Rationing was introduced in Iraq in September 1990, but most Westerners—and most Arabs—assumed that once Saddam had withdrawn from Kuwait, hopefully before any hostilities took place, these sanctions would be lifted. As so often in the Middle East, a decision that initially appeared benign was to be quickly transformed into a weapon far more deadly than missiles or shells.
UN Security Council Resolution 661 was passed on 6 August 1990, scarcely four days after Saddam’s army had crossed the Kuwaiti border, calling upon all states to prevent the import of “all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait” and to prohibit the supply of all goods except “supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs.” In retrospect, it is clear that the United States never had any faith that these sanctions— mild by comparison with the postwar restrictions—would persuade Saddam to order his forces out of Kuwait. Just as America and Britain would claim, twelve years later, that the UN arms inspectors could not be given the time to finish their work before the 2003 invasion, so the Americans gave up on the sanctions regime by the time their troops were in place for the liberation of Kuwait. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy concluded before the end of 1990 that “sanctions cannot be counted on to produce a sure result.” By 15 January 1991, British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd was announcing that Britain was resigned to fight for Kuwait because UN sanctions had had no “decisive effect” on Saddam’s capacity to wage war.
Only after the war did the United States make it clear that there would be no lifting of sanctions until Saddam Hussein was gone. Sanctions would remain, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, “until there was a change of government in Iraq.” But the effect of sanctions was now catastrophic. In 1991 the Allies had crippled power stations and deliberately bombed water and sewage facilities—a decision that was bound to cause a humanitarian catastrophe among the civilians of Iraq. A Harvard team of lawyers and public health specialists, after visiting forty-six Iraqi hospitals and twenty-eight water and sewage facilities, stated in 1991 that deaths among children under five in Iraq had nearly quintupled, that almost a million were undernourished and 100,000 were starving to death. Their research found that 46,700 children under five had died from the combined effects of war and trade sanctions in the first seven months of 1991.
As more and more Iraqis started to die—not only ravaged by the foul water they were forced to drink from bomb-damaged water-cleansing plants but increasingly prevented from acquiring the medicines they might need to recover—a UN commission redrew the country’s southern border to deprive it of part of the Rumeila oilfield and the naval base at Um Qasr, Iraq’s only access to the waters of the Gulf. The confiscated territory was given to Kuwait. Western leaders insisted that Saddam Hussein could use Iraq’s own resources to pay for humanitarian supplies, wilfully ignoring the fact that Iraqi financial assets had been blocked and oil sales prohibited. By the end of 1994, Iraqi inflation was running at 24,000 per cent a year and much of the population was destitute. On the streets of Baghdad, even the middle classes were selling their libraries for money to buy food. Volumes of Islamic theology, English editions of Shakespeare, medical treatises and academic theses on Arab architecture ended up on the pavements of Mutanabi Street in Baghdad: paper for bread.
By 1996, half a million Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. Madeleine Albright, who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave an infamous reply on 12 May that year when asked about sanctions on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes. Anchor Leslie Stahl put it to Albright: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Albright’s reply: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” In March 1997, Albright—now U.S. secretary of state—emphasised the impossibility of ending sanctions. “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions . . . And the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein’s intentions will never be peaceful.”
In October 1996, Philippe Heffinck, the representative in Iraq for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), estimated that “around 4,500 children under the age of five are dying here every month from hunger and disease.” A year later, a joint study between the UN and the World Food Programme concluded that sanctions “significantly constrained Iraq’s ability to earn foreign currency needed to import sufficient quantities of food to meet needs.” On 26 November 1997, UNICEF was reporting that “32 per cent of children under the age of five, some 960,000 children, [are] chronically malnourished—a rise of 72 per cent since 1991. Almost one quarter . . . are underweight—twice as high as the levels found in neighbouring Jordan or Turkey.”
