CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Plague

There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done. He has attempted (as I may call it) to poison the wells.

—John Henry, Cardinal Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1864

IN OCTOBER 1994, we had another “Crisis in the Gulf,” as CNN liked to bill each would-be re-invasion of Kuwait. This time, according to the Pentagon, Saddam had “massed” 60,000 troops in southern Iraq, along with 900 tanks and even more armoured vehicles. None of the journalists sent off to report this latest drama apparently remembered how confidently they had described the routing of the Iraqi army in 1991, how Saddam’s soldiers had been in “disarray,” his Republican Guards “decimated” by U.S. bombing, his logistics “annihilated.” But after being assured by the world’s leaders that Saddam had been totally defeated, his “decimated” Republican Guard divisions were now supposedly returning to haunt the battlefields again. And those television pundits and reporters for the satellite channels were bombarding Middle East capitals with visa requests and booking themselves on to any aircraft that could reach the Gulf faster than President Clinton’s carrier group. “Were they manipulating us or falling into the trap of believing their own reports?” I asked in my paper.

A Kuwaiti journalist probably got it right when he pointed out that Saddam was trying to force the UN to lift sanctions—as well as redeploy his own Iraqi army after a rumoured coup attempt in Baghdad—while Clinton wanted to distract attention from his indolence in Bosnia before congressional elections. But our preprogrammed response seemed to be unstoppable.¹⁵⁷ As usual, no one bothered to assess the civilian casualties that would follow yet another strike on Iraq.

And sure enough, journalists who were transported up to Kuwait’s border with Iraq found it hard to meet the demands of their editors. Many of us could discover only a solitary Kuwaiti tank in the desert, a vehicle that was subsequently used to tow our own press bus out of the sand. On the other side of the border, there were equally slim pickings. United Nations officers disclosed that their reconnaissance aircraft, whose flight path gave them a view over 20 kilometres north of the frontier, had not observed a single Iraqi tank or personnel carrier. The few Iraqi policemen beyond the border—now abiding by the line of the new border—could hardly be called aggressive; several of them, it transpired, regularly begged for food from the UN, pleading for clothes to replace their ragged uniforms. “We’re not supposed to give them anything,” a UN officer admitted. “But it’s hard to turn someone away when they’re hungry.”

Yet by 12 October there were reported to be 39,783 U.S. troops back in the Gulf, along with 659 aircraft and 28 ships. The RAF was flying a Hercules C-130 into Kuwait every two hours through the night, some of them carrying 155-mm artillery, and the first elements of 45 Royal Marine Commando had just walked off a Tristar. We had seen it all before: the sultry night, the C-130s’ propellers still racing on the tarmac, the accents of Sheffield and Oxford and Liverpool under the Gulf skies. Instead of “Operation Granby”—the 1990 British deployment to the Gulf—we now had Operation Driver, but the soldiers all carried the same little nuclear–chemical–biological warfare kits.

And when the U.S. 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived to start live-fire training exercises, which location did they choose? The Mutla Ridge, of course. Many of the marines knew very well that this was the top of the “highway of death” where Iraq’s fleeing convoys had been roasted out of existence just over three and a half years earlier. The men of the 15th MEU, 130 of them, weighed down with heavy machine guns and anti-armour weapons, set up their tripods and blasted thousands of rounds of ammunition into the dunes just below the hill where the anonymous mass graves still lay beneath the sand. “A lot of our marines were here at the time and some of the men here know what happened,” Lieutenant Colonel Rick Barry said, enthusiastically adding that marine units helped to trap the retreating Iraqi convoys in 1991. In the new, ever more contagious language of marine-speak, Colonel Barry’s men talked of their amphibious helicopter-borne landings as an “evolution”—note the positive, progressive nature of that word—as a “sustainment exercise,” an “adventure” and, of course, a “photo-opportunity.”

The television camera crews scrummed around the marines, cursing and pushing each other—though taking care to avoid any frames that showed that the marine “evolution” was a journalistic circus. And so the machine-gun cartridges skipped across the concrete revetments below Mutla Ridge as the marines charged through smoke grenades across the sand, whooping and shrieking at Saddam’s imaginary legions. Captain Stephen Sullivan, eyes turning into cracks against the piercing midday sun, tried to put it into a historical perspective which turned into a weird combination of morality and more marine-speak.

“Since this country was basically raped and plundered just a couple [sic] of years ago,” he said, “and there’s a massive troop build-up on the border, that is a distinctive threat to this country and all the nations that represented the [allied] coalition. We are a forward deployed presence that’s routine. We think this yields stability with power projection to show our presence . . .” But did he not ask himself why his marine unit’s “power projection” didn’t get focused on Bosnia, where rape was now on a somewhat larger scale than it had been in Kuwait? Captain Sullivan didn’t hesitate for a moment. Bosnia came under the U.S. Mediterranean Command and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit was not tasked to cover the Mediterranean area. And that was that.

There were times, reporting all this, when one wondered if insanity was not an advantage in reporting the Middle East. A day after the marines deployed at Mutla Ridge, U.S. defence secretary William Perry, a chunky, short figure in a pale brown uniform, marched across the tarmac at Kuwait airport to threaten Saddam with war if he did not withdraw his soldiers from southern Iraq. Then, just half an hour later, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, tall and dapper in a pale blue suit and tie, walked into the airport’s VIP lounge and threatened peace. Whom were we to believe? Mr. Perry, who bellowed that further American troop reinforcements would be sent to the Gulf, or Mr. Kozyrev, who said he’d just been told by Saddam that he would at last recognise the new frontiers of Kuwait? “I have brought good news to the people of Kuwait and to the whole Middle East,” Kozyrev whispered into the microphone. “Good news that this day the independence of Kuwait is reinforced.”

Perhaps it was as well that the Cold War was over. Back in the days of Jimmy Carter, the U.S. defence secretary would have been urging peace while Leonid Brezhnev’s men would have been warning of war if America bombed Iraq. To add to this transformation came the assertion from Senator John H. Warner, the former chief of the U.S. Navy who was standing next to Perry. “The lessons learned from the Gulf War,” he said, “really made it possible for this swift deterrence to be put in place.” The real lesson of the Gulf War for more conservative Americans, of course, was that if Saddam Hussein’s regime had been toppled at the time, it wouldn’t be necessary to send all this “deterrence” back to the Middle East now.

The growing regularity of attacks on Iraq did more than dull the senses of journalists; it gave a continuity to their story, so when the United States and Britain, the sole surviving allies of the 1991 war—the French had wisely pulled out of the “no-fly” zone bombardments—attacked Iraqi “military positions” over the next decade, their actions became routine, part of a pattern, a habit which, as the years went by, ceased to be a “news story” at all. The southern “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Shiites from Saddam, even though the Shiite insurgents of 1991 were long in their mass graves or still hiding in their refugee camps over the border in Iran. In the north, the “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Kurds from similar aggression; but the “safe haven” created by the allies of 1991 at least still existed there, even if it was not enough to save the Kurds of Irbil when Saddam sent his tanks into the city to break up a CIA-run operation in 1996.

Nor did it save the Kurds from the Turks, as John Pilger was to reveal. In March 2001, RAF pilots flying out of the Turkish airbase at Batman complained that, far from protecting the Kurds, they were frequently ordered to return to their airfields to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the very people they were supposed to be protecting. British pilots returning to patrol the skies over northern Iraq— having been ordered to turn off their radar so they could not identify the Turkish targets—would see the devastation in Kurdish villages after the Turkish raids. U.S. pilots, also ordered back to base, would pass American-made “Turkish F-14s and F-16s inbound, loaded to the gills with munitions,” one pilot was to recall. “Then they’d come out half an hour later with their munitions expended.” On returning to their mission, the Americans would see “burning villages, lots of smoke and fire.” In 1995 and 1997, up to 50,000 Turkish troops with tanks, fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships attacked alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party bases in the “safe haven.”

Despite much obfuscation by the Americans and the British—to the effect that the “no-fly” zones were part of, or supported by, UN Security Council Resolution 688—they had no UN legitimacy, nor were the zones ever discussed or approved by the United Nations. But they were to become the excuse for a continuing air war against Iraq, undeclared and largely unreported by the journalists who were so keen to focus on Saddam’s own provocations, especially when they involved his refusal to help—or his deliberate misleading of—the UNSCOM arms inspectors. The UN team had entered Iraq immediately after the 1991 ceasefire and was engaged in seeking out and destroying the chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons that Saddam had long sought and in some cases acquired. This was the same Saddam who had used gas against the Kurds of Halabja and hundreds of other villages—his equally ruthless gassing of the Iranian army was recalled less emotionally, if at all, in the West—and he had to be “defanged.” Within three years, the inspectors had achieved considerable success.

Their operation, which was eventually to be compromised by the Americans themselves, has been catalogued in detail many times; but it is fascinating to compare these efforts with later attempts by the U.S. and British administrations to send UN inspectors back into Iraq in 2002—and then to persuade the world that Saddam was continuing to produce and hide weapons of mass destruction. By the end of April 1992, the al-Atheer nuclear weapons establishment in Iraq had been destroyed and the explosives-testing bunker filled with concrete, a process in which a thousand Iraqi workers were forced to help. In 1994, Rolf Ekeus, the head of UNSCOM, reported that most of the information demanded of the Iraqis had been given and that weapons-monitoring systems were being set up. While Iraq was still trying to avoid handing material to the UN inspectors, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft—borrowed from the United States—had flown 201 missions over Iraq and UN helicopters had flown 273 missions to 395 suspected sites.

Iraq claimed all the while that the inspectors were working not for the UN but for the CIA; UNSCOM, according to Saddam, was “an advertising agency” for Washington. He could hardly be blamed for this contention. The CIA had asked Congress for $12 million for covert operations in Iraq and the Iraqi authorities feared that the UN’s information would be used not just for further inspections but for missile-targeting next time the U.S. president wanted to fire cruise missiles at Baghdad. In May 1995, Ekeus expressed concern about 17 tons of missing material that could be used to manufacture biological weapons, but in August 1995, Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel Hassan and Lieutenant Colonel Saddam Kamel Hassan, two sons-in-law of Saddam Hussein, defected to Jordan, where they told UN inspectors—though this was not divulged until 2003—that all weapons of mass-destruction programmes in Iraq had been abandoned.

