CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
—Walter Scott, Marmion, VI, introduction, st. 17
HOW SMALL HE LOOKED in the high-backed chair. You had to sit in the auditorium of the UN General Assembly to realise that George Bush Junior—threatening war in what was built as a house of peace—could appear such a little man. But then again Julius Caesar was a little man, and so was Napoleon Bonaparte. So were other more modern, less mentionable world leaders. Come to think of it so was General Douglas MacArthur, who had his own axis of evil, which took him all the way to the Yalu River. But on 12 September 2002, two-thirds of the way through George W. Bush’s virtual declaration of war against Iraq, there came a dangerous, tell-tale code which suggested that he really did intend to send his tanks across the Tigris River. “The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people,” he told us in the UN General Assembly. In the press gallery, nobody stirred. Below us, not a diplomat shifted in his seat. The speech had already rambled on for twenty minutes but the speechwriters must have known what this meant when they cobbled it together.
Before President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, he announced that America “has no quarrel with the Libyan people.” Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the Father told the world that the United States “has no quarrel with the Iraqi people.” In 2001, Bush the Son, about to strike at the Taliban and al-Qaeda, told us he “has no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan.” And now that frightening mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr. Bush said—absolutely none—with the Iraqi people. So, I thought to myself as I scribbled my notes in the UN press gallery, it’s flak jackets on.
Perhaps it was the right place to understand just how far the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq might take us. The green marble fittings, the backcloth wall of burnished gold and the symbol of that dangerous world shielded by the UN’s olive branches gave Mr. Bush the furnishings of an emperor, albeit a diminutive one. Television flattens faces, gives false familiarity to expressions that ought to be studied. In the flesh, Bush had none of the idealised, polished integrity that he believed he showed on the screen. I watched the angry—pugnacious—way in which he spoke. “The people”—here he looked up to his right, eyes narrowed— “of the United States”—up to the left now, eyes still narrowed—“of America.” There are two prompters at the UN, on the left and on the right of the speaker. But now Bush looked straight ahead, eyes wider, challenging, almost desperate, a mixture of innocence and arrogance. Just a day earlier, he told us, America had commemorated an attack that had “brought grief to my country.” But he didn’t mention Osama bin Laden, not once. It was Saddam Hussein to whom we had to be reintroduced—he used Saddam’s name eight times in his address, with fifteen references to the “Iraqi regime.”
Surfing that veil of American tears which bin Laden’s killers had created, it was also clear that the Bush plans for the Middle East were on a far greater scale than the mere overthrow of the Iraqi leader who once regarded himself as America’s best friend in the Gulf. There must be a democratic Afghanistan—President Hamid Karzai vigorously nodded his approval down among the General Assembly dictators—and there must be democracy in Palestine; and this would lead to “reforms throughout the Muslim world.” Reforms? In Saudi Arabia? In Jordan? In Iran? We were not told. The Bush theme, of course, was an all too familiar one; of Saddamite evil, laced with the usual caveats, conditional clauses and historical distortions. We all knew Saddam Hussein was a vicious, cruel dictator—we knew that when he was our friend—but the president insisted on telling us again. Saddam had repeatedly flouted UN Security Council resolutions; no mention here, of course, of Israel’s flouting of resolutions 242 and 338 demanding an end to the occupation of Palestinian land.
Bush spoke of the tens of thousands of opponents of Saddam Hussein who had been arrested and imprisoned and summarily executed and tortured—“all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state”—but there was no mention that these same beatings and burnings and electric shocks and mutilations and rapes were being readily perpetrated when America was on very good terms with Iraq before 1990, when the Pentagon was sending intelligence information to Saddam to help him kill more Iranians. Indeed, one of the most telling aspects of the Bush speech was that all the sins of which he specifically accused the Iraqis—a good many undoubtedly true—began in the crucial year of 1991. There was no reference to Saddam’s flouting of UN resolutions when the Americans were helping him. There were a few reminders by Bush of the gas attacks against Iran—without mentioning that this very same Iran was now supposed to be part of the “axis of evil.”
Then there were the grammatical problems, the sleight of hand historians use when they cannot find the evidence to prove that Richard III really did kill the princes in the tower. If it wasn’t for the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq “would likely” have possessed a nuclear weapon by 1993. Iraq “retains the physical infrastructure needed to build” a nuclear weapon—which is not quite the same thing as actually building it. The phrase “should Iraq acquire fissile material” didn’t mean it had acquired it. And being told that Iraq’s enthusiasm for nuclear scientists “leaves little doubt” about its appetite for nuclear weapons wasn’t quite the same as having proved it had obtained these weapons. Was this the evidence upon which America would go to war?
The UN—for this was the emperor’s message to the delegates sitting before him—could take it or leave it, join America in war or end up like that old donkey, the League of Nations. Bush mentioned the League, dismissing it as a talking shop without adding that the United States had refused to join.191 But it was clear how he intended to sell the war on the back of 11 September 2001. “Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale,” he said. And there we had it. Osama bin Laden equalled Saddam Hussein and—who knows?—Iran or Syria or anyone else.
If al-Qaeda productions had outdone Hollywood on 11 September 2001, Bush productions were now the makeover artists, turning Osama bin Laden into Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda’s Saudi hijacker-killers into Iraqis. The creative centre of America, as one columnist was to point out after the Iraqi invasion, was no longer New York or Los Angeles. For the moment, it was Washington, “where every day, more fiction is spun by the yard.” Who would have believed, a year ago, that it would be the shaven features of Saddam Hussein we’d have to hate rather than the unshaven features of Osama bin Laden? As usual, our newspaper and television journalists connived at it all. Wasn’t it the task of reporters to have asked why the picture suddenly changed? When did the transition take place? I asked during a lecture in New York. I owe it to Professor Robert Alford of the City University of New York Graduate Center to have enlightened me—it happened about the time of the Enron scandal.192
For months, I had not believed in this future war. Simon Kelner, my editor at The Independent, agreed with me. “I doubt if there’s going to be a war over Iraq,” he said. Leonard Doyle, my foreign editor was not so sure. But when Bush stopped speaking on 12 September 2002, I walked out of the General Assembly, picked up a pay phone and dialled London. “Leonard, I was wrong,” I said. “I’ve never seen a man of such arrogance before—and he means what he says. There’s going to be a war.”
Looking back on those extraordinary months, it is as if we lived in a dream— Bush, his earnest, obedient partner, the British prime minister Tony Blair, and all those of us who thought this future conflict a madness. We drifted towards the abyss, knowingly, awake yet asleep, aware that we could protest at this folly—we did, in words, in the streets—yet watching mesmerised as sleepwalkers led our countries to war. Hitler once remarked that he “walked the path that destiny dictates.” Saddam Hussein had always done this. So, presumably, did Osama bin Laden think of himself. But now Bush and Blair were walking the same omniscient, vain road.
We had seen the nature of the new America that Bush was growing on the ruins of the World Trade Center, the cruel, extrajudicial world that was to be nurtured with the blood and souls of all who died on 11 September 2001. Prisoners shackled, hooded, sedated. Taken to a remote corner of the world where they may be executed, where the laws of human rights are suspended. It took time to realise that Guantanamo was a mirror of the treatment that every Middle East dictatorship meted out to its opponents. Shackled, hooded, threatened with death by “courts” that would give no leeway to defence or innocence: this was how every Arab secret police force dealt with enemies of the regime. This was what the Western hostages of Beirut faced in the 1980s; this was the “justice” that Iran’s hanging judges bestowed upon their enemies, what Iraq’s insurgents would do with their captives. In this project, we journalists were complicit. Had not Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel, personally advised Bush to take the “harshest measures possible” against those who had attacked America?
And in the coming months, all that we most feared about this new form of “justice” came to pass: torture, sexual humiliation, murder under interrogation, rape, extrajudicial killings—by American and British troops, by our vicious allies in the “war on terror,” by all who were convinced that our cause—democracy, freedom, liberty—should be defended with any means, even if those means destroyed the democracy, freedom and liberty that we claimed to be defending. As we prepared ourselves for the next stage of our “war on terror”—the invasion of Iraq—we let slip the collective memory of Afghanistan’s betrayal. Even more seriously, we ignored the lessons that post-Taliban Afghanistan might hold for us. We chose not to dwell too much on the way in which we—the victors, the liberators, the bringers of freedom—treated the Afghans with whom, of course, we had “no quarrel.”
THE “WAR ON TERROR” reached the Afghan village of Hajibirgit at midnight on 22 May 2002. Haji Birgit Khan, the bearded, eighty-five-year-old Pashtun village leader and head of 12,000 local tribal families, was lying on a patch of grass outside his home. Faqir Mohamedin was sleeping among his sheep and goats in a patch of sand to the south when he heard “big planes moving in the sky.” Even at night, it is so hot that many villagers spend the hours of darkness outside their homes, although Mohamedin and his family were in their mud-walled house. There were 105 families in Hajibirgit, and all were woken by the thunder of helicopter engines and the thwack of rotor blades and the screaming voices of the Americans.
Haji Birgit Khan was seen running stiffly from his lawn towards the white-walled village mosque, a rectangular cement building with a single loudspeaker and a few threadbare carpets. Several armed men were seen running after him. Hakim, one of the animal-herders, saw the men from the helicopters chase the old man into the mosque and heard a burst of gunfire. “When our people found him, he had been killed with a bullet, in the head,” he says, pointing downwards. There is a single bullet hole in the concrete floor of the mosque and a dried bloodstain beside it. “We found bits of his brain on the wall.”
Across the village, sharp explosions were detonating in the courtyards and doorways. “The Americans were throwing stun grenades at us and smoke grenades,” Mohamedin recalls. “They were throwing dozens of them at us and they were shouting and screaming all the time. We didn’t understand their language, but there were Afghan gunmen with them, too, Afghans with blackened faces. Several began to tie up our women—our own women—and the Americans were lifting their burqas, their covering, to look at their faces. That’s when the little girl was seen running away.” Abdul Satar says that she was three years old, that she ran shrieking in fear from her home, that her name was Zarguna, the daughter of a man called Abdul-Shakour—many Afghans, as we have seen, have only one name—and that someone saw her topple into the village’s 18-metre well on the other side of the mosque. During the night, she was to drown there, alone, her back apparently broken by the fall. Other children would find her body in the morning. The Americans paid no attention. From the description of their clothes given by the villagers, they appeared to include Special Forces and also units of Afghan Special Forces, the brutish and ill-disciplined units run from Kabul’s former Khad secret police headquarters. There were also 150 soldiers from the U.S. 101st Airborne, whose home base is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. But Fort Campbell is a long way from Hajibirgit, which is 80 kilometres into the desert from the south-western city of Kandahar. And the Americans were obsessed with one idea: that the village contained leaders from the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement.
A former member of a Special Forces unit from one of America’s coalition partners supplied his own explanation for the American behaviour when I met him in Kandahar a few days later. “When we go into a village and see a farmer with a beard, we see an Afghan farmer with a beard,” he said. “But when the Americans go into a village and see a farmer with a beard, they see Osama bin Laden.”
The women and children were ordered to gather at one end of Hajibirgit. “They were pushing us and shoving us out of our homes,” Mohamedin says. “Some of the Afghan gunmen were shouting abuse at us. All the while, they were throwing grenades at our homes.” The few villagers who managed to run away collected the stun grenades next day with the help of children. There are dozens of them, small cylindrical green pots with names and codes stamped on the side. One says “7 BANG Delay: 1.5 secs NIC-01/06-07,” another “1 BANG, 170 dB Delay: 1.5s.” Another cylinder is marked: “DELAY Verzogerung ca. 1,5s.” These were the grenades that terrified Zarguna and ultimately caused her death. A regular part of U.S. Special Forces equipment, they are manufactured in Germany by the Hamburg firm of Nico-Pyrotechnik—hence the “NIC” on several of the cylinders; “dB” stands for decibels. Several date stamps show that the grenades were made as recently as March 2002. The German company refers to them officially as “40mm by 46mm sound and flash (stun) cartridges.” But the Americans were also firing bullets. Several peppered a wrecked car in which another villager, a taxi-driver called Abdullah, had been sleeping. He was badly wounded. So was Haji Birgit Khan’s son.
A U.S. military spokesman would claim later that American soldiers had “come under fire” in the village and had killed one man and wounded two “suspected Taliban or al-Qaeda members.” The implication—that eighty-five-year-old Haji Birgit Khan was the gunman—is clearly preposterous. The two wounded were presumably Khan’s son and Abdullah, the taxi-driver. The U.S. claim that they were Taliban or al-Qaeda members was a palpable lie, since both of them were subsequently released. “Some of the Afghans whom the Americans brought with them were shouting ‘Shut up!’ to the children who were crying,” Faqir Mohamedin remembers. “They made us lie down and put cuffs on our wrists, sort of plastic cuffs. The more we pulled on them, the tighter they got and the more they hurt. Then they blindfolded us. Then they started pushing us towards the planes, punching us as we tried to walk.” In all, the Americans herded fifty-five of the village men, blindfolded and with their hands tied, on to their helicopters. Mohamedin was among them. So was Abdul-Shakour, still unaware that his daughter was dying in the well. The fifty-sixth Afghan prisoner to be loaded on to a helicopter was already dead: the Americans had decided to take the body of eighty-five-year-old Haji Birgit Khan with them.
When the helicopters landed at Kandahar airport—headquarters to the 101st Airborne—the villagers were, by their own accounts, herded together into a container. Their legs were tied and then their handcuffs and the manacle of one leg of each prisoner were separately attached to stakes driven into the floor of the container. Thick sacks were put over their heads. Abdul Satar was among the first to be taken from this hot little prison. “Two Americans walked in and tore my clothes off,” he said. “If the clothes would not tear, they cut them off with scissors. They took me out naked to have my beard shaved and to have my photograph taken. Why did they shave off my beard? I had my beard all my life.”
Mohamedin was led naked from his own beard-shaving into an interrogation tent, where his blindfold was removed. “There was an Afghan translator, a Pashtun man with a Kandahar accent, in the room, along with American soldiers, both men and women soldiers,” he says. “I was standing there naked in front of them with my hands tied. Some of them were standing, some were sitting at desks. They asked me: ‘What do you do?’ I told them: ‘I am a shepherd—why don’t you ask your soldiers what I was doing?’ They said: ‘Tell us yourself.’ Then they asked: ‘What kind of weapons have you used?’ I told them I hadn’t used any weapon. One of them asked: ‘Did you use a weapon during the Russian [occupation] period, the civil war period or the Taliban period?’ I told them that for a lot of the time I was a refugee.”