And all this while, the reasons for sanctions—or the conditions upon which they might be lifted—changed and extended. Saddam must allow the United Nations Special Commission on Monitoring (UNSCOM) arms inspectors to do their work freely, must end human rights abuses, free Kuwaiti POWs, end the torture of his own people, recognise Kuwaiti sovereignty, pay wartime reparations and withdraw missile batteries from the (non-UN) “no-fly” zones. Individually, there was nothing immoral about any of these demands. Collectively, they were intended to ensure that the sanctions regime continued indefinitely. By January 1998, the Pope was talking of the “pitiless embargo” visited upon Iraqis, adding that “the weak and innocent cannot pay for mistakes for which they are not responsible.” U.S. officials began to warn that sanctions would stay “for ever” unless Saddam complied with American demands.
American spokesmen and spokeswomen repeatedly pointed out that Saddam Hussein was escaping the effect of sanctions. Albright appeared before the United Nations with satellite photographs of vast building complexes in Iraq, pictures, she said, of further palace-building by Saddam Hussein. She was correct in what she said, but wrong in her conclusions. For if Saddam had managed to avoid the effects of the UN sanctions on his regime, then those sanctions had clearly failed in their objective. In 1998, British foreign secretary Robin Cook became obsessed with the Iraqi regime’s purchase of liposuction equipment which, if true, was merely further proof of the failure of sanctions. He repeatedly stated that Iraq could sell $10 billion of oil a year to pay for food, medicine and other humanitarian goods—but since more than 30 per cent of these oil revenues were diverted to the UN compensation fund and UN expenses in Iraq, his statement was wrong.
And Saddam Hussein yet again found a common cause with the Americans. Just as the latter needed to prove that Saddam had permitted the further suffering of his people while building temples to his greatness, so Saddam needed to show the world—especially the Arabs—how cruel were the Americans and their allies in decimating the innocent people of Iraq. It was a calculation that found a constant response in one of his own Arab enemies, Osama bin Laden, who regularly expressed his sympathy—he did so in an interview with me—for the Iraqis suffering under the U.S.-inspired sanctions.
Those of us who visited the grey and dying world of Iraq during these ghastly years were sometimes almost as angered by the Iraqi government’s manipulation as we were by the suffering we witnessed. Each morning, Ministry of Information “minders” would encourage foreign journalists to witness the “spontaneous” demonstrations by Iraqi civilians against the sanctions. Men and women would parade through the streets carrying coffins, allegedly containing the bodies of children who had just died of disease and malnutrition. Only when we asked to see inside the wooden boxes were we told that the protest was symbolic, that the coffins only represented the dead. Yet the dead were real enough. The rivers of sewage that now moved inexorably through even the most residential of Baghdad suburbs were evidence of the breakdown of the most basic social services. From the countryside came credible reports that Iraqis were eating weeds to stay alive.
So why did the Americans and the British and their other friends at the United Nations impose this hateful sanctions regime on Iraq? Many of the Western humanitarian workers and UN officials in Baghdad had come to their own conclusions. Margaret Hassan, a British woman married to an Iraqi, a brave, tough, honourable lady who ran CARE’s office in the Iraqi capital, was outraged by the tragedy with which she was striving to cope. “They want us to rebel against Saddam,” she said. “They think that we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything—even give our own lives—to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”
Margaret Hassan was right. “Big picture,” an air force planner told the WashingtonPost in 1991. “We wanted to let people know, ‘Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that and we’ll fix your electricity.’” Just before the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document described the probable results of the destruction of power stations and continued economic sanctions. “With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population.” In other words, the United States and Britain and other members of the Security Council were well aware that the principal result of the bombing campaign—and of sanctions—would be the physical degradation and sickening and deaths of Iraqi civilians. Biological warfare might prove to be a better description. The ultimate nature of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear. Bomb now: die later.
Not long before Christmas 1997, Dennis Halliday, the bearded and balding Irishman who was heading the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq, received personal and deeply distressing evidence of what this meant. He had a paid a visit to four small Iraqi children suffering from leukaemia in the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre. “The doctors told me they couldn’t get the drugs to treat them and I got involved with them,” Halliday told me in his cramped Baghdad office, the walls hung with cheap Arab rugs. “With a World Health Organisation colleague, I managed to get the drugs they required—some from Jordan, one from northern Iraq, which means it was probably smuggled in from Turkey. Then I dropped in on Christmas Eve to see the children in their ward. Two were already dead.”