Yet the Americans never accepted the UN’s assurances. While Saddam’s mukhabarat did frequently try to impede the work of the inspectors—UN inspector Scott Ritter’s Hollywood appearances at the most sensitive of Saddam’s security headquarters were proof enough of that—the U.S. government was constantly raising “evidence” from Iraqi defectors that nuclear production continued, that the Iraqis were burying biological bombs in the desert, that Saddam’s refusal to comply with all requests for information on chemical materials was proof of his dishonesty. Iraqi claims that many archives on such weapons had been destroyed in the 1991 uprising were dismissed—not always without reason—as obfuscation. But as the UN hunt for Iraq’s libraries of scientific research continued, Saddam came to the conclusion that the UN was now spying—on behalf of Iraq’s enemies—into the country’s military future as well as its past.

Ritter’s experiences as a U.S. Marine Corps officer who had dismissed Schwarzkopf’s claims about Scud missile destruction while serving in Riyadh during the 1991 war were important. Even after promising that it had no interest in germ warfare in its first submission to the UN, Iraq had 90 gallons of a microorganism that causes gas gangrene, more than 2,000 gallons of anthrax, 5,125 gallons of botulinum toxin (which paralyses and strangles its victims) and 2.7 gallons of the toxin ricin. Iraq reluctantly admitted that it had produced VX nerve gas and up to 150 tons of sarin gas.

Ritter’s own dramatic, successful and sometimes farcical confrontations with Saddam’s security men provide a chilling portrait of the regime, as well as a remarkable insight into the mind of an American weapons inspector.¹⁵⁸ “The Iraqis, they’re like sharks,” he once famously remarked. “Fear is like blood. They smell it and they’ll come in at you. Once that game of intimidation starts, you’re never going to win . . . I am the alpha dog. I’m going in tail held high. If they growl at me, I’m gonna jump on ’em . . . When we go to a site, they’re gonna know we’re there, we’re gonna raise our tails and we’re gonna spray urine all over their walls .

. .” Yet after six years, Ekeus had forced Saddam’s regime to destroy 40,000 chemical shells and other munitions, 700 tons of chemical agents, 48 long-range missiles, an anthrax factory, a nuclear centrifuge programme and 30 missile warheads. Journalists were invited to photograph a vast fleet of Scud missiles as they lay, broken-backed, on the desert floor.

But like so many long-term operations of its kind, UNSCOM became contaminated. Ritter, who in 2002 would bravely and consistently—and correctly—claim that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction, had taken his information to the Israelis, proof positive for the Arabs that the UN was sharing its military secrets with Iraq’s only enemy in the Middle East. Ritter went so far as to tell the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israel had been helping the UN inspectors in Iraq from 1994 to 1998. “I can honestly say that if it weren’t for Israel, the commission wouldn’t have been able to carry out the anti-concealment effort,” he said. On 5 August 1998, Baghdad had suspended all cooperation with UNSCOM, claiming that it was being used by American intelligence agents. It said it would continue to cooperate with UN officials in Baghdad—but not with its U.S. members.

The UN, without revealing the truth of Iraq’s claims, decided on 13 November to withdraw its entire seventy-eight-strong team from Baghdad. Saddam, the Western media announced, had “defied” the UN Security Council—which was true only if the Iraqi allegations were false. President Clinton did not wait to explain. “Operation Desert Fox”—the nickname of Hitler’s General Erwin Rommel, though that apparently didn’t occur to U.S. military planners—involved another bombardment of 200 cruise missiles against Iraq, killing 62 Iraqi soldiers and 82 civilians. U.S. jets carried out 622 sorties against 100 targets, dropping around 540 bombs. The British flew 28 Tornado sorties against 11 targets. The Iraqis were not the only ones to note that many of the bombed facilities—including two buildings where Saddam was believed to meet his mistresses—had recently been visited by the American inspectors of UNSCOM. In early January, UNICEF and the World Food Programme reported that the attack also flattened an agricultural school, damaged at least another dozen schools and hospitals and knocked out water supplies for 300,000 people in Baghdad.

It was the endgame, the final bankruptcy of Western policy towards Iraq, the very last throw of the dice. As the missiles were launched, President Clinton announced that Saddam had “disarmed the inspectors,” which was a lie, and Tony Blair, agonising about the lives of the “British forces” involved—all eighteen pilots—told us that “we act because we must.” In so infantile a manner did we go to war, although the semantics of its presentation bore some intriguing clues about our future military aggression in the region. There were no policies, no perspective and not the slightest hint as to what might happen after the bombardment ended. With no UN inspectors back in Iraq, what were we going to do? Declare eternal war on Iraq? In fact, that’s pretty much what we had already done—and would do for the next three years—though we didn’t say so at the time.

We were “punishing” Saddam—or so Blair would have us believe at the time. Was there a computer that churned out this stuff? Maybe there was a cliché department at Downing Street that also provided British foreign secretary Robin Cook with Madeleine Albright’s tired phrase about how Saddam used gas “even against his own people.” For little had we cared when he used that gas against the Kurds of Halabja—because, at the time, those Kurds were allied to Iran and we, the West, were supporting Saddam’s invasion of Iran.

The giveaway was the lack of any sane, long-term policy towards Iraq. Our patience, according to Messrs. Clinton and Blair, was exhausted. Saddam could not be trusted to keep his word—they had just realised! And so Saddam’s ability to “threaten his neighbours”—neighbours who didn’t actually want us to bomb Iraq—had to be “degraded.” We were now, presumably, bombing the weapons facilities that the inspectors could not find. But how? For if the inspectors couldn’t find the weapons, how come we knew where to fire the cruise missiles?

There seemed to be no end to the fantasies in which we had to believe. Again, they appear, in retrospect, to be a dry-run for the phantom threat that Saddam represented in advance of the 2003 Anglo–American invasion. Saddam, we were told, could destroy the whole world, or—I enjoyed this particular conceit—could do so “twice over.” U.S. defence secretary William Cohen announced that there would be “serious consequences” for Iraq if it attacked Israel. Mr. Cohen, who was the American—not the Israeli—defence minister, did not explain what “consequences” there could be when we had already fired 200 missiles into Iraq. Then on 16 December 1998—and this was almost three years before the assaults on the United States—the Americans claimed that Osama bin Laden had been chatting on the phone to Saddam Hussein. In truth, bin Laden—who always referred to Saddam with contempt in his conversations with me—was as likely to call up the Beast of Baghdad as he was President Clinton. Clinton said he wanted “democracy” in Iraq. But no questions were asked, no lies contradicted.

Vice President Al Gore told Americans that this was a time for “national resolve and unity.” You might have thought the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor or that General MacArthur had just abandoned Bataan. When President Clinton faced the worst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. Faced with impeachment, he was now bombing Iraq. How far could a coincidence go? No wonder some of the UN inspectors called this “the War of Monica’s Skirt.” So two Christian armies—America’s and Britain’s—went to war with a Muslim nation, Iraq. With no goals but with an army of platitudes, they had abandoned the UN’s weapons control system and opened the door to an unlimited military offensive against Iraq. And nobody asked the obvious question: What happens next?

In Washington, we were informed that the impeachment hearings against Clinton—for it was he, rather than Saddam, who was in danger of being “degraded”— were delayed because “American forces were in harm’s way.” In reality, the men firing missiles at Iraq from the safety of warships in the Gulf were about as much “in harm’s way” as a CNN newsreader. The only people in danger were the Iraqis. Yet when the RAF joined in the bombardment, we were treated to an excited newsreader on the BBC World Service announcing that British aircraft had been “in action” over Iraq—as if this was the Battle of Britain rather than the bombing of an Arab country already crushed by near-genocidal sanctions.

When I called up a Saudi journalist friend and told him that Downing Street was claiming the attack on Iraq was intended to protect the Arab Gulf, he shouted one word down the phone to me: Zbeili! Zbeili is Arabic for “garbage.” “Why do you want to kill more of those poor people?” he asked. The British were trying to present this bombing offensive on Iraq in all its old 1991 Gulf War purity. Iraq’s neighbours were under threat and must be safeguarded from its weapons of mass destruction. But with the exception of Kuwait—some of whose citizens had repeated their now familiar routine of fleeing over the Saudi border—the Arab Gulf states wanted none of the West’s protection, especially when this “protection” involved even further destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure.

For the Basra oil refinery was one of the Anglo–American targets. Clinton and Blair had promised that only military targets would be hit, but the refinery had allegedly been used to smuggle oil and thus became a “military target.” Maybe we would soon be told that oil refineries were weapons of mass destruction. What they most certainly were, of course, was a means of producing oil income to pay for the Oil-for-Food programme that was supposed to lessen the effect of UN sanctions. But it was not this blatant manipulation of words that angered the Arabs. What infuriated them—and non-Arab Muslims—was the hopelessly one-sided and hypocritical way in which we tried to justify the attack on Iraq.

Just going through the 1998 list of excuses for belligerency was enough. According to Clinton and Blair, Saddam Hussein (1) was refusing to abide by countless United Nations Security Council resolutions; (2) continued to build weapons of mass destruction; (3) blocked the work of UNSCOM arms inspectors; (4) abused human rights; (5) had used poison gas “on his own people.” Now we all knew that Saddam Hussein was awful; not as bad as Hitler and Stalin but probably worse than Laurent Kabila and certainly worse than Muammar Ghadafi and quite possibly worse than Slobodan Milošević.

But who else qualified in 1998 for the first crime? Israel and Serbia. Who qualified for the second? Iran, Israel, Syria, Pakistan, India and North Korea. Crime number 3 was exclusive because there was no UNSCOM to inspect other countries’ weapons of mass destruction. But qualifying for crime number 4? Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey . . . Crime number 5? Only Iraq—with a caveat: for still no Western leader would admit that Saddam killed far more Iranians than he did Iraqi Kurds at a time when the State Department and the British Foreign Office were supporting Iraq.

So what were we doing bombing Iraq? Back in February 1998, we wanted to bomb Iraq when Saddam prevented UN arms inspectors from entering his palaces. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan produced a “memorandum of understanding” to allow the UN to make a one-time inspection, in the company of foreign diplomats, of these supposed symbols of Iraqi sovereignty. But once Saddam objected to the American UN inspectors, it was “chocks away”: he now almost certainly wished to be bombed—because he had given up any hope of sanctions being lifted and knew that the Arab world would sympathise with Iraq. Journalists became frightened of the figure of half a million children dead under sanctions; it was safer to debate the rights and wrongs of killing eighty-two civilians in the December air raids. Arabs did not see events in so distorted a way. However deplorable their regimes, they were possessed of an overwhelming sense of fury and humiliation; the conviction that the raids on Baghdad were all staged to avoid Clinton’s impeachment seemed to place events beyond the immoral.