From the villagers’ testimony, it is impossible to identify which American units were engaged in the interrogations. Some U.S. soldiers were wearing berets with yellow or brown badges, others were in civilian clothes but apparently wearing bush hats. The Afghan interpreter was dressed in his traditional shalwar khameez. Hakim underwent a slightly longer period of questioning; like Mohamedin, he says he was naked before his interrogators. “They wanted my age and my job. I said I was sixty, that I was a farmer. They asked: ‘Are there any Arabs or Talibans or Iranians or foreigners in your village?’ I said ‘No.’ They asked: ‘How many rooms are there in your house, and do you have a satellite phone?’ I told them: ‘I don’t have a phone. I don’t even have electricity.’ They asked: ‘Were the Taliban good or bad?’ I replied that the Taliban never came to our village so I had no information about them. Then they asked: ‘What about Americans? What kind of people are Americans?’ I replied: ‘We heard that they liberated us with [President Hamid] Karzai and helped us—but we don’t know our crime that we should be treated like this.’ What was I supposed to say?”
A few hours later, the villagers of Hajibirgit were issued with bright-yellow clothes and taken to a series of wire cages laid out over the sand of the airbase—a miniature version of Guantanamo Bay—where they were given bread, biscuits, rice, beans and bottled water. The younger boys were kept in separate cages from the older men. There was no more questioning, but they were held in the cages for another five days. All the while, the Americans were trying to discover the identity of the eighty-five-year-old man. They did not ask their prisoners—who could have identified him at once—although the U.S. interrogators may not have wished them to know he was dead. In the end, the Americans gave a photograph of the face of the corpse to the International Red Cross. The organisation was immediately told by Kandahar officials that the elderly man was perhaps the most important tribal leader west of the city.
“When we were eventually taken out of the cages, there were five American advisers waiting to talk to us,” Mohamedin says. “They used an interpreter and told us they wanted us to accept their apologies for being mistreated. They said they were sorry. What could we say? We were prisoners. One of the advisers said: ‘We will help you.’ What does that mean?” A fleet of U.S. helicopters flew the fifty-five men to the Kandahar football stadium—once the scene of Taliban executions—where all were freed, still dressed in prison clothes and each with a plastic ID bracelet round the wrist bearing a number. “Ident-A-Band Bracelet made by Hollister” was written on each one. Only then did the men learn that old Haji Birgit Khan had been killed during the raid a week earlier. And only then did Abdul-Shakour learn that his daughter Zarguna was dead.
The Pentagon initially said that it found it “difficult to believe” that the village women had their hands tied. But given identical descriptions of the treatment of Afghan women after the U.S. bombing of an Uruzgan wedding party, which followed the Hajibirgit raid, it seems that the Americans—or their Afghan allies— did just that. A U.S. military spokesman claimed that American forces had found “items of intelligence value,” weapons and a large amount of cash in the village. What the “items” were was never clarified. The guns were almost certainly for personal protection against robbers. The cash remains a sore point for the villagers. Abdul Satar said that he had 10,000 Pakistani rupees taken from him—about $167 (£114). Hakim says he lost his savings of 150,000 rupees—$2,500 (£1,700). “When they freed us, the Americans gave us two thousand rupees each,” Mohamedin says. “That’s just forty dollars [£27]. We’d like the rest of our money.”
But there was a far greater tragedy to confront the men when they reached Hajibirgit. In their absence—without guns to defend the homes, and with the village elder dead and many of the menfolk prisoners of the Americans—thieves had descended on Hajibirgit. A group of men from Helmand province, whose leader was once a brutal and rapacious mujahedin fighter against the Russians, raided the village once the Americans had taken away so many of the men. Ninety-five of the 105 families had fled into the hills, leaving their mud homes to be pillaged.
The disturbing, frightful questions that creep into the mind of anyone driving across the desert to Hajibirgit today are obvious. Who told the United States to raid the village? Who told them that the Taliban leadership and the al-Qaeda leadership were there? For today, Hajibirgit is a virtual ghost town, most of its houses abandoned. The U.S. raid was worthless. There are scarcely forty villagers left. They all gathered at the stone grave of Zarguna some days later, to pay their respects to the memory of the little girl. “We are poor people—what can we do?” Mohamedin asked me. I had no reply. President Bush’s “war on terror,” his struggle of “good against evil,” descended on the innocent village of Hajibirgit.
And now Hajibirgit is dead.
I SPENT PART OF THE VAPID hot summer of 2002 in Afghanistan, trying to learn what “liberation” meant. If the experience of Hajibirgit was typical—and it quickly turned out that it was—then what would happen to the people of Iraq if we decided to “liberate” them from Saddam Hussein? And how would Iraqis react to the same treatment?
I was at my small hotel in Kandahar when the U.S. Special Forces boys barged into it one day. One of them wore kitty-litter camouflage fatigues and a bush hat, another was in civilian clothes, paunchy with jeans. The interiors of their four-wheel-drives glittered with guns. They wanted to know if a man called Hazrat was staying at the guest house. They didn’t say why, didn’t say who Hazrat was. The concierge had never heard the name. The five men left, unsmiling, driving at speed back on to the main road. “Why did they talk to me like that?” the concierge asked me. “Who do they think they are?” It was best not to reply.
“The Afghan people will wait a little longer for all the help they have been promised,” the local district officer in Maiwand muttered to me a few hours later. “We believe the Americans want to help us. They promised us help. They have a little longer to prove they mean this. After that . . .” He didn’t need to say more. Out at Maiwand, in the ovenlike grey desert west of Kandahar where the teenage heroine Malalai charged the British guns in the Second Afghan War, the Americans were doing raids, not aid.
But even when the U.S. military tried to turn its hand to humanitarian work, the Western NGOs—the non-governmental organisations working with the UN— preferred to keep their distance. As a British NGO worker put it with devastating frankness in Kandahar: “When there is a backlash against the Americans, we want a clear definition between us and them.” I heard that phrase all the time in Afghanistan. “When the backlash comes . . .” It was coming already. The Americans were being attacked almost every night. There had been three shootings in Kandahar, with an American officer wounded in the neck near the airport in mid-July of 2002. American troops could no longer dine out in Kandahar’s cafés. Now U.S. forces were under attack in Khost province. Two Afghan auxiliaries were killed and five American soldiers wounded near the Pakistan border at the end of July.
For the NGOs in Kabul, the danger lay in the grey area—a deliberate grey area, they said—which the Americans created between military operations and humanitarian aid. “Up in Kunduz, they’ve got what they call a ‘humanitarian liaison team’ that has repaired a ward in a local hospital and been involved in rebuilding destroyed bridges,” the Briton said. “Some of the men with them have been in civilian clothes but carrying guns. We took this up with them, because Afghans began to think that our aid organisation also carried guns. The U.S. told us their men didn’t carry weapons openly or wear full uniforms out of deference to the feelings of local tribal leaders. Eventually, we all had to raise this matter in Washington.”
It wasn’t hard to see the dangers. In Kabul, the Americans were operating an organisation called the CJCMOTF, the Coalition Joint Civil–Military Operations Task Force, whose mission, an official U.S. document said, included “expertise in supply, transportation, medical, legal, engineering and civil affairs.” Headquartered in Kabul, it had “daily contact with [the] U.S. embassy.” Their personnel definitions included “physician, veterinarian, attorney, civil engineer, teacher, firefighter, construction, management,” but their military experience was listed as “Desert Storm, Operation Provide Comfort, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo.” Then there’s the CHLC, the Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Center, at Mazar-e-Sharif, whose objective was liaison between “assistance [sic] community and military coalition” and which was “rebuilding public facilities, 14 schools, providing a generator for the airport terminal and providing a medical clinic, a veterinarian clinic and a library.” But its tasks also included “security information,” a “channel of communication to coalition commanders, U.S. embassy and USAID” and—an interesting one, this—“miscellaneous supplies, e.g. concertina wire.” Somehow, rebuilding schools had got mixed up with the provision of barbed wire.
It made the aid agencies shudder. “I have banned all coalition forces from my compound and will not meet with them in public,” an Australian humanitarian official told me in Kabul. “If they want to contact me, I tell them to send me emails. I will meet them only in certain public authority offices. Yes, of course we are worried that people will mistake us for the military . . . They simply have no idea how to deal with the social, cultural, political complex of life here. They are really not interested. They just want to fight a ‘war on terror.’ I don’t think they care.”
This was no minor official but a Western coordinator handling millions of dollars of international aid. He knew, as did his staff, how angry Afghans were becoming at the growing U.S. presence in their country. As long as Washington went on paying the private salaries of local warlords, including some who opposed President Hamid Karzai, a kind of truce would continue to exist, but Afghans took a shrewd interest in America’s activities in their country and their anger was only stoked by U.S. bombing raids that left hundreds of innocent Afghans dead.
After the Americans bombed a wedding party in Uruzgan on 30 June 2002— the death toll eventually came to fifty-five—Pashtuns were outraged at eyewitness accounts of U.S. troops preventing survivors helping the wounded. They were especially infuriated by a report that the Americans had taken photographs of the naked bodies of dead Afghan women. An explanation was not difficult to find. For their own investigation, U.S. forces might well have taken pictures of the dead after the Uruzgan raid and, since bombs generally blast the clothes off their victims, dead female Afghans would be naked. But the story had become legend. Americans took pictures of naked Afghan women. It was easy to see how this could turn potential Afghan friends into enemies. Now guerrilla attacks were increasingly targeting Afghan forces loyal to the government, or to local drug-dealers who were friendly with the Americans. Just as the first mujahedin assaults on the Russians after the 1980 Soviet invasion tended to focus on Moscow’s Afghan Communist allies, so the new attacks were being directed at America’s Afghan allies. If America invaded Iraq, who would the insurgents there attack?
An Australian Special Forces man had his own thoughts on the subject. The Kandahar garden in which we met was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. “This is a secret war,” the Special Forces man told me. “And this is a dirty war. You don’t know what is happening.” And of course, we were not supposed to know. In a “war against terror,” journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights.
How many human rights did the mass killers of September 11 allow their victims? You are either with us or against us. Whose side are you on? But the man in the Kandahar garden was worried. He was one of the “coalition allies,” as the Americans liked to call the patsies who have trotted after them into the Afghan midden. “The Americans don’t know what to do here now,” he went on. “Even their interrogations went wrong.” Brutally so, it seems. In the early weeks of 2002, the Americans raided two Afghan villages, killed ten policemen belonging to the U.S.-supported government of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating the survivors. American reporters—in a rare show of mouselike courage amid the self-censorship of their usual reporting—quoted the prisoners as saying they had been beaten by U.S. troops. According to Western officials in Kandahar, the U.S. troops “gave the prisoners a thrashing.”
On 17 March U.S. soldiers arrested at least thirty Northern Alliance gunmen at Hauzimated in Kandahar province: according to eighteen of the prisoners, the Americans refused to listen to their explanation that they were allies and—believing they were Taliban members—punched, kicked and kneed their captives before holding them in cages for four days. They then released them with an apology.
Now things had changed. The American forces were leaving the beatings to their Afghan allies, especially members of the so-called Afghan Special Forces, the Washington-supported thugs at the former Khad torture centre in Kabul. “It’s the Afghan Special Forces who beat the Pashtun prisoners for information now— not the Americans,” the Australian Special Forces man said. “But the CIA are there during the beatings, so the Americans are culpable, they let it happen.”
This is just how the Americans began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky-clean with advisers, there were some incidents of “termination with extreme prejudice,” after which it was the Vietnamese intelligence boys who did the torture. The same with the Russians. When their soldiers poured across the border in 1979, they quickly left it to their Afghan allies in the Parcham and Khad secret police to carry out the “serious” interrogations. And if this was what the Americans were now up to in Afghanistan, what was happening to their prisoners at Guantanamo? Or, for that matter, at Bagram, the airbase north of Kabul to which all prisoners in Kandahar were now sent for investigation if local interrogators believed their captives had more to say? And what about civilian casualties of the Americans” increasingly promiscuous air raids? If so many hundreds of civilians were dying in these bombing attacks across Afghanistan, how many would die in Iraq if Washington redirected its forces to Mesopotamia?193 Of course, it was possible to take a step back from this frightening corner of America’s Afghan adventure. In the aftermath of the Taliban’s defeat, humanitarian workers achieved some miracles. UNICEF reported 486 female teachers at work in the five south-western provinces of the country, with 16,674 girls now at school. Only in Uruzgan, where the Taliban were strongest, had not a single female teacher been employed. UN officials could boast that in these same poverty-belt provinces, polio had now been almost eradicated. But the UN was fighting polio before the Taliban collapsed, and the drugs whose production the Taliban banned were now back on the market. The poppy fields were growing in Helmand province again, and in Uruzgan local warlords were trying to avoid government control in order to cultivate their own new poppy production centres. In Kabul, where two government ministers had been murdered in seven months, President Karzai was now protected—at his own request—by American bodyguards. And you didn’t have to be a political analyst to know what kind of message this sent to Afghans.
The Australian Special Forces man saw things more globally. “Perhaps the Americans can start withdrawing if there’s another war—if they go to war in Iraq. But the U.S. can’t handle two wars at the same time. They would be over-stretched.” Prescient words for July 2002. So, it seemed, to end America’s “war against terror” in Afghanistan—a war that has left the drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control of the Afghan government, many al-Qaeda men on the loose and little peace in the country—we had to have another war in Iraq.
All that year of 2002, I criss-crossed the Atlantic, reporting from the Middle East, lecturing in the United States, sometimes arriving in New York on a Friday evening only to be filing dispatches from Cairo the following Monday. Perhaps no one was travelling between East and West so often that year, and it was a paradoxical experience, the polemic of one continent about another—the American about the Arab or Middle Eastern—bearing as little relation to reality as the solecisms of Arab Muslims towards the world’s sole superpower. Both sides of the world appeared to have retreated into their own illusions and fears. It produced weird results.