Halliday was already palpably torn by his task of distributing food and medicine to 23 million Iraqis, all of whom were being punished and some of whom were dying in appalling hospital conditions because of Saddam’s crimes. At the same time as he was seeking drugs for the children, Halliday—who was clearly close to resigning—wrote an impassioned letter to UN secretary general Kofi Annan, complaining that what the UN was doing in Iraq was causing untold suffering to innocent people. “I wrote that what we were doing was undermining the moral credibility of the UN,” he said. “I found myself in a moral dilemma. It seemed to me that what we were doing was in contradiction to the human rights provision in the UN’s own charter.” Halliday, a Quaker who worked in Kenya and Iran before joining the UN’s bureaucracy in New York, was looking for some alternative to sanctions—vainly, because the United States and Britain had no intention of ending Iraq’s misery.
His desk was piled with statistics the UN didn’t want to know; that Iraq’s electrical power stations were producing less than 40 per cent of capacity, that water and sanitation systems were on the point of breakdown. Doctors were forced to reuse rubber gloves during operations, their wards were without air-conditioning or clean water. Without electrical pumps, water pressure was falling in the pipes and sewage was being sucked into the vacuum. “The government here used to encourage the use of infant formula—and infant formula with contaminated water is a real killer.” But Halliday was worried by other, long-term effects of this suffering. “There are men and women now in their twenties and thirties and forties who have known little more than the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and the sanctions. They see themselves as surrounded by unfriendly people, and a very unsympathetic America and Britain. They are out of touch with technology and communications. They have no access to Western television. And these are the people who are going to have to run this country in the future. They are feeling alienated and very Iraqi-introverted. Their next-door neighbours are going to have a tough time dealing with these people.”
Halliday’s colleague in the Baghdad UNICEF office was no more optimistic. Outside, feral children prowled through street-corner garbage. Inside, Philippe Heffinck’s files showed that chronic malnutrition for children under five stood at 31 per cent. “That accounts, in the whole of Iraq, for 1.1 million children, including the Kurdish areas. This is a serious problem—particularly serious when you have chronic malnutrition up to two years old, because that is the period when the brain is formed. You become stunted. There is a lack of physical and mental growth that will afflict the child—his schooling, his job opportunities, his chances of founding a family and quite possibly his or her offspring as well.”
Patrick Cockburn, reporting from Baghdad for The Independent in April 1998, described the way in which the Tigris River had changed colour to “a rich café au lait brown” because raw sewage from 3.5 million people in Baghdad and other towns upstream was pouring into the river. Contamination of drinking water, he wrote, was the main reason why the proportion of Iraqi children who died before they reached twelve months had risen from 3.5 per cent in the year before sanctions to 12 per cent nine years later. Lack of spare parts for electrical equipment, absence of staff and the subsequent reduced power supply had cut off clean water in many areas.154
Western humanitarian workers sometimes felt their own contribution was near-useless. Judy Morgan, who worked for CARE in Baghdad, described how she felt like a poor relative of King Canute. “The water is lapping round our feet before we’ve even had the chance to order the tide to turn back,” she told me one afternoon in 1998. Her colleague Margaret Hassan had a thick file of examples to prove that she was telling the truth. “If this was a Third-World country, we could bring in some water pumps at a cost of a few hundred pounds and they could save thousands of lives,” she said. “But Iraq was not a Third-World country before the [1991] war—and you can’t run a developed society on aid. What is wrong with the water system here is a result of breakdown and damage to complex and very expensive water purification plants. And this eats up hundreds of thousands of pounds in repairs—for just one region of the country. The doctors here are excellent—many were trained in Europe as well as Iraq—but because of sanctions, they haven’t had access to a medical journal for eight years. And in the sciences, what does that mean?”