Then—and only then, in the New Year, in the first week of January 1999, less than three weeks after the attacks were staged on Iraq because Saddam had “blocked” the UNSCOM teams—came the revelation. American arms inspectors were spies. CIA men had been planted among the UN teams—along with MI6 agents from Britain, if a report in The Independent was correct—and the UN was forced to admit that “UNSCOM directly facilitated the creation of an intelligence collection system for the United States in violation of its mandate.” U.S. agents had installed a “black box” eavesdropping system into UNSCOM’s Baghdad headquarters that intercepted Saddam Hussein’s presidential communications network. Operation Shake the Tree was supposed to uncover the regime’s weapons concealment system, but UN officials quickly realised that the SIGINT operation run by the CIA’s Near East Division—which was led by Ritter’s nemesis Steve Richter—was not sharing its intelligence information with UNSCOM. The UN arms mission to Iraq had become a U.S. spying operation against the regime. Few bothered to recall that Saddam’s reasons for expelling the U.S. inspectors—the official cause of the December bombardment—had now been proved true. But UNSCOM was finished.

The military assault on Iraq was not. For with little publicity—and amid virtual indifference in Western capitals—U.S. and British aircraft staged well over seventy air strikes against Iraq in just five weeks during January and February 1999, inflicting more damage than the pre-Christmas Anglo–American bombardment. Pilots flying out of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were now given new rules of engagement that allowed them to open fire on Iraqi installations even if their aircraft were not directly threatened. The air offensive was carefully calibrated to avoid criticism or public debate, although it coincided with further attempts by Washington to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.

At my home in Beirut that great rain-washed winter, I spent hours searching through back copies of the Arab and British press for details of these raids. I visited Tewfiq Mishlawi, a veteran Palestinian-Lebanese journalist whose daily MiddleEast Reporter was meticulous in recording each Western air attack on Iraq—and its political consequences in the Arab world—and found that his own archives were filled with small, often apparently inconsequential quotations from Western military spokesmen. Yet, sitting in his cold drab offices near the centre of Beirut, I placed these paragraphs of copy next to one another and found myself reading a coherent and all too disturbing account of a near-secret war. One-inch news items—nibs, as we call them in the trade—would turn into longer stories as I photocopied them and pinned them, one after the other, into my file. The file began to thicken. Every hour, I would have to open a new folder for the next stack of cuttings.

Iraqi missile sites were being attacked without warning and radar stations targeted solely because their presence—rather than any offensive activity—was said to menace American forces in the Gulf. In early February, for example, U.S. aircraft bombed a CSSC-3 “Seersucker” anti-ship missile battery on the Fao peninsula which, according to a spokesman, “could [sic] have threatened shipping in the Gulf.” Military sources said that there was no evidence the missiles were about to be fired, although American and British government officials continued to maintain for more than a year afterwards that pilots responded only to specific threats against their aircraft. In an article in The Independent on 7 August 2000, for instance, Foreign Office minister Peter Hain—the same Peter Hain who had condemned Halliday and von Sponeck for their outspoken criticism of UN sanctions—wrote that “there have been about 850 direct threats against our aircrew in the past year and a half, including missile attacks and heavy anti-aircraft fire. Our pilots have taken action only to defend themselves against this kind of attack” (my emphasis).

This was obviously untrue. But by attacking Iraq every day while issuing only routine information about the targets, American and British officials had also ensured that their salami bombardment attracted little or no interest in the press; newspapers now frequently carried little more than four lines about air-strikes that would have captured front-page headlines a year earlier. Only when U.S. missiles hit civilian areas was the mildest criticism heard. Often, these attacks turned out to be even more bloody than the Iraqis admitted at the time. When an American AGM-130 missile exploded in a Basra housing complex, initial reports spoke of eleven civilian casualties, although a total of sixteen died on that day and almost a hundred were wounded. Von Sponeck, who was still the UN humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad at the time, stated that two missiles hit civilian areas 30 kilometres apart, the first in Basra—where a woman and five children were among the dead—and the second in the village of Abu Khassib, where five women and five children were killed. In other words, most of the victims were children; a Pentagon spokesman later admitted the Basra attack, responding to the casualties with the words: “I want to repeat that we are not targeting civilians.”

The 1999 air offensive had begun at the New Year with five American attacks in two weeks and was followed on 11 January when U.S. aircraft attacked Iraqi missile sites from air bases in Turkey. Almost daily air raids continued to the end of January, by which time British fighter-bombers were joining U.S. planes in the attacks. On 31 January, eight British and American jets were bombing “communications facilities” in southern Iraq. A statement from the Americans on 4 February that U.S. and British planes had by then destroyed forty missile batteries—adding that this alone caused greater damage than was caused to Iraq in the whole December air bombardment—passed without comment. Neither Washington nor London explained whether the attacks had UN backing—they did not—and a warning by Britain’s socialist elder statesman, Tony Benn, went unheeded.

On 11 February, General Sir Michael Rose, Britain’s former UN force commander in Bosnia, condemned the offensive in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute. “The continual TV images of the West’s high-technology systems causing death and destruction to people in the Third World will not be tolerated for ever by civilised people,” he said. But his remarks were largely ignored. Instead, U.S. officials continued their fruitless attempts to form a united Iraqi opposition to Saddam and to seek Arab support for their plans. By declaring the Western “nofly ” zones invalid—which they were in international law—Saddam could encourage his air defences to fire at U.S. and British aircraft. He even offered a reward of $14,000 for ground-to-air missile crews who shot down raiding aircraft. It went unclaimed; Iraq’s air defence batteries were hopelessly inferior to American and British technology.

Yet still this near-secret war went on. In Baghdad, six more civilian deaths were announced—one in an air raid near Najaf on 10 February 1999, and five more, with twenty-two wounded, in southern Iraq five days later. After The Independentpublished the details of this war-by-disinterest, I continued my trawl through the daily Arab press. On 22 February, for example, it was reported that U.S. and British jets had attacked an Iraqi missile site and two communications bases near Amara and Tallil. On 1 March, American jets dropped more than thirty 2,000-pound and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on radio relay sites, “communications targets and air defence guns” in northern Iraq. Defence Secretary Cohen said the same day that U.S. pilots had been given “greater flexibility” in their attacks. When an air raid disrupted Iraqi oil exports to Turkey, the executive director of the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme, Benon Sevan, complained that there was already a $900 million shortfall between expected revenues and what was needed to fund the humanitarian programme under sanctions, and that continued raids could frustrate efforts to supply food and medicines to Iraqi civilians. Like Benn and Rose, he was ignored.

But Arab press reports on the U.S. and British attacks proved that Rose’s warnings were accurate. Even Qatar, a long-standing ally of Washington, opposed the campaign. “We do not wish to see Iraq bombed daily or these attacks which are being made on the no-fly zones,” Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, told Cohen on 9 March. Esmat Abdul-Meguid, the Arab League secretary general, demanded an end to the air raids. The Kosovo war—in which both the Americans and the British could take on the role of protector of Muslims— further helped to smother the Iraq war. On 2 April, the Iraqis stated that aircraft had destroyed a control centre at the oil-pumping station at Mina al-Bakr.

There was no end to this. On 6 April, the Pentagon announced a joint Anglo-American attack on a surface-to-air missile battery near Faysaliyah. Three civilians were reported killed in raids in Iraqi Kurdistan on 8 May, another twelve killed in Mosul five days later. And so it went on. By August 1999, even The New York Times had noticed that an Iraqi shooting war was continuing behind the backs of the American public, reporting on 13 August that American and British pilots had fired more than 1,100 missiles against 359 targets in the previous eight months, flying about two-thirds as many missions as NATO pilots conducted over Yugoslavia during the seventy-eight-day bombardment that spring. And the response to all this from the State Department? Spokesman James Rubin said that “ultimately responsibility for these events . . . lies with Saddam Hussein.”

Throughout the year, the Americans and British continued to nibble away at Iraq’s infrastructure and what was left of its defences, a war of attrition whose regularity had reduced the almost daily raids to a non-story. But not in the Arab world. Newspapers throughout the Gulf damned the assault with equal regularity; Saudi officials privately noted that the air bombardment was causing increasing fury among the young and more religious citizens of the kingdom. General Rose had warned that this violence would not be “tolerated for ever.” Yet how would the Arabs respond? What weapons did they have in their arsenal to redress the imbalance of power between East and West, save for the planes and tanks we sold their dictators to increase our own wealth?

THERE WAS ONE FINAL SCOURGE to be visited upon the Iraqi people, however, a foul cocktail in which both our gunfire and our sanctions played an intimate, horrific role, one that would contaminate Iraqis for years to come, perhaps for generations. In historical terms, it may one day be identified as our most callous crime against the Middle East, against Arabs, against children. It manifested itself in abscesses, in massive tumours, in gangrene, internal bleeding and child mastectomies and shrunken heads and deformities and thousands of tiny graves.

I first heard that Iraqis might be suffering from a strange new cancer “epidemic” while visiting the Syrian capital of Damascus in the summer of 1997. An Iraqi opposition leader, a Shiite cleric who made his way to Iran after the failed Shiite uprising of 1991 and had then travelled to Syria, told me that Iraqi ex-soldiers seeking refuge in camps in southern Iran were being diagnosed with an unusual number of cancers; most had fought in the 1991 tank battles south-west of Basra, their armour struck repeatedly by American depleted-uranium shells. The cleric spoke, too, of Iraqi children in the Iranian camps who had also fallen ill. If this was true—and these children would also have come from southern Iraq—then what was the state of health of children in Basra today? What were these mysterious cancers?

When I arrived in Baghdad in early 1998, I was confronted almost at once by unexpected cases of cancer. An Iraqi family I had known for years had lost three of its members to leukaemia in two years. The family had a history of smoking. But the middle-aged lady who greeted me at the door was, unusually for her, wearing a scarf over her head. She had just been diagnosed with cancer—and she had never smoked. Then there was the government official whose two children had just been sent to hospital with an unknown lung complaint—which subsequently turned out to be cancer. Another Iraqi acquaintance told me of a neighbour’s baby that developed a “shining” in one of her eyes. Doctors had taken the eye out so that the cancer should not spread.

