CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
—Rudyard Kipling, from “Recessional”
HIGHWAY 8 is the most dangerous road in Iraq. It is littered with smashed and burned-out American trucks and police cars blown up by rocket-propelled grenades. Every government checkpoint has been abandoned. Insurgents swarm through the villages to the east. This is kidnap country, throat-slitting country. Highway 8 is a symbol of the collapse of all our dreams. But as I am standing by the road talking to an Iraqi family, searching for the location of a Red Cross car whose driver has just been murdered, the ground begins to move and a long, roaring beast of sound swamps us.
From far to the south, a cloud of grey smoke is powering up into the sky, a thousand exhausts turning the sun dark, the biggest convoy I have ever seen in my life. The Americans are changing their brigades, the largest military movement since the Second World War, a 40-mile trail of armour and men moving up Highway 8 towards me. With the Iraqis, I sit in the muck at the side of the road. This I must watch. This I must absorb if I am to understand this war. Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees and hundreds of trucks with thousands of lean young men in battledress, wearing shades, pointing their rifles at the dangerous countryside, porcupine quills along the sides of each lorry, hour after hour of them. Six Apache helicopters come thrashing over the trees, riding shotgun, turning like aerial rodents and sweeping back down the highway at speed. The soldiers don’t bother to look up. They glance at us, a few of them, at the Englishman and the Iraqis sitting in the dirt as these twentieth-century Crusaders drive up to their great concrete-walled fortresses on the Tigris, deep into the wilderness of occupation.
And I do begin to understand. Two thousand years ago, a little to the west of here, we would have sat by the roadside as the ground shook to the tramp of Rome’s legions. Now we live in the American empire. Yes, this war was about oil. Yes, it was fuelled by folly and arrogance and lies. But it was also about the desire—the visceral need—to project power on a massive scale, based on neo-conservative fantasies, no doubt, but unstoppable, inexorable. Our army can go to Baghdad. So it will go to Baghdad. It will pour over Sumeria and Babylon and all the caliphates and across the land where civilisation supposedly began.
BUT NO FOREIGN ARMIES come here and escape unpunished. It is now a broiling 5 June 2003. High over Iraq, President George W. Bush is casting his Olympian eye over ancient Mesopotamia after praising the Americans who had “managed” the war against Saddam Hussein, and far below him, on a dirty street corner in a dirty town called Fallujah that Mr. Bush would prefer not to hear about, is a story of American blood and American power and American boots smashing down the front gates of Iraqi homes. “She’s got a gun,” an American soldier shouts when he catches sight of a woman in her back yard holding a Kalashnikov rifle. “Get to the other side of the road,” he bellows at me, “or we’ll hit you when we open fire.” I scamper to the other side of the road and I see the woman with the Kalashnikov. “Put it down!—Put the gun down!” he screams at her again. The soldiers are hot and tired and angry. They’ve been up since 3 a.m., ever since someone fired a grenade at a truckload of troops from the 101st Airborne. You could see why Bush chose to avoid any triumphal visits to Iraq.
Survivors of the ambush were among the soldiers, remembering the early hours as only soldiers can. “They fired a grenade at a two-and-a-half-ton truck full of the 101st Airborne and then strafed it with AK fire and then just disappeared into the night,” one of them said. “The guys were in a terrible state. One of our soldiers was dead with his brains hanging out of his head and his stomach hanging out, and there were eight others in the back shouting and pulling bits of shrapnel out of their legs.” Before dawn, the Americans came back to wash their comrades’ blood off the street. Then they returned once more to deal with the people who live in this scruffy corner of the old Baathist city of Fallujah.
In Qatar—before his hour-and-a-quarter flight through Iraqi airspace—Mr. Bush had done his best to lay down an appropriately optimistic narrative of the Iraq war. Iraq was a better place now that Saddam had gone—“a great evil has been ended,” he said, and praised the “humanitarian work of U.S. troops” in the country. On weapons of mass destruction, he was a little more circumspect. “We are on the look. We will reveal the truth . . . But one thing is certain. No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the Iraqi regime is no more.” But of course, no weapons of mass destruction had been found. Nor would they ever be found here.
If President Bush thought his soldiers should be proud of what they had done in Iraq—that is what he told his men and women commanders—in Fallujah it was all sweat and fear and loudspeakers ordering civilians from the streets. Would the gunmen who “disappeared into the night” have really hidden in the nearest houses to the main road, right next to the scene of their ambush? Not unless they were mad. But someone in the 3rd Infantry Division decided to send the American 115th Military Police Company to capture a few guns and round up the usual suspects. It didn’t make for happy viewing.
Ever deeper into their occupation, these soldiers were confused about the people they had just “liberated.” Some were good men. Take Sergeant Seth Cole, who once lived in the English city of Northampton, and who worked out that if just 10 per cent of the people of Fallujah didn’t like Americans, “that is an awful lot of people.” Take Sergeant Phil Cummings, a cop from Rhode Island, a big cheerful man who talked to the Iraqis glowering at him from the pavement. “Some of these people don’t like us even though we came to save them. But I always smile at them. At the schools, the kids throw rocks at us and I give them candy. I give them candy—they give me rocks.”
But it didn’t take long to see why children might throw rocks. There was another American soldier 40 metres away who was busy losing hearts and minds. “Tell them to get the fuck out of here,” he ordered a private soldier, pointing at a group of teenagers. Then he turned to a middle-aged man sitting on a chair on the pavement. “You stand up and I’ll break your neck,” he screamed.
That’s when they saw the woman with the AK. “She’s got a gun! There’s a woman with a gun.” The cry rippled down the lines of American troops. A few hours with soldiers who are as likely to be victims as they are victors, and you realise why they have to shout information to each other like street vendors. “She’s got a gun!” “She’s got a gun!” “She’s got a gun!” went up and down the street again.
Three soldiers pushed their rifles through the iron latticework of the back gate, all shouting “Put the gun down!” until a tall, sweating MP smashed his boot into the door and it swung open. “She’s put the gun down—we’ve got the gun!” Three soldiers ran into the yard and came back with a Kalashnikov. Then two female officers brought out the woman, a teacher in the local high school, veiled and dressed all in black. “Why did you hold the gun?” one of the women soldiers asked her. The woman’s eyes stared back through the slit in her veil. Then she folded her arms in a gesture of defiance and refused to speak.
“Please, sir, you’re taking my son away—he’s done nothing wrong.” There had been the crashing of another door down the street, and I just caught sight of a young man in a brown shirt being driven away in a Humvee between two American MPs. An elderly man was pleading with a medical officer. “Why my son? Why my son?” Things were no better 2 metres away. A tall soldier from Massachusetts—how eerie the name sounded here in this heat-blasted town—was listening to a man who spoke good English, who wanted to help. Over the road, three soldiers were hammering on a metal screen. “It’s an old, sick man who lives there, it’s only his shop, he sells candies to kids,” the Iraqi was telling the soldier. He did not reply.
So we stood in the ovenlike sun until the shop-front door opened. Three soldiers pointed their weapons at the slowly widening crack in the door. And then behind it we saw a very old man with a massive, long white beard and white hair in all directions, a frail creature—“ancient” was the word I wrote in my notebook— who had to lean on his refrigerator of ice-creams to steady himself, dressed in a long white gown. He looked like a prophet and for a few moments the Americans paused. “I’m sorry, sir, we have to search your shop,” one of them said. And the three went inside while the old man stood in the street and looked at us and at the shop and then hobbled back into the darkness.
There was some shooting a few hundred metres away and the soldiers ran for cover behind walls and gardens. Then a black-and-gold painted gate was booted open and a man in a grey dishdash came out and sat by the gatepost with his hands on his head and his family sitting on the porch beneath the bougainvillea while the Americans went through their home. Another AK was produced—almost every family in Iraq has two or three guns. These Iraqis were, for the most part, what we would call middle-class people, educated and with homes that might pass for villas in this run-down city with its broken munitions factories and its Baath party apparatus so deep that it’s hard to find an official uncontaminated by the stain of Saddam. Here it was, all of twenty-three years ago, that I came to see the great Iranian POW camps of the Gulf War, here and in the neighbouring town of Ramadi. These were tough people. Smashing down their doors would carry a penalty.
And so the Americans made a hundred more enemies among those they had “liberated.” One young man in Fallujah told me that a few nights earlier, gunmen had arrived at his family home and asked them to join a new resistance movement. “We turned them down,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d say if they came again.”
In Fallujah, one of the American MPs turned to me as his search operation was called off. “The Third Infantry Division are coming in here to go through this place tomorrow,” he said. And on the motorway east to Baghdad, I saw the American armour moving towards the city. There they all were again, Bradleys and Abrams and Humvees and transporters and trucks. And on their armour and gun barrels the soldiers had painted names. “Armed Response” was on one, with a picture of a naked girl astride a tank shell. “Another Round Anyone?” was on another. There was “Deadly Commemoration” and “Any Last Words” and, incredibly, “Abusive Father”—with a Christian cross beside the name. Fallujah was going to be “gone through.” And as the months passed, it was going to inflict its own “deadly commemoration” on the Americans.
As I write these words today, in the summer of 2005, back briefly in what I still like to think of as the safety of Beirut, as I go through my notebooks of the last two and a half years, the Iraqi insurrection takes on a savage, epic quality. In Baghdad now, many reporters practise “hotel journalism,” hiding in their rooms, ordered by their own security men to avoid the swimming pool, using Iraq’s deteriorating mobile phone system to talk to the Americans and British marooned in their own fortress across the Tigris, behind the concrete and machine-gun embrasures they have erected around Saddam’s old republican palace. Patrick Cockburn of The Independent and myself and several other journalists still move around Baghdad, even travelling the murderous airport road, but we do so with Iraqis in private cars, often hiding behind an Arabic-language newspaper, peeking out of the window, stopping only for a minute to see the carnage the suicide bombers have left. Mouse journalism. Now the military and political rulers of “new” Iraq have to be helicoptered from their compound to the airport—the airport road is already deemed by the authorities too unsafe for Westerners to use—and from their castle all they can see of the country they rule is through the gunslits of their own defences. Visit any Crusader castle in Lebanon and you will find out that all the Christian warriors of Europe could see from their own twelfth-century battlements was through the arrow slits built into their walls. Yes, we are the Crusaders now. But we are Crusaders who are blind to reality. George W. Bush and Tony Blair still claim their war is going well. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and are still being killed. Wal-Mart suicide bombers—produced, it seems, from some hidden assembly line—blow themselves up at the rate of two or three a day. Corpses are found by the dozen on the banks of the Tigris or dumped on Baghdad garbage tips. Foreigners are kidnapped and decapitated on tape. No weapons of mass destruction were ever discovered. Nor any link between Saddam and the massacres of 11 September 2001.
Yet the war is going well, we are told. A second war—against “terror,” of course—was now being fought in Iraq, Blair announces to an astonished audience of journalists. Iraq is on the road to democracy after national elections, albeit that the Sunni population largely failed to vote. That is the story. Saddam is imprisoned and awaiting trial—actually Iraq is now so insecure that the Americans are holding him in secret at their airbase in the emirate of Qatar. Democracy is blossoming across the Middle East. Or so we are supposed to believe. And I remember those who have died. Margaret Hassan, the gentle, tough lady who distributed medicines to the dying children of Iraq, kidnapped, videotaped in tears, mistreated and then shot in the face, executed for television screens. Marla Ruzicka, who would sit by the pool at the Hamra Hotel collating the number of Iraqis who have been killed since the invasion. Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand, as one report suggested? Marla was roasted alive as a suicide bomber exploded himself against a convoy of U.S. mercenaries on the airport road. I have watched many times Ken Bigley’s face as he pleads and repleads on the videotapes to Tony Blair. Then comes his inevitable decapitation.
Each morning in Baghdad, I would visit the city morgue. There would be twenty—sometimes thirty—fresh bodies arriving each day, sometimes whole families shot down or torn apart by suicide bombers or knifed to death or killed at American checkpoints. When the Americans brought bodies to the morgue, the staff were told not to perform autopsies. What did this mean? Outside, the relatives of the dead would shriek and weep and swoon with sorrow and curse the Americans, even if their loved ones were killed in family feuds or revenge attacks. The Americans and British keep no lists of the Iraqi dead, only of their own much-mourned soldiers—well over 1,700 Americans by the summer of 2005—so we can talk about “our” sacrifice and ignore the fate of those tens of thousands we came to “liberate.”
How did it start, the beginning of the end? In Fallujah, only days after the occupation began, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi Sunni demonstrators, killing seventeen of them. They said they had come under fire. But reporters who reached the school in which the troops were billeted could find no bullet holes. Fallujah never forgave them. The insurgency started within hours. The city would later be taken over by Iraq’s ferocious resistance, along with Ramadi. Whole provinces of Iraq would fall under their control. So the Americans invaded Fallujah again—and then a second time—and fought their way over the rubble of the ruined city. We have won. Victory. After Paul Bremer arrived as America’s first proconsul—he it was who was to appoint the former CIA agent Iyad Allawi as “interim” prime minister—he would call the insurgents “deadenders,” “diehards,” Saddam’s “remnants.” All it would need was the capture of Saddam himself and the rebellion would end.
He was wrong. I remember a young, angry Iraqi in Ramadi whose family had just been shot at an American checkpoint. “I won’t join the resistance as long as Saddam and his family are free because if we drive the Americans out, we’ll get Saddam back again. But if they eliminate Uday and Qusay and Saddam, I will kill Americans myself.” And the Americans did kill Saddam’s awful sons Uday and Qusay—along with Qusay’s own fourteen-year-old son, about whom they didn’t talk very much—in a pseudo-Palladian villa in Mosul, shot down by Task Force 20, a mix of Special Forces and CIA operatives who didn’t bother to try and capture them when they resisted. And then, inevitably, they found Saddam.
In a hole in the ground. “Ladies and gentlemen—we got him!” Bremer crowed. “This is a great day in Iraq’s history.” The 13th of December 2003 was supposed to be the end of the insurrection. After this, why would anyone bother to fight the occupiers of Iraq? Unkempt, Saddam’s tired eyes betraying defeat; even the $750,000 in cash found in his hole in the ground demeaned him. Soon Saddam would be produced in a secret court in chains. He looked in that first extraordinary videotape which the Americans produced like a prisoner of ancient Rome, the barbarian cornered at last, the hand caressing the scraggy beard. All those ghosts—of gassed Iranians and Kurds, of Shiites shot and dumped in the mass graves of Kerbala, of the prisoners dying under excruciating torture in the villas of Saddam’s secret police—must surely have witnessed something of this.
It took just 600 American soldiers to capture the man who was for twelve years one of the West’s best friends in the Middle East and for twelve more years the West’s greatest enemy in the Middle East. In a miserable 8-foot hole in the mud of a Tigris farm near the village of Al-Dawr, the president of the Iraqi Arab Republic, leader of the Arab Socialist Baath party, ex-guerrilla fighter, invader of two nations, a former friend of Jacques Chirac and a man once courted by President Reagan, was found. And it was difficult, looking at those pictures of the Lion of Iraq—for so he called himself—to remember how royally he had been toasted in the past. This was the man who was the honoured guest of the city of Paris when Chirac was mayor and when the French could see the Jacobins in his bloody regime. This was the man who negotiated with UN Secretary Generals Perez de Cuellar and Kofi Annan, who chatted over coffee to none other than the man who was to become U.S. secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, who met Ted Heath and Tony Benn and a host of European statesmen.
And there was a kind of satisfaction, driving up to al-Dawr on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, to arrive at the orange orchard where he was discovered and climb into his very hole in the ground. I lay down inside it. Seven months earlier, I had sat on his red velvet presidential throne in the greatest of all his marble palaces. Now here I was, lowering myself into the damp, dark and grey concrete interior of his final retreat, the midget bunker buried beside the Tigris—all of 8 feet by 5— and as near to an underground prison as any of his victims might imagine. Instead of chandeliers, there was just a cheap plastic fan attached to an air vent. Ozymandias came to mind. This, after all, was where his hopes finally crumbled to dust. And it was cold.
I FOUND SADDAM’S LAST BOOKS in a hut nearby: the philosophical works of Ibn Khaldun, the religious—and pro-Shiite—doctrines of the Abbasid theorist Imam al-Shafei and a heap of volumes of Arab poetry. There were cassettes of Arabic songs and some tatty pictures, of sheep at sunset and Noah’s Ark crowded with animals. But this was no resistance headquarters, no place from which to run a war or start an insurgency, no Führer-bunker with SS guards and switchboards and secretaries taking down last words for posterity.
To climb inside this most famous of all bolt-holes, I had to sit on the wooden entrance ledge and swing my legs into a narrow aperture and find my footing on four stairs made of earth. You used your arms to lower yourself into this last remnant of Iraqi Baathist history. Then you were sitting on the floor. There was no light, no water, only the concrete walls, the vent and a ceiling of wooden boards. Above the boards was earth and then a thick concrete floor which—up above— was covered by the equally thick concrete yard of a dilapidated farm hut. Yet above this sullen underground cell was a kind of paradise, of thick palm fronds and orange trees dripping gold with mandarins, of thickets of tall reeds, the sound of birds buried in the treetops. There was even an old blue-painted boat tucked away behind a wall of fronds, the last chance of escape across the silver Tigris if the Americans closed in.
Of course, they closed in from two directions, both from the river and down the muddy laneway along which soldiers of the American 4th Infantry Division led me. Saddam must have rushed from the hut where he ate his food—spilling a plate of beans and Turkish Delight onto the mud floor, I noticed—and squirrelled his portly self down the hole. When the Americans searched the hut, they found nothing suspicious—except a pot plant oddly positioned on top of some dried palm fronds, placed there presumably by two men who were later seized while trying to escape. Underneath, they found the entrance to the hole.
The soldiers mooching around the “site”—their word, as if it was a Sumerian city rather than a fraudulent, muddy Baathist playpen—were indifferent to the point of tiredness. They asked me to translate the Arabic inscription over Saddam’s bedroom—it began with the Koranic words “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful . . .”—and they lent me their torches to prowl round the Saddam kitchen.
So what could we learn of Saddam in this, his very last private residence in Iraq? Well, he had chosen to hide only 200 metres from a shrine marking his own famous retreat across the Tigris River in 1959, on the run as a wounded young guerrilla after trying to assassinate an earlier president of Iraq. Here it was that he dug the bullet out of his body, and on a low hill within eyesight of this palm-grove is the mosque that marks the spot where, in a coffee shop, Saddam vainly pleaded with his fellow Iraqi tribesmen to help him escape. Saddam, in his last days as a free man, had retreated into his past, back to the days of glory that preceded his butcheries.
He had the use of a tiny generator, which I found wired up to a miniature fridge. There were two old beds and some filthy blankets. In the little kitchen constructed next door, there were sausages hanging to dry, bananas, oranges and— near a washing-up bowl—tins of Jordanian chicken and beef luncheon meat, heaps of “Happy Tuna.” Only the Mars Bars looked fresh.
So what did Saddam discover here in the last days? Peace of mind after the years of madness and barbarity? A place to reflect on his awesome sins, how he took his country from prosperity through foreign invasion and isolation and years of torture and suppression into a world of humiliation and occupation? The birds must have sung in the evening, the palm fronds above him must have clustered against each other in the night. But then there must have been the fear, the constant knowledge that betrayal was only an orchard away. It must have been cold in that hole. And no colder than when the hands of Washington-the-all-Powerful reached out across oceans and continents and came to rest on that odd-looking pot plant and hauled the would-be caliph from his tiny cell.
But there was one other conclusion upon which every Iraqi I spoke to agreed. This bedraggled, pathetic man with his matted, dirty hair, living in a hole in the ground with three guns and cash as his cave-companions—this man was not leading the Iraqi insurgency against the Americans. If more and more Iraqis were saying before Saddam’s capture, like the man in Ramadi, that the one reason they would not join the resistance to U.S. occupation was the fear that—if the Americans withdrew—Saddam would return to power, well, that fear had now been removed. So the nightmare was over—and the nightmare was about to begin. Both for the Iraqis and for us.
I remember an American search operation in Baghdad just after Saddam’s capture, all door-kicking and screaming and fuck-this and fuck-that and, just a few metres away, finding a message newly spray-painted on a wall. Not by hand but with a stencil, in poor English perhaps, but there were dozens of identical messages stencilled onto the walls for the occupiers. “American Soldiers,” it said. “Run away to your home before you will be a body in [sic] black bag, then be dropped in a river or valley.”