A mere glance at the list of the items prohibited by the UN sanctions committee revealed the infantile but vindictive nature of the campaign now being waged against Iraq. Included in the list were pencils, pencil-sharpeners, shoe laces, material for shrouds, sanitary towels, shampoo, water purification chemicals, medical swabs, gauze, medical syringes, medical journals, cobalt sources for X-ray machines, disposable surgical gloves, medication for epilepsy, surgical instruments, dialysis equipment, drugs for angina, granite shipments, textile plant equipment, toothpaste, toothbrushes and toilet paper, tennis balls, children’s clothes, nail polish and lipstick.155
The campaigning journalist John Pilger, one of the few reporters who had the courage to condemn the sanctions at the time as wicked and immoral, recorded how, just before Christmas 1999, the British Department of Trade and Industry—a government department which tried to defend the sale of two mustard gas components to Iraq prior to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait on the grounds that one of them could be used to make ink for ballpoint pens—blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. “Dr. Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children’s vaccines were banned, he said, ‘because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.’ That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction—sanctions—seemed not to occur to him.”
By 2000, up to 70 per cent of Iraqi civilian industrial enterprises were closed or operating at a much reduced level. Unemployment had reached at least 60 per cent. Halliday and his successor Hans von Sponeck, the top UN humanitarian officers in Iraq, had both resigned their posts in Baghdad—Halliday in September 1998, and von Sponeck on 14 February 2000—and were now speaking out in the press, on television and at public meetings, von Sponeck pointing out that 167 Iraqi children were dying every day. “In all my years at the UN,” he said, “I had never been exposed to the kind of political manoeuvring and pressure that I saw at work in this programme. We’re treating Iraq as if it were made up of 23 million Saddam Husseins, which is rubbish.”
Halliday was far more outspoken. “The World Health Organisation confirmed to me only ten days ago,” he said in October 1998, “that the monthly rate of sanctions-related child mortality for children under five years of age is from five to six thousand per month. They believe this is an underestimate, since in rural parts of Iraq children are not registered at birth, and if they die within six weeks of birth, they are never registered . . . I recently met with trade union leaders [in Iraq] who asked me why the United Nations does not simply bomb the Iraqi people, and do it efficiently, rather than extending sanctions which kill Iraqis incrementally over a long period . . . Sanctions are undermining the cultural and educational recovery of Iraq, and will not change its system of governance. Sanctions encourage isolation, alienation and fanaticism . . . Sanctions constitute a serious breach of the United Nations charter on human rights and children’s rights.” In 2000, Halliday wrote that “here we are in the middle of the millennium year and we are responsible for genocide in Iraq. Today the prime minister, Tony Blair, is on the defensive on a range of largely domestic issues. His unending endorsement of the Clinton/Albright programme for killing the children of Iraq is seldom mentioned. What does that say about us all?”
The British Foreign Office—and especially Peter Hain, who was now minister of state with responsibility for the Middle East—tried to trash the UN officials who had resigned. “We know that some have raised concerns about the resignations of Hans von Sponeck and, before him, Dennis Halliday, as UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq,” a sleekly worded letter from the Foreign Office’s Middle East Department told a medical doctor who was an Independent reader.
Managing a unique and complex programme worth billions of pounds is a job for an experienced and dedicated administrator committed to making the most of the “oil for food” programme for the Iraqi people. Unfortunately neither Halliday nor von Sponeck was the right man for it. It was clear from very early on that they disagreed with the decisions of the Security Council and the purposes of the UN resolutions. It was not therefore in their interests to make “oil for food” work.
This was ridiculous. Halliday, a compassionate and decent man, and the earnest von Sponeck were both experienced humanitarian workers. To claim that two UN coordinators, one after another, were both “wrong men” for the job was beyond credibility.
The same letter claimed that a new Security Council Resolution, 1284, would make the “oil for food” programme more effective because it removed the ceiling on Iraqi oil exports, failing to add that Iraq’s broken oil facilities and a sudden lowering of the price of oil—which was not the UN’s fault—largely neutered the effects of the initiative. What Iraq needed was not the sudden relaxation of restrictions on personal items but serious reinvestment in industry, infrastructure and commercial life—something that UN sanctions did not permit. Toothpaste and toilet rolls were no use if Iraqis could no longer afford them.