In Washington, before dawn on 11 September 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks, I flicked through six American television channels and saw the Twin Towers fall to the ground eighteen times. The few references to the suicide killers who committed the crime made not a single mention of the fact that they were Arabs. The previous week, The Washington Post and The New York Times went to agonising lengths to separate their Middle East coverage from the September 11th commemorations, as if they might be committing some form of sacrilege or be acting in bad taste if they did not. “The challenge for the administration is to offer a coherent and persuasive explanation of how the Iraq danger is connected to the 9/11 attacks” was about as far as the Washington Post got in smelling a rat—and this was only dropped into the seventh paragraph of an eight-paragraph editorial. All references to Palestine or illegal Jewish settlements or Israeli occupation of Arab land were simply erased from the public conscience that week. When Hanan Ashrawi, that most humane of Palestinian women, tried to speak at the University of Colorado during the week of September 11th, Jewish groups organised a massive demonstration against her. U.S. television simply did not acknowledge the Palestinian tragedy. But maybe all this no longer mattered. When Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could claim—as he did when asked for proof of Iraq’s nuclear potential—that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” we might as well have ended all moral debate. But when Rumsfeld referred to the “so-called occupied territories,” he revealed himself to be a very disreputable man.
Strange events were now going on in the Middle East. Arab military intelligence reported the shifting of massive U.S. arms shipments around the region— not just to Qatar and Kuwait, but to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. American and Israeli military planners and intelligence analysts were said to have met twice in Tel Aviv to discuss the potential outcome of the next Middle East war. The destruction of Saddam and the break-up of Saudi Arabia—a likely scenario if Iraq crumbled, so the “experts” claimed—had long been two Israeli dreams. As the United States discovered during its fruitful period of neutrality between 1939 and 1941, war primes the pumps of the economy. Was that what was going on today—the preparation of a war to refloat the U.S. economy?
Then in one brisk, neat letter to Kofi Annan, Saddam Hussein pulled the rug from right under George W. Bush’s feet. At the United Nations, Bush had been playing the unlikely role of the multilateralist, warning the world that Iraq had one last chance—through the UN—to avoid Armageddon. “If the Iraqi regime wishes peace,” he had told us all in the General Assembly, “it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related material.” So now Saddam welcomed the UN arms inspectors. No conditions. Just as Bush had demanded. Saddam would do everything he could to avoid war. Bush, it seemed, was doing everything he could to avoid peace.
No wonder that the United States immediately began to speak of “false hopes.” No wonder, I wrote in The Independent, that the Americans were searching desperately for another casus belli “in an attempt to make sure that their next war keeps to its timetable.” But for now, the Americans had been stymied. It would take at least twenty-five days to put the UN inspection team together, another sixty for their preliminary assessment, then another sixty days for further inspections. Bush’s latest war had been delayed by more than five months. But a careful examination of the Bush UN speech showed that a free inspection of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was just one of six conditions which Iraq would have to meet if it “wishes peace.” The other Bush demands included an “end of all support for terrorism.” Did this mean the UN would now be urged to send inspectors to hunt for evidence inside Iraq for Saddam’s previous—or current— liaisons with guns-for-hire? Bush had also demanded that Iraq “cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans and others.” Notwithstanding the inclusion of Turkomans—worthy of protection indeed, though no doubt because they sat on very lucrative oil deposits—did this mean that the UN could demand human rights monitors inside Iraq? In reality, such a proposal would be both moral and highly ethical, but America’s Arab allies would profoundly hope that such monitors were not also dispatched to Riyadh, Cairo, Amman and other centres of gentle interrogation.
Yet even if Saddam was prepared to accede to all these demands with a sincerity he had not shown in response to other UN resolutions, the Americans had made clear that sanctions would only be lifted—that Iraq’s isolation would only end— with “regime change.” For Bush’s sudden passion for international adherence to UN Security Council resolutions—an enthusiasm that never, of course, extended to Israel’s flouting of UN resolutions of equal importance—was in reality a manoeuvre to provide legitimacy for Washington’s planned invasion of Iraq.
Tony Blair’s adherence to this cynical policy must remain one of the more mystifying elements in this chapter of Middle East tragedy. The coalescence of Bush’s born-again Christianity with Blair’s High Church pronouncements—and the unique combination of Blair’s own self-righteousness and legal casuistry— was to produce one of the strangest alliances of our times. The hollowness of the British political contribution—symbolised by the Downing Street “dossier” of 24 September 2002—should have made this obvious months before its warning of a “45-minute” WMD attack came to be debated in Parliament and in the later Hutton Report.
I first read this document in Beirut and—as always in the Middle East—its contents appeared quite different to a reader 3,000 kilometres from London than they did to an MP in Westminster or an editor in what used to be called Fleet Street. I found it truly shocking—but not for any 45-minute warnings. Reading it, I wrote, “can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof—if the contents are true—that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam’s building of weapons of mass destruction are correct—and I will come to the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘coulds’ later—it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us—for nothing.” In May 1996, as we know, Madeleine Albright had told us that sanctions worked and prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction. Our then Tory government agreed, and Tony Blair toed the line. But when asked by an interviewer if the “price”—the death of half a million children—was worth it, she had replied to the world’s astonishment: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”
Now we were being told—if Blair was telling us the truth—that the price was not worth it. The purchase bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of children wasn’t worth a dime. For the Blair “dossier” was telling us that, despite sanctions, Saddam was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction. All that nonsense about dual-use technology, the ban on children’s pencils—graphite could have a military use—and our refusal to allow Iraq to import equipment to restore the water-treatment plants that we bombed in the Gulf War, was a sham. This grievous conclusion was the only moral one to be drawn from the sixteen pages that supposedly detailed the chemical, biological and nuclear horrors that the Beast of Baghdad had in store for us. It was difficult, reading the full report, to know whether to laugh or cry. The degree of deceit and duplicity in its production spoke of the trickery that informed the Blair government and its treatment of MPs.
Let us take just one example of the document’s dishonesty. On page 45, we were told—in a long chapter about Saddam’s human rights abuses—that “on March 1st, 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, riots broke out in the southern city of Basra, spreading quickly to other cities in Shia-dominated southern Iraq. The regime responded by killing thousands.” What’s wrong with this paragraph is the lie in the use of the word “riots.” These were not “riots.” They were part of a mass rebellion specifically called for by President Bush Junior’s father and by that CIA-RUN radio station in Saudi Arabia. The Shia Muslims of Iraq obeyed Bush Senior’s appeal. And were then left to their fate by the Americans and British, who they had been given every reason to believe would come to their aid. No wonder they died in their thousands. But all this was cut out from the Blair “dossier.”
Indeed, anyone reading the weasel words of doubt that were insinuated throughout this text could only have profound concern about the basis on which Britain was to go to war. The Iraqi weapon programme was “almost certainly” seeking to enrich uranium. It “appears” that Iraq was attempting to acquire a magnet production line. There was evidence that Iraq had tried to acquire specialised aluminium tubes (used in the enrichment of uranium) but there was “no definitive intelligence” that it was destined for a nuclear programme. “If ” Iraq obtained fissile material, it could produce nuclear weapons in one or two years. It was “difficult to judge” whether al-Hussein missiles could be available for use. Efforts to regenerate the Iraqi missile programme “probably” began in 1995. And so the “dossier” went on. Yes, Saddam—we had to say this in every radio interview, every lecture, write it in every article in order to be heard—was a brutal, wicked tyrant. But were “almost certainly,” “appears,” “probably” and “if ” really the rallying call to send our Grenadiers off to the deserts of Kut-al-Amara?
There was high praise in the document for UN weapons inspectors. And there was more trickery in the relevant chapter about them. It quoted Dr. Hans Blix, the executive chairman of the UN inspection commission, as saying that in the absence of (post-1998) inspections it was impossible to verify Iraqi disarma– ment compliance. But on 18 August 2002—scarcely a month before the Blair “dossier”—Blix had told the Associated Press that he couldn’t say with certainty that Baghdad possessed WMDs. This quotation, of course, was excised from the British government document. So there it was. If these pages of trickery were based on “probably” and “if,” we had no business going to war. If they were all true, we murdered half a million Iraqi children for nothing. How was that for a war crime?
Yet each day, someone said something even more incredible—even more unimaginable—about President Bush’s obsession with war. In October, Bush was himself talking to an audience in Cincinnati about “nuclear holy warriors.” Forget for a moment that we still couldn’t prove Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. Forget that the latest Bush speech was just a rehash of all the “ifs” and “mays” and “coulds” in Tony Blair’s flimsy sixteen pages of allegations in his plainly dishonest “dossier.” We now had to fight “nuclear holy warriors.” That’s what we had to do to justify the whole charade through which we were being taken by the White House, by Downing Street, by all the decaying “experts” on terrorism and, alas, far too many journalists. Forget the fourteen Palestinians, including the twelve-year-old child, killed by Israel a few hours before Bush spoke in Cincinnati, forget that when American-made aircraft killed nine Palestinian children in July, along with one militant, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon—a “man of peace” in Bush’s words—described the slaughter as “a great success.” Israel was on our side in the “war on terror.” We had to remember to use the word “terror”—about Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Yassir Arafat, in fact about anyone who opposed Israel or America. Bush used the word in his Cincinnati speech thirty times in half an hour—that was one “terrorism” a minute.
What we had to forget if we were to support this madness, needless to say, was that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It was essential to forget this for three reasons. First, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians—which was one of the reasons we were now supposed to go to war with him. Second, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the U.S. embassy—in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad. And third, because the envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. One might have thought it strange, in the course of one of his folksy press conferences, that Rumsfeld hadn’t chatted to us about this interesting tit-bit. You might think he would wish to enlighten us about the evil nature of the criminal with whom he so warmly shook hands. But no. Until questioned much later about whether he warned Saddam against the use of gas—he claimed he did, but this proved to be untrue—Rumsfeld was silent. As he was about his subsequent and equally friendly meeting with Tariq Aziz—which just happened to take place on the day in March 1984 that the UN released its damning report on Saddam’s use of poison gas against Iran.
We had to forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds—when he “used gas against his own people” in the words of Messrs. Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al.— President Bush Senior provided Saddam with $500 million in U.S. government subsidies to buy American farm products. We had to forget that in the following year, after Saddam’s genocide was complete, the elder Bush doubled this subsidy to $1 billion, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious “dual-use” material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons. And of course, we had to forget about oil. Indeed, oil is the one commodity—and one of the few things that George Bush Junior knew something about, along with his ex-oil cronies Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and countless others in the administration— which was never mentioned. In all of Bush’s thirty minutes of anti-Iraq war talk in Cincinnati—leavened with just two minutes of how “I hope this will not require military action”—there wasn’t a single reference to the fact that Iraq might hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stood to gain billions of dollars in the event of a U.S. invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war. We had to ignore all this before we went to war. And that’s pretty much what we did.
In the continuing war against al-Qaeda, Washington trumpeted its victories, even when they set new records in extrajudicial executions. A “Clean shot” was The Washington Post’s description of the murder of the al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen by a U.S. Predator unmanned aircraft in November 2002. The U.S. press used Israel’s own definition of such deaths as “targeted killing”—the BBC parroted the same words on 5 November. No one explained why these important al-Qaeda leaders could not have been arrested. Or tried before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation. Instead, the Americans released a clutch of Guantanamo “suspects,” one of whom—having been held for eleven months in solitary confinement and then returned to Afghanistan—turned out to be around one-hundred years old, and so senile that he couldn’t string a sentence together. Unsurprisingly, American intelligence never seemed aware of just how many of bin Laden’s associates it had been fighting in Afghanistan.194
The very expression “targeted killing” had now become part of the lexicon of the “war on terror.” Ariel Sharon of Israel used the term. So too did the Russians in their renewed war on Chechnya. After the disastrous “rescue” of Moscow theatre hostages held by rebel Chechens in Moscow, Putin was supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya. In October 2002, Newsweek ran a brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a deeply moving account of Russian cruelty there, it told of a Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier began to rape her. “Hurry up, Kolya,” his friend shouted, “while she’s still warm.” But no matter. The “war on terror” meant that Kolya and the boys would be back in action soon, courtesy of Messrs. Putin, Bush and Blair.
That very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who tried to warn the West of Israel’s massive nuclear war technology, imprisoned for twelve years of solitary confinement—and betrayed, so it appears, by Robert Maxwell—wrote a poem in his confinement. “I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver,” Vanunu wrote. “They said, ‘Do this, do that, don’t look left or right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.’”
Kolya would have understood that. So would the U.S. Air Force officer “flying” the drone that killed the al-Qaeda men in Yemen. So would the Israeli pilot who bombed the apartment block in Gaza, killing nine small children as well as well as his Hamas target, the “operation” described by Sharon as “a great success.” Was this not part of the arrogance of colonial power? Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during the 1956–52 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting in October 2002 of his prowess at the guillotine. “You must never give the guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head around and that’s when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through his jaw, and you have to use a butcher’s knife to finish it off. It is an exorbitant power—to kill one’s fellow man.” So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom.
When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he wrote, in his Gallic Wars: “Alea iacta est.” The die is cast. Just after 11 a.m. on 8 November, when the United Nations Security Council voted 15–0 to disarm Iraq, President George W. Bush crossed the Rubicon. “The world must insist that that judgement must be enforced,” he told us. The Rubicon is a wide river. It was deep for Caesar’s legions. The Tigris would be more shallow—my guess was that the first American tanks would be across it within one week of war—but what lay beyond? “Cheat and retreat . . . will no longer be tolerated,” Bush told the UN. And after eight weeks of debate in the Security Council, no one any longer mentioned the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, because, of course, Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with September 11th. “Should we have to use troops,” Bush told a 7 November press conference, “. . . the United States, with friends, will move swiftly— with force—to do the job.” In other words, he would invade Iraq, the “friends,” presumably, being British.
The United Nations could debate any Iraqi non-compliance with weapons inspectors, but the United States would decide whether Iraq had breached UN resolutions. In other words, America could declare war without UN permission. The BBC, with CNN and all the other television networks, billed Resolution 1441 as “the last chance” for Saddam Hussein. In fact, it was a “last chance” for the United Nations. It was easy to identify the traps. America’s UN ambassador, John Negroponte—later to be his country’s ambassador in Iraq—insisted that the Security Council resolution “contains no hidden triggers.” But it did. It allowed the Security Council to discuss non-compliance without restraining the United States from attacking Baghdad. “One way or another,” Negroponte said, “. . . Iraq will be disarmed.” Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s nightmare headmaster at the UN, performed appropriately. “Crystal clear,” “unequivocal choice,” “serious consequences,” no more “ambiguous modalities.” You could almost feel the cane. No mention, of course, of the CIA’s manipulation of the last team of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. Washington wanted a UN fig leaf for a war on Iraq and was willing to go through an inspection process in the hope that Iraq obstructed it.