It took several days before I grasped what this meant: that something terrible might have happened towards the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Some Iraqis blamed the oil fires which had burned during and after the war, releasing curtains of smoke that hung over the country for weeks, producing a carcinogenic smog over Baghdad and other large cities. Others suspected that Saddam’s bomb-blasted chemical weapons factories might be to blame. But increasingly, we found that those most at risk came from areas where allied aircraft—and in the far south, tanks—had used large quantities of depleted-uranium munitions. DU shells are made from the waste product of the nuclear industry, a hard alloy that is tougher than tungsten and that ignites into an aerosol uranium “spray” after punching through the armour of tanks and personnel carriers. As I expected, the Americans and the British maintained that these munitions could not be the cause of cancer.

This was not an easy story to investigate. Unlike bomb fragments with their tell-tale computerised codes, DU munitions—while easy to identify because they left a penetrator “head” in or near their target—could not be physically linked to the leukaemias afflicting so many thousands of Iraqis, other than by a careful analysis of the location of these cancer “explosions” and interviews with dozens of patients. Some of the children I spoke to, for example, were not even born in 1991; but invariably, I would find that their fathers or mothers had been close to allied air or tank attacks. There was another difficulty in reporting this story which I and my colleagues, Lara Marlowe, now of the Irish Times , and Alex Thomson of Britain’s Channel 4 television—who worked with me on my first investigation—encountered the moment we visited Iraq’s dilapidated and often dirty hospitals.

Cancer wards are shocking, child cancer wards more so, places that should not—if life and youth have meaning—exist on this earth. But child cancer wards for those who die from the diseases of war are an abomination. For what slowly became evident was that an unknown chemical plague was spreading across southern Mesopotamia, a nightmare trail of leukaemia and stomach cancer that was claiming the lives of thousands of Iraqi children as well as adults living near the war zones of the 1991 Gulf conflict.

They smiled as they were dying, these children. Ali Hillal was eight when I met him in the Mansour hospital in Baghdad. He lived next to a television station and several factories at Diyala, repeatedly bombed by allied aircraft. He was the fifth child of a family that had no history of cancers. Now he had a tumour in his brain. Dr. Ali Ismael recalled how malnourished the little boy was when he first arrived at the hospital. “First he had the mumps, then he had swelling in his chest and abdomen,” he said. “Now the tumour has reached his brain. When the condition reaches this point, the prognosis is very poor.” Ali Hillal’s mother, Fatima, recalled the bombings. “There was a strange smell, a burning, choking smell, something like insecticide,” she told me. “Yesterday, he had a very severe headache,” Dr. Ismael said, smiling at the child. “He was screaming. When I gave him an injection between his vertebrae, he told me he knew the pain of the needle, but that he would be very quiet because he knows I want what is best for him.”

Latif Abdul Sattar was playing with a small electric car when I first caught sight of him. His smile, beneath the dome of his baldness, suggested life. But he would die.¹⁵⁹

I walked with Dr. Ismael on his morning rounds. Youssef Abdul Raouf Mohamed from Kerbala—close to military bases bombed in 1991—has gastrointestinal bleeding. He still has his curly hair and can talk to his parents but has small blood spots on his cheeks, a sure sign of internal bleeding. And Dr. Ismael is bothered by a memory. “Since the UN embargo, patients often die before they can even receive induction treatment,” he says, looking at the floor because he knows his story is going to be a terrible one. “They get thrombocytopenia, a severe reduction of blood platelets. They start bleeding everywhere. We had another child like Youssef. He was called Ahmed Fleah. And after we started the cytotoxin treatment, he started bleeding freely from everywhere—from his mouth, eyes, ears, nose, rectum. He bled to death in two weeks.”

Dr. Ismael, who is resident doctor in the cancer ward, sat down in his office, staring in front of him. “When Faisal Abbas died two days ago, I came here, closed the door, sat down and cried,” he said. “I gave drugs to him from my own hands. He was like a brother to me. He was only ten years old. He was diagnosed with leukaemia three years ago and we treated him with drugs—he received treatment, but it was only partial because we lack so many drugs.”

Dr. Ismael blamed the sanctions, of course, for blocking the medicines; and he blamed the 1991 war for turning his paediatric cancer ward into a way-station for dying children, for the infants who—given their first medicines—bleed to death in front of the doctors. “In three years, I have seen hundreds of children with leukaemia and last year there was a dramatic increase,” Dr. Ismael said. “This month we diagnosed twenty new cases, mostly from the south—from Basra, Nasiriyah, Kerbala and Najaf. It’s mainly caused by radiation.” The doctors here had an odd way of expressing themselves, in a kind of scientific-emotional grammar. “We have palliative treatment but not curative treatment,” one of them said.

When I walk into the child cancer ward across the hall, I understand what this means. Little Samar Khdair lies in what the doctors quite casually call the “ward of death.” She is only five years old but looks much younger, lying shrivelled on her bed, her eyes squeezed shut with pain, her large, unwieldy father—massive in his grey galabiya robe amid such frailty and pain—gently placing a damp yellow compress on her face. She comes from al-Yussfiya on the road to Babylon, the target of regular allied raids in February 1991.

Samar’s father, Jaber, looks poor because he is. He spent 15,000 dinars to buy cytotoxins for his dying daughter—more than three months’ wages for Jaber. “I sold my car to buy the medicine for her,” he tells me quietly. And how would he pay for the next dose? we ask. “I will borrow the money.” Dr. Ismael listens in silence, then he says to me in English: “I’ve seen these patients’ families so many times. They sell everything in their house, even their beds—and then their child dies anyway.”

You could not move through Baghdad’s “ward of death” without two emotions—a deep sense of unease, even shame, that “our” 1991 military victory over the cruel Saddam might well have created this purgatory of the innocent by poisoning both the air they breathe and the land they try to grow up in; and a profound admiration for the dignity of the poor Iraqis who sometimes sell their own clothes in a vain effort to save the children who die in their arms. And no one could remain unaffected by the bravery of the victims.

Dr. Selma al-Haddad is the kind of doctor whom you would select for your own terminal illness. My notes, scribbled in near-incredulity into my pocketbook that year, fill dozens of pages. In the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre in Baghdad—it is necessary to adopt a semantic amnesia with the names of so many institutions in Iraq—Dr. al-Haddad cuddles the children who she knows will soon die. She jokes with thirteen-year-old Karrar Abdul-Emir, who is frightened of his own leukaemia but too frightened to take the drugs which may save him. She introduces me to each child by name without ever looking at the chart at the bottom of the beds to check their identity. “Now here is Cherou Jassem and she has put on a party dress for you to take her picture,” Dr. al-Haddad laughs.

And the beautiful girl in the sun bonnet—her name means “budding rose” and she has acute myloblastic leukaemia—smiles with delight. Amna Ahmed sits, bald, radiant, a kind of tranquillity about her baby face, framed in my camera lens by the electric fan that cools her fever. The machine, fighting the heat of the Baghdad afternoon, becomes a kind of halo round her head, an angel from Babylon who is dying of an abdominal mass. “Yes, of course I’m depressed and frustrated,” Dr. al-Haddad says. “I can’t save many of these children—but what can I do? I have a sense of responsibility towards these poor children. Most times, I feel helpless.” She asks if I will send the copies of my photographs of the children to Baghdad as soon as I can. In a month or two, Amna may well be dead. Cherou too. Dr. al-Haddad wants them to see my photographs before they die.

What was one to make of the words of mothers and fathers standing by the beds of their dying children? Seven-year-old Youssef Mohamed, a handsome little boy in a blue-and-white pyjama top—unrelated to the child from Kerbala—has acute leukaemia and his mother, Hassiba, thinks she knows why. “There was a military base near our home in Baghdad,” she says. “It was bombed heavily by the Americans, also the local telephone exchange. We felt ill with the choking smoke at the time. I already had a healthy child, born before the war. But when I became pregnant after the war, I had a miscarriage. Then I had Youssef, who has leukaemia, then another miscarriage. Why should this have happened to me? My brother-in-law, Abdul-Kadem Mooushed, died of leukaemia two years after the war. He had been a soldier; he was only thirty-six. How could my family—which never had a history of cancer—suddenly suffer like this?”

Ashwark Hamid is thirteen, with acute leukaemia, a quiet, gentle-faced girl in a yellow patterned scarf. She needs a bone marrow transplant—for which there is no hope in Iraq. Her grandmother Jasmiya sits on her bed. “We are from Diyala in eastern Iraq,” she says. “The bombing was very near to us—the airport and the agricultural factory was heavily bombed. We smelled strange fumes, like the smell of gas.” What, one wondered, was the “agricultural” factory making? Pesticides or gas? Or what were the American or British bombs made of?

Oulah Falah is four, born four years after the Gulf conflict, and has a kidney tumour; her father was a soldier in the 1991 war—there are many rumours in Baghdad that Iraqi veterans are dying in large numbers from cancer—and her mother, Fatin, still shakes her head at her daughter’s fate. “Still I am surprised why my child got cancer,” she says. A few feet away, Dhamia Qassem is in critical condition after suffering heart failure during recent treatment for acute leukaemia. She is thirteen. Mysteriously, her aunt died of cancer only forty days ago. The aunt was just thirty-six years old. Ahmed Walid’s case is much more disturbing.

He was diagnosed as having chronic myeloid leukaemia just three years ago and was only a baby during the bombing of his home town in Diyala. But his mother tells a frightening story. “We all smelled the strange fumes after the bombing and then the children round about started bringing in pieces of rockets and shells as souvenirs. They were very bright—a light, bright silver colour—and they played with them in our house. A neighbour of ours was killed when a rocket hit his farm and the children brought big iron pieces of the rocket into our home.”

One evening, after spending ten hours in the children’s “ward of death” in Baghdad, I visit the Iraqi government’s press centre where the Western agency journalists are filing their latest reports on the negotiations between Kofi Annan and Saddam. I walk through the shabby hall to the AP office, a rectangular booth with hardboard walls, and tell a long-standing American colleague and friend what I have been discovering. He listens patiently, recalls the Iraqi “empty coffin propaganda” and gives me his slightly irritated response. “Robert,” he says. “I am not writing Iraqi babystories!” But what I am hearing is unending, consistent and undoubtedly true, since the often uneducated parents do not know I am going to visit their children, let alone ask about the 1991 war. Again and again, I hear the same thing.