While Washington and London were still congratulating themselves on the capture of Saddam Hussein, U.S. troops shot dead at least eighteen Iraqis in the streets of three major cities in the country. Dramatic videotape from the city of Ramadi 75 miles west of Baghdad showed unarmed supporters of Saddam Hussein being shot down in semi-darkness as they fled from American troops. Eleven of the eighteen dead were killed by the Americans in Samara to the north of Baghdad. All the killings occurred during demonstrations by Sunni Muslims against the American seizure of Saddam, protests that started near Samara. The first demonstrators blocked roads north of Baghdad when armed men appeared alongside civilians who believed—initially—that U.S. forces had arrested one of Saddam’s doubles rather than the ex-dictator of Iraq. But their jubilation turned to fury when the Americans opened fire in Samara a few hours later. As usual, the American military claimed that all eighteen dead were “insurgents” and that U.S. forces had come under fire in all three cities. But this is what they also claimed in Samara just two weeks earlier when they boasted they had shot fifty-four “terrorists.” Journalists investigating the killings concluded then that while U.S. forces in the city had been ambushed while taking new currency notes to two banks, the only victims of American gunfire that could be confirmed were nine civilians, one of them a child, another an Iranian pilgrim.
A disturbing new phenomenon in this environment of growing military violence was the appearance of hooded and masked Iraqi gunmen—working for the Americans—on road checkpoints north of Baghdad. Five of them now checked cars on the Tigris River bridge outside Samara, apparently fearing that their identities would be discovered if their faces were not concealed. They wore militia uniforms and—although they said they were part of the new American-backed “Iraqi Civil Defence Corps” (ICDC)—they had neither badges of rank nor unit markings. The same hooded men were now appearing on the streets of Baghdad. Just before the Samara killings, several policemen stopped my car outside the city to warn that the Americans were “involved in a big battle with the holy warriors”—ominously for U.S. forces, they used the word “mujahedin”—and soon we were to discover that some—perhaps many—of these men were also insurgents, cops by day, killers by night; which was exactly what happened in Algeria. Families of the dead adopted the tradition of all tribal groups, just as they did at Fallujah: the dead must be avenged. And so their retaliation also turned inexorably into a resistance war that now embraced the entire Sunni Muslim area of Iraq.
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2003. The thump of air pressure on my Baghdad window wakes me up, a blast of sound that gently shakes the walls; the sound of seventeen lives disappearing. The aftermath of bombs in Baghdad is a kind of obscene theatre. I reach the crossroads minutes later. There’s a shattered minibus with the pulverised remains of its passengers inside, a screaming fireman, pieces of a lorry—blown apart with such impact that the engine block is shorn in half—and two burning cars, the flames licking at their wheels and something terrible below the driver’s seat. The bomb was in the truck. But the bus, why would anyone bomb a busload of Iraqi civilians? There is flesh on the road, and vast shards of iron and metal and sandals and women’s handbags around the bus where several of the dead passengers—or what is left of them—are still sitting pitifully in their seats. Shrapnel has cascaded into the slums of Al-Bayaa, a pathetic warren of brick houses and sewage-filled laneways whose broken windows now sparkle in the streets.
A group of U.S. soldiers has just arrived, three of them prowling through the muck and the oil-splattered road for the detonator. Sergeant Joel Henshon of the 11th/65th U.S. military police guards what might have been part of the mechanism, a grenade that glistens grey and sinister on the mud of a traffic island. There must be 1,000 shouting people standing in the dawn of smoke and flames, men, kuffiahed in Arab scarves, many of them in black leather jackets. I find some cops by the burning cars, friendly, American-paid policemen with smart little yellow identification badges and pale blue uniforms. A brand-new fire brigade truck arrives and a torrent of water swamps what’s left of the truck and the bus. “New Iraq” responds efficiently to its growing violence. A policeman—for this is the flip side of every constabulary in the world—walks up and, incredibly, asks me if I’d like to know what he’s discovered.
“The truck belonged to the Ministry of Oil, it was a tanker without a trailer, registration number 5002, and we found this in what was left of the cab.” He gives me a golden sticker with “Allah” written in Arabic on one side and “Mohamed” on the other. God and his Prophet withstood the blast. Nothing else did. A dozen men have clustered ghoulishly around the nearest car and there is a mass of glistening bones beneath the blackened steering shaft, femurs and bits of a backbone. The Mercedes minibus had come from the province of Dyala, east of Baghdad, ten men and women and a driver who must have woken before dawn for a routine journey to the capital. But surely the bomber was en route to another target. Premature explosion. Was there a police station near here? Sergeant Henshon gives a Baghdad reply. “There was,” he says with a beautiful Alabama twang in this grim dawn. “But it’s already been bombed.” Then a shopkeeper says he saw an American convoy driving down the road and the truck trying to catch up with it and colliding with one of the cars beside the minibus. Was this the target? A few hours later, the occupation powers announce that the bombing was a traffic accident, a petrol tanker that exploded when it collided with a bus. It is a lie. What about the grenade in the road? The chopped-up engine block? The missing trailer? But we must now live on lies. Anything to keep another suicide bombing out of the papers.
Believe we are winning. Believe that we always kill insurgents. I am in Samara again, December 2003, and schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America’s famous “insurgents.” He was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself and his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the ancient Abbasid city. It was three in the morning, according to his mother, Manal, when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division came to the house, firing bullets through the gate. One of the rounds pierced the door, punched through a window and entered his back, speeding on through an outer wall. His father was hit in the ankle and was taken to Tikrit hospital in serious condition. Issam cries in pain in the emergency hospital ward, a drip-tube sticking into his stomach through a wad of bloody bandages.
Then there is the case of thirty-one-year-old farmer Maouloud Hussein, who was trying to push his five young daughters and son into the back room of his two-room slum home a few hours earlier when yet another bullet came whizzing through the gate and the outer wall of the house, and smashed into Maouloud’s back. His son, Mustafa, bleary-eyed with tears beside his father’s bed, and his four daughters, Bushra, Hoda, Issra and Hassa, were untouched. But the bullet tore into Maouloud’s body and exited through his chest. Doctors had just removed his spleen. His forty-one-year-old brother, Hamed, winces as he sees Maouloud cringing in agony—the wounded man tries to wave a hand at me but lapses into unconsciousness—and says that twenty-three bullets hit the house in their Al-Muthanna quarter of the city. Like Issam Hamid, he lay bleeding for several hours before help came. Issam’s mother, Manal, tells a terrible story. “The Americans had an Iraqi interpreter and he told us to stay in our home,” she says. “But we had no telephone, we couldn’t call an ambulance and both my husband and son were bleeding. The interpreter for the Americans just told us we were not allowed to leave the house.”
Hamed Hussein stands by his brother’s bed in a state of suppressed fury. “You said you would bring us freedom and democracy but what are we supposed to think?” he asks. “My neighbour, the Americans took him in front of his wife and two children and tied his hands behind his back and then, a few hours later, after all this humiliation, they came and said his wife should take all her most expensive things and they put explosives in their house and blew it up. He is a farmer. He is innocent. What have we done to deserve this?”
What will people do when you treat them like this? I ask myself. If we can shoot down the innocent like this, how soon before we torture them as well? Soon, soon. Now the city of Samara has become, like Fallujah, a centre of resistance to the American 4th Infantry Division. “We wanted the Americans to help us,” another man said to me in a street of American-vandalised homes. “This was Saddam’s Sunni area, but many of us disliked Saddam. But the Americans are doing this to humiliate us, to take their revenge on the attacks against them by the resistance.” Three times, I am taken into broken houses where young men tell me that they intend to join the muqawama—the resistance—after the humiliation and shame visited upon their homes. “We are a tribal people and I am from the al-Said family,” one says to me. “I have a university degree and I am a peaceful man, so why are the Americans attacking my home and filling my wife and children with fear?”
I go back and forth through my notes. It was in May 2003, only a month after the Americans entered Baghdad, that I first asked in The Independent : Isn’t it time we called this a resistance war? I predicted the insurgency when U.S. forces first entered Baghdad; but the speed with which the Americans found themselves fighting off a growing army of fighters was astonishing. In five, six months, a guerrilla war might have started. But one month? Two Americans shot dead and another nine wounded by unidentified gunmen in Fallujah, two U.S. military policemen badly wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade at a north Baghdad police station, a grenade thrown at American soldiers near Abu Ghraib. That was the little toll of violence for just one day after the “liberation,” 27 May 2003—not counting the Muslim woman who approached U.S. troops with a hand grenade in each hand, was shot down before she could throw one of them and then, as she tried to hurl her second grenade from the ground, was finally killed by the Americans.
Even then, most people in Baghdad were receiving only two hours’ electricity a day. The petrol queues—in a country whose oilfields had already been corralled by the U.S. military, along with the lucrative clean-up and reconstruction contracts for American companies—stretch for up to 2 miles. Children are being withdrawn from newly opened schools after widespread child kidnapping and rape. The police stations now guarded by U.S. troops have been turned into blockhouses, surrounded by armour and guards with heavy machine guns, in lookout posts draped in camouflage netting and surrounded by concrete walls. Baghdad is becoming a city of walls, 20 feet high, running for miles along highways and shopping streets. We Westerners are on the run. Caged inside the marble halls of Saddam’s finest palace, thousands of American officers and civil servants—utterly cut off from the 5 million Iraqis in Baghdad around them—are now battling over their laptops to create the neo-conservative “democracy” dreamed up by Messrs. Rumsfeld, Perle and the rest. When they venture outside, they do so in flak jackets, perched inside armoured vehicles with escorts of heavily-armed troops.
Already, U.S. forces were driving through Baghdad much as the Israelis once did in southern Lebanon, ordering motorists to stay away from their vehicles, threatening them with death. “Stay 50 yards away from this vehicle or deadly force will be used” was the printed warning in Arabic on the back of the American Humvees. Bremer banned a small-circulation Shiite magazine—run by Muqtada Sadr’s equally small party—for provoking sectarian tension and for comparing him to Saddam Hussein. So Sadr’s militia rose up against the Americans. Najaf was besieged, just as the British had besieged it more than eighty years earlier. Apache gunships fired into the Baghdad Shia slums of Shuala. Iraq’s cities were now hunting grounds for thieves and rapists. Its even older cities—the great archaeological treasures of Sumeria—were left unguarded, so an army of robbers had moved in to smash their way through their buried treasures to 3,000-year-old pots, turning the ancient sites into a land of craters, as if a B-52 had carpet-bombed the desert. After an international outcry following the theft of treasures from the Baghdad Museum, Washington sent an FBI–CIA team to investigate the robberies.206 But the postwar tearing apart of the Sumerian cities is on an infinitely greater scale. Historians may one day conclude that this mass destruction of mankind’s inheritance is among the most lasting tragedies of the Anglo–American “liberation” of Iraq.
Watching America’s awesome control over this part of the world, its massive firepower, its bases and personnel across Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Doha, Oman, Yemen, Israel of course, and now Iraq, you can see how the Iraqis thought it through. A generation of teenagers, crucified in the eight-year war with Iran, had grown up knowing nothing but suffering and death. What did their lives count for now? And if the Sunnis among that generation should ever become allied with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, what destruction might they sow among the Americans and any who chose to help them? A reborn Iraqi army of the shadows, forged in the greatest of all Middle East wars, and an army of suicide bombers; this would be an enemy to challenge any superpower.
Yet still the fantasy had to continue. Faced with ever greater armed resistance to their occupation, the Americans, it transpired, were admitting only a fraction of the attacks against their forces. Although the U.S. occupation authorities acknowledged ambushes in which their troops died, they were failing to report a mass of attacks and assaults against their patrols and bases in and around Baghdad. Yet the reality—largely unreported by the media—was that the Americans were no longer safe anywhere in Iraq: not at Baghdad airport, which they captured with so much fanfare in early April 2003, not at their military bases nor in the streets of central Baghdad nor in their vulnerable helicopters nor on the country roads. Helicopters were shot down over Fallujah, C-130s blasted out of the sky by missiles.
And the United States responded in the way of all occupation armies. Its prison camps became places of shame. Prisoners—there were 11,300 by May 2003 in Iraq alone—were routinely beaten during interrogation. Thirty had died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2005, often after brutal interrogations. We like to think we only began to discover this when the vile photographs of Abu Ghraib were revealed to the world in 2004, but in my files I discover that my colleague Patrick Cockburn and I had been writing about torture and prison abuse in the late summer of 2003. “Sources” may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but my sources for the beatings in Iraq were impeccable. Now it was happening at U.S. military bases around Iraq. “Torture works,” an American Special Forces colonel boasted to a friend of mine.
He was wrong. Torture creates resistance. Torture creates suicide bombers. Torture ends up by destroying the torturers. I remember the village of Khan Dari, where the first American to be blown up by a roadside bomb was killed in July 2003. His blood was still across the highway and the crowd was gloating over his death. And a man walked up to me who wanted to talk politics of a very violent kind. He had, he said, been a prisoner of the Americans and savagely beaten. “This is the way we deal with occupiers,” he said. “They came and said they were liberators but when we realised they were occupiers, we had to fight. We are people of steel. The Americans and all the other occupiers will burn.” Then came something as frightening as it was terrible. “I have a one-year-old daughter,” he said. “And I would happily put a bomb in her clothes and send her to the Americans to kill them.”
Already, by late July 2003, Amnesty International’s investigators had amassed a damning file of evidence that Iraq’s Anglo–American occupiers were ill-treating or torturing prisoners, refusing to obey Iraqi court orders to release detainees, using excessive force on demonstrators, killing innocent civilians and passing their own laws to prevent newly constituted Iraqi courts from trying American or British soldiers for crimes committed in the country. Amnesty also discovered that large sums of money had gone missing after house raids by American troops, in one case receiving from the U.S. authorities an acceptance that an officer in the U.S. 101st Division had “removed” 3 million Iraqi dinars—$2,000—from an Iraqi family’s home. In another case, Amnesty found that an Iraqi labourer and father of three children, Radi Numa, died in British custody only hours after his arrest in the south of the country. On 10 May, British soldiers delivered a written note to the family’s home stating that he “suffered a heart attack while we were asking questions about his son. We took him to the military hospital, go to the hospital.” Unaware that he was dead, the Numa family went to the hospital only to be told he wasn’t there. They later found him in the mortuary where his unidentified corpse had been brought by Royal Military Police two days earlier. Baha Moussa, a young Basra hotel waiter, died in British military custody, reportedly beaten to death.
On at least two occasions arrests were made in Iraq not by soldiers but by “U.S. nationals in plain clothes”—presumably CIA agents. Nasser Abdul Latif, a twenty-three-year-old physics student, for example, was shot on 12 June in a raid on his home “by armed men in plain clothes, who were apparently U.S. nationals.” Searching for a senior member of the Baath party, U.S. troops raided the home of Khreisan Aballey on 30 April and arrested him and his eighty-year-old father. His brother was shot—the family didn’t know if he was alive or dead—and Aballey, who claimed not to know the whereabouts of the Baathist official, was taken for interrogation. He said he was made to stand or kneel facing a wall for seven and a half days, hooded and handcuffed tightly with plastic strips. He reported that a U.S. soldier stamped on his foot and tore off one of his toenails.207
Paul Bremer’s “Coalition Provisional Authority” (CPA)—a name that just reeked of apologies for its own existence—issued edicts like a Roman emperor with the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths at the gates of the capital. The Iraqi army would be disbanded, putting tens of thousands of armed men out of work. What did Bremer now think they were going to do in their spare time? Tons of razor wire now surrounded the marble Saddamite palace from which Bremer’s whiz-kids and anti-terror advisers tried to govern Iraq. The “coalition”—essentially America and its British ally during the war—seemed less and less provisional and equally less an authority as the weeks went by.
The “Interim Council” and its twenty-five members, representing a dutiful balance between Iraq’s Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and secular population, was already the subject of the deepest cynicism. Its first act—at the behest of the Pentagon’s Shia accolyte Ahmed Chalabi—was to declare a national holiday for 9 April, marking the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Or at least, that is how it looked in the West. For Iraqis, their first new national holiday marked the first day of foreign occupation of their land. In the conference hall that now served as press centre for the occupation authorities in Baghdad, sets of handouts were laid carefully on a table for journalists to peruse. They read like a schizophrenic nightmare. “Al Saydia Public Health Clinic Grand Opening,” one would say. “Soldier Killed in Explosion” said the next. “Iraq National Vaccination Day for Children” said a third, just an inch from another flyer recording the killing of two more U.S. troops.
The Americans were buying time, making decisions on the hoof, failing to assess the effects of their every action. First it was Jay “pull-your-stomach-in-and-say-you’re-proud-to-be-an-American” Garner—the man I’d last met in Kurdistan in 1991—and then the famous “anti-terrorism” expert Paul Bremer who washed up in Baghdad to fire and then rehire Baath party university professors, and then, faced with one dead American a day, to rehire the murderous thugs of Saddam’s torture centres to help in the battle against “terrorism.” Sixteen of America’s thirty-three combat brigades were now in the cauldron of Iraq—five others were also deployed overseas—and the 82nd Airborne, only just out of Afghanistan, was about to be redeployed north of Baghdad. “Bring ’em on,” Bush had taunted America’s guerrilla enemies in June 2003. They took him at his word. There was so far not a shred of evidence that the latest Bush administration fantasy— “thousands” of foreign Islamist “jihadi” fighters streaming into Iraq to kill Americans—was true.
But soon that fantasy would be made manifest. What would we be told then? Wasn’t Iraq invaded to destroy “terrorism” rather than to re-create it? We were told that Iraq was going to be transformed into a “democracy,” and suddenly it’s to be a battleground for another “war against terror.” America, Bush was now telling his people, “is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or . . . Los Angeles.” So that was it, then. Draw all these nasty “terrorists” into our much-loved, “liberated” Iraq, and they would obligingly leave the “homeland” alone.
When the Twin Towers collapsed in New York, who had ever heard of Fallujah? When the killers of 11 September 2001 flew their plane into the Pentagon, who had heard of Ramadi? When the Lebanese hijacker flew his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would ever have believed that President George W. Bush would be announcing, in August 2003, a “new front line in the war on terror” as his troops embarked on a hopeless campaign against the guerrillas of Iraq? Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to arms against “terrorism” in “Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza”?
Gaza? What did the miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? Nothing, of course. Nor did Iraq have anything whatever to do with 11 September 2001. Nor did September 11 change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people—and the sympathy of the rest of the world—to introduce a “world order” dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. The Iraqi “regime change,” as we now all knew, was planned as part of a Richard Perle/Paul Wolfowitz campaign document to would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. That Tony Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising what it represented—a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists—truly beggared belief.
But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan—its American-paid warlords raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in their burqas, its opium production now making Afghanistan the world’s number one exporter, and its people sometimes killed at the rate of up to a hundred a week—was a “success,” something that Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld still boasted about. By 2005, the Taliban were back and so was al-Qaeda, killing American soldiers rather than Russians. Iraq—a midden of guerrilla hatred, popular resentment and incipient civil war—was also a “success.” Now Bush wanted $87 billion to keep Iraq running, he wanted to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a “talking shop” in 2002, he wanted scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to die in America’s occupation war, to share the burdens of occupation—though not, of course, the decision-making, which must remain Washington’s exclusive imperial preserve.
What’s more, the world was supposed to accept the insane notion that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was part of this monstrous battle. It was the planet’s last war of colonisation, although all mention of the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza had been erased from the Middle East narrative in U.S. statements about the “war on terror,” the cosmic clash of religious extremism that President Bush invented after 11 September 2001. Could Israel’s interests be better served by so infantile a gesture from Bush? The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers and the grotesque implantation of Jews and Jews only in the colonies had now been set into this colossal struggle of “good” against “evil,” in which even Ariel Sharon was “a man of peace,” according to Mr. Bush.
In the Pentagon, there was some sanity. They were re-showing Gillo Pontecorvo’s film of the French war in Algeria. The Battle of Algiers showed what happened both to the guerrillas of the FLN and to the French army when their war turned dirty. The flyers sent out to the Pentagon brass to watch this magnificent, painful film began with the words: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas . . .” And, they might have added, give encouragement to every resistance force in the Middle East. “If Israel’s superpower ally can be humbled by Arabs in Iraq,” a Palestinian official explained to me in one of the Beirut camps in 2003, “why should we give up our struggle against the Israelis, who cannot be as efficient soldiers as the Americans?”
That’s the lesson the Algerians drew when they saw France’s mighty army surrendering at Dien Bien Phu. The French, like the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, had succeeded in murdering or “liquidating” many of the Algerians who might have negotiated a ceasefire with them. The search for an interlocuteur valablewas one of de Gaulle’s most difficult tasks when he decided to leave Algeria. But what could the Americans do? Their interlocuteur might have been the United Nations. But the UN had been struck off as a negotiator by the suicide bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad. So had the International Red Cross, also suicide-bombed. The insurgents were not interested in negotiations of any kind. Bush had declared “war without end.” And it looked as though Iraqis—along with ourselves—were going to be its principal victims.