I AM IN ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, preparing to give a lecture to university students on the coming war in Iraq. It is mid-November, and in my hotel room I am dusting off my description of bin Laden, of how I met him in Sudan and Afghanistan. Not since the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan have we heard his voice, although my contacts have insisted to me that he is alive. I turn on CNN. And there, sitting in my room above the Mississippi, I hear his voice. He is alive. It takes only a brief round of phone calls to the Middle East and South-West Asia for my sources to confirm that it is Osama bin Laden’s gravelly voice that is threatening the West in the short monologue transmitted by the Al-Jazeera television channel. So the Saudi billionaire, the man in the cave, the “Evil One”—I quote a Newsweek headline—the bearded, ascetic man whom the greatest army on earth has sought in vain, is with us still.
“U.S. intelligence”—the heroes of September 11th who heard about Arabs learning to fly but didn’t quite manage to tell us in time—come up with the usual rubbish for the American media. It may be him. It’s probably him. The gravelly voice may mean he’s been hurt. He is speaking fast because he could have been wounded by the Americans. Untrue. The United States was finally forced to acknowledge on 18 November that the man some of them had claimed to be dead was still very much in the land of the living—and uttering the kind of threat that confirms the darkest fears of Western leaders. “Just like you kill us, we will kill you,” bin Laden said.
When he was recorded, bin Laden was not talking into a tape-recorder. He was talking into a telephone. The man on the other end of the line—quite possibly in Pakistan—held the recorder. Bin Laden may not have been in the same city as the man with the recorder. He may well not have been in the same country. Osama bin Laden always speaks slowly. His voice is rapid, and the reason for this is apparently quite simple: the recorder’s battery was low. When replayed by Al-Jazeera at real-time speed, the voice goes up an octave.
Writing about bin Laden now is one of the most difficult journalistic tasks on earth. I have to say what I know. I have to say what I think must be true. I have to ask why he made this tape. I start to tap out my report for The Independent. My story moves deeper into questions. Why? What for? Why now? It requires a new, harsh way of writing to tell the truth, the use of brackets and colons. Knowledge and suspicion, probability and speculation, keep grinding up against each other. Bin Laden survived the bombing of Tora Bora. Fact. Bin Laden escaped via Pakistan. Probability. Bin Laden is now in Saudi Arabia. A growing conviction.
So here, with all its imperfections and conditional clauses, is what I suspect this tape recording means. The story is a deeply disturbing one for the West. I am frightened of the implications of this tape. One of its messages to Britain—above all others after the United States—is: Watch out. Tony Blair was right (for once) to warn of further attacks, though the bin Laden phone call was not (I suspect) monitored. But it was bin Laden. We must start with Tora Bora in the autumn of 2001. Under heavy bombardment by the U.S. Air Force, bin Laden’s al-Qaeda fighters realised they could not hold out indefinitely in the cave complex of the White Mountains above Jalalabad. Bin Laden was with them. Al-Qaeda men volunteered to fight on to certain death against the Afghan warlords paid by the Americans, and bin Laden at first refused to go. He argued that he wished to die with them. His most loyal bodyguards and senior advisers insisted he must leave. In the end, he abandoned Tora Bora in a state of anguish, his protectors hustling him down one mountainside with much the same panic as Dick Cheney’s security men carried the U.S. vice president to the White House basement when al-Qaeda’s killer-hijackers closed in on Washington on September 11th. All of the above comes under the label of “impeccable source.”
Bin Laden went either to Kashmir (possible, though unlikely) or Karachi (most probable). I say this because bin Laden boasted to me once of the many admirers he had among the Sunni clergy of this great, hot and dangerous Pakistani city. He always talked of them as his “brothers.” He had given me those posters in Urdu which these clerics had produced and pasted on the walls of Karachi. He liked to quote their sermons to me. So I’ll go for Karachi. But I may be wrong. In the months that followed, there were little, tiny hints that he remained alive, like the smell of tobacco in a room days after a smoker has left. An admirer of the man insisted to me that he was alive (fact, but not an impeccable source). He was trying to find a way of communicating with the outside world without meeting any Westerner. Absolute fact. His most recent videotape—which was dismissed as old by those famous “U.S. intelligence sources” because he didn’t mention any events since November 2001—was new. (Strong possibility, backed up by a good— though not impeccable—source.)
So why now? The Middle East was entering a new and ever more tragic phase of its history, torn apart by the war between Israelis and Palestinians and facing the incendiary effects of a possible Anglo–American invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden must have realised the need to once more address the Arab world—and his audiotape, despite the threats to Britain and other Western countries, was primarily directed towards his most important audience, Arab Muslims. His silence at this moment in Middle East history would have been inexcusable in bin Laden’s own eyes. And just to counter the predictable counter-claims that his tape could be old, he energetically listed the blows struck at Western powers since his presumed “death.” The bombings of French submarine technicians in Karachi, a synagogue in Tunisia, the massacre in Bali, the Chechen theatre siege in Moscow, even the killing of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan. Yes, he was saying, “I know about all these things.” He was saying he approved. He was telling us he was still here. Arabs might deplore this violence, but few would not feel some pull of emotion. Amid Israel’s brutality towards Palestinians and America’s threats towards Iraq, at least one Arab was prepared to hit back. That was his message to Arabs.
Bin Laden always loathed Saddam Hussein. He hated the Iraqi leader’s un-Islamic behaviour, his secularism, his use of religion to encourage loyalty to a Baath party that was co-founded by a Christian. America’s attempt to link al-Qaeda to the Baghdad regime has always been one of the most preposterous of Washington’s claims. Bin Laden used to tell me how much he hated Saddam. So his two references to “the sons of Iraq” are intriguing. He makes no mention of the Baghdad government or of Saddam. But with UN sanctions still killing thousands of children—and with Iraq the target of a probable American invasion—he cannot possibly ignore it. So he talks about “Iraq’s children” and about “our sons in Iraq,” indicating Arab Muslim men who happened to be Iraqi, rather than Iraqi nationalists. But not Saddam. It’s easy to see how the U.S. administration may try to use these two references to make another false link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, but bin Laden—who is intelligent enough to be able to predict this—clearly felt that an expression of sympathy for the Arabs of Iraq outweighed any misuse Washington could make of his remarks. This has to come under the label of speculation (although near-certainty might be nearer the mark). Washington does indeed use these phrases to prop up its false contention that there are bin Laden–Saddam links. Back in 1996, bin Laden told me that British and French troops in Saudi Arabia were as much at risk of being attacked by his followers as American forces. In 1997 he changed this target list. The British and French he now dissociated from any proposed attacks. But in the new audiotape they are back on the hit list along with Canada, Italy, Germany and Australia. And Britain is at the top.
The message to us—the West—is simple and repeated three times. If we want to back George W. Bush, the “pharaoh of the age”—and “pharaoh” is what Anwar Sadat’s killers called the Egyptian president after his murder more than two decades ago—we will pay a price. “What business do your governments have in allying themselves with the gang of criminals in the White House against Muslims . . . ?” I have heard bin Laden use that Arabic expression ifarbatu al-ijran twice before in conversation with me. “Gang of criminals.” Which is what the West has called al-Qaeda.
A few days earlier, after I gave a lecture in North Carolina, a woman in the audience had asked me when America would go to war in Iraq. I told her to watch the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post for the first smear campaigns against the UN inspectors. And, right on time, the smears began in early December. One of the UN inspectors, it was now stated—a man appointed at the behest of the State Department—was involved with pornography. Another senior official, we were told—a man who again was appointed at the urging of the State Department—was previously fired from his job as head of a nuclear safety agency. Why, I wonder, did the Americans want these men on the inspection team? So they could trash it later? The official drubbing of the UN inspectors began way back in September when The New York Times announced, over Judith Miller’s by-line, that the original inspections team might, according to former inspector David Kay, be on a “mission impossible.” The source was “some officials and former inspectors.”
President George W. Bush was banging on again about Iraqi anti-aircraft defences firing at American and British pilots—even though the “no-fly zones” had nothing to do with the UN inspections nor, indeed, anything to do with the UN at all. The inspections appeared to be going unhindered in Baghdad. But what was George Bush now telling us? “So far the signs are not encouraging.” What did this mean? Simply that America planned to go to war whatever the UN inspectors found. The New York Times—now a virtual mouthpiece for scores of anonymous U.S. “officials”—had persuaded itself that Iraq’s Arab neighbours “seem prepared to support an American military campaign.” Despite all the warnings from Arab leaders, repeated over and over again, month after month, urging America not to go to war, this was the nonsense being peddled in the United States.
And suddenly, the British government came up with another of its famous “dossiers” on Saddam’s human rights abuses. Yes, again, we knew about his raping rooms and his executions and his torture when we eagerly supported his invasion of Iran in 1980. So why regurgitate it yet again? I noticed at once a little point in the latest British “dossier.” It revealed that a certain Aziz Saleh Ahmed, a “fighter in the popular army,” held a position as “violator of women’s honour.” Now I happened to remember that name. This was the same Aziz Saleh Ahmed who turned up on page 287 of the book published back in 1993 by Kanan Makiya, who formerly called himself Samir al-Khalil. Even ignoring the controversy about this “revelation” at the time, what was the British government doing rehashing the Aziz Saleh Ahmad story all over again as if we’d just discovered it, when it was at least eight years old and—according to Makiya—was first seen more than a decade ago?
In the meantime, Bush’s foreign policy advisers were busy hatching up the conflict of civilisations. Kenneth Adelman, who was on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was saying that for Bush to call Islam a peaceful religion was “an increasingly hard argument to make.” Islam was “militaristic” in Adelman’s eyes. “After all, its founder, Mohammed, was a warrior, not a peace advocate like Jesus.” Then there was Eliot Cohen of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who was also on the Pentagon board. He now argued that the “enemy” of the United States was not terrorism but “militant Islam.” Adelman and Cohen did not vouchsafe their own religion, but Islam was clearly their target. Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster—who used to run a radio station in southern Lebanon which uttered threats against Muslim villagers and UN troops—said that “Adolf Hitler was bad but what the Muslims want to do to Jews is worse.” Jerry Falwell, one of the pit bulls of the religious right, called the Prophet a “terrorist,” while Franklin Graham, son of the same Billy Graham who made anti-Semitic remarks on the Nixon tapes, called Islam “evil.” Graham had spoken at Bush’s inauguration.
We ignored this dangerous rhetoric at our peril. Did Blair ignore it? Wasn’t he aware that there were some very sinister people hovering around Bush? Did he really think Britons were going to be cheer-led into war by “dossiers” and the constant reheating of Saddam’s crimes? Didn’t we want the UN inspectors to do their work? If a reporter’s job is to describe the lies of statesmen, then at least The Independentalso thought it a journalist’s duty to condemn them. “I rather think that we are being set up for war,” I wrote in my paper on 4 December, “that Britain will join America in invading Iraq, whatever the inspectors discover. In fact, we are being prepared for the awful, incredible, unspeakable possibility that the UN inspectors will find absolutely no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That will leave us with only one conclusion: they were no good at their job. They should have been in the oil business.”195
After a lecture in New York, I am approached by a young American, a member of a U.S. Special Forces intelligence team newly returned from Afghanistan. He shows me photographs of al-Qaeda suspects, hooded and shackled as they are put aboard an American transport aircraft to Kandahar. They live in pens of eight or ten men. They are given cots with blankets but no privacy. They are forced to urinate and defecate publicly because the Americans watch their prisoners at all times. We agree to meet at a coffee shop in lower Manhattan next morning. He turns up on time but nervous, looking over his shoulder, worried that someone might be following us, starting from his seat when my mobile phone rings.
U.S. forces, he says, have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq; they are finding it almost impossible to crack the al-Qaeda network because bin Laden’s men have resorted to primitive methods of communication that cut off individual members of al-Qaeda from all information. This man’s prognoses were totally at variance with the upbeat briefings of U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Even in Pakistan, the man tells me, middle-ranking Pakistani army officers are tipping off members of al-Qaeda to avoid American-organised raids. “We didn’t catch whom we were supposed to catch,” he says. “There was an over-expectation by us that technology could do more than it did. Al-Qaeda are very smart. They basically found out how we track them. They realised that if they communicated electronically, our Rangers would swoop on them. So they started using couriers to hand-carry notes on paper or to repeat messages from their memory, and this confused our system. Our intelligence is high-tech—they went back to primitive methods that the Americans cannot adapt to.”
There were originally “a lot of high-profile arrests.” But the al-Qaeda cells didn’t know what other members were doing. “They were very adaptive and became much more decentralised. We caught a couple of really high-profile, serious al-Qaeda leaders but they couldn’t tell us what specific operations were going to take place. They would know that something big was being planned but they would have no idea what it was.” The intelligence officer, who had spent more than six months in Afghanistan in 2002, was scathing in his denunciation of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord implicated in the suffocation of up to 3,000 Taliban prisoners in container trucks. “Dostum is totally culpable and the U.S. believes he’s guilty but he’s our guy and so we won’t say so . . . one of the things we failed to do was create a real government. We let the warlords firmly entrench themselves and now they can’t be dislodged.”
American security agents in Karachi were looking for Daniel Pearl’s murderers, but they would find their arrest targets had fled because of secret support within middle ranks of the Pakistani army. “We would go with the Pakistanis to a location but there would be no one there because once the middle level of the Pakistani military knew of our plans, they would leak the information. In the NorthWest Frontier province, the frontier corps is a second-rate army—they are a lot more anti-Western in sentiment than the main Pakistani army. In the end we had to coordinate everything through Islamabad.”
When I asked about prisoners, the Special Forces officer became worried, withdrawn. He asked for another coffee. “In Kandahar, in what we call their living areas, the prisoners are given cots with blankets and Adidas suits and runners, but they have no privacy. There are no sides to their living areas because we have to see them all the time. They have no privacy in the bathroom. Some of them masturbate when they are looking at the female guards. Our guards had no reaction to this. They are soldiers. When the interrogations take place, the prisoners are allowed to sit. I don’t want to get into specifics about the questions we ask them.” As for the Western journalists he met at Bagram, the American intelligence officer had a low opinion. “They just hung around our base all day. Whenever we had some special operation, we’d offer the journalists some facility to go on patrol with our Special Forces and off they’d go—you know, ‘We’re on patrol with the Special Forces’—and they wouldn’t realise we were stringing them along to get them out of the way.”