Tareq Abdullah is thirteen, again with acute leukaemia. He himself tells me how neighbours “brought bright pieces of bombs into our home. They were very heavy, like iron.” Tareq was diagnosed just a year ago. Karrar Abdul-Emir, the boy even more frightened of the drugs that may save him than he is of his own leukaemia, comes from Kerbala in southern Iraq. His mother, Ihlass, remembers the bombs falling close to their home. “Some scattered pieces fell nearby. I tried to find them and they were very sharp, like razor blades. I didn’t allow the children to touch them in case they cut themselves. There was a very harsh smell; it made our eyes swell.” Rasha Abbas from Basra has leukaemia, fifteen years old with a fever and a declining blood count, with mouth lesions, unable to talk, her father a fatality in the earlier Iran–Iraq War. “In 1991,” her mother, Hasna, tells me—slowly, wondering what happened to her family—“our house was bombed. It burned and the explosion ruptured Rasha’s ears. Pieces of rocket came right into our house. All the children were running to touch these pieces . . .”

Of course, children were not the only victims, in Baghdad or in the south of Iraq. In the corner of the cancer ward at the Basra teaching hospital, the wreckage of Matar Abbas’s emaciated body seems to mock the broad, blue Shatt al-Arab outside the window. He has already lost an eye and is hawking mucus into a handkerchief, his scarf slipping from his head to reveal the baldness of chemotherapy treatment, part of his face horribly deformed by the cancer that is now eating into his brain. He comes from Nasiriyah, the city whose outskirts were shelled and bombed by the allied forces in the last days of the 1991 war.

His wife, Ghaniyeh, is a peasant woman with tattoos on her face, and stayed throughout the war with Matar—a sixty-year-old former taxi-driver with nine children—on the road between Amara and Misan. “We saw the flashes of the bombs but nothing was bombed near us,” she recalls for me, speaking carefully, as if her memory might somehow save her doomed husband. “We were safe.” But Dr. Jawad Khadim al-Ali, a member of the Royal College of Physicians, begs to disagree. “We rarely saw these types of tumours before the war,” he says, gently touching Matar’s right ear. Dr. al-Ali smiles a lot, although—from time to time— you notice tears in his eyes and realise that he might also be a spiritually broken man. He looks a little like Peter Sellers, physically small with thinning hair and a drooping moustache. But there is nothing funny about his commentary.

“Because of the tumour in his ear, Matar Abbas is now unable to talk or take food and is deaf,” he said. “He came for his first treatment only on January sixteenth, with a swelling and an inability to talk or drink. The biopsy showed cancer. I am giving him cytotoxic chemotherapy—but later on, the cancer will go to his brain and lungs. He will probably live one year, not more.” The doctor leads me across the room to where Zubeida Mohamed Ali lies, chadored, on her bed. She comes from Zubayr—close to the Iraqi air base that was saturated with allied bombs in a series of raids that started on the night of 13 February 1991. “She has tumours of the lymph nodes and they have infiltrated her chest,” Dr. al-Ali says. “She is suffering shortness of breath.” Zubeida is seventy.

Opposite lies fifty-five-year-old Jawad Hassan, diagnosed with cancer of the stomach two years ago. He lived very close to the Basra television station that was the target of allied bombing. “He was exposed to fumes and bombs at his home,” Dr. al-Ali continues. “He was also close to the river bridges that were bombed. He is losing weight despite our treatment, which makes his prognosis very bad.” The man, prematurely aged, looks at me with a blank expression. “Ever since I was exposed to the fumes of the bombings,” he says, “I complained about pains in my abdomen.”

The implications of what these cancer victims were saying were so terrible that I almost wished my visit had been the result of a feeble attempt by the authorities to set up a visiting journalist with an easy-to-expose lie, a crude attempt by Saddam’s regime to raise a grave moral question over the entire 1991 war. But again, Dr. al-Ali had no idea I was visiting him until the moment I walked into his Basra office. His patients did not expect visitors. And if some of them were—like so many cancer victims elsewhere in the world—elderly, what was to be made of the flock of men and women, young and old, who were waiting outside his oncology department when I arrived? “It’s a tragedy for me,” Dr. al-Ali said, pointing to a tall, handsome youth standing amid a group of women. “I’m losing friends every day—this boy has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This girl is suffering lung cancer.” She was small, petite, with a big, smiling, moon-like face. Another, Fawzia Abdul-Nabi al Bader, was a fifty-one-year-old English teacher who walked into the department office and pulled her collar down to show a suture on her neck and then opened her blouse to show the scar where her right breast should have been. “Why should this have happened to me?” she asked. “My first operation was in 1993. Until then, my health was very good.”

In his office, Dr. al-Ali’s maps tell their own story: “Number of cancer patients of all kinds in the Basra area,” it says over a map of the Basra governorate, sliced up into yellow, red and green segments. The yellow, mainly to the west of the city, represents the rural and desert areas that were battlefields in 1991. A green area to the north indicates an average incidence of cancer. But a large blood-red rectangle in the centre stands for the almost 400 cancer patients whom Dr. al-Ali had to treat in 1997. It is his thesis that the old Gulf War battlefields in the yellow area to the west contaminated the water, the fields, even the fish with depleted uranium and nitrate, contaminating the land not only for survivors of the war but for those still unborn.

Back in the last days of the conflict, U.S. strategists were debating whether the damage to Iraq’s infrastructure—the bombing of water pipes, power plants and oil refineries—would take the lives of Iraqis in the months or years to come. But never did they publicly suggest that a policy of bomb now, die later would ever involve cancer. Many of the hundreds of children in Baghdad who have died of leukaemia and stomach cancer since the war came from the south and were sent north by Dr. al-Ali. “Every one of us is in despair,” he said. “It is a great burden on me—I am losing many of these patients every day. They need bone marrow transplants but we cannot give these to them. I cannot sleep at night for thinking about them.”

Armed with one of Dr. al-Ali’s cancer cluster maps, Lara, Alex and I drive south of Basra, back to those fields in which the last tank battles of the 1991 war were fought. We travel with a goon from the Ministry of Information, a “minder,” but a man who has long ago been suborned by us, who is now paid more by us in a day than he earns from the ministry in a month. When we need to travel somewhere that might not be permitted—or when we wish to ask something that might not meet with the ministry’s approval—he suffers a cold and returns to his hotel or moves to the other side of the room. But we need him south of Basra, an Iraqi military area which overlaps with the operational area of the UN’s frontier peacekeeping force.

I had always thought that the last battles of the 1991 Gulf conflict were fought in the desert, in the thick sand of northern Iraq which tormented us in February 1991. But the countryside through which we are driving is pasture-land. There are streams and cows grazing, fields of vegetables and—scattered amid this bucolic landscape—the burned-out hulks of Iraqi tanks. Some had exploded into pieces, bent iron that was now lying in ditches or half buried in the earth. Others are remarkably intact, their gun barrels still pointing south and west towards the American enemies that destroyed them.

We drive on for another 15 kilometres. At first glance, the Adwan family’s tomato plantation doesn’t look like a killing field. The polythene covers reflect the high, bright winter sun. And when I ask sixteen-year-old Imad Adwan what happened here during the Gulf War, he glances at the man from the Ministry of Information beside me and says he cannot remember. It pays, you see, to have a short memory in Iraq—and to lie. As water trickles through the ditches between the rows of pale green bushes, a sharp wind blows out of the desert to the west, just as it did in February 1991 when Major General Tom Rhame’s U.S. 1st Infantry Division—the “Big Red One”—swept up the highway to Safwan, shelling the retreating columns of the Iraqi Republican Guard with DU rounds. Imad Adwan is watching me to see if I have understood his amnesia.

“Don’t worry,” the ministry man says, and produces an identity card. The boy grins. “The battles were all around us here—we didn’t even stay in the house because we knew it would not give us cover. But we didn’t leave. The wrecked tanks are over there.” Far beyond the barbed wire surrounding the farm, beyond a stand of trees and another plantation, the rusting victims of General Rhame’s attack are settled deep in the damp earth. Imad’s mother has appeared beside us, a scarf around her head, a black dress tugged by the breeze. She is holding a pale green tomato in her hand. “Please,” she says. “It is for you.”

The tomato is small, plucked from the bush in front of us, a poisoned fruit— according to the Basra doctors—from a poisonous war, grown on a dangerous stem, bathed in foetid water. “The soldiers died on this road,” she says, gesturing towards the highway behind us which leads south-west towards Safwan and the new Kuwaiti frontier. “The battles went on for hours. People still get killed—two boys were blown up by mines over there last July.” The outline of a collapsed trench shows the fatal spot. But it is other deaths that we have come about. Are the Adwans worried about their land? Do they know what the doctors say about it? Imad’s mother has heard of cancer cases in the farmlands but none in her family.

It is then that Hassan Salman walks up to us. He grows tomatoes and onions on the other side of the road. He has a distinguished face, brown from the sun, and is wearing a gold-fringed robe. When we mention cancer, he frowns. “Yes, we have had many cancer cases here,” he says. “I think it happened because of the fires and what happened during the battles. The tanks were just down the road.” He pauses. “My daughter-in-law died of cancer around fifty days ago. She was ill in the stomach. Her name was Amal Hassan Saleh. She was very young—she was just twenty-one years old.”

Official Western government reaction to the growing signs of DU contamination was pitiful. When I first reported from Iraq’s child cancer wards in February and March 1998, the British government went to great lengths to discredit what I wrote. I still treasure a sarcastic letter from Lord Gilbert at the Ministry of Defence, who told Independent readers that my account of a possible link between DU ammunition and increased Iraqi child cancer cases would—“coming from anyone other than Robert Fisk”—be regarded as “a wilful perversion of reality.” According to his Lordship, particles from the DU-hardened warheads—used against tank armour—are extremely small, rapidly diluted and dispersed by the weather and “become difficult to detect, even with the most sophisticated monitoring equipment.” Now I have to say that over the months, I had gathered enough evidence to suggest that—had this letter come from anyone other than his Lordship—its implications would be mendacious as well as misleading.

So let’s start with a far more eloquent—and accurate—letter sent to the Royal Ordnance in London on 21 April 1991 by Paddy Bartholomew, business development manager of AEA Technology, the trading name for the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Mr. Bartholomew’s letter, of which I obtained a copy—I called him later and he confirmed he was the author, but would make no other comment— refers to a telephone conversation with a Royal Ordnance official called J. Y. Sanders on the dangers of the possible contamination of Kuwait by depleted-uranium ammunition. In an accompanying “threat paper,” Mr. Bartholomew notes that while the hazards caused by the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination of these weapons “are small when compared to those during a war,” they nonetheless “can become a long-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are a risk to both the military and the civilian population” (my emphasis). The document, marked “UK Restricted,” goes on to say that “U.S. tanks fired 5,000 DU rounds, U.S. aircraft many 10s of thousands and UK tanks a small number of DU rounds. The tank ammunition alone will amount to greater than 50,000 lbs of DU . . . if the tank inventory of DU was inhaled, the latest International Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor . . . calculates 500,000 potential deaths” (again, my emphasis).