TO ABU GHRAIB PRISON. It is September 2003. It will be another seven months before the torture and abuse perpetrated by the Americans in Saddam’s old murder house are revealed. No talking to the prisoners, we are told. We can see them beyond the dirt lot, standing in the heat beside their sand-brown tents, the razor wire wrapped in sheaths around their compound. No pictures of the prisoners, we are told. Do not enter the compound. Do not go inside the wire. Of the up to 800 Iraqis held here, only a handful are “security detainees”—the rest are “criminal detainees”—but until now almost all of them have lived out here in the heat and dust and muck. Which is why the Americans were so pleased to see us at Saddam’s vile old prison. Their message? Things are getting better.
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, commander of the U.S. 800th Military Police Brigade, has cleaned up the burned and looted jail cells for hundreds of prisoners. A new medical section with stocks of medicines, X-ray machines and even a defibrillator has been installed for the prisoners. In the newly painted cells, there are blankets and toothpaste, toothbrush, soap and shampoo for every man, neatly placed for them—and for us, I suspect—on top of their prison blankets. These are the same cells in which the prisoners will later be held naked, or forced to wear women’s underclothes or bitten by dogs. This is the corridor in which a young American military policewoman will hold a naked prisoner on a dog leash, where Iraqi prisoners will be piled naked on top of each other on the floor. General Karpinski will later be the Pentagon’s fall-gal for what is happening here.
General Karpinski was obviously a tough lady—she was an intelligence officer in 7th Special Forces at Fort Bragg and served as a “targeting officer” in Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990—but back in September 2003 she had a little difficulty at first in recalling that there was a riot at the jail four months earlier in which U.S. troops used “lethal force” when protesting prisoners threw stones and tent-poles at American military policemen. The troops killed a teenage inmate. Most of the “security detainees”—the 800th MP Brigade’s publicity said that they have the responsibility of “caring” for prisoners rather than guarding them—were across at Baghdad airport where, General Karpinski said, there were men who “may be part of a resistance force.” Note the word “resistance,” rather than terrorist. Then when I asked if there were any Western prisoners being held, she said that she thought there were “six claiming to be American and two claiming to be from the UK.” General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, who would also be blamed for the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2005, will deny this within twenty-four hours. No explanation given.
Then came the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison, a Dr. Majid. When I asked him what his job was when Saddam used the place as a torture and execution centre, he replied that he had been—er—the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison. Indeed, half his staff were running the medical centre at Abu Ghraib under the Saddam regime. “No, I didn’t ever attend the executions,” he said. “I couldn’t stand that. I sent my junior doctors to do the death certificates.” Except at night, of course, when the security services brought in political prisoners for hanging. Then Dr. Majid would receive an instruction saying “no death certificates.” The politicals were hanged at night. During the day, the doctor said, it was the “killers” who were hanged. Killers? Killers? What did his use of that word imply?
The new Iraqi prison guards at Abu Ghraib, we were informed, had been trained in human rights—including two, it turned out, who had been police officers under the Saddam regime. No wonder General Karpinski said that the Americans hadn’t chosen the doctors—that had been the work of the new Iraqi Ministry of Health. There were U.S. intelligence officers in Abu Ghraib but no, the military police were not present during interrogations. Yes, General Karpinski had visited Guantánamo Bay for “a few days,” but she had not brought any lessons learned there to Baghdad.208
Of course, we were taken on a statutory visit to Abu Ghraib’s old death chamber, the double hanging room in which poor Farzad Bazoft of The Observer and thousands of Iraqis were put to death. General Karpinski gave the lever a tug and the great iron trapdoors clanged open, their echo vibrating through the walls. Dr. Majid said he had never heard them before, that he was never even a member of the Baath party. So let this be written in history: the chief medical officer at Saddam’s nastiest prison—who was now the chief medical officer at America’s cleanest Iraqi prison—was never a member of the Baath party and never saw an execution.
Of course, there are things which only a heart of stone cannot be moved by, the last words written and carved on the walls of the filthy death row cells, just a few yards from the gallows. “Ahmed Qambal, 8/9/2000,” “Ahmed Aziz from Al-Najaf governorate, with Jabah, 2/9/01,” “Abbad Abu Mohamed.” Sometimes they had added verses from the Koran. “Death is better than shame.” “Death is life for a believer and a high honour.” What courage it must have taken to write such words, their very last on Earth.
But there was something just a little too neat about all this. Against Saddam’s cruelty, any institution looks squeaky clean. Yet there was a lot about Abu Ghraib which didn’t look as clean as the new kitchens. There was still no clear judicial process for the supposed killers, thieves and looters behind the razor wire. The military admitted that the transcription of Arabic names—with all the Ellis Island mistakes that can lead to—meant that families often could not find their loved ones. There was no mention—until we brought it up—of the guerrilla mortar attack that killed six prisoners in their tents. The Americans had sent psychologists to talk to the inmates afterwards and found that they believed—surprise, surprise—that the Americans were using them as human shields. And, as we know, much, much worse was to come.
OWEID POINTS ACROSS the dry earth and sweeps his hand across the grey desolation of sand, dust and broken homes to the north. “I knew all these villages,” he says. “Take this down in your notebook—you should remember the names of these dead villages: Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal, Daoudi, Djezeran Nakbia, Zalal, Abu Talfa, Jdedah, Ghalivah, Um al-Hamadi, Al-Gufas, Al-Khor, Al-Hammseen . . .” It is too much. I cannot keep up with Abbas Oweid. The sheer scope of Saddam’s destruction of the Marsh Arabs has outpaced the speed of my handwriting. But then, far across the rubble of bricks and broken doorframes and dried mud, there comes the cry of a bird.
Oweid’s face breaks into a smile. “Where the birds are, there is the water,” he says, and rests on his heels, a man—the Arabs like this—who has found the right aphorism for the right moment. But it is true. The birds are returning because the water is trickling back into the thousands of square miles that Saddam drained for ten long years. You can literally hear it, gurgling, frothing, sucking its way into old ditches and dried-up streams and round the low dirt hills upon which the Shia Muslim Marsh Arabs built their homes before Saddam decided to destroy them. This is the same estuary where my friend and colleague Mohamed Salam of AP saw the charred corpses of the Marsh Arabs twenty years ago, burned and electrocuted by Saddam’s army, people who’d lived among ducks and buffaloes and fished with spears, gutted open like fish, where the innocent had to die along with the invader.
I sit on a little boat, puttering up the broad Salal River, and see an old mud and concrete house with a new roof and new palm trees planted around it and a small, green-painted boat pulled onto the dirt embankment. The bulrushes and reeds are gone and there is no tree higher than 3 feet. But one family has come back. Even Mohsen Bahedh, whose family fled to the safety of Iran during the long and terrible man-made drought that Saddam inflicted on his people, is thinking of returning.
He sat beside me in our boat, his left hand holding a Kalashnikov rifle, his right resting on the head of his five-year-old son, Mehdi. “There were 12,000 families here and they all left,” he said. “We had fish and fruit and vegetables and birds and water buffalo and our homes, and Saddam dried us out, took all our water away, left us with nothing.”
Our boat slowed at one point because the water level rose 6 inches in front of us, a literal ridge of higher water that fell back to the river’s normal level on the other side. “Underneath us are the remains of a Saddam dam,” Mohsen said. “It makes the water run over the top of it. So we can still see the dams, even when they are no longer here.”
You have to come here to appreciate Saddam’s ruthlessness of purpose. After the Americans and British encouraged the Shia Muslims of Iraq to rise up against Saddam in 1991—and, of course, betrayed them by doing nothing when he wiped out his opponents—deserting Iraqi soldiers and rebels who wanted to keep on fighting retreated into the swamps of Howeiza and Amara and Hamar where the Marsh Arabs, immortalised in Wilfrid Thesiger’s great work so many decades ago, gave them sanctuary. Iraqi helicopters and tanks could not winkle them out. So Saddam embarked on a strategy of counter-guerrilla warfare that puts Israel’s political assassinations and property destruction—and America’s Vietnam Agent Orange—into the shade. He constructed his set of dams—hundreds of them—to block the waters flowing into the marshes from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He diverted the water through new and wide canals—one of them was called the Mother of All Battles River—which irrigated the towns and cities that remained loyal to him. The only water allowed into the marshes was from the runoffs of fertilised fields, so the Marsh Arabs’ cattle walked into the centre of the streams to find fresh water. In the end, there was almost no water left.
But when the Anglo–American invasion force crashed into Iraq in March 2003 there were still some hundreds of square miles of marshes left; and in the first hours after the British reached Basra, the people of Hamar dug through the earth and concrete dams that Saddam had erected to destroy them and breached his ramparts. One old man in Nasiriyah told me his wife woke him after the first night of bombing to tell him she could hear water trickling in the old ditch behind their house. The man didn’t believe her. “Then I got up and walked outside in the moonlight,” he said. “And I saw water.”
It is a story of hope. Faisal Khayoun’s father was murdered by Saddam’s secret police in 1993 while driving on the Basra Road. “They shot him in the forehead and neck,” he said. “My cousin and my uncle were arrested in 1997 and hanged at Abu Ghraib. Themukhabarat used to come here on raids at four in the morning and I would always spend the nights on the roof, waiting in case they came. Now, for the first time in my life, I stay asleep in my home until the sun wakes me in the morning.”
Mohsen Bahedh jumped ashore 4 miles north of the Hamar Bridge and we sloshed together through deep, black mud that pulled at our shoes, to the four broken walls of a house. “This was my home,” he said. “I came back and knocked some of the bricks and window-frames out to build a new home south of Saddam’s dam. See, that’s where we kept the geese—and my cattle were where the dust is. And my boat was down there.” He and Mehdi paddled through the wreckage. “Maybe we will come back now,” he said. “Yes, we helped Saddam’s opponents. And when the soldiers deserted and came here, we fed them and gave them places to sleep and fuel to keep them warm. We are a kind people.”
Mohsen is forty-eight, but has two young wives and five children and says he can scarcely afford to finish building his new house. And the Marsh Arabs cannot just walk back to their land. Many long ago exchanged the water buffalo for a Mercedes and became traders. Other tribes moved into the area and planted crops in newly irrigated land. But Thesiger’s people survived and Saddam’s regime did not, and a small tide of dark blue water was now seeping back into the desert, creeping around Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal and all the lost villages of the marshes.
How hope and horror nestled against each other. As the Americans slaughtered a wedding party in an air strike—and called the guests “insurgents”—another of Saddam’s mass graves would be opened. No sooner had I returned from the land of the Marsh Arabs than I would learn of the “Documentation Centre for the Female Martyrs of the Islamic Movement,” whose study of Saddam’s young female victims—most were subjected to vicious torture and deliberately cruel executions—is not for the faint-hearted.
Wives were forced to watch their husbands hanged before being placed in the electric chair, were burned with acid, tied naked to ceiling fans, sexually abused. In several cases, women were poisoned or used as guinea pigs for chemical substances at a plant near Samara believed to be making chemical weapons. Their names—along with the names of their torturers and executioners—are at last known. One man, Abu Widad, once boasted that he had hanged seventy female prisoners in one night at the Abu Ghraib prison. In many cases, women were put to death for the crime of being the sisters or wives of a wanted man. Most were associated with the forbidden Dawa party whose members were routinely tortured and killed by the Baathist government.
A typical entry in “Imprisoned Memories: Red Pages from a Forgotten History”—compiled by Ali al-Iraq in the Iranian city of Qum—reads as follows:
Samira Awdah al-Mansouri (Um Iman), birthdate 1951, Basra, teacher at Haritha Intermediate School . . . married to the martyr Abdul Ameer, a cadre of the Islamic movement military wing . . . member of Islamic Dawa party . . . Torturers: Major Mehdi al-Dulaymi who tortured while drunk, Lieutenant Hussain al-Tikriti, who specialised in breaking the rib cages of his victims by stamping on them . . . Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Lamee who beat victims on their feet . . . Um Iman was beaten . . . hung by her hair from a ceiling fan and suffered torture by electricity. Having spent two months in the prison cells in Basra without giving way, al-Dulaymi recommended she be executed for carrying unlicensed arms and belonging to the al-Dawa party.
In fact, Um Iman was transferred to the Public Security Division in Baghdad, where further torture took place over eleven months. She subsequently appeared before the Revolutionary Military Security Court, which sentenced her to death by hanging. She spent another six months in the Rashid prison west of Baghdad until—when she might have hoped that her life would be spared—she was, on a Sunday evening, transferred to Abu Ghraib and executed by Abu Widad.
There are frequent accounts of women and children tortured in front of their husbands and fathers. In 1982, for instance, a Lieutenant Kareem in Basra reportedly brought the wife of an insurgent to the prison, stripped and tortured her in front of her husband, then threatened to kill their infant child. When both refused to talk, the security man “threw the baby against the wall and killed him.”
Ahlam al-Ayashi was arrested in 1982 at the age of twenty because she was married to Imad al-Kirawee, a senior Dawa member. When he refused to give information to the security police, two professional torturers—named in the report as Fadil Hamidi al-Zarakani and Faysal al-Hilali—attacked Ahlam in front of the prisoner and his child, torturing her—the account spares readers the details—to death. Her body was buried in the desert outside Basra and has no known grave. Three of Ahlam’s five brothers were executed along with her husband, and another brother was killed in the insurrection that followed the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. But her child Ala, who witnessed her mother’s torture, was taken to Iran, where she married and was now about to enter university.
Many of the stories are painfully tragic. Twenty-one-year-old Awatif Nour al-Hamadani, for example, was betrayed by her own husband, who—under extreme torture—named his wife and several colleagues as gun-runners. Awatif was pregnant but was set on by a man called Major Amer who beat her with a metal chair and then sexually abused her. At her trial, Judge Mussalam al-Jabouri—who was later to try Saddam’s nuclear physicist, Hussain Shahristani—suggested that “a miniature gallows should be found for her baby daughter because she had sucked on her mother’s hate-filled milk.”
Awatif was first taken to be executed with two female colleagues and forced to watch the hanging of 150 men, 10 at a time; as their corpses were taken away, she recognised one of them as her husband. She was then returned to her cell. She was later executed in an electric chair. Many inmates were also killed in the same chair at Abu Ghraib, including two other women, Fadilah al-Haddad in 1982 and Rida al-Ouwaynati the following year.
Maysoon al-Assadi was an eighteen-year-old university student when she was arrested for membership in a banned Islamic organisation. During her interrogation she was hanged by her hair and beaten on the soles of her feet, and then she was sentenced to hang by Judge Awad Mohamed Amin al-Bandar. Her last wish—to say goodbye to her fiancé—was granted and the two married in the prison. But while saying goodbye to other prisoners, she made speeches condemning the leadership of the Iraqi regime and the prison governor decided that she should be put to death slowly. She was strapped into the jail’s electric chair and took two hours to die.
Salwa al-Bahrani, the mother of a small boy, had been caught distributing weapons to Islamic fighters in 1980. She was allegedly administered poisoned yoghurt during interrogation by a Dr. Fahid al-Dannouk, who experimented in poisons that could be used against Iranian troops. Hundreds of mujahedin fighters of Dawa were, according to the report, used as guinea pigs for experiments with toxic chemicals at Salman Pak just south of Baghdad. Salwa died at home forty-five days after being forced to eat the yoghurt. Fatimah al-Hussaini, aged twenty, was accused of concealing weapons for al-Dawa and arrested in Baghdad in 1982. She was beaten with plastic cables, hung from the ceiling by her hands, which were tied behind her back, tortured with electricity and had acid poured on her thighs. She refused to talk and her torturer recommended execution. She was hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1982 and buried by her family in Najaf.
The 550-page report which records the dreadful suffering of Saddam’s female Shiite prisoners was no literary work. Some of its prose is florid and occasionally appears to describe women’s martyrdom as a fate to be emulated. Nor was this a volume that would make easy reading for Americans anxious to use it as evidence against Saddam. At the time these crimes were being committed, the United States regarded Saddam as an ally—and the book repeatedly stated that the chemicals used on women prisoners were originally purchased from Western countries. But the detail is compelling—the names and fates of at least fifty women are recorded, along with the names of their torturers—and the activities of the “Monster of Abu Ghraib,” Abu Widad, have been confirmed by the few prisoners who survived the jail. He carried out executions between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. and would hit condemned men and women on the back of the head with a hatchet if they praised a murdered imam before they were hanged. In the end, forty-one-year-old Abu Widad was caught after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man; he was hanged on his own gallows in 1985.
The Americans and British benefitted from these accounts of terror under Saddam. Would you rather he was still here in Iraq, torturing and gassing his own people? they would ask. Don’t you think we did a good thing by getting rid of him? All this because the original reasons for the invasion—Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, his links with the outrages of September 11th, Blair’s 45-minute warning—turned out to be lies. But it was a dark comparison that Bush and Blair were making. If Saddam’s immorality and wickedness had to be the yardstick against which all of our own iniquities were judged, what did that say about us? If Saddam’s regime was to be the moral compass to define our actions, how bad—how iniquitous—did that allow us to be? Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects in Bagram and subjected them to inhuman treatment in Guantánamo.209 Saddam was much worse. And thus it became inevitable that the symbol of Saddam’s shame—the prison at Abu Ghraib—subsequently became the symbol of our shame too.
What was interesting was the vastly different reaction in East and West to our abuses at Abu Ghraib. We “civilised” Westerners were shocked at the dog-biting and humiliations and torture “our” men and women administered to the inmates. Iraqis were outraged, but not shocked. Their friends and relatives—some of whom had been locked up by the Americans—had long ago told them of the revolting behaviour of the American guards. They weren’t surprised by those iconic photographs. They already knew.
By early 2004, an army of thousands of mercenaries had appeared on the streets of Iraq’s major cities, many of them former British and American soldiers hired by the occupying Anglo-American authorities and by dozens of companies who feared for the lives of their employees in Baghdad. The heavily armed Britons working for well over 300 security firms in Iraq now outnumbered Britain’s 8,000-strong army in the south of the country. Although major U.S. and British security companies were operating in Iraq, dozens of small firms also set up shop with little vetting of their employees and few rules of engagement. Many of the Britons were former SAS soldiers—hundreds of former American Special Forces men were also in the country—while armed South Africans were also working for the occupation authorities.
The presence in Iraq of so many thousands of Western mercenaries—or “security contractors,” as the American press coyly referred to them—said as much about America’s fear of taking military casualties as it did about the multi-million-pound security industry now milking the coffers of the U.S. and British governments. Security firms were escorting convoys on the highways of Iraq. Armed plain-clothes men from an American company were guarding U.S. troops at night inside the former presidential palace where Paul Bremer had his headquarters. In other words, security companies were now guarding occupation troops. When a U.S. helicopter crashed near Fallujah in 2003, it was an American security firm that took control of the area and began rescue operations. Needless to say, casualties among the mercenaries were not included in the regular body count put out by the occupation authorities.
Nor were the names of prisoners included in their lists. When fifty-five-year-old Mohamed Abul Abbas died mysteriously in a U.S. prison camp in Iraq, nobody bothered to call his family. His American captors had given no indication to the International Red Cross that the man behind the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1985 had been unwell; his wife, Reem, first heard that he was dead when she watched an Arab television news show. Yet in his last letter to his family, written just seven weeks earlier, the Palestinian militant wrote, “I am in good form and in good health,” adding that he hoped to be freed soon. So what happened to Mohamed Abul Abbas?
Although he was a prominent colleague of Yassir Arafat for more than three decades, the world will for ever link his name with the Achille Lauro, when members of his small “Palestine Liberation Front” commandeered the vessel in the Mediterranean and, in a cruel killing that was to cause international outrage, shot dead an elderly Jewish American, Leon Klinghoffer. Yet within ten years the Israelis themselves would allow Abul Abbas, now a member of the Palestine National Council, to enter the occupied territories to participate in elections in the Gaza Strip. He even visited his old family home in Haifa in Israel. He supported Israeli–Palestinian peace agreements and favoured the annulment of the anti-Israeli articles in the PLO’s charter. Like so many of Arafat’s colleagues, he had undergone that mystical Middle East transformation from “super-terrorist” to peacenik.
So why was he ever incarcerated in the harsh confines of America’s airport prison camp outside Baghdad? He was never charged with any crime, never offered a lawyer, never allowed direct contact with his wife and family, able to communicate with the outside world only via the Red Cross. It was they who finally telephoned his wife, Reem, in Beirut to confirm that her husband was dead.