IF JOURNALISTS COULD BE FOOLED by the Americans, Afghans made their own judgements on recent history. For while U.S. Special Forces cruised the streets of Kandahar in their four-by-fours, the people of this brooding, hot city were now visiting a bleak graveyard with the reverence of worshippers. Beneath grey, parched mounds of dust and dried mud lay the “martyrs” of al-Qaeda. Here, among the 150 graves, lay the men who held out to the end in the city’s Mirweis hospital, shooting at the Americans and their Afghan allies until they died amid sewage and their own excrement. They were honoured now as saints. Other earth hid the bodies of the followers of Osama bin Laden who fought at Kandahar airport in the last battle before the fall of the Taliban. They are Arabs and Pakistanis and Chechens and Kazakhs and Kashmiris and all—if you believe the propaganda—are hated and loathed by the native Pashtun population of Kandahar.
Not true. The people of the Taliban’s former caliphate tended the graves in their hundreds. On Fridays, they came in their thousands, travelling hundreds of miles. They brought their sick and dying. Word had it that a visit to the graveyard of bin Laden’s dead would cure disease and pestilence. As if kneeling at the graves of saints, old women gently washed the baked mud sepulchres, kissing the dust upon them, looking up in prayer to the spindly flags that snapped in the dust storms. The Kandahar kabristan—the place of graves—was a political as well as a religious lesson for all who came there.
“Foreigners are advised to stay away from the al-Qaeda graveyard,” a Western aid worker solemnly announced. “You may be in danger there.” But when I visited the last resting place of bin Laden’s men, there were only the fine, gritty winds of sand to fear. Many of the men around the graves kept their scarves around their faces, dark eyes staring at the foreigner in their midst. Two soldiers of the “new” Afghan army, stationed here by the supposedly pro-American authorities, watched the visitors as they put bowls of salt on the graves and took pieces of mud to touch with their tongues. An old man from Helmand was there. He had put stones and salt and mud on the tombs—he shook hands with me with salt on his fingers—and he had come because he was sick. “I have pain in my knee and I have polio and I heard that if I came here I would be cured,” he said. “I put salt and grain on the graves then later I will collect the grain and eat the salt and take the mud from the grave home.” Khurda, the Pashtuns call this, bringing salt to the tomb of saints.
A second, even older man had travelled from Uruzgan with his mother. “My mother had leg and back pains and I brought her to Kandahar so she could see the doctors. But when I heard the stories about these martyrs’ graves—and that they might cure her—I also brought my mother here. She is happier here than going to the doctors.” I watched his aged mother on her knees, scraping dust from the mud tombs, praying and crying. The government soldiers appeared to have succumbed to the same visionary trance. “I’ve seen for myself people who get healed here,” a young, unbearded man with a Kalashnikov on his shoulder told me. “People get well after visiting the graves. I’ve seen deaf men who could hear again and I’ve seen the dumb speak. They were cured.”
This was not the time—and definitely not the place—to contradict such conviction. The sand blasted over the graveyard with a ruthlessness worthy of bin Laden. The city cemetery is much larger—there are square miles of tribal graveyards within its perimeter. But it was the al-Qaeda dead who attracted the mourners. Attracted by what? The rumours and legend of healing? By the idea that these men resisted the foreigners to the end, preferred to die rather than surrender, that the non-Afghan “martyrs” had fought like Afghans?
So there was secret collusion, a fraudulent attempt to use the United Nations as a fig leaf for war, a largely unsympathetic British public, journalists used as propagandists and our enemy—an Arab dictator previously regarded as a friend of the West—compared to the worst criminals of the Second World War. This was our world in the winter of 2002.
But it also happened to be our world almost half a century earlier, a conflict not about oil but over a narrow man-made canal linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The Suez crisis has haunted British governments ever since 1956—it hung over Margaret Thatcher during the 1982 Falklands War, and its memory now moved between the Foreign Office and Downing Street, Jack Straw and Tony Blair. For Suez destroyed a British prime minister—along, almost, with the Anglo-American alliance—and symbolised the end of the British empire. It killed many civilians—all Egyptian, of course—and brought shame upon the allies when they turned out to have committed war crimes. It rested on a lie—that British and French troops should land in Egypt to “separate” the Egyptian and Israeli armies, even though the British and French had earlier connived at Israel’s invasion. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser was described by the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, as “the Mussolini of the Nile” even though, scarcely a year earlier, Eden had warmly shaken Nasser’s hand in an exchange of congratulations over a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty—shades of Donald Rumsfeld’s chummy meeting with the “Hitler of Baghdad” in 1983. In the end, British troops—poorly equipped and treating their Egyptian foes with racial disdain—left in humiliation, digging up their dead comrades from their graves to freight back home lest the Egyptians defile their bodies.
I have always been fascinated by the “other side,” by how the losers thought and fought and—occasionally—turned out not to be the losers after all. When I was with the Iraqi army during the 1980–88 war with Iran, I always wanted to talk to the Iranian soldiers on the other side of the front lines. When I was with the Iranians, I was determined to talk to their Iraqi opponents. When the Hizballah fought the Israeli occupation army in southern Lebanon, I longed to listen to the Israeli army’s analysis of the Hizballah—far from the usual “terrorist” rhetoric produced by their politicians, Israeli junior officers often showed respect for the Hizballah’s guerrilla tactics. In Baghdad in 2003, I lived among Iraqis as they were bombed and attacked by the Anglo–American invasion force. I was too young to cover Suez—my mother, as I have recalled, was relieved I was too young to be a British soldier in the invasion of Egypt—but on the thirtieth anniversary of the crisis, I did set out to talk to the Egyptians who took over the Suez Canal and fought the British, spending weeks in Cairo listening to those who dared to oppose the British empire and the French nation and the invading Israelis.
The Egyptians do not call it the “Suez Crisis” or even the “Suez War.” They refer to it, always, as “the Tripartite Aggression,” so that their countrymen may never forget that two European superpowers colluded with Israel to invade the new republic of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Suez was a complex crisis, but it revolved around Nasser’s decision—against international agreements—to nationalise the canal and take over the Suez Canal Company. British banks and businesses had long dominated investment in Egypt and held a 44 per cent stake in the company, originally negotiated by Benjamin Disraeli. Nasser’s takeover was greeted with delirium by Egyptian crowds who had been aghast at America’s earlier withdrawal from the Aswan High Dam project. The code word for the takeover was “de Lesseps,” who had built the canal when Egypt was part of the Ottoman empire, and the moment Nasser uttered the Frenchman’s name in a radio speech from Alexandria on 26 July 1956, twelve of Nasser’s collaborators stormed the company’s great wooden-framed headquarters.
Among them was Captain Ali Nasr, a shy twenty-six-year-old Suez Canal pilot with a thin moustache who walked up the steps of the building in Ismailia and calmly told the French employees inside that they were now working for the Egyptian Canal Company. Nasr was the only seaman of the group. “We all knew it was a job we had to do for our country—we were ready to lay down our lives for this,” he was to tell me thirty years later. “We had the feeling of being soldiers awaiting instructions. We were led inside by Engineer Mahmoud Younis, who had been given his sealed orders by Nasser himself. Engineer Younis had a pistol. I was unarmed—I have never believed in carrying a weapon. But inside, we found the French and British and Greeks were very friendly. We told them: ‘The canal is nationalised. It belongs to Egypt now. We want your cooperation. The ships must go on moving in the canal.’ Then we exchanged cigarettes with them. We slept in the offices, usually slumped on the desks of the French officials. That is how we came to run the canal.”
As Captain Nasr was turning in to sleep in Ismailia, Anthony Eden was concluding a dinner at Downing Street with the Iraqi king and his prime minister, Nuri es-Said. Both would be assassinated in Baghdad two years later. But on that night in 1956, es-Said’s venom was directed at the Egyptian leader. “Hit him,” he advised Eden. “Hit, hit hard and hit now.” In London, Eden summoned his chiefs of staff. He wanted to topple Nasser—“regime change” is a new version of the same idea—and free the canal. But the British military informed him it couldn’t be done. Troops were out of training, landing craft out of commission. “It was only when we eventually dropped outside Port Said,” a Parachute Regiment officer told me more than forty years later, “that we suddenly realised how far our army’s readiness had declined since the Second World War. Our transport aircraft could only unload from the side, our jeeps broke down and they couldn’t even drop artillery to support us.”
The first test of Nasser’s strength came on 15 September 1956, when almost all the foreign pilots in the Suez Canal Authority withdrew their labour. Eden and Guy Mollet, the French prime minister, had devised the walkout in London five days earlier. The world would be shown that the Egyptians were not competent to run the canal. Of the 205 pilots capable of steering convoys through the 101-mile ditch between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, only forty were Egyptian—and five of them were on holiday. “Younis realised this was going to happen and he called us Egyptian pilots together to ask what we should do,” Captain Nasr recalled. “I told him we must train extra pilots but that we did not have time to teach them the navigation of the whole canal. I told him we should teach the men four sectors of the canal—one lot would learn how to pilot vessels southbound on the first half of the canal to Ismailia, the next would be taught the second stage southbound to Suez, the other two would learn the canal northbound in the same stages.”
On the night of 15 September, Nasr found himself aboard a 14,000-ton German ship at Port Said. “The foreign pilots had left and I was so anxious about my job and my responsibility for the new scheme that I found I couldn’t distinguish the green buoy lights from the red buoy lights at the mouth of the canal. But the German captain was very kind and gave me encouragement. We moved down the canal at night, and at dawn I saw the lights of a car on the road beside us. It was Younis with a megaphone, shouting encouragement to me and to the pilots of each ship as they steamed past him.”
In Britain, the days and weeks and months that followed Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal were taken up with prevarication, parliamentary lies, desperate attempts to form a coalition army and—most damaging of all—a secret meeting at Sèvres, outside Paris, in which the Israelis, the British and the French agreed that the Israeli army should invade Egypt and that Britain and France would then intervene, instruct the Israeli and Egyptian armies to withdraw their forces either side of the canal, and then place an Anglo-French intervention force in the Canal Zone around Port Said. “Operation Musketeer,” it would be called, and the British people were duly summoned from their postwar lethargy by newspaper editorials that condemned those who questioned Eden’s right to use military force.
The Times led the way. “Of course, it [public opinion] wants to avoid the use of force,” the paper’s editorial—written personally by its editor, William Haley— thundered. “So does everyone and we hope no one does so more than the British Government. But that is a far cry from saying that because there seems little we can do about it, the best thing is to find excuses for, and forget, the whole business. Nations live by the vigorous defence of their interests . . . The people, in their silent way, know this better than the critics. They still want Britain great.” The Manchester Guardianclaimed that The Times’s editorial was an attack on the right to speak out against government in times of crisis—a similar debate restarted when the Iraqi war grew closer in early 2003—and Eden’s press secretary, William Clark, played a role not unlike Alastair Campbell’s in Downing Street under Blair.
“Clark worked in unison with The Times,” Tony Shaw recalled in his brilliant and sometimes outrageously funny history of the crisis. Clark’s job—and here there is a deeply uncomfortable parallel with George Bush and the UN—was “to prepare the ground for the government’s brief referral of the dispute to the United Nations . . . This required a certain amount of ingenuity since Eden and the paper had hitherto dismissed the organisation as unwieldy and incapable of producing swift results.” Eden had told Haley that he wanted to use the UN as an instrument solely to prove Nasser’s guilt and justify force—which is pretty much what George W. Bush wanted the UN arms inspectors to do in Iraq in 2002.
And there was another 1956 Times editorial that could have been reprinted in late 2002 with the word “Iraq” substituted for “the canal”:
The objection to the matter being simply referred to the UN and left there has all along been, and remains, that the UN is likely to be dilatory and certain to be ineffective as a means of freeing the canal. But whatever international control is eventually brought about by negotiation or otherwise should certainly be under the aegis of the UN and the sooner the UN is officially informed of what has happened the better.
“Collusion,” according to Kennett Love’s monumental study of the Suez War, “was born of a marriage between Eden’s anti-Nasser policy and the unwritten anti-Nasser alliance of France and Israel.” Israel was to invade Sinai on 29 October, stating that its forces had attacked Palestinian Fedayeen bases and that their military operations had been necessitated “by the continuous Egyptian military attacks on citizens and on Israeli land and sea communications.” Britain and France would call for a ceasefire between Israeli and Egyptian forces, a truce which—as had already been decided in advance—the Israelis would accept. Nasser, who had long convinced himself—correctly—that the three powers were conniving on the war, would refuse.
The Egyptian army retreated with some acts of bravery but much chaos across Sinai to the banks of the canal.196 On 31 October the British and French air forces commenced their own long-planned operations against Egypt. Reserve Major Mustafa Kamal Murad of the Egyptian army’s eastern command drove down the desert road from Cairo that afternoon. “It was a nightmare,” he was to recall for me thirty years later. “There was mile after mile of Egyptian armour on the road and every truck and armoured vehicle was burning after the air attacks. I was terribly shocked. The poor farmers were walking onto the road and screaming at us: ‘You have brought this destruction on our land, you devils.’” Murad found Ismailia calm but milling with frightened and disillusioned troops from Sinai. “Morale was very bad, our soldiers had swollen feet from walking in the desert and were putting fear into the army defenders and our home guard, the ‘National Guard.’ All withdrawing armies tell lies to their friends. We had to send them down to Cairo quickly.”
Murad found himself in the old British consulate in Ismailia, which now served as emergency Egyptian military headquarters, an institution, Murad was to remember, “which was a great pleasure to our officers as the British had left behind them crates of whisky, champagne, beer and cognac.” Egyptian troops were looting civilian homes in the city—until their commander, Kamaledin Hussein, ordered all thieves to be shot on sight. Under the strain of command, some Egyptian officers went to pieces. “Colonel Abdul Aziz Selim was told to defend the outskirts of Ismailia and he shouted at Hussein: ‘My battalion will be completely annihilated by the British air force,’” Murad recalled. “I urged Hussein to send him back to Cairo. But in the morning, Selim’s batman came to us and said there was blood seeping from beneath the colonel’s door. When we opened the door, we found Selim had shot himself on my desk.”