Mr. Bartholomew added in his 1991 paper that while “this theoretical figure is not realistic, however it does indicate a significant problem.” And he continues:

The DU will spread around the battlefield and target vehicles in various sizes and quantities . . . it would be unwise for people to stay close to large quantities of DU for long periods and this would obviously be of concern to the local population if they collect this heavy metal and keep it. There will be specific areas in which many rounds will have been fired where localised contamination of vehicles and the soil may exceed permissible limits and these could be hazardous to both clean up teams and the local population.

Mr. Bartholomew’s covering letter says that the contamination of Kuwait is “emotive and thus must be dealt with in a sensitive manner,” adding that the AEA’s regional marketing director (Alastair Parker) might send a copy of the “threat paper” to the UK ambassador in Kuwait. AEA Technology could “clean up” the depleted uranium under a contract with the Kuwait government. Needless to say, no one had bothered to suggest a clean-up in Iraq, where so many children were dying of unexplained cancers. Why not? And why did Lord Gilbert write his extraordinary and deeply misleading letter to The Independent in March of 1998? Here’s a clue. It comes in a letter dated 21 March 1991, from a U.S. lieutenant colonel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to a Major Larson at the organisation’s “Studies and Analysis Branch” and states that:

There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. If DU penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed) through Service/DOD [Department of Defense] proponency. If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability.

So there it is. Shorn of the colonel’s execrable English, the message is simple: the health risks of DU ammunition are acceptable until we—the West—invent something even more lethal to take its place. No wonder, then, that an official British government review of the UK’s Ministry of Defence radioactive waste management at the British firing range for DU ammunition in the Lake District in December 1997 detailed the extraordinary lengths taken to protect local British villages. They included firing shells into tunnels with a filtered extract system, pressure-washing the surfaces and sealing up the contaminated residues in cemented drums. Lord Gilbert did not tell Independent readers about that in his letter to the paper. So much for the “wilful perversion of reality.”¹⁶⁰

If governments did not care about the Iraqi children, however, British people did. The Independent launched an appeal for the medicines these children so desperately needed, and within weeks our generous readers had donated more than $250,000 for us to buy cancer drugs and medical equipment to take to Iraq. At last, it seemed, we could do something, rather than just write angry articles about the plight of these pariah children. But could we? Were we going to save lives, or merely prolong suffering?

It was mundane work. In October 1998 we employed refuse carts and a squad of sweating Iraqis to heave our boxes of medicinal supplies from a refrigerated truck that we had backed into the broken loading bay of a Baghdad hospital; across town at the Mansour hospital, we had to use a stretcher to transport the 5,185 kilograms of medicine, stuffing the painfully expensive vincristine into the director’s personal fridge. It was a bit of an anticlimax, until I saw the children in the wards upstairs. Weeping with pain or smiling in innocence of their fate, the cancer children of Iraq—in Mosul and Basra as well as Baghdad—were at last receiving help. “Have you brought something for me?” a little girl asked as a doctor told her that all the drugs must be shared equally.

In one corner of the Mansour cancer ward, Hebba Mortaba lay in a patterned blue dress, a hideous tumour distorting her tiny figure. When her mother lifted the dress, her terribly swollen abdomen displayed numerous abscesses. Doctors had already surgically removed an earlier abdominal mass—only to find, alien-like, that another grew in its place. During the 1991 war, Hebba’s suburb of Basra was bombed so heavily that her family fled to Baghdad. She was now just nine years old and, so her doctors told me gently, would not live to see her tenth birthday.

Given UN sanctions and then Saddam Hussein’s own ban on medicine imports, it was in truth something of a miracle that our truck made it across the Iraqi desert, finally shepherded around the country’s hospitals by CARE’s two indomitable Iraqi representatives, Margaret Hassan and Judy Morgan. The UN at first fulminated about the length of time that it might take to clear our medicines through the sanctions commission—until we told them that we would take the medicines whether they liked it or not, at which point, on 15 June, clearance was given in twenty-four hours. The office of the Iraqi president was almost equally obtuse, delaying and prevaricating and ignoring our shipment request until September, when Saddam Hussein gave his personal approval—another example of that disturbing coincidence of intention between the West and the dictator in Baghdad.

“The members of the [Security Council] Committee have no objection to the sending of the specified items . . .” the UN’s pompous letter had concluded, as if they were doing us a favour. The documentation at the UN accurately referred to the medical payment as “readers donations fromIndependent newspaper.” But the fifty-eight cartons and boxes, flown from Heathrow to Amman by Royal Jordanian Airlines and then trucked the 800 kilometres to Baghdad by Iraqi driver Rahman Jassem Mohamed—cloxacillin and ampicillin vials, cytarabine and vincristine, methotrexate and dexamethasone ampoules and syringes and gloves and blood solutions—were successfully distributed to children’s hospitals across Iraq.

But were we in time? The truth should be told. Most of the children whose suffering I had recounted were already dead—even the boy whose portrait became the symbol and logo of The Independent’s appeal. I had taken a photograph of Latif Sattar from Babylon, the five-year-old with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who was playing with a toy car and smiling beneath the bald dome of his head when I met him the previous February. I took his picture close-up as he lay on his bed in a knitted pullover, his eyes staring at me. But the records of the paediatric hospital in Baghdad show that he died on 7 April 1998. Then there was leukaemia victim Samar Khdair, the beautiful girl whose photograph appeared in my paper the day after Latif’s. She was the child who lay in her nightie, her father pressing a yellow compress to her forehead, her eyes squeezed shut with pain. Again, the hospital file provided no comfort. It recorded how Samar suffered a relapse through lack of drugs and blood products. But she fought on—only to die on 20 September 1998, just days before the drugs paid for by our readers arrived in Baghdad.

Most of the tiny children I was now seeing in Iraq would die too. “When the cancers reach this stage, there is not much we can do,” Dr. al-Ali told me frankly when I reached Basra and talked to him again. “But you must understand what your people have done—they have helped to prolong these small lives, and to improve the quality of life of these children. They are going to die in one month, two months, two years . . . Yes, perhaps a few will live . . . believe me, it is worth bringing your drugs here.” I go on scribbling the names of the soon-to-be-dead in my notebook. Nour Shehab and Halah Saleh are ten and Haitham Ahmed is eight. Tiba Favel is only eighteen months old. Moustapha Jaber is eight and Dhamia Qassem is thirteen. All have acute leukaemia except for Moustapha, who has lymphoma.

It was impossible to visit these cancer wards again without a feeling of great indignation. Even now, when the children had the drugs they needed for leukaemia, blood platelets for them were not being made fast enough in Iraq because the machine that separated the blood needed maintenance. UN sanctions had broken the back of the hospital system. We in the West—we, in the most literal sense of the word—were responsible for all this, we who accepted the UN sanctions against Iraq, the sanctions that were clearly killing these children and that, equally clearly, were not harming Saddam Hussein. But there was also reason for exasperation.

For although the U.S. and British administrations understandably tried to keep the two groups of victims separate, the American and British soldiers suffering from what had become known as Gulf War Syndrome appeared to be suffering from almost identical cancers and leukaemia and internal bleeding as the children of Iraq. The explosion of cancers in Iraq largely affected the Shiite community, and it was therefore no surprise that, seven years after the war, Saddam Hussein’s regime had made no mention of it—yet again, Clinton, Blair and Saddam had made common cause in a total failure to explain the calamity. But even as I was touring the cancer wards of Basra and Baghdad, Tony Flint, the acting chairman of the British Gulf Veterans’ and Families’ Association, was warning that the very same DU shells could be responsible for cancers that had so far killed at least thirty British veterans. A day later, the American National Gulf War Resource Center, a coalition of U.S. veterans’ groups, announced that as many as 40,000 American servicemen might have been exposed to depleted uranium dust on the battlefield.

In October 1998, Phil Garner telephoned me to ask how he could make contact with the doctors treating Iraq’s child cancer victims. He had been reading my reports on the growing evidence of links between cancers and depleted uranium shells. During the 1991 Gulf War, Garner was in the British Royal Army Medical Corps. He wasn’t in the front lines, but he handled the uniforms of Britain’s “friendly fire” casualties, men who were accidentally attacked by U.S. aircraft that were using depleted-uranium rounds. And now he was suffering from asthma, incontinence, pain in the intestines, and had a lump on the right side of his neck. What does this mean? I knew all about these lumps. I had seen them on the necks of the Iraqi children.

In Basra again, I watch the anguish of a parent. “Oxygen, for God’s sake get some oxygen—my son is dying.” It is an almost animal wail from the man on the staircase of the paediatric hospital, tears running from his eyes, shaking uncontrollably. In the small room at the top of the stairs, his son, Yahyia Salman, is crying with fear, desperate to breathe. A leukaemia relapse—especially in the sulphurous heat of southern Iraq—is a thing of panic. “Stop shouting, we have another oxygen bottle,” Dr. Jenane Khaleb admonishes the father, pursing her lips with a mixture of irritation and concern. But the man will not be consoled. “My God, what am I going to do?” he cries as a technician with a ratchet begins to unscrew the top of another massive, dented black oxygen bottle. The little boy’s eyes move across the room, towards the doctor, towards me and his father. This is not the moment to tell the child that his hospital now has all the drugs it needs for leukaemia. The boxes of vincristine and vials of cefuroxine, ampoules of metoclopramide, of surgical gloves and syringes arrived less than twenty-four hours ago. But Yahyia Salman has gone a long way down the road towards death.

So has two-year-old Youssef Qassem in the next room and Halah Saleh who, just ten years old, is suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The doctors show me these children with infinite weariness, and I can understand why. They have received so many visitors and so many promises of help. At least ours was honoured. Dr. Khaleb asks, very carefully, if the Basra hospital received the same amount of drugs as other hospitals in Baghdad and Mosul. I understand the purpose of her question: it was the Shiites here in the south who rose against the Iraqi government in 1991 and there are those in Baghdad who have never forgiven them.

Dr. Khaleb says nothing of this. Yes, I insist, The Independent ’s medicines were pre-packed before leaving Heathrow to ensure that every area of Iraq received an equal share. And she smiles as she reads through the drug manifest which I have brought with me. It is the first smile I have seen on this trip to Basra. For the doctors here are overwhelmed as much by the implications of their discoveries as they are by lack of medicine. The increase in child cancer in these southern provinces—it is now October 1998—is in places reaching ferocious heights.