“I know nothing about this—nothing,” she wailed down the telephone to me. “How did he die? Why were we told nothing?” Mohamed Abul Abbas remains the most prominent prisoner to die in U.S. custody in Iraq and joined a growing list of unexplained deaths among the 15,000 Iraqis and Palestinians held by U.S. military forces. The occupation authorities in Iraq would say only that they were to hold a post-mortem on Abul Abbas’s remains. The Palestine Liberation Front had long had offices in Baghdad, along with Arafat’s PLO; the head of the PLF’s “political bureau,” Mohamed Sobhi, said that Mohamed Abul Abbas’s arrest by U.S. troops on 14 April the previous year had “no reason in law other than the need of the American soldiers at that time to look for false victories. We all knew that Abul Abbas had been to Palestine in 1995 and that the United States and Israel both allowed this. After that, he travelled to Palestinian areas and to other Arab states many times. We had told all this to the Americans here and demanded that he be released. In his last letter home, he said he hoped to be freed soon. So what happened to him?”
Reem Abul Abbas, who has a child by her husband and two by an earlier marriage, said that he was still living in Baghdad when American troops entered the city on 9 April last year. “He was trying to keep away from them because many people—Iraqis and Palestinians—were being arrested, people who had done nothing. Then American troops raided our home. Mohamed wasn’t there but I saw it all on Fox Television. Would you believe I saw my own home on television and they had moved things around and draped a Palestinian flag over a mirror and then invited Fox Television to film it. On the evening of April 14th, Mohamed called me from a Thuraya satellite phone from a friend’s home. It was a big mistake. I think that’s how they tracked him down and found him. Not long afterwards, American soldiers came up the stairs.”
The U.S. occupation authorities initially announced the capture of the “important terrorist Abul Abbas,” making no mention of his return to the occupied territories or that the Israelis themselves—who might have been more anxious than the Americans to see him in prison—had freely allowed the PLF leader to enter their territory as a peace negotiator. “First he was a ‘terrorist,’ ” his wife, Reem, said. “Then he was a man of peace. Then when the Americans arrested him, they made him a ‘terrorist’ again. What is this nonsense?” Within months, the same transformation was to be undergone by Yassir Arafat. Abul Abbas’s last letter to his family, dated 19 January and written in neat Arabic on one side of a sheet of Red Cross paper, gave no indication of his fate. Addressed to his brother Khaled in Holland, it is a prisoner’s familiar appeal for letters and news, of expressions of affection and hope. “Dear Khaled,” it begins, “. . . first I present my kisses to the head of your dear mother and I hope she’s ready to prepare the ‘dolma’ and the red chicken that I love, because my first lunch (in freedom) will be at her home. What is the news about my family and my dearest Issa? . . . Very special greetings to him, his wife and children and for your brothers and sisters and their families because they are my family, too, and my dearest ones . . . I hope you can send me a dishdash . . . I am in good form and in good health and I really need to know news of my family and friends. I have great hopes of being released soon—with God’s will.” Mohamed Abul Abbas appears to have had no premonition of his imminent death. But forty-nine days after he wrote his letter of hope, he was dead.
Iraq allowed the world to forget Palestine, where Yassir Arafat was now living in the foetid, unwashed offices in which he had been held under effective house arrest by the Israeli army in Ramallah. The Israelis broke off all contact with him. So did the Americans. Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up across Israel until Ariel Sharon began building a vast wall across the West Bank, cutting off hundreds of Palestinian villages, carving a de facto annexation into the land which was supposed to be a Palestinian state. The wall, it should be said at once, could not be called a wall by most journalists—even though it was far longer than the old Berlin Wall. “Wall” has ugly connotations of ghettoes and apartheid. So it became a “security barrier” in The New York Times and on the BBC or else, even more fancifully, a “fence.” The International Court at The Hague—to which the broken Palestinian Authority sent its spokesmen—ruled the construction illegal. Israel ignored the ruling.210
And it continued its policy of murdering its opponents. These “targeted killings”—another example of Israel’s semantic inventions which the BBC and others obediently adopted—went for the top, even though the innocent were inevitably killed in the same attacks. On 21 March 2004 an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at the elderly and crippled head of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as he left a mosque in Gaza. It didn’t take much courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. Likewise, it took only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination. Yes, he enthusiastically endorsed suicide bombings—including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not. But something infinitely dangerous—another sinister precedent—was being set for our brave new world.
Take the old man himself. From the start, the Israeli line was simple. Sheik Yassin was the “head of the snake”—to use the words of the Israeli ambassador to London—the head of Hamas, “one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisations.” But then came obfuscation from the world’s media. Yassin, the BBC World Service Television told us on the day of the murder, was originally freed by the Israelis in a “prisoner exchange.” It sounded like one of those familiar swaps— a Palestinian released in exchange for captured Israeli soldiers—and then, later the same day, the BBC told us that he had been freed “following a deal brokered by King Hussein.”
Which was all very strange. He was a prisoner of the Israelis. This “head of the snake” was in an Israeli prison. And then—bingo—this supposed monster was let go because of a “deal.” So let’s remember what the “deal” was. Sheikh Yassin was set free by no less than that law-and-order right-wing Likudist Benjamin Netanyahu when he was prime minister of Israel. The now dead King Hussein hadn’t been a “broker” between two sides. Two Israeli Mossad secret agents had tried to murder a Hamas official in Amman, the capital of an Arab nation which had a full peace agreement with Israel. They had injected the Hamas man with poison and the late King Hussein of Jordan called the U.S. president in fury and threatened to put the captured Mossad men on trial if he wasn’t given the antidote to the poison and if Yassin wasn’t released.
Netanyahu immediately gave in. Yassin was freed and the Mossad lads went safely home to Israel. So the “head of the snake” was let loose by Israel itself, courtesy of the then Israeli prime minister—a chapter in the narrative of history which was conveniently forgotten when Yassin was killed. Which was all very odd. For if the elderly cleric really was worthy of state murder, why did Netanyahu let him go in the first place? Much more dangerous, however, were the implications. Yet another Arab—another leader, however vengeful and ruthless—had been assassinated. The Americans want to kill bin Laden. They want to kill Mullah Omar. They killed Saddam’s two sons. Just as they killed three al-Qaeda men in Yemen with a remotely piloted drone and rocket. The Israelis repeatedly threatened to murder Yassir Arafat. And shortly after Yassin’s death, the Israelis struck again, firing another missile at the new Hamas leader, Abdul-Aziz Rantissi. It was Rantissi who had been illegally deported to Lebanon with hundreds of other Palestinians more than a decade before, who had lived out the long months of heat and snow in the “Field of Flowers” close to the Israeli border. It was the same bearded Rantissi I had last interviewed in Gaza, who had told me then, “the preferred way of ending my life would be martyrdom.” I had looked out of the window then, searching for an Apache helicopter. Now it had come for him.
No one had begun to work out the implications of all this. For years, there had been an unwritten rule in the cruel war of government versus guerrilla. You can kill the men on the street, the bomb-makers and gunmen. But the leadership on both sides—government ministers, spiritual leaders, possible future interlocuteurs valables as the French used to call them when in 1962 they discovered they had murdered most of the Algerian leadership—were allowed to survive.
True, these rules were sometimes broken. The IRA tried to kill Mrs. Thatcher. They murdered her friend Airey Neave. Islamic Jihad murdered an Israeli minister in his hotel room. But these were exceptions. Now all was changed utterly. Anyone who advocated violence—even if palpably incapable of committing it—was now on a death list. So who could be surprised if the rules were broken by the other side?
Is President Bush now safe? Or Tony Blair? Or their ambassadors and fellow ministers? How soon before “our” leaders are “fair game”? We will not say this. If—or when—our own political leaders are assassinated, shot down or blown up, we shall vilify the murderers and argue that a new stage in “terrorism” has been reached. We shall forget that we are now encouraging this all-out assassination spree. The Americans failed to condemn Sheikh Yassin’s assassination just as they did Rantissi’s. So we took another step down a sinister road.
Then death came to the old man. Arafat had long shown the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease but in the filth of his smashed Ramallah compound his health was bound to deteriorate further. He had fallen into the habit, even in the company of diplomatic visitors, of pulling off his socks and rubbing the sores on his feet. He had difficulty concentrating, lost his appetite. To the same visitors, he would ramble on about his 1982 battle against the Israelis in besieged Beirut. Some of his entourage realised that his mind was wandering, that he was losing his grip on the real world, that he was dying. They were right. The Israelis at last allowed the desperately sick Arafat to leave his ruined headquarters and the French transported the elderly man to the Percy military hospital outside Paris. Here, on 11 November 2004, on the eighty-sixth anniversary of the end of the First World War—the war which had produced the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the conflict which ultimately caused his people’s dispossession and exile—Yassir Arafat died.
I watched his funeral in Cairo, a grim, short journey on a horse-drawn gun carriage down a boulevard in which not a single Egyptian or Palestinian civilian was allowed to walk, before a phalanx of Arab dictators, some with blood on their hands. They had been chatting beside a mosque when a far gate in a palace wall opened and six black horses clip-clopped onto the road with the coffin, still bearing the Palestinian flag which the French had laid over it. And for almost a minute, no one noticed the horses or the coffin. It was like a train that steamed unnoticed into a country station on a hot afternoon. Yet when the body arrived in Ramallah, the Palestinians gave Arafat a more familiar funeral, shrieking and wailing—tens of thousands of them—fighting to touch the coffin and shooting cascades of bullets into the air. Arafat would have enjoyed it, for it was as chaotic, as dramatic, as genuine and as frightening as his own flawed character. And of course, the world was happy. Now that Arafat had gone, there was hope. That was our reaction. While the Palestinians grieved, they were told that life would now improve.
So, after democratic elections—something that Arafat never approved of—the colourless Mahmoud Abbas became president, a man whom the Americans and British thoroughly approved of. Abbas had written Palestinian documents for the Oslo accord, 600 pages in which he did not once use the word “occupation,” in which he referred only to the “redeployment” of the Israeli army rather than its withdrawal. Yet while he promised to end “terrorism”—Abbas’s ability to use America’s and Israel’s lexicon was among his many accomplishments—the land of Palestine slipped from under him. Hamas and Israel broke ceasefires and then President George W. Bush announced, after a meeting in the United States with Ariel Sharon, that new realities had to be faced, that while he wanted a democratic Palestinian state “side by side” with Israel, the larger Jewish settlements built illegally on Palestinian land would have to stay. He had said this first in April 2004, when Arafat was still alive. It amounted to the destruction of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which said that land could not be acquired by war. Ariel Sharon was prepared to close down the puny little settlements in Gaza—housing just 8,000 Israelis—and this was a “historic and courageous act.” And the result? Vast areas of the Palestinian West Bank would now become Israeli, courtesy of President Bush. Land that belonged to people other than Israelis could now be appropriated with America’s permission because it was “unrealistic” to accept otherwise. The Palestinians were appalled. This was just the sort of deceit and dishonesty that Osama bin Laden enjoyed talking about. Indeed, if George W. Bush thought he could define what was “unrealistic” in the Middle East, one was entitled to ask another question. Did he actually work for al-Qaeda?
We all have lands that “God” or our fathers gave us. Didn’t Queen Mary Tudor of England die with “Calais” engraved on her heart? Doesn’t Spain have a legitimate right to the Netherlands? Or Sweden the right to Norway and Denmark? Or Britain the right to India? Didn’t the Muslims—and the Jews—have a right to fifteenth-century Andalusia? Every colonial power, including Israel, could put forward these preposterous demands. Every claim by Osama bin Laden, every statement that the United States represents Zionism and supports the theft of Arab lands, had now been proved true to millions of Arabs, even those who had no time for bin Laden. What better recruiting sergeant could bin Laden have than George W. Bush? Didn’t he realise what this meant for young American soldiers in Iraq? Or were Israelis more important than American lives in Mesopotamia?
IN HIS LAST HOURS as U.S. proconsul in Baghdad in the summer of 2004, Paul Bremer decided to tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed across the land of Iraq. He drafted a new piece of legislation, forbidding Iraqi motorists to drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound their car horns except in an emergency. That same day, while Bremer fretted about the standards of Iraqi driving, three American soldiers were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of more than sixty attacks on U.S. forces over the same weekend.
It would be difficult to find a more preposterous—and distressing—symbol of Bremer’s failures, his hopeless inability to understand the nature of the debacle which he and his hopeless occupation authority had brought about. It was not that the old Coalition Provisional Authority—now transmogrified into a 3,000-strong U.S. embassy, the largest in the world—was out of touch. It didn’t even live on planet Earth. Bremer’s last starring moment came when he departed Baghdad on a U.S. military aircraft, two U.S.-paid mercenaries—rifles pointed menacingly at camera crews and walking backwards—protecting him until the cabin door closed. And Bremer, remember, was appointed to his job because he was an “anti-terrorist” expert.
It was a terrible summer. If they could not always strike at the Americans, the insurgents would produce their Wal-Mart suicide bombers and destroy those they deemed collaborators. On 28 July, for example, hordes of impoverished would-be police recruits were massacred, up to a hundred of them in the Sunni city of Baquba, as they lined up unprotected along a boulevard in the hope of finding work. The bomber—identity, as usual, unknown—drove his Renault car into a mass of 600 unemployed young men looking for jobs in the police force, detonated his explosives and cut them to pieces. The bomb left a 7-foot hole in the road and wounded at least another 150 men and women, many of them shopping in a neighbouring market.
It would be the last summer when it was still possible to move on the roads of Iraq with some hope of not being killed or kidnapped and decapitated. I took a boat out on the Tigris, where the boatman, a former Iraqi soldier called Saleh, who was wounded in the Iran–Iraq War, offered to take me to Basra. A bit far, I thought, a full week’s journey on Saleh’s barge. So I settled for a trip out of Baghdad, past Saddam’s old school and the wreckage of the defence ministry and the armies of squatters in the ruined apartment blocks. And as we drifted down the pea-green waters of the Tigris, I asked Saleh, who was a Shia, if there was any hope for the Middle East, for Iraq, for us. “Our Imam Ali said that a man is either our brother in religion or our brother in humanity and we believe this,” he said. “You must live with all men in perfect peace. You don’t need to fight him or kill him. You know something—Islam is a very easy religion, but some radicals make it difficult. We are against anyone who is killing or kidnapping foreigners. This is not the Muslim way.”
I call on Sheikh Jouwad Mehdi al-Khalasi, one of the most impressive Shia leaders in Baghdad. A tall, distinguished man who speaks with both eloquence and humour, he has the forehead and piercing eyes of his grandfather—the man who led the Shia Muslim insurrection against British occupation in 1920. He brings out a portrait of the grand old revolutionary, who has a fluffy but carefully combed white beard. One of the most eminent scholars of his day, he ended his life in exile, negotiating with Lenin’s Bolshevik government and dying mysteriously— poisoned, his supporters believed, by British intelligence.
Sheikh Jouwad’s shoulders shake with laughter when I suggest that there are more than a few parallels between the Iraqi insurrections of 1920 and 2004. “Exactly,” he says. “In 1920, the British tried to introduce an Iraqi government in name only—it looks like a copy of UN Security Council Resolution 1546. Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi had become the grand ‘marja’ [the leading Shiite scholar] after the death of Mohamed al-Shiazi and he issued a fatwa telling his followers and all Shiites in Iraq not to participate in elections, not to give legitimacy to a government established by occupation forces.
“Not only the Shiites responded to it but the Sunnis and the Jewish, Christian and other minorities as well. The elections failed and so the British forced my grandfather to leave Iraq. They arrested him at his home on the other side of this religious school where we are today—a home which many years later Saddam Hussein deliberately destroyed.”
It was a familiar colonial pattern. The Brits were exiling troublesome clerics— Archbishop Makarios came to mind—throughout the twentieth century, but Sheikh Mehdi turned out to be as dangerous to the British abroad as he had been at home. He was transported to Bombay, but so great was the crowd of angry Indian Muslims who arrived at the port that British troops kept him on board ship and then transported him to the hot, volcanic port of Aden.
“He said to the British: ‘You don’t know where to send me—but since the pilgrimage season is close, I want to go on the haj to Mecca.’ Now when Sherif Hussein, the ruler, heard this, he sent an invitation for my grandfather to attend the haj. He met Sherif Hussein on Arafat Mountain at Mecca. And then he received an invitation to go to Iran, signed by the minister of foreign affairs, Mohamed Mossadeq. And in Iran, waiting for him, were many religious leaders from Najaf.” Thirty years later, the Americans would topple Mossadeq’s Iranian government— with help from Colonel “Monty” Woodhouse of MI6.
Sheikh Jouwad uses his hands when he talks—Shia prelates are far more expressive with their hands than Anglican clergymen—and each new episode in his grandfather’s life produces a pointed finger. “When Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi arrived at the Iranian port of Bushehr, he received a big welcome but an official of the Iranian Oil Company fired ten bullets at him. Many people said at the time that this was a plot by Colonel Arnold Wilson, who had been the head of the British occupation in Iraq in 1920. All the great religious leaders from Qom in Iran were waiting for him—Al-Naini and al-Asfahani, Sheikh Abdulhalim al-Hoeri al-Yezdi, who was the professor of the future Ayatollah Khomeini—and then King Feisal, whom the British had set up in Baghdad, announced that exiled religious leaders could return to Iraq—providing they promised not to interfere in politics.”
Sheikh Mehdi angrily dismissed the invitation as “an attack on our role as religious leaders and on the independence of Iraq.” Instead, he travelled to the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashad and established there an assembly “to protect the holy places of Iraq,” publishing treatises in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Russian and Turkish.
“There was even an indirect dialogue between my grandfather and the Bolshevik revolutionaries of Lenin,” Sheikh Jouwad says. “They wanted to use difficulties in the international situation to help Iraq to become a really independent country. There would be a revolution in Iraq. That was the idea. But then in 1925, my grandfather suddenly died. They claimed he had a disease. But my father always believed that the British consul in Mashad had Sheikh Mehdi poisoned. On the afternoon that he died, the consul had invited all the doctors in Mashad to a reception outside the city and so when my grandfather became ill, no one could find a doctor and there was no one to care for him.”
And now? I ask Sheikh Jouwad. What of Iraq now? He chairs the Iraqi Islamic Conference—which combines both Shia and Sunni intellectuals, and which is demanding independence for Iraq, just as Sheikh Jouwad’s grandfather did more than eighty years ago. “The Shia will not separate and they will not isolate themselves from the Sunni. They will have their rights when all the people of Iraq have rights. We have the right also to resist occupation in different ways and we do so politically . . . The Americans want civil war—but they will fail, because the Iraqi people will refuse to fall into civil war.”
But there are Arabs who might also like to provoke a civil war and who want to portray Islam as a religion of revenge and fear. I start to look at the videotapes, the kidnap tapes, of men and women pleading for their lives. The pictures are grainy, the voices sometimes unclear. But when Kim Sun-il from South Korea shrieks “Don’t kill me” over and over again, his fear is palpable. As the heads of the kidnap victims are sawn off, Koranic recitations—usually by a well-known Saudi imam—are played on the soundtrack. At the beheading of an American, the murderer ritually wipes his bloody knife twice on the clothes of his victim, just as Saudi officials clean their blades after public executions in the kingdom. Terror by video is now a well-established part of the Iraq war. The “resistance” or the “terrorists” or the “armed Iraqi fighters”—as U.S. forces now referred to their enemies—began with a set of poorly made videos showing attacks on American troops in Iraq. Roadside bombs would be filmed from a passing car as they exploded beside U.S. convoys. Guerrillas could be seen firing mortars at American bases outside Fallujah. But once the kidnappings began, the videos moved into a macabre new world. More than sixty foreigners had been abducted in Iraq by July 2004; most were freed, but many were videotaped in captivity while their kidnappers read their demands. Angelo de la Cruz’s wasted face was enough to provoke street demonstrations in Manila and the early withdrawal of the small Filipino military contingent in Iraq.
But the scenario has become horribly routine. The potential victim kneels in front of three hooded men holding Kalashnikov rifles. Sometimes he pleads for his life. Sometimes he is silent, apparently unaware of whether he is to be murdered or spared. The viewer, however, will notice something quite terrible which the victim is unaware of. When the hostage is to be beheaded, the gunmen behind him are wearing gloves. They do not intend to stain their hands with an infidel’s blood. There is a reading of his death sentence and then—inevitably—the victim is pulled to the right and one man bends over to saw through his throat. The latest victim had been Bulgarian. Just as Ken Bigley from Liverpool was to turn up, trussed like a Guantánamo prisoner, crying out for help from Tony Blair, so Romanian, French, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and other foreign nationals are paraded before the cameras.