Murad’s recollection of the RAF bombing at Ismailia was still so vivid when I met him in 1986 that as he recalled the violence his hand repeatedly swooped through the air to illustrate the raids on the airfields around Ismailia. “I was astonished that they attacked no civilians. They were very accurate. When I got to the airfields after the raids, I found that our young soldiers had disobeyed their orders to retreat to the slit trenches under air attack. Instead, they had stayed at their anti-aircraft guns and kept on firing. The RAF rockets were so accurate that they always hit the guns. The rockets cut our men in half. I would find their legs and the trunks of their bodies on the guns: their top half would be missing.”
On 5 November 1956, the Anglo-French force landed around Port Said, many of them carried in a fleet of ageing warships from Cyprus. At Gamil airfield 780 British paratroopers were dropped, and 470 French paratroopers landed at two bridges on the canal at Raswa. In the early hours, Murad was sleeping fitfully on a sofa at his Ismailia headquarters when he was awoken by a tall man standing beside him. “I stood up and was astonished to find it was Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was in a very nicely fitted civilian suit. I said to him: ‘Welcome, Mr. President— but what are you doing here? You should be in Cairo. The roads are very dangerous because the British are bombing them.’ He said he was going to Port Said. I said: ‘Forget about it, sir, you must return to Cairo at once because the British paratroopers are expected to land at Port Said in a few hours.’ Nasser asked for a room to rest in and I put him in the British consul’s bedroom. A few hours later, the British were already in Port Said, fighting for the Gamil airbase.”
Major Murad may thus have prevented Anthony Eden capturing the Egyptian he so hated. Nasser, wearing fresh clothes and smelling of eau de cologne, did return to Cairo—but not before Murad had put an important question to him. “I asked Nasser: ‘Is there an agreement with the Russians for military aid?’ He said there was not. I asked: ‘Not even a gentleman’s agreement?’ He said: ‘No.’ I was furious. I thought that this man must be mad in challenging all three forces at once. I said: ‘Sir, we shall do our best but it will be a miracle if we can stand up against the British, the French and Israel.’ He just replied: ‘Rabina ma’ana’—May God be with us. Then he left.”
Captain Nasr was living in his apartment in Jumhuriya Street in Port Said when the British landed. “We heard the firing—everyone was told to stay in their homes for twenty-four hours. The first thing I saw when I went outside was a neighbour of mine, Adel Mandour, lying dead in the street. He was a member of the National Guard. He had been shot by a British soldier and he was lying face-down in the gutter with his arms spread out. I remember his mother walked out of her house and just silently lifted him up and took him into her home.” At first the dead were buried privately, but dozens of bodies, most of them civilians, were placed in a mass grave near the airfield. The British stormed an Egyptian police station that held out under intense fire and killed almost all the policemen inside. A British general estimated that almost a thousand Egyptians died in the city, a figure at variance with Major Murad’s high opinion of RAF bomb-aiming. Several civilians were massacred by French paratroopers, one of whom was to write later that he and his colleagues shot dead a group of innocent fishermen because the French had been ordered to take no prisoners. The paratroopers shot others in the face at point-blank range when they pleaded for mercy in the canal.
“The British were well behaved—they did not steal anything when they billeted men in my apartment,” Captain Nasr said. “But the French behaviour was very different. They treated people very badly. Maybe it was their experience of Algeria but I think they were angry because they thought the canal belonged to them and that they had a right to take it back.” Nasser was publicly supporting the FLN struggle in Algeria.
At Gamil airport, a young Egyptian guerrilla, Mohamed Mahran Othman, was seized by the British, who wanted to know the whereabouts of Egyptian arms stores. He later claimed that his eyes were cut out by British military doctors in Cyprus when he refused to divulge information about arms dumps or broadcast propaganda for the allies from a radio station in Cyprus. There is no independent testimony to this, although in 1997 I met Othman, whose eyes had clearly been taken from their sockets. He claimed then that the British were also taking revenge for the wounding of a military doctor during his descent onto Gamil airfield. A Parachute Regiment doctor, Lieutenant A. J. M. “Sandy” Cavenagh, the 3rd Parachute Regiment battalion medical officer, was hit in the left eye by shrapnel during his descent on Gamil, although he told me forty years later that he knew nothing of the blind Egyptian’s claims; ironically, Cavenagh had many years later noticed Othman working as a guide in the Port Said military museum, but did not speak to him. A gentle and kindly man, Cavenagh, who was to write a graphic account of the landings, was praised by his commander for continuing, while seriously wounded, to treat his comrades for five more hours.197
The archives contain evidence of the racism that marked the former imperial army. The poorest area of Port Said was marked on British maps as “Wog-Town,” while a note about propaganda from “Allied Forces Headquarters” on 1 December 1956 refers to the “malicious mentality” of Arabs. The British prevented reporters from reaching Port Said until days after the battle, but a week after the ceasefire, reporter Alex Efthyvoulos was to see bodies still unburied in Port Said.
The Egyptian commander of Ismailia, Kamaledin Hussein, was outraged when his opposite number in Port Said, Brigadier General Salahedin Moguy, came through on a surviving telephone line. “He told us he had agreed on a six-hour ceasefire with a British general to collect the dead and wounded,” Murad recalled. “Hussein shouted back: ‘How dare you meet an English general without my orders?’ I heard Moguy replying: ‘I am the commanding officer in Port Said and it is my decision.’ Then he hung up.”
Early on the morning of 7 November, Murad was plodding gingerly up a narrow canal road north of Ismailia with his sub-machine gun on his back. He had just passed a fishing village called Jisr el-Hind when he saw what he thought were two red poppies moving in the long grass to his right. “Then I could see these two boys, both British paratroopers in red berets, lying in the long grass watching me. They were pointing their guns towards me from about seventy yards away. They pulled out white handkerchiefs and tied them on their bayonets and one of them shouted: ‘Hallo.’ I kept my hand away from my gun and said ‘Hallo’ back to him. In front of me, I could see British tanks and some soldiers pulling barbed wire across the road . . . These two boys could have shot me so I had this feeling that there must have been a ceasefire. I kept thinking: ‘How stupid the British commander was to have stopped here, only thirty-eight kilometres south of Port Said. There is nothing in front of him—he could be in Cairo in only a few hours.’”
But the British moved no farther. Murad had just stumbled into the very end of the British army’s very last imperial adventure. It took him some time to realise that the Americans had intervened and that an era had also come to an end. President Eisenhower had been furious when he learned that Israel’s invasion had been set up by the Allies—mainly by the French—and, contrary to the Bush doctrine of 2003, reserved America’s right to condemn the whole invasion. Eisenhower’s famous remark to Foster Dulles—that his job was to go to London and tell Eden: “Whoa, boy”—showed just how close he was to cutting off all support for Britain. By 28 November, the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, was telling the Cabinet that “if we withdrew the Anglo–French troops as rapidly as was practicable, we should regain the sympathy of the U.S. government.”
Questioned by the 1922 Committee about the collusion of Israel, Britain and France, Eden said that “some [half-truths]—and if they existed at all, they were not serious or many in number—were necessary, and always are in this sort of operation which demands extreme secrecy.” On 20 December he lied to the House of Commons. “I want to say this on the question of foreknowledge and to say it quite bluntly to the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt—there was not. But there was something else. There was—we knew it perfectly well—a risk of it, and, in the event of the risk of it, certain discussions and conversations took place, as, I think, was absolutely right, and as, I think, anybody would do.” In the aftermath of the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair could not have bettered that. Eden was a sick man—he had just suffered an operation in which a surgeon had accidentally left a medical instrument inside him— and began, as W. Scott Lucas recalls in his account of the drama, to sound out colleagues about his future. On 9 January 1957 he told Harold Macmillan that his doctors had warned him his health was in danger if he stayed in office and that “there was no way out.” Macmillan was stunned. “I could hardly believe that this was to be the end of the public life of a man so comparatively young, and with so much still to give,” he wrote. “We sat for some little time together. We spoke a few words about the First War, in which we had both served and suffered . . . I can see him now on that sad winter afternoon, still looking so youthful, so gay, so debonair—the representation of all that was best of the youth that had served in the 1914–18 war.”
Eden’s resignation marked the end of the last attempt Britain would ever make to establish, as Scott Lucas writes, “that Britain did not require Washington’s endorsement to defend her interests.” Henceforth, Britain would be the servant of U.S. policy. It would be American policy to act unilaterally to “defend” the Middle East. The 1957 Eisenhower doctrine led inexorably to the hegemony the United States now exercises over the world. Now Washington might need Britain’s endorsement to defend her interests—at least in an invasion of Iraq, although even that was doubtful.
In Egypt, Nasser ruled to ever greater acclaim, even surviving his appalling defeat at Israel’s hands in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, suppressing all domestic opposition with executions and torture. Suez distracted the world’s attention as Russian troops stormed into Budapest on 30 October 1956 and crushed its revolution. Some never forgave the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell for his November broadcast in which he labelled British troops as aggressors—unlike in 2003, there was at least a serious political opposition to the government in the House of Commons—while The Observerlost readers it never recovered for opposing the war.
“It was all a gamble,” ex-Major Murad was to say thirty years later. “Nasser was very lucky that the Americans intervened and asked the British to cease fire and evacuate—the Americans wanted to replace the Europeans as the big power in the Middle East. But it was luck. If I had been in Nasser’s place, I would not have done this because there was no agreement with Russia. The war was not an equal match—it was not even a war. It was an action taken against the nationalisation of the canal to destroy Nasser’s power. We realised this at the time.”
But the last word should go to Eden just after the British landed at Suez. “If we had allowed things to drift,” he said, “everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Muslim Mussolini, and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control.” We would hear all this again in 2002 and 2003, even if Eden’s hatred for Nasser had some limits. “I have never thought Nasser a Hitler,” Eden was to write. “. . . But the parallel with Mussolini is close.” Guy Mollet, the French premier, referred to Nasser as an “apprentice dictator.” He and Eden were both possessed by what Mollet himself called “the anti-Munich complex.”
IN BRITAIN IN 2003, newspapers screamed their arguments for war. In America they argued with books, heaps of them, coffee-table books recalling the attacks of 11 September 2001, paperbacks pleading for peace in Iraq, great tomes weighed down with footnotes extolling the virtues of “regime change” in the Middle East. In New York, the publishers as well as the media went to war. You only had to read the titles of the 9/11 books—many of them massive photo-memorial volumes—on America’s news-stands:Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of Swords . . . No wonder American television networks could take the next war for granted. “Showdown in Iraq,” CNN announced. “Prepared for War.” No one questioned its certainty. I protested during a live radio show in the United States in January that the participants—including an Israeli academic, a former Irish UN officer, a Vietnam veteran, Tony Benn and others—were asked to debate not whether there should be a war in Iraq, but what the consequences of that war would be. The inevitability of conflict had been written into the script.
The most recent and most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent “debate” in the United States had been The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA spook and an ex-director for “Gulf affairs” at the National Security Council. It was the book that all America was supposed to be talking about and its title—The Threatening Storm was, of course, a copy-cat version of The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Winston Churchill’s Second World War history—told you all you needed to know about the contents. Just as in 2002 George W. Bush tried to dress himself up as Churchill fighting appeasement, so Pollack twice pretended that the world was confronting the same dilemma that faced Britain and France in 1938. The Allies could have won in a year, he claimed, if they had gone to war against Hitler then. The fact that Britain and France, though numerically stronger in troops, were weaker in modern armaments—whereas the United States could now crush Saddam’s forces in less than a month—was not allowed to interfere with this specious argument. Pollack accepted that Saddam was not Hitler, but once more Saddam was dressed in Hitler’s clothes—just as Nasser was the Mussolini of the Nile during the Suez crisis of 1956—and anyone who opposed war was, by quiet extension, a Nazi sympathiser.
Before and immediately after the start of the Second World War—the real Second World War, that is—British publishers deployed their authors to support the conflict. Victor Gollancz was a tireless defender of British freedoms. By 1941, we were publishing the bestselling Last Train from Berlin by Howard K. Smith, the brilliant American foreign correspondent’s desperate account of life in Nazi Germany before the United States entered the conflict. But these were often works of literature as well as ideology. What happened in the United States in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq was something quite different: a mawkish, cheapskate attempt to push Americans into war on the back of the hushed, reverent, unimpeachable sacrifice of September 11th.
Removing Saddam “would sever the ‘linkage’ between the Iraq issue and the Arab–Israeli conflict,” Pollack wrote. In the long term, “it would remove an important source of anti-Americanism” and produce a positive outcome “if the United States were to build a strong, prosperous, and inclusive new Iraqi state . . . a model of what a modern Arab state could be.” Pollack’s argument for war was breathtakingly amoral. War would be the right decision, it seemed, not because it was morally necessary but because we would win. War was now a viable and potentially successful policy option. It would free up Washington’s “foreign policy agenda,” presumably allowing it to invade another country or two where American vital interests could be discovered. And that all-important “linkage” between Iraq and the Palestinian–Israeli war would be over. This theme recurs several times in Pollack’s text, and the narrative—in essence an Israeli one—is quite simple: deprived of the support of one of the Arab world’s most powerful nations, the Palestinians would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians’ “vicious terrorist campaign” without the slightest criticism of Israel. He talked about “weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses,” the standard Israeli version of the conflict. The author regarded America’s bias in favour of Israel as nothing more than an Arab “belief.” Needless to say, there was no mention of former UN weapons inspector and ex-Marine Major Scott Ritter, whose own tiny volume opposing the war—War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know—was a mere ninety-six-page flea-bite on the back of the pro-war literature churned out in Washington.
As this material came off the presses, the latest fantasies were seeping out of Washington and London. Stories of further attacks—on the Lincoln Tunnel and the Golden Gate bridge in the States—were mixed with all the scare stories Britons had been fed over previous weeks: smallpox, dirty bombs, attacks on hotels and shopping malls, a chemical attack on the Tube, the poisoning of water supplies, “postcard target” attacks on Big Ben and Canary Wharf, the procurement of 5,000 body bags, 120,000 decontamination suits, survival classes for seven-year-old schoolchildren, new laws to quarantine Britons in the event of a biological attack. There seemed no end to this government terrorism. Did they want Osama bin Laden to win? Or was this merely part of the countdown to war on Iraq, the essential drug of fear that we all needed to support Messrs. Bush and Blair?