While in some areas an average of only 3.9 children in every 100,000 are suffering from cancer, the districts of Harthe and Gurne now produce statistics of 71.8 and 41.8 respectively. There was heavy bombing in these suburbs in 1991 and the words “depleted uranium” are heard in every ward; even the parents now know the meaning of the phrase. Dr. Jawad al-Ali is stupefied. “I don’t know how to explain the implications of this to you but I am now seeing terrible things,” he said. “One of our medical students who has just graduated, Zeineddin Kadam, has cancer and he will die in a few days. The wife of one of our orthopaedic surgeons died just a week after a diagnosis of acute leukaemia—she died less than a month ago when she thought she merely had an appendix problem. They found part of her small intestine was gangrenous.”

Dr. al-Ali opens another thick file of notes. “Of fifteen cancer patients from one area, I have only two left. I am receiving children with cancer of the bone— this is incredible. I have just received a fifteen-year-old girl, Zeinab Manwar, with leukaemia—she will live only a year. My God, I have performed mastectomies on two girls with cancer of the breast—one of them was only fourteen years old—this is unheard of!”

Dr. Akram Hammoud, director of the paediatric hospital, is no less appalled. “Almost all the children here will die in a few months,” he says. “We have one family with three children, all of whom have Hodgkin’s lymphoma. What can have done this? Before the war, we received in this hospital about one cancer patient a week—now I am getting an average of forty a week. This is crazy. We are getting patients with carcinoma cancer below the age of twenty—one of my patients is twenty-two, another eighteen. One of the symptoms of leukaemia is bleeding from the nose—now every child that has a nosebleed is brought here by panic-stricken parents.” The doctors are careful in talking about depleted uranium. They do not want their patients—or their own observations—to be used for propaganda, however justifiably, but they know of the 1990 American military report which states that cancers, kidney problems and birth defects are among the health effects of uranium particle contamination.

“Even the common cold in Basra is changing its features,” Dr. al-Ali says. “It takes longer to cure here now and we get advanced cases, sometimes associated with encephalitis.” He reopens his file. “In 1989, we received 116 cancer patients in the whole area; last year, the figure was 270. Already in the first ten months of this year, it’s 331. No one will give us the equipment to test the soil. Probably we are all polluted.”

The British government responded to the new evidence of child cancers in Iraq with the same lethargy and indifference as Lord Gilbert. “The Government is aware of suggestions in the Press, particularly by Robert Fisk of the Independent, that there has been an increase in ill-health—including alleged deformities, cancers and birth defects—in southern Iraq, which some have attributed to the use of depleted uranium (DU) based ammunition by UK and U.S. forces during the 1990/91 Gulf conflict,” the British minister for the armed forces, Doug Henderson, wrote in December 1998. “However, the Government has not seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims and it would therefore be premature to comment on this matter.” I liked the bit about “peer-reviewed epidemiological research data” because, of course, there weren’t any—nor would there be. Even when the Royal Society was asked to investigate the effects of depleted uranium, its researchers didn’t visit Iraq.¹⁶¹ The evidence, as shameful as it was shocking, had little effect. At a Christian service in 2000 to mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of the wartime RAF and American fire-bombing of Dresden, the bishop of Coventry, Colin Bennetts, declared that Britain had to accept responsibility for the death and deformity of children in Iraq as a result of allied bombing during and after the 1991 Gulf War. While criticising Saddam Hussein’s “evil,” the bishop said that the child victims of Iraq “were conceived and born around the time of the Gulf War. They were born with hideous physical deformities. Many are also suffering from infantile leukaemia. There is very strong evidence to suggest that all this was caused by the depleted uranium in our weapons.” Yet still the Americans and British refused to acknowledge any such guilt. In just three years’ time, they were to use depleted uranium yet again— once more, against Iraq.

What did all this say about our pretensions for the future, about our desperate, fantasy hope—if we ever did invade Iraq and destroy Saddam’s regime—that these people would greet us as liberators? Iraqis might take satisfaction at the overthrow of their dictator. But punished by twelve years of brutal sanctions, bombed repeatedly by allied aircraft over the same period under the spurious notion that enforcement of the “no-fly” zones would protect them, dusted over by the poison of our depleted-uranium munitions, twice in just over a decade, would they really come to greet and love us—the new occupiers who had so punished them, who had humiliated them and persecuted them over so many years?

By the late Nineties, my reports from Iraq have now become a diary. I am overwhelmed by what we are doing—what we have done—to this country. How can Iraqis in Baghdad contemplate the future when they have to live by selling their last possessions in the Soukh Midan? One day in February 1998, I found at least a hundred ill-kempt men and a few women standing in the drizzle below the magnificent magenta cupola of the Jama’a al-Qushla mosque. At their feet lay the most pitiable things on display at any of the world’s bazaars: a collection of rusting bath fittings and old car parts, some torn leather shoes, nuts and bolts and moth-eaten rugs, used shirts, second-hand socks and a broken television set lying forlornly in a puddle, its massive brown wooden fittings and tiny screen mindful of a pre-Baathist age. A woman in a soiled black chador looked up at me. Her name was Leila, she said. “Our money is worthless—only God can help us.”

Sohad still had money, the middle-class wife of a former diplomat whose home overlooked the banks of the great brown greasy Tigris River. She was eighty-one, and a long stay in India taught her the Hindu virtue of sublime patience. “All of us have changed these past seven years,” she said with an air of finality. “We are accepting life as it is. If we can’t get proper medicine, we will go back to old medicine. I had a knee problem. This friend of ours produced a medicine for me from an old herbal formula that the Chinese invented two thousand years ago and I drank a cup of it every morning and now my knee is better.”

Sohad’s sister was eighty-five. “We live from day to day, from hour to hour. This is part of our changed life—for us, planning is now a luxury. I am not in control, so why bother about it? Now I just want to have a flower in my life, a flower from our garden to look at during the day.” In the hall of their old home is a spread of sepia photographs of Turkish grandfathers, some of them dressed in the tunics and scabbards of the Ottoman army—the army that Private Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment fought in Mesopotamia and that the doomed Australian Gunner Frank Wills fought at Gallipoli. “This is how we get our strength,” Sohad said. “It comes from our Arab and Georgian and Kurdish and Turkish origins.” I met another old lady of great dignity that same day, a woman who had just sold almost all her baccarat glasses. “I bought these glasses on my first visit to Paris in 1947,” she said. “But now I needed the money, so I said ‘to hell with it’—we had it for a great time and enjoyed it, so I let it go. For ‘peanuts’ I sold it. I have only a jug and a carafe left.”

Yes, Iraqis are a proud people, but the poor have a special, demented vacuum in which they must live. Across the estuary calm of the Tigris, Baghdad continued to moulder away, its pavements veined with weeds, bushes growing in the cracks of the city underpasses, its great railway yards packed with rusting, empty carriages. Even the portraits of Saddam Hussein had become bleached by seven summer suns. As the sanctions ate into the fabric of every soul—except the soulless centre of the regime itself—an army of beggars deployed across the streets.

The children and women who came beating on the doors and windscreen of my car in the centre of Baghdad were pleading for money and food. One small boy, tears coursing through the mud on his face, no more than four years old, barefoot and dressed in a worn, oversize leather jacket with a dozen holes ripped into it, banged his hands against the car passenger window. “Give me money!” he shrieked, kicking the door, staring at me through the glass and wrinkling his eyes to imitate tears. Or was it imitation? On the pavement an hour later, three more children attacked Lara Marlowe of the Irish Times and myself, older this time, grabbing at our coats, screaming “money” until we gave them a dollar. They grabbed our bags for more until we pushed them from us, cursing them for their assault. Would Madeleine Albright have given them a dollar? Or would she have lectured them on the iniquities of their leader and the need for UN sanctions, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the immorality of weapons of mass destruction? In the only decent coffee shop near my hotel, they were playing a scratched tape of Doris Day. “ Que sera sera,” she sang, as the beggars watched through the windows. “Whatever will be, will be—the future’s not ours to see . . .”

On my way to Basra from Baghdad with Lara, I hand a beggar girl a 250-dinar note—scarcely 14 cents—only to see her thrown to the road by her friends, the money torn from her dirty fist. Basra is now a pit of desolation. In front of Fatima Hassan’s house, a tide of pale blue and creamy-white liquid streams gently through an open sewer. Her iron front door cannot hide the stench, nor the sound of the screaming, shoeless children in the street. Jumping the sewer—leaping across this little canyon of filth—is a pastime for the kids of the suburb of Dour Sheoun. Stand outside Fatima’s door and they run towards you, blistered, whey-faced, with large eyeballs, the irises ivory-white with malnutrition. A woman—a bright, pretty woman in a black robe with a white headband—introduces us to her eight-year-old daughter Roula, then suddenly says: “Please take her with you.” Sundus AbdelKader is just thirty-three—and she is ready to give away her own child.

Fatima has five children. Her husband was a car-painter in Kuwait before Saddam invaded the emirate; he stayed on for eight months after its liberation, still working but unpaid by his Kuwaiti employers. Now he sells sandwiches. “We don’t eat eggs or milk,” she says. “We can’t afford to eat meat. We drink the tap-water—we don’t boil it. This little boy of mine has trouble breathing, this one has a swollen stomach because of the water. We go to the hospitals but the doctors say there is no medicine. Wherever we go, they say there is no medicine.”

Outside, an older woman in black pushes her way through the street urchins. “I have two crippled people in my family,” she pleads. “They have fever and sore throats. Can you take them with you to Europe?” We explain that we are not doctors, but she thrusts into our faces a thick piece of yellow paper with a history of muscular dystrophy from which her relatives are suffering. After half an hour, my writing hand grows numb listing the sicknesses and starvation. A child has anaemia, another has severe respiratory problems, a third cannot control its bowels; it appears to be dying. “When are you going to lift the sanctions?” yet another woman shouts at me. “Our children need food and clothes.”

At the end of the street, there is a tootling trumpet, a fat man with a drum and a stooped old soldier marking time for a squad of thirty-three middle-aged, half-bearded men, all carrying Kalashnikovs but most of them in shoddy uniforms. These are the local Dad’s Army, Saddam’s heroic volunteers, preparing to withstand the might of America. They march round a traffic island while the children chant the Iraqi national anthem:

A country that stretches its wings over the horizon
And clothes itself in the glory of civilisations . . .
This land is a flame and a light,
Like a mountain that overlooks the world . . .
We have the anger of the sword
And the patience of the Prophet.