And every few months, as the UN inspectors sent to disarm the Baathist regime of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons—often faced with the obtuseness and threats of Iraq’s security police—sought to discover the extent of Saddam’s armoury, the Americans would announce another “threat” by the Iraqi dictator to invade Kuwait, to ignore the U.S.-imposed “no-fly” zones in southern and northern Iraq—supposedly set up to “protect” the Shiites and Kurds—or to retrieve ground-to-ground missiles that had been left behind in the UN-administered zone along the Iraqi–Kuwaiti border. Repeatedly, in the early nineties, I would race to Beirut airport for yet another flight to Kuwait, just in case Saddam was about to repeat his messianic blunder of 1990—even though network news shows were filming Iraqi soldiers milling around rusting troop trains, some of them barefoot, many of them clearly emaciated, their uniforms torn and discoloured.
Almost two years after they celebrated victory in the 1991 Gulf War, the conflict’s three principal Western allies—the United States, Britain and France— launched a series of air strikes against Iraq’s supposed violation of the southern no-fly zone and its seizure of Silkworm anti-ship missiles from the United Nations. On 12 January 1993, six British Tornado bombers and a squadron of French Mirage jets based in Saudi Arabia joined a much larger force of American planes from the carrier Kitty Hawk in attacking targets inside Iraq, most of them missile sites and radar bases. For more than a week, the United States had protested at Iraq’s positioning of SAM anti-aircraft missile batteries inside the “no-fly” zones.
Yet if the Americans needed a regular crisis in the Gulf, Saddam also wanted to provoke tension. Saddam’s spokesman had claimed once more that very day that Kuwait was “an integral part of Iraq that will be restored.” The United Nations had escorted a troop of journalists up to the new Iraq–Kuwaiti frontier—the one that the UN revised in favour of Kuwait but that Iraq did not accept—and happily displayed the wooden boxes (stamped “Ministry of Defence, Jordan”) from which the Iraqis had indeed seized their old Silkworm missiles the previous weekend, weapons that were taken before the eyes of the UN guards.
That same morning, the Iraqis had made their third foray across the new frontier—the one they didn’t recognise—saying they had an agreement with the UN to remove their equipment from warehouses up to 15 January. But they had not asked permission from the UN or the Kuwaiti government to do so. Why not? And why, for that matter, had we not hitherto been told that the Iraqi forays into the Um Qasr naval base began eight months previously? In May 1991, it emerged, Iraq took eleven Silkworm missiles from the base and then another four less than a month later. It subsequently gave the four back—at the request of the UN Iraq–Kuwait Observer Mission—but kept the other eleven. The weekend’s foray allowed them to “recapture” those four missiles yet again.
Saddam was acting, it seemed, according to an American script. It wasn’t the first time that this odd continuity operated between Washington and Baghdad. Just as both sides found it expedient to ignore the mass Iraqi casualties of the 1991 war, so now Saddam was playing his appointed role as aggressor. “Saddam is mad, but you know why he’s done this?” an old Kuwaiti friend—one of the lucky ones to escape captivity inside Iraq in the last days of the war—asked me. He was laughing, a trifle contemptuously, I thought. “Saddam doesn’t care about Bush. He wants the Arabs to care. The UN fails in Bosnia . . . More important, the UN fails to get Israel to take back the Palestinian detainees in Lebanon [deported illegally by the Israelis as ‘terrorists’]. But the UN lets America use the big stick on Iraq. Saddam wants the Arabs to think about that difference. He thinks that way the Arabs will turn to him.”
Saddam was doing this in an increasingly self-delusional way. His half-hour television broadcast to Iraqis on 17 January 1993 was a masterpiece of Arab nationalist bombast. He cursed the Arab “traitors” who had opposed him and the Iraqis who had rebelled against his rule two years earlier. The UN he branded a mere satrapy of the United States—this, at least, was an allegation of some merit—and insisted that the “Mother of all Battles” had not ended, nor had the struggle for “victorious Iraq.” Nor for a “liberated Palestine.” And Kuwait and Iraq were part of “one nation.” It was a Gulf War anniversary speech aimed at “the children of Arabism everywhere.”
In some ways, the unsmiling Saddam was the same dictator whom the West had learned to loathe during the occupation of Kuwait. His olive-green uniform, with the inevitable brigadier-general’s crossed-swords insignia on its shoulders, was crudely offset by a bowl of red-and-white flowers. Iraq was glorious, its people steadfast, acting only on behalf of the “Arab nation.” America and its partners were “criminals,” bent only on the division of a powerful Arab nation prepared to stand alone and on the acquisition of Kuwait as a “rented oil well.” But he then embarked on a striking personal attack on the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait, talking to the Kuwaiti population in an eerie combination of threat, entreaty and apology.