For these stories provided a vital underpinning to pro-war literature. In the United States, the intellectuals’ support for war in fact went far further than Kenneth Pollack’s insipid book. In Foreign A fairs magazine, for example, Johns Hopkins University Professor Fouad Ajami, constantly disparaging the Arab world for its backwardness, its lack of democracy, its supposed use of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict “as an alibi for yet more self-pity and rage,” announced, “with sobering caution . . . that a war will have to be waged.” And—here was the line for fantasy-lovers to remember—“any fallout of war is certain to be dwarfed by the terrible consequences of America’s walking right up to the edge of war and then stepping back, letting the Iraqi dictator work out the terms of another reprieve.”
The logic of this was truly awesome. America had to go to war because it had threatened to do so. Its own threat was now to become the cause of war; peace would therefore be more terrible than war. As New York St. Lawrence University Professor Laura Rediehs remarked in a perceptive essay in Collateral Language, one of the best books on the linguistics of this conflict, in a Cosmic Battle between Good and Evil of the kind Bush imagined, the taking of innocent lives by us would be justified because we were good. But when the other side killed innocents, it was unjustified because the other side was evil. “What makes the deaths of innocent people bad, then, is not their actual deaths, but the attitudes and feelings of those who killed them.” By far the most moving contribution towards the anti-war campaign in the same book was that of Amber Amundson, whose husband Craig of the U.S. Army was killed in the attack on the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. “Will the invasion of Iraq really bring us to a more peaceful global community?” she asked her nation’s leaders. “. . . If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality [of September 11] by perpetuating violence against other human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband.”
Obsessed with their own demonisation of Saddam Hussein, both Bush and Blair now constantly reminded us of the price of appeasement. Bush thought he was the Churchill of America, refusing the appeasement of Saddam. It seemed as if the Second World War would be for ever the excuse, the warning, the justification, the utterly dishonest paradigm for every folly, for every bloodbath we initiated. The Second World War was an obscenity. It ended in 1945. Yet you might have thought, in early 2003, that Hitler was alive in his Berlin bunker. The Luftwaffe, if you listened to Bush and Blair, was still taking off from Cap Gris Nez, ready to bombard London after years of appeasement of Nazi Germany. Yet it was our air forces that were about to strike from Iraq’s “Cap Gris Nez”—Kuwait and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and assorted aircraft carriers—to pulverise not London but Baghdad. What was it about our Lilliputian leaders that they dared to trivialise the massive sacrifice of the Second World War for their squalid conflict against Iraq, elevating Saddam’s tinpot dictatorship into the epic historical tragedy of the 1939–45 war?198
How could a sane human being react to this pitiful stuff? One of the principal nations that “did nothing about Hitler” was the United States, which enjoyed a profitable period of neutrality in 1939 and 1940 and most of 1941 until it was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. And when the Churchill–Roosevelt alliance decided that it would only accept Germany’s unconditional surrender— a demand that shocked even Churchill when Roosevelt suddenly announced the terms at Casablanca—Hitler was doomed.
Not so Saddam, it seemed. For Donald Rumsfeld offered the Hitler of Baghdad a way out: exile, with a suitcase full of cash and an armful of family members, if that is what he wished. I couldn’t recall Churchill or Roosevelt ever suggesting that the Führer should receive a golden handshake. Saddam is Hitler—but then suddenly he’s not. He is—said The New York Times—to be put before a war crimes tribunal. But then he’s not. He could scoot off to Saudi Arabia or Latin America, if he took Rumsfeld at his word. In other words, he wasn’t Hitler after all.
What, I kept asking, happens after the invasion? On 26 January I asked our Independent on Sunday readers what we planned to do when Iraqis demanded our withdrawal from their country. “For we will be in occupation of a foreign land. We will be in occupation of Iraq as surely as Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And with Saddam gone, the way is open for Osama bin Laden to demand the liberation of Iraq as another of his objectives. How easily he will be able to slot Iraq into the fabric of American occupation across the Gulf. Are we then ready to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan and countless other countries? It seems that the peoples of the Middle East—and the West—realise these dangers, but that their leaders do not, or do not want to.”
Travelling to the United States more than once a month, visiting Britain on the penultimate weekend of January 2003, moving around the Middle East, I had never been so struck by the absolute, unwavering determination of so many Arabs and Europeans and Americans to oppose a war. Did Tony Blair really need that gloriously pertinacious student at the British Labour party meeting on 24 January to prove to him what so many Britons felt: that this proposed Iraqi war was a lie, that the reasons for this conflict had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, that Blair had no business following Bush into the war? Never before had I received so many readers’ letters expressing exactly the same sentiment: that somehow—because of Labour’s huge majority, because of the Tory party’s effective disappearance as an opposition, because of parliamentary cynicism—British democracy was not permitting British people to stop a war for which most of them had nothing but contempt. From Washington’s pathetic attempt to link Saddam to al-Qaeda, to Blair’s childish “dossier” on weapons of mass destruction, to the whole tragic farce of UN inspections, people were no longer fooled. The denials that this war had anything to do with oil were as unconvincing as Colin Powell’s claim in January 2003 that Iraq’s oil would be held in “trusteeship” for the Iraqi people. “Trusteeship” was exactly what the League of Nations offered the Levant when it allowed Britain and France to adopt mandates in Palestine and Transjordan and Syria and Lebanon after the First World War. Who will run the oil wells and explore Iraqi oil reserves during this generous period of “trusteeship”? I asked in my paper. American companies, perhaps?
Take the inspectors. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and now, alas, Colin Powell didn’t want to give the inspectors more time. But why not, for God’s sake? On 12 September 2002, when Bush, wallowing in the nostalgia of the 11 September 2001 crimes against humanity, demanded that the UN act, he insisted that it send its inspectors back to Iraq. They should resume and complete their work. Bush, of course, was hoping that Iraq would refuse to let the inspectors return. Horrifically, Iraq welcomed the UN. Bush was waiting for the inspectors to find hidden weapons. Terrifyingly, they found none. Now they were still looking. And that was the last thing Bush wanted. Bush said he was “sick and tired” of Saddam’s trickery—when what he meant was that he was sick and tired of waiting for the UN inspectors to find the weapons that would allow America to go to war. He who wanted so much in September 2002 to get the inspectors back to work, now, in January 2003, didn’t want them to work at all. “Time is running out,” Bush said. He was talking about Saddam but he was actually referring to the UN inspectors, in fact to the whole UN institution so laboriously established after the Second World War on the initiative of his own country.
The only other nation pushing for war—save for the ever-grateful Kuwait— was Israel. Here are the words of Zalman Shoval, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s foreign affairs adviser, in January 2003. Israel, he said, would “pay dearly” for a “long deferral” of an American strike on Iraq. “If the attack were to be postponed on political rather than military grounds, we will have every reason in Israel to fear that Saddam Hussein uses this delay to develop non-conventional weapons.” As long as Saddam was not sidelined, Shoval said, it would be difficult to convince the Palestinian leadership that violence didn’t pay and that it should be replaced by a new administration. Arafat would use such a delay “to intensify terrorist attacks.” So now the savage Israeli–Palestinian war could only—according to the Shoval thesis—be resolved if America invaded Iraq; terrorism could not be ended in Israel until the United States destroyed Saddam. There could be no regime change for the Palestinians until there was regime change in Baghdad. And by going along with the Bush drive to war, Blair was, indirectly, supporting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (since Israel still claimed to be fighting America’s “war on terror” against Arafat).
Saddam was not unlike the Dear Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, the nuclear megalomaniac with whom the Americans had just been having “excellent” discussions but who didn’t have oil. How typical of Saddam to send Ali “Chemical” Majid—the war criminal who gassed the Kurds of Halabja—to tour Arab capitals, to sit with President Bashar Assad of Syria and President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon as if he never ordered the slaughter of women and children. But Bush and Blair said nothing about Majid’s tour—either because they did not want to offend the Arab leaders who met him or because the link between gas, war crimes and Washington’s original support for Saddam was still a sensitive issue.199
On 4 February 2003 I was in Austin, Texas, waiting to fly up to New York to watch Colin Powell convince the UN Security Council that Washington’s lies about weapons of mass destruction were not lies at all but honest-to-God truth. But there was one sure bet about the Powell statement, I wrote that day: he wouldn’t be talking about Afghanistan. For since the Afghan war was the “successful” role model for America’s forthcoming imperial adventure across the Middle East, the near-collapse of peace in this savage land and the steady erosion of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—the nightly attacks on American and other international troops, the anarchy in the cities outside Kabul, the warlordism and drug trafficking and steadily increasing toll of murders—were unmentionables, a narrative constantly erased from the consciousness of Americans who were now sending their young men and women by the tens of thousands to stage another “success” story. This article, I wrote:
is written in President George Bush’s home state of Texas, where the flags fly at half-staff for the Columbia crew, where the dispatch to the Middle East of further troops of the 108th Air Defence Artillery Brigade from Fort Bliss and the imminent deployment from Holloman Air Force Base in neighbouring New Mexico of undisclosed numbers of F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers earned a mere 78-word down-page inside “nib” report in the local Austin newspaper.
Only in New York and Washington do the neo-conservative pundits suggest—obscenely—that the death of the Columbia crew may well have heightened America’s resolve and “unity” to support the Bush adventure in Iraq. A few months ago, we would still have been asked to believe that the post-war “success” in Afghanistan augured well for the post-war success in Iraq.
So let’s break through the curtain for a while and peer into the fastness of the land that both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair promised not to forget. Hands up those who know that al-Qaeda has a radio station operating inside Afghanistan which calls for a holy war against America? It’s true. Hands up again anyone who can guess how many of the daily weapons caches discovered by U.S. troops in the country have been brought into Afghanistan since America’s “successful” war? Answer: up to 25 per cent.
Have any U.S. troops retreated from their positions along the Afghan–Pakistan border? None, you may say. And you would be wrong. At least five positions, according to Pakistani sources on the other side of the frontier, only one of which has been admitted by U.S. forces. On December 11th, U.S. troops abandoned their military outpost at Lwara after nightly rocket attacks which destroyed several American military vehicles. Their Afghan allies were driven out only days later and al-Qaeda fighters then stormed the U.S. compound and burned it to the ground.
It’s a sign of just how seriously America’s mission in Afghanistan is collapsing that the majestically conservative Wall Street Journal— normally a beacon of imperial and Israeli policy in the Middle East and South-west Asia—has devoted a long and intriguing article to the American retreat, though of course that’s not what the paper calls it.
“Soldiers still confront an invisible enemy,” is the title of Marc Kaufman’s first-class investigation, a headline almost identical to one which appeared over a Fisk story a year or so after Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979–80. The soldiers in my dispatch, of course, were Russian. Indeed, just as I recall the Soviet officer who told us all at Bagram air base that the “mujahedin terrorism remnants” were all that was left of the West’s conspiracy against peace-loving (and Communist) Afghans, so I observed the American spokesmen—yes, at the very same Bagram air base—who today cheerfully assert that al-Qaeda “remnants” are all that are left of bin Laden’s legions.
Training camps have been set up inside Afghanistan again, not—as the Americans think—by the recalcitrant forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s anti-American Afghans, but by Arabs. The latest battle between U.S. forces and enemy “remnants” near Spin Boldak in Kandahar province involved further Arab fighters, as my colleague Phil Reeves reported. Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami forces have been “forging ties” with al-Qaeda and the Taliban; which is exactly what the mujahedin “terrorist remnants” did among themselves in the winter of 1980, a year after the Soviet invasion.
An American killed by a newly placed landmine in Khost; 16 civilians blown up by another newly placed mine outside Kandahar; grenades tossed at Americans or international troops in Kabul; further reports of rape and female classroom burnings in the north of Afghanistan—all these events are now acquiring the stale status of yesterday’s war.
So be sure that Colin Powell will not be boasting to the Security Council today of America’s success in the intelligence war in Afghanistan. It’s one thing to claim that satellite pictures show chemicals being transported around Iraq, or that telephone intercepts prove Iraqi scientists are still at their dirty work; quite another to explain how all the “communications chatter” intercepts which the U.S. supposedly picked up in Afghanistan proved nothing. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, you can quote Basil Fawlty: “Whatever you do, don’t mention the war.”
The 5th of February 2003 was a snow-blasted day in New York, the steam whirling out of the road covers, the U.S. Secret Servicemen—helpfully wearing jackets with “Secret Service” printed on them—hugging themselves outside the fustian, asbestos-packed UN headquarters on the East River. Exhausted though I was after travelling thousands of miles around the United States, the idea of watching Secretary of State Colin Powell—or General Powell, as he was now being reverently re-dubbed in some American newspapers—make his last pitch for war before the Security Council was an experience not to be missed. In a few days, I would be in Baghdad to watch the start of this frivolous, demented conflict. Powell’s appearance at the Security Council was the essential prologue to the tragedy—or tragicomedy if one could contain one’s anger—the appearance of the Attendant Lord who would explain the story of the drama, the Horatio to the increasingly unstable Hamlet in the White House.
There was an almost macabre opening to the play when General Powell arrived at the Security Council, cheek-kissing the delegates and winding his great arms around them. CIA director George Tenet stood behind Powell, chunky, aggressive but obedient, just a little bit lip-biting, an Edward G. Robinson who must have convinced himself that the more dubious of his information was buried beneath an adequate depth of moral fury and fear to be safely concealed. Just like Bush’s appearance at the General Assembly the previous September, you needed to be in the Security Council to see what the television cameras missed. There was a wonderful moment when the little British home secretary Jack Straw entered the chamber through the far right-hand door in a massive power suit, his double-breasted jacket apparently wrapping itself twice around Britain’s most famous ex-Trot. He stood for a moment with a kind of semi-benign smile on his uplifted face, his nose in the air as if sniffing for power. Then he saw Powell and his smile opened like an umbrella as his small feet, scuttling beneath him, propelled him across the stage and into the arms of Powell for his big American hug.
You might have thought that the whole chamber, with its toothy smiles and constant handshakes, contained a room full of men celebrating peace rather than war. Alas, not so. These elegantly dressed statesmen were constructing the framework that would allow them to kill quite a lot of people—some of them Saddam’s little monsters no doubt, but most of them innocent. When Powell rose to give his terror-talk, he did so with a slow athleticism, the world-weary warrior whose patience had at last reached its end.