Then the kids go back to sewer-jumping. And this, I remind myself, is the country which, according to Messrs. Clinton and Blair, threatens the whole world.

We drive across to Basra’s old port, the harbour that the British invested in 1914, once visited in the late eighteenth century by the young Horatio Nelson. “Five Englishmen ran this port until 1958,” Ali al-Imara proudly announces. “The first chairman was John Ward, from 1919 until 1942, and then we had William Bennett until 1947. They were very good men. In 1958, Mr. Shaawi took over; he was a very good man too.” There is no mention of the 1958 Iraqi revolution that ended British stewardship of Basra’s old harbour and of Iraq itself. But why be churlish in a place of such decrepitude? Today, the gates to the wharf are still adorned with well-polished Tudor roses, but the slates have cascaded off the roofs of the old colonial offices. The railway lines, laid down when Basra was an international terminal, are corroded.

The wide, sluggish waterway of the Shatt al-Arab, so fateful and laden with death in Iraq’s recent history, drifts past the hulks tied up on the quays. Here is the Yasmine, a trawler under whose black paint it is still possible to read the words Lord Shackleton, Port Stanley, F.I. (Falkland Islands); and there the Wisteria, all 6,742 blackened tons of her, her mentors slowly dismembering the burned-out tanker. Who set fire to her? I ask three Iraqi officials on the quay. “An Iranian missile hit it in 1981,” one of them replies. But his friend mutters in Arabic: “Tell him it was the Americans.” Then they all chorus: “It was the Americans!”

Basra lives on lies: if only the Iranians hadn’t attacked Iraq and closed the river in 1980, they tell you—but it was the Iraqis who invaded Iran; if only the UN had not slapped sanctions on Iraq after the Iran–Iraq War—and we are supposed to forget the little matter of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Even the ships have changed their names in embarrassment. The supply ship Atco Sara, according to a half-erased name, used to be the Pacific Prospector of Illinois and, before that, the Northern Builder. There is a Krupps hoist and a set of rusting cranes bearing the name “Thomas Smith and Sons of Leeds” on a black iron plate.

And I cannot but remember how I arrived at this city and its port eighteen years before. I had watched these ships burn. Just downriver was the island from which Jon Snow had embarked to rescue the crew of the trapped freighter Al-Tanin as I cowered on the riverbank waiting for him, the Iranian tracer fire zipping towards us across the darkened Shatt al-Arab River. It was on this very quayside, aboard a Yugoslav freighter, that I filched the maps of the waterway for Jon and the Iraqi frogmen who were to rescue the crew. From Basra each morning, Gavin Hewitt of the BBC and I would set out to watch the “Whirlwind War” that would destroy the Islamic Republic. And now the Iraqis had reaped the whirlwind.

Behind us now, the marshalling yards are filled with long freight trains, massive grey wagons hooked up to leave on a journey that should have started in 1980, the trucks now entangled with weeds and bushes. Mr. al-Imara strides along the docks. “Take as many pictures as you want,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the sanctions, we would have this port dredged and running.” An old dog falls asleep on the tracks below the stern of the Wisteria, its steel ladders twisted against the hull to which they were welded eighteen years ago.

It is an odd affliction that now besets Iraq’s Baathist bureaucracy. Tutored to boast of all that is best about Iraq, they now have to publicise all that is worst. It must be an awfully difficult transition. For who knows when the orders might come down from Baghdad to reverse the process yet again? Mr. al-Imara tells us he is a poet as well as being “foreign relations adviser” to Basra port. And he quotes, as we walk beside his decaying, marooned ships, a work of his which he calls “Confrontation”:

When you shoot with a bullet from anywhere,
The bullet will head straight for my chest;
Because the events through which we have passed
Have made my chest round.

And we look at Mr. al-Imara’s diminutive chest and laugh politely. Whose bullets is the poet referring to? Surely not those that scar the façade of Basra’s central police station, still a gutted marble shell beside one of the city’s foetid canals. Certainly not those that smashed into the burning governorate building during the same 1991 uprising by Basra’s Shiite majority, now replaced with masses of prestressed concrete. And not the bullets that were fired into the city’s police cars, now replaced—as they have been throughout Iraq—with gleaming new Hyundai saloons, a final mockery to the starvation of the people the police are supposed to “control.” On the grainy old television in my Basra hotel room, Saddam is seated before his Revolutionary Command Council, making a joke at which his uniformed courtiers guffaw. “When he laughed, respectable senators burst into laughter.”

The Corniche of Martyrs corrects any misapprehension about the enemy. For along the west bank of the Shatt al-Arab, below the dank portals of the Basra Sheraton Hotel, stand the dead heroes of Saddam’s “Whirlwind War.” For these three dozen Iraqi soldiers—out of perhaps half a million—death will not have been in vain. Each man, modelled in bronze from photographs, points across the muddy waterway towards the precise location of the war front, inside Iran, at which he died. “Corporals and Sergeants and Captains and Majors and Colonels—all martyrs of the Qadisiya war,” it says in brass on each pedestal.

The soldiers, three times life-size, are identified by name, along with a colossus down the bank representing Saddam’s cousin General Adnan Khairallah, one of the greatest and most popular of Iraq’s military leaders—too popular for Saddam perhaps. He stands facing his cannon-fodder, right arm raised in honour of their courage; he was to die—“tragically,” as the Iraqi press obediently announced at the time—in a helicopter crash not long after the Iran–Iraq War ended. Below these statues, the street urchins hawk nuts parcelled in old newspapers at 12 cents a package.

They are as far as they can get from the food chain, at the furthest corner of Iraq, clamped between Iran’s suspicions to the east, and Kuwait’s hatred to the south, and the West’s contempt, dominated by rusting ships and the towering giants of the dead. Each night in Iraq, I pound away on my heat-cracked laptop with its partially damaged screen, writing about the suffering and the volcanic anger of Iraqis. It is 16 October 1998. This is the report I send to my paper that night from Baghdad, one that I will read again in 2003, after we have occupied Iraq and found ourselves facing a ferocious insurgency:

Fairy lights illuminate the Babeesh Grill Restaurant in President Street. Mock stained glass windows discreetly protect the clientele. For this is an up-market bistro for up-market eaters, most of them UN officials. The hungry Iraqis who are not dazzled by the fairy lights outside can just make out the candlelit tables and the foreigners inside as they wolf their way through beef and roast chicken, side-plates heaped with fruits and vegetables or—the Babeesh’s speciality—shrimp salad. Soft music plays as white-jacketed waiters serve the UN’s finest, the sanctions boys and the arms inspectors and the men and women who try desperately to undo the suffering caused by the gentlemen in the glass building on the East River 5,990 miles away.

But despite the white-liveried waiters, whatever you do, don’t mention the Titanic. Iraqi state television has shown James Cameron’s film three times (he can forget about the royalties) as a balm for hardship, the Baghdad equivalent of bread and circuses. But unlike the Titanic, the Babeesh has no third class diners. This is a restaurant for those who measure money by the kilo rather than the Iraqi dinar note. Now that the dinar is worth 0.0006 of a dollar (thanks to the employers of the Babeesh’s clientele), my own meal for three needed a stack of 488 one hundred dinar notes, a wad of cash a foot thick. No wonder some cafes have given up counting their takings—they check the bills by stacking the dinar notes on a weighing machine.

So you can forget the Weimar Republic in a land where an average villager can expect to earn a mere 3,400 dinars a month. Let me repeat that: 3,400 dinars—two dollars—a month. Which means that our little snack at the Babeesh—and there was no wine because alcohol is banned in restaurants on orders from the man whose name no one says too loudly—cost fourteen times the monthly salary of an Iraqi. So why no food riots? Why no revolution?

Take a stroll off Rashid Street in the old part of town and you can see why. The sewage stretches in lakes, wall-to-wall, a viscous mass of liquid so pale green in colour that it possesses its own awful beauty. This is what happens when the electricity cuts out and the water treatment plants and sewage facilities go unrepaired. Electrical appliance vendors—for Rashid Street is where you go for a light-bulb, an adapter, a piece of wire—hug the walls like nuns to keep the mess from their plastic shoes. “You have done this to us,” a thin, bearded man said to me as I asked (heaven spare me) for an electric kettle. The kettle could only be obtained at a foreign goods shop in the suburbs for just over $20—around nine and a half times the monthly salary of the Iraqi villager.

Grind down the people to this abject level and survival is more important than revolution. Unless you choose highway robbery. I’m not talking of the kind practised at the Babeesh, but on the long motorways west to Jordan or south to Basra. “That’s where they shot the Jordanian,” my driver said to me 100 kilometres out of Baghdad on the Amman road, a carefree reference to the diplomat who chose to travel after dark and paid the price. You don’t drive to Basra overnight for fear of deserting soldiers, so the rumour goes, who’ve turned to banditry to keep their families alive. By night, the gunmen lurk, by day the village women who sell themselves for “temporary marriage” and a few more dinars. The latter I didn’t believe.

Until I left Basra one hot afternoon and drove out through the slums with their own lakes of sewage—warmer than the Baghdad variety, for the Gulf temperatures drive up the heat of every liquid—and saw a crazed mass of men and women, tearing at their faces with their nails, carrying in front of them the body of a child, pushing it into a battered orange and white taxi on the main road. And a young man, maybe only 16, suddenly jumped into the sewage lake beside the highway and plastered his body in filth, screaming and raging and smacking his hands into the green water so that it splattered all the mourners with filth.

To what does poverty and hunger drive a people? I soon found out. Seventy miles north of Basra, where the road mirages in the heat between the endless encampments of Saddam’s legions who are suppressing the Marsh Arabs, a group of girls could be seen, dressed in red turbans and black dresses, their faces cowled like Touaregs, dancing—actually twirling themselves round and round—in the fast lane of the motorway until we drew to a halt. One of them approached the driver’s window, her eyes soft, her voice rasping. “Come buy our fish,” she whispered. “Come see our fish and you will want to buy them.”

She pronounced the Arab word for fish—sumak— with a hiss, and the driver giggled in a cruel, lascivious way. She was maybe 16 and she was selling not fish but herself. And when they realised we were not customers, the fish girls of Iraq twirled back into the motorway lane to offer themselves in front of a speeding Jordanian truck. Yes, you can forget the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, let alone the destruction of his magnificent palaces and ornamental lakes and colonnaded halls. But I do wonder how the Iraqis in President Street can resist the temptation of breaking through the windows of the Babeesh restaurant and tearing its customers to pieces, perhaps even choosing the odd remaining foreign limb to supplement their diet.