He urged Kuwaitis to “learn the lessons,” to “absorb the circumstances” and “understand” the period of Iraqi occupation. Iraqis who had committed any acts against Kuwaitis had been punished, he announced. “Those Kuwaitis who remained in their country will remember that one of the [Iraqi] officers remained hanging for everyone to see because of the bad things he did to Kuwaitis. This is the real face of Baghdad. These are the principles of Baghdad . . . if there were any bad acts they took place through traitors, directed by the enemies of Iraq.”
There was no mention of the torture chambers, the rape of foreign women, the doorstep execution of resistance men and women (in front of their families, of course); merely a reference to the unfortunate necessity that faced Iraqi armoured forces to “return fire” when they were attacked. Kuwaitis should therefore feel “brotherhood and love in God and in the nation which holds them in its heart in Baghdad.” Kuwaitis did not remember history quite so romantically, though few would forget the hanging Iraqi colonel—truly “the real face of Baghdad”—who was indeed suspended from a crane in a central square, allegedly, so it was said at the time, for helping the Kuwaiti resistance.
But the culprit for all this suffering, according to Saddam, was the Kuwaiti emir. He had invested $60 billion in Western banks while Arabs endured “poverty and starvation.”156 He had failed to heed Baghdad’s warnings not to seek Iran–Iraq War debt repayments and to end oil overproduction, warnings made by Saddam at the Arab summit on 27 May 1990, repeated on 17 July and again in an Iraqi foreign ministry memorandum to the Arab League that same day. Saad Abdullah al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti negotiator at the Jeddah summit with the Iraqis—the meeting whose breakdown led immediately to Iraq’s invasion—had received, so Saddam’s tale went, secret orders from the emir not to settle the dispute. The people of Kuwait should learn their lesson and take control of their country from a family which allowed foreigners to run Kuwait but who fled from the Iraqi army “like leaseholders, without saying goodbye.”
As for the “infidels” whose forces still stood “on sacred Muslim land,” they had changed their objectives, from the defence of Saudi Arabia to the destruction of “the Iraqi regime.” Why else had the “no-fly” zones been instituted? These zones, along with the refusal to allow Iraqi planes to fly, were “an act of war despite the ceasefire.” The West was anxious to destroy the nation which “from Zakho [in Kurdistan] to Fao [in the far south of Iraq] remains a bastion of freedom.” With just a hint of emotion, he predicted that “the infidels will ultimately know who is victorious . . . if the aggressors continue, they will fail. God help you!” Here, without any doubt, was the old Saddam.
And within hours of their January 1993 air strikes against Iraq, the Americans decided to make an issue of further Iraqi “provocations” along the Iraq– Kuwait border, demanding that Baghdad close down six of its police posts in the UN-controlled demilitarised zone by midnight on 14 January—or face the consequences. The U.S. threat came on the eve of the arrival in Kuwait for “operational reasons” of 1,250 American soldiers from the U.S. 1st Armored Cavalry Division. The six Iraqi positions—all containing armed Iraqi border policemen—had actually been in existence for almost a year, during which the frontier had been withdrawn—although Washington had made no issue about their presence then.
In all of this, journalists played a special role: to run the American story. And sure enough, the U.S. military reinforcements sent into Kuwait were attended by the usual camera crews and hair-perfect reporters and agency men who wanted those equally perfect shots of the men who were going to defend Kuwaiti freedom. So it was that Captain Lackey drew his line on the tarmac of an Iraqi airbase. “If you come over this line, I’m going to remove you from the airfield,” he bawled at the reporters. “I’m going to tell the security people to move you out of here if you don’t obey this instruction. Is there anybody who doesn’t understand what I’ve told you?” The camera crews dutifully assembled like schoolchildren, toes and tripods on the white-painted strip. The U.S. 1st Cavalry Division was about to arrive.