The videos, usually delivered to one of two Arabic-language television channels, are rarely shown in full. But in an outrageous spin-off, websites—especially one that appeared to be in California—were now posting their full and gory contents. One American website, for example, had posted the beheading of the American Frank Berg and a South Korean hostage in full and bloody detail. “Kim Sun-il Beheading Video Short Version, Long Version,” the website offered. The “short version” showed a man severing the hostage’s neck. The long version included his screaming appeal for mercy—which lasted for at least two minutes and is followed by his slaughter. On the same screen and at the same time, there are advertisements for “Porn” and “Horse Girls.”
The Iraqi police had watched all the execution tapes and believed that they followed an essentially Saudi routine of beheading. In many cases, the captors speak with Saudi or Yemeni accents. But a video produced of eight foreign truck-drivers—including Kenyans, Indians and an Egyptian—showed gunmen speaking in Iraqi accents. They demanded that the companies employing the drivers should end their contracts with the U.S. military in Iraq—just as a Saudi company abandoned its work after another Egyptian employee was taken captive. Clearly, the “resistance” was also trying to starve the Americans of foreign workers and force more U.S. troops back onto the dangerous highways to drive the supply convoys that traversed Iraq each day.
And where did the inspiration for all these ghoulish videos come from? In January 2004, a colleague had discovered a video on sale in the insurgents’ capital of Fallujah allegedly showing the throat-cutting of an American soldier. In fact, the tape showed a Russian soldier being led into a room by armed men in Chechnya. He is forced to lie down—apparently unaware of his fate—and at first tries to cope with the pain as a man takes a knife to his throat. His head is then cut off. It takes me several months before I realise why this tape was circulated. It was intended to be a training manual for Iraq’s new executioners, how to butcher your fellow man, be he a brother in religion or a brother in humanity.
But behind all this—above all this—the shadow that appeared at the back of the historical cave remained that of Osama bin Laden. Every few months, a tape or video of bin Laden himself would turn up on Al-Jazeera, often hand-delivered to the station’s correspondent in Islamabad. A routine would then be adopted by reporters. Was it really him? When was the tape made? The Pentagon would say it was “studying the tape” and journalists would then point out any threat that bin Laden had made. What they rarely did was listen to the whole speech, make a full translation and find out what bin Laden was actually saying. After all, if you want to know what goes on in his mind, you have to listen to the voice, even if the rhetorical flourishes about charging horses and flashing lances become a little tedious. On 27 December 2001, for example, he read a poem supposedly dedicated to the murderers of September 11th which included a “frowning sword,” “shields,” “bolts of lightning,” “drums” and “tempest.”
What is also clear from his tapes, however, is bin Laden’s almost obsessive interest in history. There are references to the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes– Picot agreement—on 20 February 2003 he suggested that the Bush–Blair friendship was a modern version of the latter—and, of course, to the Treaty of Sèvres. “Our nation [the Islamic world] has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years,” he says on 7 October 2001. In the same tape, he blames the United Nations for the partition of Palestine in 1947: “. . . we shall never accept that the tragedy of Andalusia will be repeated in Palestine,” he says. Andalusia was perhaps the greatest act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Arabs, when Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain ejected the Moors—and the Jews, although bin Laden showed no sympathy for them, even though they are the “People of the Book”—from south-western Europe in 1492.211
In the tape which was allegedly found by a British intelligence agent in a house in Jalalabad after the fall of the Taliban, bin Laden appears to admit his responsibility for the attacks of 11 September 2001. Since much of the tape is inaudible, I was initially suspicious of the Pentagon’s claim that it could make a translation of bin Laden’s remarks—until I read this extract:
We were at a camp of one of the brother’s guards in Kandahar. This brother belonged to the majority of the group. He came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America . . . At that point I was worried that maybe the secret [of the proposed 11 September assault] would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream . . . So I closed the subject. I told him if he sees another dream, not to tell anybody . . .
How could I forget that frightening moment more than four years earlier when bin Laden smiled at me on a cold mountain in Afghanistan and told me that “one of our brothers had a dream,” that the “brother” had seen me on a horse, wearing a beard and a robe “like us” and that I must therefore be a Muslim? Dreams occur in the words of other bin Laden followers, and their influence on al-Qaeda is probably far greater than we imagine. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar claimed that in a dream he had been called by the Prophet Mohamed to save Afghanistan. Dream theories have a long history in Islam; as early as AD 866, the Islamic philosopher Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi argued that while asleep, the psyche is liberated from the senses and has direct access to “the form-creating faculty.” The basis of such a belief must have been founded on the experience of the Prophet himself, who received the word of God in a series of dream-visions, many of them presented to him as he sat in a cave on Mount Hira. Bin Laden’s followers would have known that their own leader dreamed in Afghan caves.
By 2004, bin Laden did not attempt to hide al-Qaeda’s involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks, and especially with the leading hijacker. “We had agreed with Mohamed Atta—may God rest his soul—to conduct all operations within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration realised what was happening,” he said on 30 October. In his tape, timed to coincide with the imminent U.S. presidential elections, bin Laden specifically addressed Americans—most of his messages were primarily for a domestic Arab audience—and responded to Bush’s “they hate freedom” speech about al-Qaeda. “. . . we fight you because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression,” he said. “We want to restore freedom to our nation—and just as you lay waste to our nation, so shall we lay waste to yours.”212 Now he attributed the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to the memory of seeing Beirut’s “towers” bombed to the ground during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, adding that “I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere.” Bin Laden was not in Beirut in 1982—he was fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan—and could only have seen the bombardment of Beirut in video footage. There were high-rise buildings destroyed during the siege, but Beirut had no “towers” of the kind bin Laden spoke about. But Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese hijacker, had been in Beirut as a child in 1982. Did he, much later, recount his memories to bin Laden?
But the al-Qaeda leader’s most devastating remarks—the warning that America and Britain totally ignored, indeed probably never even read—came in an audio-message broadcast by Al-Jazeera on 13 February 2003. This was five weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Had they studied what bin Laden was saying—had they concentrated on his message rather than spent their time feeding his tape through computers for voice identification—the Pentagon might have grasped the extent of the ruthless insurgency that was to break out less than a month after America’s invasion of Iraq.
Bin Laden always expressed his hatred of Saddam Hussein, referring to him as just another American-created “agent” of the Arab world along with the House of Saud and sundry Gulf princes and emirs. But in that all-important 13 February tape, he made a clear offer to ally his forces with those of Saddam’s Arab Socialist Baath Party:
It is beyond doubt that this Crusader war is first and foremost directed against the family of Islam irrespective of whether the Socialist party and Saddam survive or not. It is incumbent on Muslims in general and specifically those in Iraq—seriously and in the manner of jihad—to roll up their sleeves against this tyrannical campaign. Furthermore they are duty-bound to accumulate stocks of ammunition and weapons. Despite our belief and our proclamation concerning the infidelity of socialists, in present-day circumstances there is a coincidence of interests between Muslims and socialists in their battles against the Crusaders . . . Socialists are unbelievers wherever they may be, be it in Baghdad or Aden. This fight that is taking place today is to a great extent similar to the Muslims’ previous fight against the Christians. The coincidence of interests is beneficial. The Muslims’ fight against the Christians coincided with the interests of the Persians and did not in any way harm the companions of the Prophet.
Bin Laden’s “coincidence of interests”—albeit accompanied by the reminder that socialists are “infidels”—was a call to his followers to fight alongside an Iraqi force which included Saddam’s Baathists, not for Saddam, who bin Laden rightly appeared to believe might be doomed, but for the Muslim land of Iraq. Had the West read this message, then the catastrophe that would befall the Americans in Iraq might have been anticipated. Those words proved quite openly that al-Qaeda planned to involve itself in the battle against the United States in Iraq, even if this meant cooperating with those who had fought for Saddam. This was the moment when the future guerrilla army fused with the future suicide bombers, the detonation that would engulf the West in Iraq. And we didn’t even notice.
FROM THE EVER MORE dangerous streets of Baghdad, I would fly a tiny twin-prop aircraft back to Beirut, to breathe, to relax by the sea, to sit on my lovely balcony and watch the Mediterranean or swim in the pool of the old and broken St. Georges Hotel. Yet each morning, I would awake early, uneasy, fearful of what was to come. Never had the Middle East been so fearful a place in which to live. Where will today’s explosion be? I used to ask myself. On 14 February 2005 I was walking along the seafront corniche, opposite my favourite restaurant, the Spaghetteria, talking on my mobile phone to my old friend Patrick Cockburn, my replacement in Baghdad, when a white band of light approached at fearsome speed, like a giant bandage. The palm trees all dipped towards me as if hit by a tornado and I saw people—other strollers on the pavement in front of me—fall to the ground. A window of the restaurant splintered and disappeared inside. And in front of me, perhaps only 400 metres away, dark brown fingers of smoke streaked towards the sky. The blast wave was followed by an explosion so thunderous that it partially deafened me. I could just hear Patrick. “Is that here or there?” he asked. I’m afraid it’s here, Patrick, I said. I could have wept. Beirut was now my home-from-home, my safe haven, and now all the corpses of the Lebanese civil war were climbing out of their graves.
I ran down the street towards the bombing. There were no cops, no ambulances yet, no soldiers, just a sea of flames in front of the St. Georges Hotel. There were men and women round me, covered in blood, crying and shaking with fear. Twenty-two cars were burning, and in one of them I saw three men cowled in fire. A woman’s hand, a hand with painted fingernails, lay on the road. Why? Not bin Laden, I said to myself. Not here in Beirut. I was staggered by the heat, the flames that crept across the road, the petrol tanks of vehicles that would explode and spray fire around me every few seconds. On the ground was a very large man, lying on his back, his socks on fire, unrecognisable. For some reason, I thought he might have been a kaak-seller, one of the army of men who provide the toasted Arabic bread that the corniche pedestrians love to eat. The first medics had arrived and another blackened figure was pulled from a car that was burning like a torch.
Then through the smoke, I found the crater. It was hot and I climbed gingerly into it. Two plain-clothes cops were already there, picking up small shards of metal. Fast work for detectives, I thought. And it was several days before I realised that—far from collecting evidence—they were hiding it, taking it from the scene of the crime. I came across an AP reporter, an old Lebanese friend. “I think it’s Hariri’s convoy,” he said. I couldn’t believe it. Rafiq Hariri had been Lebanon’s billionaire prime minister until the previous year. He had been “Mr. Lebanon,” who had rebuilt Beirut, the symbol of its future economy, the man who had turned a city of ruins into a city of light, of fine new restaurants and shops and pedestrian malls. But the Syrians believed that he was secretly leading Lebanese opposition to their military and intelligence presence in Lebanon. They suspected that his hand lay behind an American–French UN Security Council resolution, number 1559, demanding the withdrawal of Syria’s remaining 40,000 troops in the country.
Hariri had been a friend to me. He would call me from time to time when he was prime minister and invite me for coffee and warn me of the dangers of the Middle East. He would ask me what was really happening in Iraq, whether the insurgency had popular support. I reported after the civil war that I doubted if his ambitious reconstruction plans would ever work and whenever we saw each other in public he would bellow: “Ah, here’s the reporter who thought I couldn’t rebuild Beirut!” After I was beaten on the Afghan border in December 2001, he was the second person to call me as I lay bleeding in bed. “Robert! What happened? I will send my jet to get you from Quetta. Pervez Musharraf is my friend and we can get landing permission and have you in the AUH [American University Hospital] here tomorrow.” And I had thanked him and politely declined the offer. Journalists don’t take gifts from prime ministers.
And now, half an hour after the bombing, his family knew he had gone; Hariri’s mobile had stopped working, along with those of all his bodyguards. The convoy’s anti-bomb neutralisers—a cluster of scanners on the roofs of the armoured four-by-fours—had failed to protect him. And next day, when I opened the Lebanese papers, there was a photograph of a large man lying on his back with his socks burning and he was identified as “the martyr prime minister Rafiq Hariri.”
The Syrian army did leave—faster than expected, almost certainly because of the fury with which the Lebanese greeted Hariri’s assassination. A million Lebanese—almost a third of the country’s population—stood around Martyr’s Square to demand their withdrawal and the truth about Hariri’s murder. This would be another Hariri legacy. An initial UN investigation team, led by a senior Irish police officer, would discover that pro-Syrian Lebanese security officers had not only removed evidence from the crime scene—including all those burned vehicles which had formed part of Hariri’s convoy, which were taken away during the hours of darkness—but had also planted evidence in the crater.
In the days that followed, I could only feel depressed. Death seemed to possess the Middle East and haunt my own life. Page after page of my contacts book would have little notes beside names. “Died, 2004,” I had written next to Margaret Hassan’s Baghdad telephone number. “Murdered 14/2/05” I now wrote beside Hariri’s name. Edward Said, that majestic Palestinian scholar—he who had once sworn to me that he would stay alive “because so many people want me dead”—had died of leukaemia in 2004, depriving Palestinians of their most eloquent voice. In March 2003, Rachel Corrie, a young American woman who had travelled to Gaza to try to prevent the Israelis from destroying Palestinian homes, stood in front of an Israeli Caterpillar bulldozer to force the driver to stop. But he drove over her. And then he drove over her again. When her friends ran to her help, she said: “My back is broken.” And she died.
Did we react to these constant tragedies of life and death? No, I would say, journalism should be a vocation. One could be angry at death, but we were not here to weep. Doctors—and I’m not comparing journalism to the medical profession—don’t cry while they’re operating on the desperately sick. Our job is to record, to point the finger when we can, to challenge those “centres of power” about which Amira Hass had so courageously spoken. But I felt exhausted. There were times when I wondered how long I would continue flying across the Atlantic, escaping the kidnappers of Baghdad, increasingly stunned by the growing tragedy of the Middle East.
In Baghdad in 2005, I walked to the voting booths with whole Iraqi families, men with babies in their arms, children with their mothers, as the air pulsated to the sound of the day’s first suicide bombers. It was a moving experience. Rarely do you see collective courage on this scale. And an Iraqi government was formed, of sorts, dominated for the first time by the country’s Shia Muslims but broken by the one phenomenon that undermined their legitimacy: the continued American occupation. In the polling stations, many of the families told us they were voting for power but also for an end to the occupation. And the occupation was not going to end. The Americans must leave, I used to say to myself. And they will leave. But they can’t leave. This was the terrible equation that now turned sand into blood. The Americans insisted that they wanted democracy across the Middle East. Iraq would be the start. But what Arab nation wanted to join the hell-disaster that Iraq had now become?
Yes, Arabs and other Muslims wanted some of that bright, shiny democracy which we liked to brandish in front of them. But they wanted something else. They wanted justice, a setting-to-rights, a peaceful but an honourable, fair end to the decades of occupation and deceit and corruption and dictator-creation. The Iraqis wanted an end to our presence as well as to Saddam’s regime. They wanted to control their own land and own their own oil. The Syrians wanted Golan back. The Palestinians wanted a state, even if it was built on less than 22 per cent of mandate Palestine, not a 20-foot wall and occupation. The Iranians had freed themselves from the Shah, America’s brutal policeman in the Gulf, only to find themselves living in a graveyard of theocracy, their democratic elections betrayed by men who feed off the hatred for America that now lies like a blanket over the Middle East. The Afghans resisted the Soviet Union and wanted help to restore their country. They were betrayed—and finished in the hands of the Taliban. And then another great army came into their land.213 However much the newly installed rulers and the old, surviving dictators whom we had helped to power over past decades might praise the West or thank us for our financial loans or for our political support or for invading their countries, there were millions of Muslims who wanted something more: they wanted freedom from us.
Israelis have a country—built on someone else’s land, which is their tragedy as well as that of the Arabs—but its right-wing governments, happily encouraged by that most right-wing of American governments, are destroying all hope of the peace Israel’s people deserve. When President Bush tells Israel that it can keep its major colonies on Palestinian land, he is helping to kill Israelis as well as Palestinians, because that colonial war will continue. And the Armenians. When will they receive their acknowledgement of loss and the admission of responsibility by the descendants of those who committed this holocaust?
By the summer of 2006, the colossal tragedy of the Middle East had been made manifest across the region and, indeed, the world. In the darkness of Iraq, where few journalists now dared penetrate, a whole Arab society was uprooted, torn apart in an epic of ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were now dying in suicide bombings, street-side executions and gangland terror. While Bush and Blair continued to boast that the country’s prospects were improving, it was plunging into a state of near civil war that the Americans were powerless to control. Indeed, the Syrians—blamed by the United States for encouraging the insurgency—were now suggesting openly that the mass murders and car bombings might be the work of the new Iraqi government, or mercenaries working for the Western occupiers—anything to turn Iraqis against each other rather than increase American casualties. In reality, the Iraqi authorities controlled only the few acres of Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad, a fortress within a city that was now the scene of daily gun battles.
The bombing of the Shiite mosque at Samara created an open war between Sunni and Shiite militias. America’s killing of al-Qaeda’s local leadership in Iraq— represented by a Jordanian mafioso called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—only deepened a Western collapse that now embraced not only Iraq but whole provinces of Afghanistan that were reverting into the hands of the Taliban. America’s shame at Abu Ghraib was now compounded by their massacre of Sunni families in the Iraqi town of Haditha and by an atrocity south of Baghdad in which U.S. troops apparently raped an Iraqi girl, and murdered her and her family. Could Haditha, we asked ourselves, be only the surface of the mass grave? Could the corpses there be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America’s army of the slums reach further?
The shadows of Iraq now spread wider. Sunni and Shia communities in Syria, Saudi Arabia—even in Lebanon—began to fear an inter-Arab civil war embracing the Arab lands from the Tigris to the Mediterranean. The corruption and cowardice of the old Middle Eastern regimes—Mubarak’s sclerotic government in Egypt, the PLO’s apparatchik gangs in Gaza and the West Bank—brought elections in which Islamic candidates scored astonishing successes, not least in “Palestine,” where Mahmoud Abbas’s powerless Palestinian Authority was replaced by a Hamas government democratically elected. Now Israel’s Islamic enemies were in power, but the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on them for refusing either to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist or abide by the PLO’s previous agreements with Israel—not that Israel itself had abided by many of these.
Sharon unilaterally withdrew Jewish settlements from Gaza and was praised as a peacemaker. The ironies were obvious even if few perceived them. When Arafat, who was loved by Palestinians despite his nepotism, died, the West claimed there was now a chance for peace. When Sharon later relapsed into a terminal coma, the loss of this unindicted war criminal was hailed as a blow to peace. Urged by none other than George W. Bush to hold democratic elections, the Palestinians did so. But they chose the wrong party—Hamas—and when the military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacked Israeli troops inside Israel, capturing an Israeli soldier and killing three others, the Israeli army moved back into Gaza and destroyed Palestinian Authority buildings and ministries. All this despite the fact that on 22 June 2006 Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, admitted that fourteen Palestinian civilians had been killed by Israeli forces in just nine days—most of them slaughtered as bystanders when Israel was murdering Islamic Jihad members. “There is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel and Israeli army operations,” Olmert was reported to have told Abbas, “because the army does not intend to hurt innocents.”
It was the same argument used by the Americans in Iraq. We are the power, so this morality ran. Those who do not behave as peaceful victims will be cut down. Those who resist us will be killed, no matter what the cost to innocent life. And all the while, Israel continued to enlarge its settlements on the West Bank, approving expansion of the “jurisdictional areas” of four Jewish colonies on Palestinian land on 21 May. Israel’s wall—dutifully referred to as a “security barrier” by the ever more craven BBC, apparently unaware that this was the former East German regime’s word for its own wall in Berlin—cut off tens of thousands of Palestinians from their land and homes. It was only a temporary “fence” to keep out suicide bombers, so the Israelis said—which meant, of course, that the wall could be moved farther forward into Palestinian territory as well as back to the 1967 borders that Olmert now said he would not return to. The purpose was obvious: there was to be no Palestinian state. Had not one of Sharon’s spokesmen remarked—in the months before the old man’s demise—that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza put any chance of a Palestinian West Bank state into “formaldehyde”? And when the Israelis arrested more than half the Hamas government in June 2006, even the quotation marks round the word “Palestine” seemed insufficient to indicate its collapse.
It was little wonder that as the West’s moral and physical power was smashed in the Middle East, a new wave of al-Qaeda–style bombings reached out across the world, even taking the lives of more than fifty Londoners on 7 July 2005 when the city’s tube and bus systems were attacked by suicide bombers. Prime Minister Blair still insisted that this had nothing to do with Britain’s role in Iraq—a claim that seemed all the more mendacious when it was revealed that the British security apparatus had already warned of just such attacks after Britain occupied southern Iraq.