But it was an old movie. I should have guessed. Sources, foreign intelligence sources, “our sources,” defectors, sources, sources, sources. Ah, to be so well-sourced when you have already taken the decision to go to war. The Powell presentation sounded like one of those government-inspired reports on the front page of The New York Times—where it was, of course, treated with due reverence next day. It was a bit like heating up old soup. Hadn’t we heard most of this stuff before? Should one trust the man? General Powell, I mean, not Saddam. Certainly we didn’t trust Saddam, but Powell’s speech was a mixture of awesomely funny recordings of Iraqi Republican Guard telephone intercepts à la Samuel Beckett that just might have been some terrifying proof that Saddam really was conning the UN inspectors again, and ancient material on the Monster of Baghdad’s all too well known record of beastliness.
If only we could have heard the Arabic for the State Department’s translation of “OK buddy”—“Consider it done, sir”—this from the Republican Guard’s “Captain Ibrahim,” for heaven’s sake. The dinky illustrations of mobile Iraqi bio-labs whose lorries and railway trucks were in such perfect condition suggested the Pentagon didn’t have much idea of the dilapidated state of Saddam’s railway system, let alone his army. It was when we went back to Halabja and human rights abuses and all Saddam’s indubitable sins, as recorded by the discredited UNSCOM team, that we started eating the old soup again. Jack Straw may have thought all this “the most powerful and authoritative case” for war—his ill-considered opinion afterwards—but when we were forced to listen to the Iraqi officer corps communicating by phone—“Yeah,” “Yeah,” “Yeah?,” “Yeah . . .”—it was impossible not to ask oneself if Colin Powell had really considered the effect this would have on the outside world. From time to time, the words “Iraq: Failing to Disarm—Denial and Deception” appeared on the giant video screen behind General Powell. Was this a CNN logo? some of us wondered. But no, it was the work of CNN’s sister channel, the U.S. Department of State.
Because Colin Powell was supposed to be the good cop to the Bush–Rumsfeld bad cop routine, one wanted to believe him. The Iraqi officer’s telephone-tapped order to his subordinate—“Remove ‘nerve agents’ whenever it comes up in the wireless instructions”—seemed to indicate that the Americans had indeed spotted a nasty new line in Iraqi deception. But a dramatic picture of a pilotless Iraqi aircraft capable of spraying poison chemicals turned out to be the imaginative work of a Pentagon artist. And when Secretary Powell started talking about “decades” of contact between Saddam and al-Qaeda, things went wrong for the “General.” Al-Qaeda only came into existence in 2000, since bin Laden—“decades” ago— was working against the Russians for the CIA, whose present-day director was sitting grave-faced behind Mr. Powell. It was the United States which had enjoyed at least a “decade” of contacts with Saddam.
Powell’s new version of his President’s State of the Union lie—that the “scientists” interviewed by UN inspectors had been Iraqi intelligence agents in disguise—was singularly unimpressive. The UN talked to Iraqi scientists during their inspection tours, the new version went, but the Iraqis were posing for the real nuclear and bio boys whom the UN wanted to talk to. General Powell said America was sharing its information with the UN inspectors, but it was clear already that much of what he had to say about alleged new weapons development—the decontamination truck at the Taji chemical munitions factory, for example, the “cleaning” of the Ibn al-Haythem ballistic missile factory on 25 November—had not been given to the UN at the time. Why wasn’t this intelligence information given to the inspectors months ago? Didn’t General Powell’s beloved UN Resolution 1441 demand that all such intelligence information should be given to Hans Blix and his lads immediately? Were the Americans, perhaps, not being “pro-active ” enough? Or did they realise that if the UN inspectors had chased these particular hares, they would have turned out to be as bogus as indeed they later proved to be?
The worst moment came when General Powell dscussed anthrax and the 2001 anthrax attacks in Washington and New York, pathetically holding up a teaspoon of the imaginary spores and—while not precisely saying so—fraudulently suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the anthrax scare. But when the secretary of state held up Iraq’s support for the Palestinian Hamas organisation, which has an office in Baghdad, as proof of Saddam’s support for “terror”— he of course made no mention of America’s support for Israel and its occupation of Palestinian land—the whole theatre began to collapse. There were Hamas offices in Beirut, Damascus and Iran. Was the 82nd Airborne supposed to grind on to Lebanon, Syria and Iran?
How many lies had been told in this auditorium? How many British excuses for the Suez invasion, or Russian excuses—the same year—for the suppression of the Hungarian uprising? One recalled, of course, this same room four decades earlier when General Powell’s predecessor Adlai Stevenson showed photographs of the ships carrying Soviet missiles to Cuba. Alas, Powell’s pictures carried no such authority. And Colin Powell was no Adlai Stevenson.
IF POWELL’S ADDRESS merited front-page treatment, the American media had never chosen to give the same attention to the men driving Bush to war, most of whom were former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years they had advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush’s most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W. Bush was elected U.S. president. And they weren’t doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the United States but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by Perle. The destruction of Iraq would, of course, protect Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons—always supposing Saddam also possessed them— and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon had in store for them. Although Bush and Blair dared not discuss this aspect of the coming war—a conflict for Israel was not going to have Americans or Britons lining up at recruiting offices—Jewish–American leaders talked about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish–American groups who opposed this madness were the first to point out how pro-Israeli organisations foresaw Iraq not only as a new source of oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris River to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic had to be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University tried to do in The Wall Street Journal the day after Powell’s UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations’ objections to the war might—yet again—be ascribed to “anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent.” This nonsense was opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery, argued that an Iraq war would leave Israel with even more Arab enemies.
The slur of “anti-Semitism” also lay behind Rumsfeld’s insulting remarks about “old Europe.” He was talking about the “old” Germany of Nazism and the “old” France of collaboration. But the France and Germany that opposed this war were the “new” Europe, the continent that refused, ever again, to slaughter the innocent. It was Rumsfeld and Bush who represented the “old” America; not the “new” America of freedom, the America of F. D. Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolised the old America that killed its native inhabitants and embarked on imperial adventures. It was “old” America we were being asked to fight for— linked to a new form of colonialism—an America that first threatened the United Nations with irrelevancy and then did the same to NATO. This was not the last chance for the UN, nor for NATO. But it might well have been the last chance for America to be taken seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.
Israeli and U.S. ambitions in the region were now entwined, almost synonymous. This war, about oil and regional control, was being cheer-led by a president who was treacherously telling us that this was part of an eternal war against “terror.” The British and most Europeans didn’t believe him. It’s not that Britons wouldn’t fight for America. They just didn’t want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if that included the prime minister, they didn’t want to fight for Blair either. Still less did they wish to embark on endless wars with a Texas governor–executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, was now sending America’s poor to destroy a Muslim nation that had nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.
Those who opposed the war were not cowards. Brits rather like fighting; they’ve biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included. But when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons and many Americans were a lot braver than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children. Perhaps Henry VIII’s exasperation in that play better expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: “Do they take me for a simpleton?” The British, like other Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their opposition to this war might ultimately have made them feel more, not less, European.
Palestine had much to do with it. Brits have no special love for Arabs, but they smell injustice fast enough and were outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians by a nation that is now in effect running U.S. policy in the Middle East. We were told that our invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—a burning, fearsome wound to which Bush devoted just eighteen words in his 2003 State of the Union address. Even Blair could not dismiss it this easily, hence his “conference” for Palestinian reform, at which the Palestinians had to take part via video-link because Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let them travel to London.
Across the Middle East, thousands of journalists now gathered for the latest war-by-media. There would be no more “pools”; henceforth, journalists travelling with the military would be “embedded.” It was a sign of the complacency of the press and television that they willingly adopted this supine word as part of their own vocabulary. Fox and CNN and the big American networks now spoke as one. Part Two of the “War on Terror” was about to begin, complete with its golden logos and theme music. American journalism had developed its own special controls over the years, the use of “controversial” words—“occupied” being one of those most necessary to avoid, unless used about Saddam’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait—deleted in favour of a set of “safe” definitions. I even listed some of the phrases and clauses that would become de rigueur in the Iraqi war: “liberated” for American-occupied, “terrorists” for Iraqis who resisted American occupation, “die-hards” for insurgents, “now at last it can be told” for reporters at the site of Saddam’s mass graves. They were all used. “Collateral damage” was reheated for further use. Television journalists based in Baghdad were told that their reports would carry a caveat: that their dispatches had been “monitored by the Iraqi authorities.” “Monitored” meant “censored,” although in many cases this was not true. Whenever I was interviewed on air from Baghdad in the coming weeks, I would always protest that no one listened to my calls—and that if they did, I would tell the truth whether they liked it or not. But television and radio stations like rules. They feel safer that way.200
On 15 March, I took the last commercial flight into Saddam’s Iraq—the very last plane whose baggage would be tagged to “Saddam International Airport”—a Royal Jordanian Airbus containing a few journalists, some eastern European contract workers and a flood of Iraqis who preferred to spend the coming terrible weeks with their families—perhaps to die with them—rather than exile themselves in the third-class hotels of Amman. We were heading for a country about to be invaded by more than a 100,000 American and British troops, but the crew went about their business as if there was no crisis and no war. We ate the usual cake and sandwich in-flight meal, were told to put our seats in the upright position before landing, to keep our seatbelts fastened until the aircraft had come to a complete halt. Our safety was their first concern.
For Baghdad, it was night number one thousand and one, the very last hours of fantasy. As UN inspectors prepared to leave the city in the early hours of 17 March, Saddam Hussein appointed his own corrupted son Qusay to lead the defence of the city of the caliphs against the American invasion. Yet at the Armed Forces Club, I found the defenders playing football. Iraqi television prepared Baghdad’s people for the bombardment to come with music from Gladiator. Until the last moment, the UN—only hours from packing—diligently continued its work by disarming the soon-to-be-invaded nation, observing the destruction of two more al-Soummoud missiles. It was a disarmament which the Americans had so fervently demanded and in which they had now totally lost interest. With the inspectors gone, there would be nothing to stop the Anglo-American air forces commencing their bombardment of the cities of Iraq.
So was Baghdad to be Stalingrad, as Saddam told us in those last hours of peace? It didn’t feel like it. The roads were open, the checkpoints often unmanned, the city’s soldiery dragging on cigarettes outside the UN headquarters. From the banks of the Tigris—a muddy, warm-sewage-swamped version of Stalingrad’s Volga—I watched the evening fishermen casting their lines for the masgouf that Baghdadis eat after sunset. The Security Council Resolution withdrawn? Blair calls an emergency meeting of the Cabinet? Bush to address the American people? Baghdad, it seemed, was sleepwalking its way into history almost as soundly as America and Britain.
How come I found a queue of Iraqis waiting outside the Sindbad Cinema in Saadun Street that night queuing for that ancient Egyptian clunker Private Lives, its posters displaying the ample thighs of its heroine? True, the local Baathist papers regaled us with reports of peace marches and peace protests around the world—as if Bush was going to call back his 140,000 men because Jordanians burned American flags in Amman.
The detachment was quite extraordinary, as if we were breathing in Baghdad a different kind of air, existing on a planet quite removed from the B-52s and Stealths and cruise missiles and Mothers of All Bombs that would soon make the ground tremble beneath our feet. The very history and culture of the Arab world were about to be visited by a Western-made earthquake, the like of which had never been seen before. Even the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman empire would be made redundant in the next few hours. Yet on the banks of the Tigris stood a massive statue, bound up in sacking and gauze, a monolith of epic proportions, waiting for its unveiling: another bronze likeness of Saddam Hussein.
In the fumes of Baghdad’s traffic, among its old yellow taxis, brand-new red double-decker buses and trucks, I searched for signs of the tempest to come. There were a few. Queues of cars outside gas stations, filling up for the last time, a clutch of antique shops closing down for the duration, a gang of workers removing the computers from a ministry, just as the Serbs did before NATO visited Belgrade in the spring of 1999. Didn’t the Iraqis know what was about to happen? Did Saddam?
I could only be reminded of that remarkable and very recent account by a former Cuban ambassador. He had been part of a 1990 delegation sent by Castro to persuade Saddam of the overwhelming American firepower that would be sent against him if he did not withdraw from Kuwait. “I’ve received several reports like that,” Saddam replied. “It’s our ambassador to the UN who sends them to me and most of the time, they finish down there.” And here Saddam gestured to a marble rubbish bin on the floor.
Was the marble bin still being filled with similar reports? Iraqi state television told us yet again on 16 March that Saddam had said, personally, once more, that although Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the past, they no longer existed today. Now we know he was telling the truth. It was America’s own weapons of mass destruction and its sponsorship of Israel, Saddam said, that threatened the world. All day, a UN C-130 aircraft baked on the tarmac at Saddam International Airport—there were two more UN transport aircraft in Cyprus—ready to bring the 140 inspectors out of Iraq before Bush and Blair launched their blitz. No one questioned the obvious: why had the inspectors bothered to come in the first place? If the British, as the attorney general in London claimed on 16 March, didn’t need UN Security Council Resolution 1441 to wage war because they were justified under earlier resolutions, why on earth did they vote for it? Because they hoped Saddam would refuse to accept them back. Or, as Saddam put it rather neatly in his latest address, “the inspectors came to find nothing.”
A group of foreign “peace activists” stood hand-in-hand along the parapet of Baghdad’s largest bridge, old men and young American Muslims and a Buddhist in a prayer shawl, smiling at the passing traffic, largely ignored by Iraqi motorists. It was as if Iraqis were less caught up in this demonstration than the foreigners, as if their years of suffering had left them complacent to the terrible reality about to fall upon them. What did this portend for the Americans? Or the Iraqis?
So I went at dusk on this last night of peace to the great eggshell monument that Saddam erected to the Iraqi dead of his 1980–88 war against Iran, whose cavernous marble basements are inscribed with the names of every lost Iraqi. “Hope comes from life and brings fire to the heart,” one of the lines of Arabic poetry says round the base. But the couples sitting on the grass beside the monument had not come to remember loved ones. They were courting students whose only political comment—aware of that “minder” hovering over my shoulder—was that “we have endured war so many times, we are used to it.”
So I am left with a heretical thought. Might Baghdad ultimately become an open city, its defenders moved north to protect Saddam’s heartland, the capital’s people left to discover the joys and betrayals of an American occupation on their own? I suppose it all depends on the next few hours and days, on how many civilians the Americans and the British manage to kill in their supposedly moral war. Would Iraqis have to construct another monument to the dead? I asked in my report to The Independent that night. Or would we?