Maybe it was the American army’s revenge for the media debacle on the beaches of Mogadishu—the collapse of the UN mission to Somalia was still to come—but Captain Lackey knew what he wanted. While long lenses whirred at the miniature figures climbing down the steps of the 747, we craned over the necks of the photographers to catch sight of this latest symbol of America’s “resolve” in the Gulf as the soldiers, many of them carrying “comfort bags,” straggled across the apron to a line of old American school buses parked 300 metres from the jumbo.
Instead of talking to the soldiers who were about to perform—if President Bush’s words about his bomber pilots applied to them—“God’s work,” we were instead encouraged to talk to the civilian crew of the chartered Northwest Airlines 747. So journalists surrounded the prettiest crimson-uniformed stewardess as the plane’s captain—in a splendidly staged advertisement for his airline—regaled us with the soldiers’ in-flight meal services. The men and women drawing yet another line in the sand had spent their sixteen hours in the air munching their way through barbecued chicken, rice and eggs. No questions here—no thought for what the Iraqis were eating 100 kilometres to the north of us. Just the usual network men performing their usual duties, breathlessly and urgently. I pulled out my notebook to capture some of their gems. “Just sixty miles from the Iraqi border . . .” “. . . six weeks, but they could be here much longer.” “. . . and for the Kuwaitis, this is another reassuring sign . . .” “. . . a deterrent against retaliation Saddam Hussein might try across the Kuwaiti border.”
The quotations were real, but was the mission? Were these young men and women with their pre-positioned company of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, of M1A1 tanks and their artillery battery anything more than a symbol? Not really. In the end, President Bush fired off another set of cruise missiles towards Baghdad—and within minutes of their arrival, the Iraqi policemen began dismantling their posts in Um Qasr, one of them being shot dead by a Kuwaiti policeman. “It was just an ordinary night,” Captain Mike Maugham of the 1st Cavalry’s Alpha company described it to me later. “We stayed up half the night watching the football game— we got the whole match with the Bills. But the first sergeant would come in from time to time switching the channel and during breaks in the game, we’d go over to CNN in Baghdad.”
Breaks in the game. Captain Maugham confessed that watching the anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad on CNN was “a sobering experience,” but there were plenty of well-worn clichés to be had along the line of Bradleys next morning. Saddam was “going to get his ass kicked” and it was “time to finish the job.” CNN had uncomfortably proved that an explosion in the lobby of the Rashid Hotel which killed a female receptionist was caused by an American missile—Brent Sadler popped up with a hunk of cruise misssile, complete with computer codings—and this produced the usual scepticism. “Nobody likes to see civilian casualties”—this from Second Lieutenant Bernard Ethridge—“but that’s kind of a function [sic] of war. It just happens. But if a cruise missile hit that hotel, I don’t think the hotel would have so little damage. Our soldiers talked about this; they thought that maybe a dud anti-aircraft round came back on the Iraqis.” As usual. When Palestinians died under Israeli bombing in Beirut in 1982, they were killed by their own gunfire. When the Americans bombed Libya, the civilian casualties were killed by stray Libyan anti-aircraft missiles. When the Americans blasted civilians to bits in the streets of Baghdad in 2003, the Iraqis were killed, once more, by their own anti-aircraft rockets—or by pieces of old shrapnel cunningly planted in the ruins by Saddam’s secret policemen. It was never us. Or if it was, we didn’t mean it.
Thus when President Clinton loosed off another twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles against Baghdad on 27 June 1993 in retaliation for Iraq’s alleged involvement in the attempted murder of George Bush in Kuwait more than two months earlier—the case against the accused Iraqis, still to be heard, would be riddled with inconsistencies and the court hearing deeply flawed—little interest was shown by journalists when eight civilians were found to be among the victims. One of them was Leila Attar, a distinguished Iraqi painter who had exhibited her work in Kuwait, Cairo and New York. It would be almost five years before I heard the full story of her tragedy.