America demanded an end to another crisis: Iran’s nuclear ambitions under its new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We were supposed to forget another Muslim state that has nuclear weapons as well as thousands of al-Qaeda and Taliban members within its frontiers. But Pakistan was a “friend of the West,” an ally in the “war on terror.” No one grasped that the leader of the Islamic side in this so-called war—bin Laden—was now irrelevant. The billions of dollars spent in trying to find him proved that we had still not understood the reality of the attacks of 11 September 2001: bin Laden had created al-Qaeda, but his role was now largely ceremonial, ideological rather than military. Seeking to discover his whereabouts was akin to arresting the world’s nuclear scientists after the invention of the atom bomb: al-Qaeda now existed in the minds of thousands of Muslims. The monster—as Western journalists like to refer to their enemies—had grown up and propagated.
Iran’s own role consisted of giving support not to Iraqi insurgents, as the Americans and British maintained, but to the Iraqi government that was now run largely by Shia Muslims whose own political parties were created inside Iran during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The Iraqi ex-potentate appeared from time to time at a farcical “trial” in Baghdad, the lawyers there regularly murdered—his own among them— and Saddam himself ever more scornful of the proceedings. Should he hang for his crimes? This was the question we were all supposed to ask, the issue we were expected to debate as Iraq—with the sole exception of the nascent Kurdish state in the north—fell into the darkness of mass murder and genocide. We wanted, we Westerners, to keep turning the pages of Middle East history, to unearth some happier fortune for ourselves out of the Arab wasteland, to discover some mirror in which we could smile and watch the sand cloak the injustices of the Middle East. By July 2006, Lebanon’s renaissance had, too, descended into massive tragedy.
We might be able to escape history. We can draw lines in our lives. The years of 1918 and 1945 created our new lives in the West. We could start again. We think we can recommend the same to the peoples of the Middle East. But we can’t. History—a history of injustice—cloaks them too deeply. Albert Camus, the pied noir who understood colonial oppression in Algeria all too vividly, wrote after the Second World War:
It is true that we cannot “escape History,” since we are in it up to our necks. But one may propose to fight within History to preserve from History that part of man which is not its proper province . . . Modern nations are driven by powerful forces along the roads of power and domination . . . They hardly need our help and, for the moment, they laugh at attempts to hinder them. They will, then, continue. But I will ask only this simple question: what if these forces wind up in a dead end, what if that logic of History on which so many now rely turns out to be a will o’ the wisp?
T. S. Eliot, writing in the same year, 1946, addressed history with equal cynicism:
Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion; and that meddling in other people’s affairs which was formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention. Nations which once shrank from condemning the most flagitious violation of human rights in Germany, are now exhorted to interfere in other countries’ government—and always in the name of peace and concord. Respect for the culture, the pattern of life, of other people . . . is respect for history; and by history we set no great store.
Have they all died for history, then, those thousands of dead—let me be frank with myself—whom I have seen with my own eyes across the Middle East? The dead soldier with the bright wedding ring on his finger, the slaughtered masses of Sabra and Chatila, the Iranians putrefying in the desert, the corpses of Palestinians and Israelis and Lebanese and Syrians and Afghans, the unspeakable suffering of the Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Afghan, Israeli—and, yes, American—torture chambers; was this for history? Or for justice? Or for us? We know that the Balfour Declaration was made eighty-eight years ago. But for Palestinian refugees, in the slums of their camps, Balfour spoke yesterday, last night, only an hour ago. In the Middle East, the people live their past history, again and again, every day.
And so, as I write these words, I prepare for my next fraught journey back to Baghdad, back to the suicide bombers and the throat-cutters and the fast-firing Americans. And through the veil of Iraqi tears, I will draw more portraits of suffering and pain and greed and occasional courage and I wonder if, when I eventually leave this vast chamber of horrors, I will try to emulate the advice of the only poem that always moves me to tears, Christina Rossetti’s “Remember”:
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
I think in the end we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors’ folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and arrogance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that’s the thing. Which is why, as I have written this book, I have heard repeatedly and painfully and in a dreamlike reality the footfall of 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk and his comrades of the 12th Battalion, the King’s Liverpool Regiment, marching on the evening of 11 November 1918 into the tiny French village of Louvencourt, on the Somme.
1 Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, rev. ed. (1990; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), U.S. new edition entitled Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (New York: Nation Books, 2002). Readers interested in the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982, the Qana massacre and other tragedies in Lebanon may turn to Pity the Nation. I have not attempted to rewrite the story of Lebanon here.
2 The more dangerous the destination, the more fictional the name of the airline that flies there. The only direct flight from Beirut to the cauldron of occupied Iraq was run by another company called—yes, you guessed it—“Flying Carpet Airlines.”
3 Alexander the Great smashed through the Afghan tribes on his way to India and the land was subsequently ruled by the Kushans, the Persian Sassanians, the Hephthalites and then the Islamic armies whose initial conquests and occupation were fiercely resisted by the Hindu tribes. Genghis Khan invaded in 1219 and was so infuriated by the death of his grandson outside the besieged city of Bamiyan—where two giant 600-year-old Buddhas could clearly be seen, cut into the cliffs above the valley—that he ordered his Mongol army to execute every man, woman and child. Other empires were to extend their territory into what is now called Afghanistan. At the end of the fourteenth century, Timur-i-leng—“Timur, the club-footed,” the Tamburlaine of Christopher Marlowe’s blood-boltered play—conquered much of the land. The Timurids were succeeded by the Moguls of India and the Safavids of Persia. There were periodic rebellions by Afghan tribes, but the outlines of a country that could be identified as Afghanistan only emerged in 1747 when the leader of a minor Pushtun tribe, Ahmad Shah Durrani, formed a confederacy that subsequently invaded the north of India. Only under Dost Mohamed in the 1830s did Afghanistan take on the appearance of a single political nation.
4 Influenced by the secular revolutions of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Shah Reza in Persia, Amanullah instituted a series of worthy reforms—an elected assembly, a constitutional monarchy, secular education—which delighted the modern “West” but appalled the Islamic authorities who naturally saw in them the end of their feudal, indeed medieval, power. There was insurrection and Amanullah went into Italian exile. His kinsman Mohamed Nadir Khan did not make the same mistakes. He identified himself with the Muslim conservatives and created— a dangerous precedent, this, in a country of such disunity—a new and powerful army. He was assassinated in 1933, to be succeeded by his son Zahir. There followed a brief period of “democracy”—of free elections and a moderately free press—but in 1973 a coup brought Mohamed Daoud to power. Daoud turned to the Soviet Union for economic assistance, promulgated several liberal laws which found favour in the “West”—one encouraged the voluntary removal of the veil from women—but his virtual renunciation of the Durand Line led Pakistan, which had inherited the old frontier of the Raj, to close its border. Afghanistan was now ever more dependent on the Soviet Union.
5 Literally, “God is Greatest” or “God is the Greatest.” Because in English the expression “is greatest” tends to be used about football teams rather than a divinity, I have used the less accurate but more traditional “God is Great” which more powerfully reflects the faith to Western ears.
6 True to the maxim that no prison ever loses its original purpose, Po-le-Charkhi was the scene of post-Taliban Afghanistan’s first judicial execution in April 2004. The death sentence of the “bandit” was signed by the country’s pro-American Pushtun president, Hamid Karzai.
7 Lewis later went on to anchor ITN’s evening news in London but also indulged himself by writing books about dogs and cats, a pastime that was probably more rewarding than reporting Karmal’s press conferences.
8 Karmal was flown back to Moscow by the Russians in 1986 to be replaced by Mohamed Najibullah, the head of the Khad secret police. He was subsequently deposed by mujahedin factions and took shelter in the UN’s Kabul offices in 1992, three years after the Soviet withdrawal. In 1996, the Taliban took Najibullah from his dubious protectors—“some men have come for you,” one of the UN officials bleakly announced to Moscow’s former servant—and, after emasculating the former secret serviceman, hanged him from a tree along with his brother, Afghan currency bills stuffed into his mouth and pockets. This was, no doubt, the fate that the “night letter”s’ authors had hoped for Karmal—who was to die of cancer in 1996 in Moscow.
9 From his executive office in London’s Fleet Street—approximately 5,700 kilometres from Kabul—the managing director of Reuters, Gerald Long, dutifully fired off a letter to The Times, condemning me for holding the Kalashnikov. “Much though everyone will understand the natural instinct for self-preservation,” he wrote, “he [Fisk] should have refused to carry the gun. If we are to claim protection for journalists reporting conflict, journalists must refuse to carry arms in any circumstances. Those who are responsible for the safety of journalists will instruct them to avoid avoidable risks. The risk to all journalists of any journalist carrying a gun is in my view greater than the doubtful protection a gun can give him.” Despite the letter’s odd syntax, I could not have agreed more. But how were we journalists supposed to “avoid avoidable risks” in Afghanistan? I had been trying to travel to Mazar on a bus, not to Kabul on a Soviet convoy.
10 All my dispatch lacked was a photograph for The Times. Major Yuri had taken pictures of me for his personal scrapbook—or for the KGB—but I had none of him. So when I trudged out through the packed snow to the gate of the Soviet army base back in Kabul and caught sight of a Russian hat, complete with red hammer and sickle badge and strap-up fur ear muffs, on a lorry driver’s empty seat, I snatched it from the truck and stuffed it under my brown Afghan shawl. For years, I would proudly produce this memento of Soviet military power at dinners and parties in Beirut. But within ten years the Soviet Union had collapsed and tourists, alas, could buy thousands of identical military hats—along with those of Soviet generals and admirals and batteries of medals won in Afghanistan—in Moscow’s Arbat Street for only a few rubles.
11 And printed all but one. Ivan Barnes had felt that a paragraph in a feature article in which I recorded how Gavin and I had come across a tribesman outside Jalalabad standing on a box and sodomising a camel was too much for Times readers.
12 As usual, Churchill saved his own thoughts for his last sentence: “One man was shot through the breast and pouring with blood; another lay on his back kicking and twisting. The British officer was spinning round just behind me, his face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out. Yes, it was certainly an adventure.”
13 Anxious to avoid incriminating Ali if he was forced to hand over my file on his journey to Peshawar, I sent a suitably oblique message about the policemen to The Times, telling them that I was having “Maigret problems”—a reference to Georges Simenon’s famous French police inspector. But in time of war, journalists should never be too clever. Sure enough, someone on the foreign desk passed my message to CBC’s London office who immediately sent back a telex sympathising over my “migraine” problems.
14 At this time, many Afghans also believed that Polish, East German, Czech and other soldiers from the Soviet satellite states were arriving in their country to support Russian troops. These false rumours probably began when Russians were heard speaking German in the Kabul bazaar. But these were Soviet troops from the German-speaking area of the Volga.
15 It was instructive to note that Soviet journalists had so much difficulty in conveying the reality of this early stage of the war that Moscow newspapers were reduced to printing extracts from Western dispatches, including my own.
16 But at least Hitchcock’s “Huntley Haverstock” would go on seeing the war with his own eyes. Charles Douglas-Home would later express to me every editor’s fear for a story uncovered. “Now that we have no regular coverage from Afghanistan,” he wrote, “I would be grateful if you could make certain that we do not miss any opportunity for reporting on reliable accounts of what is going on in that country . . . We must not let events in Afghanistan vanish from the paper simply because we have no correspondent there.”
17 During his time as UN secretary-general, Waldheim had successfully concealed his role in the Wehrmacht’s Army Group E in Yugoslavia, when German troops and their Croatian allies participated in the mass killing of Serbs and Muslims. Although there was no evidence that he took part in these massacres, Waldheim’s denial that he knew that war crimes were taking place in Bosnia at the height of the battles between the Nazis and Tito’s Partisans in 1943 was at odds with my own investigations in the region. When I visited the Bosnian town of Banja Luka in 1988, I discovered that one of Waldheim’s intelligence offices stood next to a wartime execution ground and only 35 kilometres from the extermination camp of Jasenovac—of which Waldheim said he knew nothing at the time. In the Middle East, the UN’s top man would later lecture political leaders on guerrilla warfare, without revealing that he was an expert in the subject. My abiding memory of leaving Bosnia that summer was a call to Ivan Barnes at The Times to tell him that I saw so many parallels in modern-day Yugoslavia with Lebanon on the eve of conflict in 1975 that I believed a civil war would break out in Bosnia in the near future. Barnes laughed at my naiveté. “We’ll report it if it happens,” he told me. In 1992, I was reporting the Bosnian war—for The Independent.
18 Students of Saddam Hussein’s later bestialisation should note that the U.S. ambassador’s successor, Loy Henderson, wrote to the State Department of Mossadeq that “we are confronted by a desperate, a dangerous situation and a madman who would ally himself with the Russians.” Replace the Russians with al-Qaeda and it could be President Bush or Prime Minister Blair in 2002.
19 Unsurprisingly, the CIA announced in 1997 that almost all its documents on the Mossadeq coup had been destroyed in the early 1960s—“a terrible breach of faith with the American people,” according to the former CIA director James Woolsey, who in 1993 had publicly promised that the Iran records would be made public. A CIA historian noted that there had been “a culture of destruction” at the agency in the early Sixties.
20 When he died in 2001, it was Woodhouse’s wartime career that was remembered. His obituary in The Independent (26 February 2001) made no mention of his Persian skulduggery.
21 Not that the future Ayatollah Khomeini at this stage was opposing the Shah. The American academic James A. Bill wrote of rumours that the future leader of Iran’s Islamic revolution was one of those who urged the preeminent Shia cleric of the day, Ayatollah Sayed Mohamed Hussein Burujirdi, to support the Shah’s political system. Iranian newspaper biographies of Khomeini in 1979 intriguingly left out any reference to his activities more than a quarter of a century earlier.
22 One of its victims was Massoud Ahmadzadeh, an engineer later executed by the regime. In 1972, Nuri Albala, a French lawyer, who attended his trial, described how Ahmadzadeh pulled up his pullover to show the marks of torture. “The whole of the middle of his chest and his stomach was a mass of twisted scars from very deep burns. They looked appalling . . . His back was even worse. There was a perfect oblong etched into it, formed by a continuous line of scar tissue. Inside the oblong, the skin was again covered in shiny scars from burning.” Ashraf Dehqani, who escaped from prison after torture—she was an opposition militant—wrote of how she was raped by her Savak torturers and had snakes placed on her body.
23 An almost identical law, passed by Paul Bremer, the U.S. proconsul in Baghdad after America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, brought widespread protests from Iraqis and helped mobilise popular opposition to the U.S. occupation.
24 There were other odd parallels with America’s later disaster in Iraq. The Shah, while still in power, always insisted that his enemies were “communists” and “fanatics.” President Bush was always claiming that America’s enemies were “Saddam remnants” and “foreign terrorists.” Neither the Shah nor Bush could admit that they faced a popular domestic insurgency.
25 There were now 3.5 million people out of work—about 25 per cent of the workforce—and 50 per cent of the population lived in grossly overcrowded cities. The food shortages were not just caused by Khomeini’s insistence that Muslims should in future refuse to eat frozen meat; they were brought about by Iran’s proud refusal to import more foreign goods. Yet until the previous winter, the country had been relying on $2 billion of imported foodstuffs.
26 These changes were nothing to the problems afflicting the editors of the Times Atlas in London. On 13 December, I received a message from Barry Winkleman of Times Books asking for the new names of Pahlavidezh in Kurdistan, Reza Shah Pahlavi reservoir north of Dezful and Shahreza south of Isfahan. In Tehran, he wanted to know, “what was the old name of Taleghani Avenue?” Answer: Takht-e-Jamshid Street.
27 Ireland in 1920 also comes to mind.
28 Lessons in journalism. When I filed my report from Tehran that evening, I made a point of telling The Times that they must give due credit to the two American networks and should under no circumstances change the order in which I had placed our names in the dispatch, my own at the end. The foreign desk promised to ensure that this was done. Then, late at night, a sub-editor thought that The Times should have its own reporter in front of the U.S. networks and altered the order of names, giving the impression that the Americans had been “piggybacking” my own interview. I cursed the paper. Jennings, who was to die of cancer in 2005, cursed me. It was days before he forgave me for The Times’s unprofessional behaviour.
29 It was typical of the bureaucracy of U.S. security that American journalists arriving back at JFK airport in New York from Tehran with the published volumes containing the embassy documents found the books seized by U.S. Customs on the grounds that they contained “restricted” government papers. What the people of Tehran could buy on the street for 15 rials a copy was forbidden to the people of America.
30 There seemed no end to these revelations. Among the last of the documents released by the government were secret papers inexplicably abandoned in the Iranian eastern desert on 24 April 1980, when the Americans aborted their attempt to rescue the embassy hostages after a C-130 and a U.S. helicopter crashed into each other, killing eight U.S. servicemen. The documents, produced in book form by the Iranians—complete with fearful pictures of the fire-scorched bodies of some of the dead Americans—included dozens of high-altitude and satellite photographs of Tehran, emergency Iranian landing fields, maps, coordinates and codewords which the rescuers were to use in their transmissions to the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz.
31 By the time he died of heart disease and cancer in 2003, Khalkhali was thought to have sent at least 8,000 men and women to the gallows and the firing squad.
32 This was believed to be the first time in living memory that Muslims had been stoned to death in the Middle East after a court hearing. Stoning was a common village punishment in Iran and other Islamic countries for hundreds of years, and in the nineteenth century, members of the minority Bahai sect were killed with stones in Shiraz and Tehran. But they died at the hands of mobs, not after a judicial trial. Prostitutes were stoned to death long before the time of the Prophet Mohamed and the Bible describes how Jesus Christ tried to stop the practice.
33 I was taping Khalkhali’s prison tour for CBC radio, and on the cassette in my archives it is still possible to hear the Hojatolislam’s lips smacking over his ice-cream as he discusses the finer points of stoning.
34 The full flavour of the somewhat portentous statement released in English by the Pars News Agency on 16 December is best conveyed in the following extract: “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful and the Islamic nation of Iran—the Great Satan, the United States, this origin of corruption of West [sic ], after being defeated by our great nation, is trying to give asylum to its corrupt servant, the runaway Shah, and to prevent justice being implemented . . . In order to free itself from its great political deadlock and befool its nation, the U.S. has embarked on a futile effort and has sent the criminal Mohamed Reza out of the U.S. and has delivered to its poppet [sic] Panama. We herebye [sic] announce that to reveal the treacherous plots by the criminal U.S. and to punish it, the spy hostages will be tried.”
35 Grandson of Genghis Khan who destroyed Baghdad in 1258 as part of the Mongol campaign to subdue the Islamic world.
36 For seventy years, Samuel Martin’s gravestone stood in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: “In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn., Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire.” In the gales of shellfire that swept over Basra during the 1980–88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many of the gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months that followed the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming the broken headstones and even the brass fittings of the central memorial stolen.
37 Lawrence made no mention of his confident assertion to a cabinet committee two years earlier that “in Irak the Arabs expect the British to keep control.”
38 The Germans had no more success in Iraq than any other Western powers over the past century. They flew 24 Heinkels and Messerschmitts into Mosul but lost their top Luftwaffe liaison officer in a dogfight over Baghdad. Only when Iraqi resistance to British forces was collapsing did Hitler issue his Military Directive No. 30 on the Middle East. “The Arab liberation movement in the Middle East is our natural ally against England,” it announced. “In this connection the rising in Iraq has special importance . . .”
39 Mesopotamia had been the seat of kindly rulers, but it is not difficult to find precedents for cruelty. During the African slave revolt in Iraq from 869 to 883, the Caliph Moutaded failed to persuade a slave leader called Mohamed “Chemilah” to denounce his comrades. “Even if you have my flesh roasted,” Chemilah is said to have replied, “I will never reveal the name of the person in favour of whom I administered the oath and whom I recognise as an imam.” The caliph said that he would administer the punishment Chemilah had just designated. The unfortunate man was said to have been “skewered on a long iron rod which penetrated him from his anus to his mouth; he was kept like this over a huge fire until he died, heaping invective and curses on the caliph, who attended his torture.” Another version of his demise says that he was tied between three spears, placed over a fire and turned like a chicken “until his skin began to crackle.” Then he was tied to a gallows in Baghdad.
40 In The Sphinx and the Commissar, Heikal told of Nikita Khrushchev’s reaction to his cigar-smoking. “Suddenly Khrushchev turned on me. ‘Are you a capitalist?’ he demanded. ‘Why are you smoking a cigar?’ ‘Because I like cigars,’ I said. But Khrushchev seized my cigar and crushed it out in the ashtray. I protested. ‘A cigar is a capitalist object,’ said Khrushchev . . . The next time I interviewed Khrushchev, in 1958, I left my cigar outside. Khrushchev asked me where it was. ‘I want to crush it again,’ he said.”
41 See pp. 162ff.
42 Simon Sebag Montefiore found other parallels. Gori, Stalin’s Georgian birthplace, was barely 800 kilometres north of Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit. Both men were raised by strong, ambitious mothers, abused by their fathers; both were promoted by revered potentates whom they ultimately betrayed.
43 Impossible though it was to assess Iraqi public opinion under Saddam, I could speak to old Iraqi friends in their homes. In a feature article filed to The Times on 30 July 1980, I noted that many Iraqis “admitted even in private that stability under President Hussain [sic] is preferable to the social chaos that might occur if the freedoms of liberal western thought were suddenly introduced.” Twenty-four years later, their fears of anarchy proved all too real.
44 Mohtashemi was also imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but told me years later that “none of this hindered or affected my beliefs or my determination and this made me even more resolute in my decision to fight and struggle against the United States of America, Israel and all the other proxy governments and states.”
45 Days before the siege, I had visited the embassy to request a visa to Iran and was asked to leave my second passport at the mission. After the fire, I had to send a message to Ivan Barnes from Beirut to say that I “think we have to assume my second passport now smouldering with the charred corpses in the embassy.” I decided I would use my first passport to acquire an Iranian visa from diplomats at Iran’s embassy in Beirut “in the hope that they don’t blow up too, making Fisky stateless” and—if no visa was forthcoming—that I would try to enter Iran without one.
46 My “utterly reprehensible” journalism at least had the merit of putting both sides’ noses out of joint. In the summer of 1980, Tony Alloway, the Times stringer in Tehran, told Ivan Barnes, the foreign news editor, that he could not obtain accreditation for me in Tehran because Iranian officials “were extremely upset both by the arrival of Robert Fisk in Tehran without proper visa . . . and by the copy he filed and vowed never to let him in again.” The visa problem had been caused by the burning of my second passport in Iran’s own embassy in London.
47 Many years later, Naccache would tell me that he and his gunmen—another Lebanese, two Iranians and a Palestinian—had “tried to attack Bakhtiar’s apartment but we failed because the door was armoured. We just had little pistols. If you check the place, you don’t know if it’s armoured or not. There was a shootout with the French gendarmes who were guarding him. Two people were killed; I was wounded in the arm and thigh. No one saw this woman. The bullet went through her door and unfortunately hit the woman in the head. The shootout was with the policemen. When I was in hospital, the judge said there was a woman killed. I asked: What woman? I didn’t understand. I said that’s very bad. I felt very badly. We hadn’t foreseen that at all. She was innocent but immediately I proposed, according to the principles of Islam, that funds should be paid to the victim’s family in recompense, also to the family of the dead policeman.” Naccache said that he led his men to kill Bakhtiar because “I felt there was a danger of a repeat of the coup against Mossadeq. That’s why we decided to attack Bakhtiar. He was the head of a plot to do a coup d’état against the revolution and come back to Iran . . . I had no personal feelings against Bakhtiar. It was purely political. It was not an attempted assassination. A sentence of death passed by the Iranian revolutionary tribunal is carried out as an execution.” According to Naccache, the proof of Bakhtiar’s coup plot was furnished by an Iranian military officer who handed to the authorities the names of other officers involved with Bakhtiar; they were arrested and more than a hundred were executed.
48 For years, the Iranian authorities openly accused Bakhtiar of planning a coup. A booklet published by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance in Tehran in 1981 stated that he had been “setting the scene for his 1953 style return to Iran. By this time the American administration probably was thinking of an American Iran without the Shah . . .”
49 See p. 814.
50 By 1987, the year before the Iran–Iraq War ended, the American government believed Iran had only five F-14s able to fly, along with just fifteen Phantoms.
51 We had to be careful with the freedom of reporting we were sometimes able to enjoy. Hewitt and his crew at one point hired a river boat to film on the Shatt al-Arab. Stopped by the Iraqi authorities, the boat’s owner was taken away. “He will be punished,” a remorseful Hewitt was told. He was advised that any protest on the boatman’s behalf would only make this unknown “punishment” worse.
52 He claimed, accurately, that the Prince of Wales would pronounce “thousands and thousands of pounds” as “thicends and thicends of pines” and was able to perform variants of regal accents in situations of enormous peril.
53 At first, according to Al-Ahram’s military affairs correspondent, the Iraqis sent European arms agents to Cairo to purchase the munitions “because they did not want us to know we were dealing with them. But when they asked for Soviet heavy artillery ammunition . . . we knew it was the Iraqis. We told the Iraqis that we Egyptians are a proud people, a dignified people, we must have respect. The Iraqis had to come to us in person and they did. They got the shells and they received our combat experience.”
54 Far from gloating over the attack, the Iranian “war information headquarters” in Tehran called it a “serious and dangerous trap” laid by the Iraqis to draw Washington and Moscow into the war.
55 In an emotional interview in which he kept breaking into tears—to the consternation of his press secretary, Anne O’Leary—U.S. ambassador to Bahrain Sam Zakhem insisted to me that “we never before had reason to feel the Iraqis would attack an American ship . . . our people feel it was a mistake. We paid very dearly for that mistake because the nature of the American people is to give others the benefit of the doubt.” If the Soviet Union wished to prove its own good intentions in the Gulf, Zakhem said, it could “stop the flow of arms of the eastern bloc nations to Iran . . . It’s Iran which has refused to come to the negotiating table.” So Iraq was “friendly”— and Iran had to be deprived of weapons to defend itself.
56 Foreign correspondents on assignment add datelines to their names so that readers immediately know from where they are reporting. Sending dispatches from the oceans of the world is more problematical. I dutifully—and accurately—gave my dateline in the Gulf as “51 degrees 40 mins E, 26 degrees 40 mins N.” The sub-editors of The Times changed this, with my permission, to “At Sea”—which pretty much summed up how most of us felt about the story.
57 James Cameron, one of my great journalistic heroes, describes precisely the same phenomenon in his brilliant account of the Korean War landing at Inchon in 1950. In the middle of the military landing craft heading for shore, he wrote, was “a wandering boat marked in great letters: ‘PRESS,’ full of agitated and contending correspondents, all of us trying to give an impression of determination to land in Wave One, while seeking desperately to contrive some reputable method of being found in Wave Fifty.”
58 Anderson would be held in Lebanon for almost seven years. He has recounted his ordeal in Den of Lions (Hodder, 1994). The author’s account of Anderson’s captivity can be found in Pity the Nation, pp. 584–627, 654–62.
59 Chalabi would be convicted in Amman in 1992 for a $60 million banking fraud—which he denied after fleeing Jordan in the trunk of a friend’s car—and eleven years later, the same Chalabi, now leader of the CIA-funded Iraqi National Congress, was the Pentagon’s choice as the post-Saddam leader of Iraq. He was unceremoniously dropped after a public opinion poll suggested that only 2 per cent of Iraqis supported him. By 2005, however, he had become a deputy prime minister of “new” Iraq.
60 The most comprehensive account of North’s life and career, though it makes some naive errors about the Middle East and adopts a pro-Israeli view of the region, is Ben Bradlee Junior’s Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North (Grafton Books, London, 1988).
61 And not just because more Western nations were taking Iraq’s side in the war. At least 317 Iranians had been killed during the annual haj at Mecca on 31 July 1987, shot down—so Iran claimed—by Saudi police. Initial reports suggested that the pilgrims were battered and crushed in a stampede through the narrow, oppressive streets near the great mosque as an Iranian political demonstration became fused with religious emotion and anger at the presence of black-uniformed Saudi security police. In 1986, the Saudis said they had discovered explosives in the bags of 113 male and female Iranian pilgrims, but they had received a promise from President Ali Khamenei that this would not be repeated in 1987.
62 A measure of the Iranian victory may be gained from the number of senior officers captured in the attack. Among them were Col. Yassir al-Soufi, commander of the 94th Infantry Brigade, Lt. Col. Mohamed Reza Jaffar Abbas of the 7th Corps’ Rangers Special Forces, Staff Lt. Col. Walid Alwan Hamadi, second-in-command of the 95th Infantry Brigade, Lt. Col. Madjid al-Obeydi, second-in-command of the 20th Artillery regiment, Lt. Col. Selim Hammoud Arabi, commander of the 16th Artillery Regiment and Lt. Col. Jaber Hassan al-Amari, commander of the 3rd Infantry battalion, 19th Brigade. From their names, at least three of these officers were Shia Muslims.
63 A captured pilot from the Iraqi 49th Air Force squadron at Nasiriyah, Abdul Ali Mohamed Fahd, said that Iran’s air defences had improved significantly over the previous eleven months and forced Iraqi bombers to fly at much higher altitudes. His MiG-23 was apparently shot down by one of Oliver North’s Hawk missiles. The same pilot also claimed that Soviet, French and Indian technicians were advising the Iraqi squadrons at Nasiriyah and that the Iraqis often used a Kuwaiti airbase to refuel during their bombing missions against Iranian oil tankers.
64 The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, had initially guaranteed their authenticity. I was passing by the foreign desk in London en route back to Beirut when the Reuters “bulletin” bell began to ping in the wire room and Ivan Barnes seized the copy. “Ah-ha!” he bellowed. “The diaries are forgeries!” The West German government, as it then was, stated that a forensic analysis confirmed the documents were postwar.
“Why don’t you go and tell Charlie?” Ivan suggested. “I think Murdoch’s with him at the moment.” Barnes, who like me had always suspected the diaries were false, sat back with a wolfish smile on his face. “Let me know how they react,” he said. I padded round to the editor’s office and there was Charles Douglas-Home behind his desk and, on a sofa to his right, Rupert Murdoch. “Well?” Charlie asked. We had all been expecting a statement from the German government that morning. “They say they’re forgeries, Charlie,” I said, looking at the editor and pretending to ignore the owner of the newspaper. Charlie looked at his boss and so did I. “Well, there you go,” Murdoch giggled after scarcely a moment of reflection. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” That, I tell Grigg, also pretty much sums up American policy in the Middle East.
65 Storm Center: The USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655, co-authored by Rogers and his wife, Sharon, and published by the Naval Institute Press at Annapolis, was later the subject of fierce debate among other U.S. naval officers, including the commander of the USS Sides.
66 The Vincennes was named after the south-western Indiana city whose French-built fort was captured by American forces under George Rogers Clark in 1779. The ill-fated Stark bore the name of General John Stark, who fought at Bunker Hill in 1775.
67 “Monsieur Gayant, seigneur de Cantin, nommé Jehan Gelon, délivra au IXe siècle la Ville de Douai assiégée par les Northmans” (Gayant, Lord of Cantin, who was called Jehan Gelon, freed the City of Douai which was under siege by the Norsemen in the ninth century). Bill, who always carried a small French dictionary with him as a soldier, wrote sadly on the back of the card: “Don’t know what this means.”
68 The politics of partition necessitate some statistics here. The 36th (Ulster) Division were almost all Protestants from the nine northernmost counties of Ireland—six of them now constituting Northern Ireland—who would have had no sympathy with the 1916 Dublin Rising. Their appalling casualties of 32,186 killed, wounded and missing were inflicted on the Somme and at Ypres. The 10th and 16th Irish Divisions, most of whom were Irish Catholics—many born in Britain—fought in Gaza and Palestine as well as the Somme and Flanders. Together, they lost 37,761 killed, wounded and missing. In all, 35,000 Irishmen are estimated to have been killed in the 1914–18 war.
69 After I first wrote about my father’s billets in Louvencourt in The Independent, I received a letter from a reader who said she now owned the château. She was British and told me that many of the officers had carved their names on the table and walls in the basement. Bill’s name, of course, was not among them.
70 The Armenians, descended from ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD 301, and had to defend their faith against the Persians, who were Zoroastrian before becoming Muslim, and then the Arabs. The Turks arrived from central Asia in the eleventh century. Armenia and Greece were both Christian nations within the Ottoman empire.
71 When Enver held the city of Edirne during the calamitous Balkan wars, thousands of babies were named after the future mass murderer; Enver Hoxha, the mad dictator of Albania, was one, Anwar Sadat, the sane dictator of Egypt, another.
72 The powerful Anglo-Armenian Association lobby group had been founded by Lord Bryce in 1890 and maintained constant pressure on the British government to ensure equal rights for Armenians within the Ottoman empire. A special supplement to the Anglo-Armenian Gazette of April 1895, in the possession of the author, contains a harrowing account of the massacre of Armenians at Sasun, a tub-thumping message of support from Lord Gladstone—“mere words, coming from the Turk, are not worth the breath spent in uttering them”—and a demand for a European-officered gendarmerie to protect “Armenian Christians.” Their religion, rather than their minority status in the empire, was clearly the spur to British sentiment.
73 At a conference in Beirut in 2001, Professor Wolfgang Wippermann of the Free University of Berlin introduced evidence that many German officers witnessed the Armenian massacres without intervening or helping the victims.
74 Strangely enough, the French national airline Air France had no qualms about discussing the Armenian bloodbath. In 1999, its own onboard airline magazine ran an article about a photographic exhibition of the mass killings, referring to “the genocide, still denied by the Turks today.” Yet Air France continued to be allowed to fly unhindered to Turkey.
75 Rivka Cohen, the Israeli ambassador in Yerevan, said on 5 March 2002 that while the Armenian genocide was “a tragedy,” the (Jewish) Holocaust “was a unique phenomenon, since it had always been planned and aimed to destroy the whole nation.” Understandably, the Armenian government in Yerevan issued a diplomatic note of protest.
76 There are no conspiracies on The Independent’s copydesk; just a tough, no-nonsense rule that our articles follow a grammatical “house” style and conform to what is called “normal usage.” And the Jewish Holocaust, through “normal usage,” takes a capital “H.” Other holocausts don’t. No one is quite sure why—the same practice is followed in newspapers and books all over the world, although it was the centre of a row in the United States, where Harvard turned down a professorial “Chair of Holocaust and Cognate Studies” because academics rightly objected to the genocide of other peoples—including the Armenians—being heaped in a bin called “cognate.” But none of this answered the questions of my Armenian friend. To have told him his people didn’t qualify for a capital “H” would have been as shameful as it would have been insulting.
“Common usage” is a bane to all of us journalists, but it is not sacred. It doesn’t have to stand still. My father, I told my editor, had fought in what he called the “Great War”—but common usage had to be amended after 1945, to the “First World War.” What’s in a name? I asked in my paper. What’s in a capital letter? How many other skulls lie in the sands of northern Syria? Did the Turks not kill enough Armenians? From that day, The Independent printed Holocaust with a capital “H” for both Jewish and Armenian genocides.
77 Elsewhere, it should be noted, Tahsin Bey does not appear in so favourable a light; but wasn’t Oskar Schindler a member of the Nazi party?
78 She later wrote to the Aghajanians. “I will do my best to continue working on the recognition of the genocide,” she said in her letter, “and make a difference, even a small one.”
79 See Chapter Five.
80 Shortly after it was refused passage through the Bosporus, the ship exploded and 767 of its passengers were drowned.
81 Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator, had engineered several truces. On 17 September 1948, he was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Stern Gang, who regarded the Swede as a British agent. One of the three men who sanctioned the murder was Yitzhak Shamir, another future Israeli prime minister.
82 Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford University Press, 2001)—in the United States, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (New York: Nation Books, 2002), especially pp. 12–47, 161–400.
83 Isaam Sartawi, a PLO official and heart surgeon who successfully urged Arafat to negotiate with moderate Israelis, had been murdered in Portugal in April of 1983—just under two months before my conversation with Arafat—by gunmen paid by Abu Nidal’s “Fatah Revolutionary Council.” The claim of responsibility was made in that “beating heart of Arabism” which was even now besieging Arafat: Syria.
84 UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, which emphasised “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” demanded “the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for the acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” The latter implied an Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist. Israel, with its continuing colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza, repeatedly pointed out that the UN’s demand for withdrawal employed the word “territories” without the definite article—and thus meant that Israel did not have to withdraw from all the territories it had occupied in 1967. It is inconceivable that the framers of 242 intended that Israel should pick and choose which bit of occupied land they would leave and which they would keep. Israel’s claim that it was permitted to keep Arab territory because the 1967 conflict had been an act of aggression by the Arabs and that the territories had been occupied during a defensive war was undermined by the UN resolution’s emphasis on “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Israelis and Arabs continue to nit-pick over the semantics of this short and perfectly succinct resolution.
85 It was typical of the mood of anger in Madrid that no one pointed out that UN Resolution 181 of 1947, while it called for the partition of Palestine—which the Arabs rejected—laid down borders that Israel ignored once it had expanded its territory after the 1948 war.
86 Resolution 338 of 1973 was essentially a reiteration of 242. Resolution 425 called for an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Israel retreated from its occupation zone in Lebanon in 2000, twenty-two years after 425 had been voted by the Security Council.
87 Arafat always carefully arranged his kuffiah in the shape of Mandate Palestine, the “Negev desert” of this cloth map always concealing his right ear.
88 When I questioned CNN’s Jerusalem bureau chief about this meretricious commentary, he replied that the film was “generic.” I grasped at once what this meant. The film was “generic” because the violence was “generic,” because Palestinians were a “generically” violent people. They protested, threw stones, objected to “peace” and were therefore, I suppose, anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-peace and, of course, “pro-terrorist.”
89 A Palestinian driver subsequently arrived back in our dust bowl with a handwritten note from Sarah, the kind of message one doesn’t want to receive from colleagues. It read: “It seems you cannot come further so I will stay here. Almost no journalists are here. Sorry guys. Have fun. Love S.”
90 The Oslo II (Taba) agreement, concluded by Rabin in September 1995—two months before he was assassinated—promised three Israeli withdrawals: from Zones A, B and C. These were to be completed by October 1997. Final status agreements covering Jerusalem, refugees, water and settlements were to have been completed by October 1999, by which time the occupation was supposed to have ended. In January 1997, however, a handful of Jewish settlers were granted 20 per cent of Hebron, despite Israel’s obligation under Oslo to leave all West Bank towns. By October 1998, a year late, Israel had not carried out the Taba accords. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu negotiated a new agreement at Wye River, dividing the second redeployment promised at Taba into two phases—but he only honoured the first of them. Netanyahu had promised to reduce the percentage of West Bank land under exclusively Israeli occupation from 72 per cent to 59 per cent, transferring 41 per cent of the West Bank to Zones A and B. But at Sharm el-Sheikh in 1999, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak reneged on the agreement Netanyahu had made at Wye River, fragmenting Netanyahu’s two phases into three, the first of which would transfer 7 per cent from Zone C to Zone B. All implementation of the agreements stopped there.
91 Readers who wanted to test this particular mandate were referred to Genesis 12:17, Leviticus 26:44–45, Deuteronomy 7:7–8, Samuel 7:12–16, I Kings 15:4, Psalms 89:34–37 and 105:8–11. “The battle for Jerusalem has begun,” the ad said, “and it is time for believers in Christ to support our Jewish brethren . . .”
92 Israeli leaders were not the only ones to try to avoid confronting this physically obvious blockade on the road to peace. In 2000, John Hume, Northern Ireland’s only statesman, advised Palestinians and Israelis that “your challenge is not one of geographical turf, but rather the construction of agreed institutions . . .” The Irish version of the “peace process,” however, does not travel well. A “turf” war—two groups of people arguing over the same piece of real estate—was precisely what this Middle East conflict wasabout. The nearest Irish approximation to the Israeli–Arab struggle would be an attempt to mediate an end to violence after the seventeenth-century dispossession of the Catholics. Urging the Protestant landlords and the mass of impoverished Irish Catholics to construct “agreed institutions” would not have commended itself to either side.
93 A Scottish pathologist confirmed in 1995 that a Palestinian who died in Israeli custody, Abed Samed Hreizat from Hebron, suffered fatal brain injuries when his head was forcefully jerked during “shaking” by Israeli Shin Bet agents on 22 April that year. In an Israeli special commission report on interrogation, retired justice Moshe Landau sanctioned the use of “moderate physical pressure” against Palestinians. In 1997, Palestinian military intelligence turned up at Nablus hospital with a detainee called Youssef Baba, who had been burned on the arm and thighs with the electric element used to boil water. His wounds had become gangrenous; he was later returned to prison, where he died on 31 January.
94 Not least when Netanyahu threw in the release from an American prison of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard—who had been sending Pentagon secrets to Israel—as part of his demands for success at Wye. Pollard, a Jewish American working as a U.S. intelligence analyst, had been sentenced to life in March 1987. In 1995, Ehud Barak even made him an Israeli citizen. Clinton, after cringingly saying that he would “seriously review” Pollard’s case, at least managed to refuse Netanyahu’s demand.