For in 1998, in an art gallery behind the Meridien Hotel in Baghdad, there worked an old man, Abu Khaled—“a guest in this life with perhaps three or four more years to live”—who told me of that hot June night when he said farewell to Attar, who was the joint director of the gallery. “She left at nine p.m. and it was only in the morning that the man who made tea here said: ‘Abu Khaled, Madame Attar is in the hospital.’ But she was not. I found her daughter and her son in the hospital. But they said she was still under her house.” When Abu Khaled reached the artist’s home in the Mansour district of Baghdad, he found Leila Attar’s husband dead under the rubble. “No one could find her,” he said. “But then I saw her long hair between the bricks of the house and I knew she was there. We found her with her handbag still gripped in her hand. She was trying to get away when the missile struck.”
There was neither apology nor remorse in Washington. It was Saddam who was being attacked, his regime and his murderous apparatus of secret policemen. And when I visited the rubble of Leila Attar’s home in Baghdad in 1998, sure enough, there was, just behind her house, a largemukhabarat security service compound of high brick walls and barbed wire. The cruise missile had not quite cleared her house on the way to its target. So again, it wasn’t our fault. Collateral damage. We didn’t mean it. President Clinton told Americans they could “feel good” about the attack.
And all this was apparently provoked by an Iraqi plot to kill ex-President Bush. In October of 1994—well over a year after the Clinton air raids—I went along to the Kuwait appeal “trial” of the thirteen men convicted of planning to kill Bush. The accused, grey-uniformed and grey-faced, many of them bearded and several apparently praying, listened without emotion as Judge Abdullah al-Issa started his judicial review. But given the chance to talk, at least one of the condemned men had plenty to say. And for a man who had been convicted by President Clinton— who had launched his retaliatory air raids before the initial court hearings had been concluded—and sentenced to the gallows by the state of Kuwait, Wasli al-Ghazali looked understandably angry as he fingered the brown-painted bars of the cage in Court No. 15. “Every Arab child is worth all of America,” he shouted at us. “I am an Iraqi citizen. Bush killed sixteen members of my family. I have lost all of my feelings.” Al-Ghazali and the twelve other men, one of them a Kuwaiti, were all allegedly involved in the plot.
According to the Kuwaiti authorities, Iraqi intelligence ordered the defendants to kill Mr. Bush in a plot that was uncovered by the Kuwaiti security services just a day before the former president arrived in the country. One of the defendants was said to have been found in possession of a car loaded with 180 pounds of explosives, while al-Ghazali was accused of planning to assassinate Bush with a belt-bomb strapped to his waist. However, he later retracted his confession, while others in the original trial claimed they had been beaten into making false confessions or had crossed the border on a smuggling expedition.
And although the earlier court had sentenced all of the men—six to death, the rest to prison terms—there was a host of reasons why Kuwaiti and foreign lawyers should have doubted the fairness of this particular trial. There had been plea retraction, other evidence of beatings by the security police, a scandalous lack of pre-trial access to the defendants by local lawyers and, most extraordinary of all, of course, a missile attack on Baghdad—based on the defendants’ guilt but staged before their conviction. It was little wonder that Najib al-Wougayan, the small and persistent lawyer for the only Kuwaiti condemned to death, Badr al-Shaamari, claimed that the Clinton attack prejudiced the fairness of his client’s trial.
“Clinton’s missile attack on Baghdad placed the hearing in a political context,” he said. “Before the trial finished, Clinton said that he had evidence that Iraq was behind the bomb attack on Bush. How could he do this before the trial had been concluded? There are defendants who have admitted their guilt and I do not quarrel with this—they made confessions. But Badr did not. He is innocent and the Americans condemned him.” In fact, the White House had said that it had “certain proof” of Iraqi guilt in the plot, a claim that Amnesty International would later condemn as undermining the defendants’ presumption of innocence. Eight years later, George Bush’s son, during a speech intended to garner support for his invasion of Iraq, would recall how Saddam “tried to kill my dad.”
The explanation that the men were involved in routine smuggling rather than political assassination was given further credibility when Salim al-Shaamari, the brother of the accused Kuwaiti, began giggling during a court appearance after being asked by the judge why his face appeared familiar. He replied that he had been imprisoned on fifteen previous occasions for smuggling whisky into Kuwait. Further doubt was cast on the court’s fairness when a public prosecutor referred to the accused as “this rotten group of defendants.”
For all this, Leila Attar died.