95 This “threat” was thrown into doubt when an Israeli reporter, Rami Tal, revealed to the newspaper Yediot Ahronoth in 1997 that Moshe Dayan, the defence minister who conquered Golan in 1967, had told him in a series of interviews before his death that many of the Israeli–Syrian firefights were deliberately provoked by Israel, and that the kibbutz residents who pressed the government to take Golan did so less for security than for the farmland.
96 The video and photographs of the twelve-year-old falling lifeless into his father’s arms became one of the iconic images of the second intifada, and the Israelis quickly erased all trace of the killing by demolishing the wall behind which they had taken cover. An Israeli military investigation then attempted to prove that Palestinians had been responsible for their deaths—and successfully persuaded America’s CBS channel to air their bogus “findings” on its 60 Minutes programme. “One gets the impression,” Israeli Knesset member Ophir Pines-Paz bravely pointed out, “that instead of genuinely confronting this incident, the IDF [Israel Defence Force] has chosen to stage a fictitious re-enactment and cover up the incident by means of an enquiry with foregone conclusions and the sole purpose of which is to clear the IDF of responsibility for al-Dura’s death.” Western reporters who investigated the killings concluded that Israelis had shot both the son and the father, who survived, although the Israeli soldiers responsible may not have been able to see them behind the wall.
97 Less than two weeks later, Ashrawi will write an open letter to President Bill Clinton. “It has been our experience, Mr. President, that most American public officials, once out of office, begin to suffer pangs of conscience and inexplicable urges to express contrition in the form of public confessions pertaining to the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people. With an honest desire to spare you the fate of other high officials who develop after-the-fact immaculate hindsight and a drive for justice, I would like to point out that there is still world enough and time to speak out—better yet, to act now.” Ashrawi knew Clinton would not do so. What she could not have known was that, when he did “speak out” once he was no longer president, he would blame the Palestinians.
98 He certainly took refuge at the London home of Syrian security men. Hindawi signed a statement for police, saying he had been given the bag containing the bomb by an officer working for General Mohamed el-Khouly, the head of Syrian air force intelligence. In court, Hindawi retracted this statement, claiming he had been forced to sign it unread and believed he was part of a conspiracy by Israeli agents to damage Syria. He was convicted and Britain broke off relations with Damascus. Israel condemned “Syria’s central role in terrorism,” though I do remember a strange incident a few days later when I met the outgoing British ambassador to Syria in the VIP lounge at Damascus airport. There was some evidence, he said, that the Israelis “knew the bomb was being brought to Heathrow.” He would say no more. Had the Israelis learned of the bomb by tapping Syrian embassy phones? Had they been tipped off by British security? Had they encouraged the Syrians to involve themselves in a bomb plot? No Israeli government would bomb its own aircraft. But if they knew about it in advance, the Israelis could, once the bomb arrived at Heathrow, arrest Anne-Marie Murphy and end up “proving” that Syria was a “centre of international terror.”
99 There is a rich seam of information on Israel’s policy of assassinating its opponents inside Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. As long ago as 1984, two of four Palestinian bus hijackers were bludgeoned to death by Shin Bet operatives after they had been interrogated, an admission made only when press photographers produced pictures of the two men being led, very much alive, from the bus. The then Israeli defence minister Yitzhak Shamir described the killings as “a mishap.” In 1991, Palestinian lawyers and human rights groups began the re-examination of dozens of cases of Palestinian men shot dead during the first intifada after Israeli television revealed the existence of Israeli army hit squads. In early 1992, Israeli witnesses testified that they had seen Israeli soldiers in civilian clothes opening fire on masked Palestinians who were spray-painting graffiti on a wall in Dura near Hebron. Amnesty International’s 21 February 2001 report on Israel and the Occupied Territories: State Assassinations and Other Unlawful Killings is a carefully researched account of Israel’s extrajudicial murders which includes the death of forty-nine-year-old Dr. Thabet Thabet, a former Fatah activist who was later named as a PLO representative to the 1991 Madrid peace talks and who developed many friendships with members of the Israeli peace movement. Thabet, a Tulkarem dentist, was shot dead in his car by Israeli troops on 31 December 2000. The Israelis later claimed he was a commander of a Tanzim cell who “instructed people where to carry out attacks,” a highly unconvincing explanation for the murder of a Palestinian who had attended the funeral of an Israeli soldier, the son of an Israeli peace campaigner he had befriended. The killing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders then became routine, helped by a ruling from one of Israel’s chief rabbis. “Jewish religious law,” Rabbi Israel Meir Lau claimed on 27 July 2001, “gives its . . . full support to the policy of active killings which the government and security forces maintains today in order to prevent terrorists from planning and carrying out attacks in Israel.” On the same day, the spiritual leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, announced in a sermon broadcast over Israeli army radio that Arabs were reproducing like insects and should go to hell. “In the old city of Jerusalem, they’re swarming like ants,” he said. “They should go to hell—and the Messiah will speed them on their way.” The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem condemned the “immoral and illegal practice” of killing wanted Palestinians in the occupied territories. In 1993, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch calculated that 120 Palestinians had been killed by covert Israeli units since December 1987. When a Mossad hit squad tried to murder Khaled Mashaal, a Hamas official, in Jordan in 1997—Israelis criticised the attack not because it was illegal but because it had failed—even President Mubarak of Egypt felt constrained to call the tactics “immoral.” Israel had already been shocked by earlier revelations that its security men had murdered dozens of Egyptian soldiers in the 1967 Middle East war. Their mass grave had been discovered in Sinai; Rabin called the war crime an “aberration.” Death always involved double standards. In 1998, for example, Israel’s social security system said it could not compensate the family of a Palestinian killed by a Jewish gunman because under Israeli law an Arab murdered by a Jewish “terrorist” is not considered a victim of terrorism while a Jew killed by an Arab is.
100 Preferring to avoid the deeply flawed trials which had condemned nine alleged collaborators to death, Arafat’s intelligence operatives were now murdering Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel, killing at least twenty men between December 2000 and August 2001. Palestinian police no longer investigated the killings of men believed to have worked for the Israeli intelligence services and who in some cases helped Israel to murder Palestinian militants. Bassam Abu Sharif, one of Arafat’s special advisers, admitted to me that “these people who were shot, they were killed by intelligence, under orders, because of very certain information and recorded confessions. All these people were shot by Palestinian intelligence in areas not under our security control. All were shot in Area B or Area C where they were protected by Israeli security.” Kassem Khleef, found dead at a checkpoint near al-Ram on 12 November 2000, had been accused of providing Shin Bet with the movements of Hussein Abayat, assassinated three days earlier. Adnan Fathi Sultan was shot in the neck and chest by armed men who dragged him from his Bethlehem home on 17 December 2000 because they believed he had colluded with the Israelis to murder Yousef Abu Sway five days earlier. On 30 July 2001, sixty-eight-year-old Jamal Eid Shahin—the oldest victim so far—received a call at his house in Beit Sahour from men wearing Palestinian police uniforms; they asked him to follow them into the street. There they shot him eleven times and reportedly assaulted his corpse with a hammer. By the summer of 2001, a total of eighteen Palestinians had died in Palestinian prisons since 1993, often under torture by interrogators trained by the CIA.
101 Amira Hass, the Ha’aretz correspondent, told me that although she had visited the houses of suicide bombers in Gaza, she did not, during the first year of the second intifada, choose to do so because “as an Israeli, I can’t be objective.” She only rarely went to the homes of “martyrs.” “I made one story about a child—I really wanted to show how he was killed, that he was not a danger to the soldier who killed him. The family was not happy with an Israeli journalist.”
102 The most shameful explanation of Palestinian suicide bombing was concocted by Tom Friedman, an old friend but an increasingly messianic columnist for The New York Times. Palestinians, he wrote, had not chosen suicide bombing out of “desperation” but because “all they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy.” They had lost sight of the sacredness of human life, he claimed, because they were blinded by “narcissistic rage.” He advised the Palestinians to adopt “nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi.” But peaceful protests by Palestinians have always been ignored or suppressed. When Palestinians and other Arab nations took their case against Ariel Sharon’s land-grabbing wall to the International Court at The Hague in 2004— surely a “Gandhi-an” technique of seeking justice—Israel simply refused to heed the court’s ruling. Friedman made no comment on this.
103 Recording these details, a Quaker magazine, reporting the work of an international Quaker working party on the Israeli–“Palestine” conflict, notes that “we have been disturbed to find that within Israel the option of ‘transfer’—that is, the ethnic cleansing of large numbers of Palestinians from the occupied territories, or even of Palestinian citizens from inside Israel itself—is now discussed openly by politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders and many other segments of society . . . we condemn this idea and any other proposal that fails to respect the equal worth of all of God’s children.”
104 If Hizballah helped to construct that gateway, then the Palestinians surely passed it on to the Iraqi insurgents of 2003 and 2004. Suicide bombers were to appear daily on the streets of the major cities of Iraq, a country which had hitherto had no record of self-annihilation in its various insurgencies against foreign rule. In Iraq, too, civilian lives lost their sanctity for both sides. If the bombers or their controllers felt any compassion for the hundreds of innocent men and women torn apart by their attacks on American and British convoys, police stations, barracks, hotels and occupation headquarters, they never expressed any sorrow. The Sunni resistance, in the words of one of its progenitors, was not “overly worried” about civilian casualties because the insurgents were prepared to “pay any price” to destroy the occupation. But revolutions in guerrilla warfare, however brutal, do not cross frontiers unless the people who wish to adopt them have a cause.
105 In Korea, a country with its own vault of sadness and betrayal, this feeling is translated as han. A writer on Korea has concluded that “it is likely the misfortune of all small countries to experience injustice at the hands of larger, more powerful neighbours. The Irish cultivate their version ofhan towards the English; Polish han is directed at the Russian and German neighbours that have long wrestled for control of the land that lay between them.”
106 Like the American and British armies, the Israelis often announce a “media” title for their operations which bears no relation to the actual military codename. Thus Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was officially called “Operation Peace for Galilee”—a propaganda legend that gullible journalists happily disseminated—while its real codename was “Operation Snowball.” Unlike “peace,” snowballs increase in size and power as they roll downhill.
107 Amnesty International’s statistics showed that between 27 February and June 2002, which included two major Israeli offensives and the reoccupation of the West Bank, nearly 500 Palestinians were killed, many during armed confrontations, although 16 per cent of the victims— more than 70—were children. From the first Israeli incursions in March until June 2002, more than 250 Israelis were killed, including 164 civilians of whom 32 were children. More than 8,000 Palestinians detained during this period, according to Amnesty, were “routinely subjected to ill-treatment” and 3,000 Palestinian homes were demolished.
108 Though not so formidable that the old Palestinian guerrilla hands who had endured the six weeks’ siege of Beirut in 1982 showed any admiration for them. “Why didn’t they fight?” one of them asked me in Lebanon a month later.
109 The Israelis said the Red Cross were allowed to enter but that they chose not to do so. The Red Cross said this was untrue. The Israelis then claimed they had a video of Red Cross officials declining the Israeli offer. But when we demanded to see this video, the Israeli authorities failed to produce it. Few journalists believed that it existed.
110 The Bethlehem siege provided another “first” when BBC Television World News, unable to cover the fighting round the church with its own cameras, repeatedly used Israeli army video footage—without announcing its provenance.
111 Again, to no avail. In January 2003, Yaron was in Washington, presenting Israel’s defence “needs” to justify a request for $4 billion in “special defence aid.”
112 And woe betide the diplomat or journalist who points this out. In 2001, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris accused the Swedish president of the European Union of “encouraging anti-Jewish violence.” For her to condemn Israel for “eliminating terrorists,” the centre wrote in a letter to the Swedish prime minister, “recalls the Allied argument during the Second World War, according to which bombing the railways leading to Auschwitz would encourage anti-Semitism among the Germans.” Sweden was making “a unilateral attack against the state of the survivors of the Holocaust.” And the Swedish EU president’s crime? She had dared to say that “the practice of eliminations constitutes an obstacle to peace and could provoke new violence.” She had not even called the Israeli murder units “death squads.” The Swedes did not apologise. But nor did they correct the misuse of historical facts. The principal Allied excuses for not bombing the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps included “technical difficulties,” the belief that the task should fall to the Soviet air force, and the contention that all means should be directed to the overthrow of Nazi Germany—which would be “the positive solution to this problem.” The latter reasons— inadequate and shameful in the light of history though they are—would not, of course, have made the Wiesenthal Centre’s note to Stockholm as unpleasant as it was clearly intended to be.
113 Variations on the Sharon theme were to emerge in the Israeli press. Although Israel furnished humanitarian aid to Kosovo Albanians—an act which Sharon said he supported—the fear that NATO’s campaign could be transposed to the Middle East persisted. “. . . there is something to the question raised by Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon about a future Israeli response to the possibility that Arabs in the Galilee will demand their own separatist framework,” Dan Margalit wrote. “ . . . One can assume that Israel would never behave like the Serbs and engage in massacres while forcibly evicting the population across the border. But what exactly is the level of evil that allows NATO to attack a sovereign state that is protecting its sovereignty?” As a journalist in Serbia at the time, I asked the same question about Serbia’s “sovereignty,” not least because NATO inserted a mischievous clause in its prewar peace proposals to Milošević that would force him to accept NATO troops across all of Serbia. But Margalit’s description of Serbia’s massacres “while forcibly evicting the population” was a word-perfect description of Israel’s own behaviour in 1948. There was also a Kinzer-like diminution of history in Margalit’s throwaway remark that “the massacres of Albanians undertaken by Slobodan Milosevic” were “somewhat reminiscent of the Turkish massacres of Armenians . . . terrible crimes but not a Holocaust.”
114 In a Palestinian document detailing the case of Mahmoud Freih, a seventeen-year-old who set a bomb for an Israeli tank in Gaza, the Israeli “translation” stated that he had been protected by the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the original Arabic document stated clearly that the Palestinian Authority had prevented the bombing of the tank by cutting the wire to the detonator before finally inducing Freih to join Arafat’s men.
115 Reality did not always win over propaganda. Amnesty’s 2002 report said that despite repeated claims to the contrary, “no judicial investigation is known to have been carried out into any of the killings of children by members of the Israeli Defence Force in the occupied territories, even in cases where Israeli government officials have stated publicly that investigations would be carried out.” Yet just over two years later, Michael Williams, an editor of The Independenton Sunday, felt able to “applaud the rigour with which it [Israel] applies the rule of law to the actions of its military . . .”
116 Theories abound on the origin of the term pied noir. In his history of the Algerian war of independence, Alistair Horne says the expression may have come from the black polished shoes worn by the French military, or from the metropolitan French idea that the African sun burned the feet of the colons black. More recently, an Algerian told me that the name was given to poor Spanish immigrants who lived in a quarter of the Moroccan capital of Rabat but who allegedly never washed their feet. When French citizens moved into the same area, they inherited the name and then brought it with them to Algeria.
117 The Harkis were the loyal Algerian auxiliaries of the French army who were to be betrayed by their masters in 1962—left behind to be butchered by their fellow countrymen or dumped in misery in the south of France.
118 No language protects politicians from flights of fancy about democracy and Islam. I leave it to readers to spot the non sequiturs in the following extracts from Boudiaf’s Algiers press conference on 16 February 1992—which he gave in Arabic and French—as well as his self-delusionary optimism and incomprehension of what drove so many Algerians to support the FIS. “The halting of the electoral process was made necessary in order to safeguard democracy,” he said. “The electoral process was stopped because it had come to represent a danger to Algeria. But the state of emergency had nothing to do with any restriction of fundamental freedoms . . . The situation is improving day by day. Algeria has become fed up with Fridays of terror and doubt . . . In Islam, tolerance, understanding and modesty can go together with democracy. A ‘closed’ Islam, which harks back to thirteen or fourteen centuries ago, cannot work with democracy. In Iran, is there or is there not democracy? I leave it to you to decide . . . people are not being hanged here. If we had followed the election principle, we would have had hanging in Algeria . . . Islam should not accept extremism. Mosques should be a place of preaching, of rest and moderation. Religion has its place, but democracy is a march towards a modern society which includes political pluralism.”
119 By 1995, the Algerian government would officially admit that 15,000 of its citizens had been murdered, that there had been 6,000 wounded and 2,143 acts of sabotage. In fact, the true figure of deaths was thought to be closer to 75,000.
120 Massu was only giving advice—the French government was supplying much more serious help to the Algerian military. Throughout much of 1994, France was sending helicopters, night-sight technology for aerial surveillance of mountain hide-outs, and other equipment, much of it aboard French military flights into Algiers airport. The son of a French government minister was said to run a private security company outside Paris which legally sold millions of francs’ worth of equipment to the Algerian security police. Just as the Americans sold helicopters to Saddam during the Iran–Iraq War on the grounds that they would be used for “civilian” purposes, so the French, ten years later, sold nine Ecureuil helicopters to Algeria for “civil” use—thus avoiding statutory investigation by the French inter-ministerial commission for the inspection of military exports (Cieemg); the machines, of course, had only to be fitted with rockets and night-sights to become front-line weapons. The French were also listening in to all Algerian military radio traffic from a former cargo vessel, sailing along the Algerian coastline and crewed by members of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE, the French secret service). Code-numbered A646 Berry, the white-painted vessel monitored Algerian forces in the Lakhdaria Mountains. Its work was augmented by radio intercepts from French air force planes, and intelligence officers inside the French embassy in Algiers. On Christmas Eve 1994, “Islamist” gunmen seized an Air France airliner at Algiers airport and, after executing three passengers, flew it to Marseille for refuelling, threatening to crash the aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. French troops stormed the plane at Marseille, killed the hijackers and rescued the passengers. The surprising thing about the hijack was not that it took place, but that the French national airline was still operating scheduled flights into a country where law and order had virtually disintegrated and where the very name of France had become a death sentence to those of its citizens who remained in Algeria. No one, of course, asked whether the gunmen seriously intended to fly into the Eiffel Tower—or whether their plan might in the future inspire other, more ambitious projects involving passenger airliners and tall buildings.
121 Ramadan in 1994 had been an especially doleful one for Algerian intellectuals. The dramatist Abdelkader Alloula, director of the Oran national theatre, was shot dead on his way to give a drama lecture. Four days later, Aziz Smati, a television producer, had been seriously wounded— he was now a paraplegic—and in September of the same year, gunmen shot dead Cheb Hasni, the best-known performer of rai music. Only a threat by the Kabyle people to “declare war on Islam” temporarily saved the life of their own kidnapped singer Lounes Matoub; he was released after fifteen days of captivity. Accusing intellectuals of “frivolity” and of insulting the Muslim religion, the armed goups had come to regard the artistic community—not without reason—as the forefront of the intellectual battle against an Islamic republic. One of Rachid Mimouni’s best-known books was Of Barbarity in General and Fundamentalism in Particular; the only surprising thing about his own death in February 1995 was that he died of natural causes. In Egypt, authors were also being targeted. The writer Farag Fhoda was murdered; the Gema’a Islamiya— the “Islamic Group”—knifed the Nobel prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo but failed to kill him. Karim Alrawi, the Egyptian writer who had done so much for the human rights movement in Cairo, explained that the “Islamic struggle” was specifically cultural in nature. “Because Islam is the religion of the Book, the Koran is the very word of God uttered in the Arabic language. Arabic is therefore both the language of everyday discourse and the Sacred Language . . . Yet to be a writer is to be a creator of texts and to claim for them a truth that does not necessarily partake of the sole truth of the one sacred text. For that reason, the target is writers, not merely their words.”
122 The British were not alone in sending Algerians back to their homeland for execution. The Belgian authorities deported a junior FIS leader, Ben Othman Bousria, to Algeria on 15 July 1996, on the fraudulent grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned. After again trying to flee Algeria, he was arrested while trying to cross the Libyan border and died in police custody at Mostaganem. A police report said he had “committed suicide” by throwing himself out of a security forces office while awaiting trial.
123 In its highly mendacious “evidence,” the U.S. government quoted an article from The Independent—filed by me from Algiers on 8 March 1995—in which I wrote that photographs of murdered Algerian intellectuals were “enough to make you hate them [Islamists], despise them, deprive them of any human attribute, let alone human rights—which was, of course, the intention, provided you could forget how many people voted for the FIS in the elections which the government annulled.” The U.S. Justice Department failed to see the irony in the last line—nor the clear implication that the pictures had been published as part of an Algerian government propaganda campaign. The American documentation was also very sloppy. The titles of at least two Algerian newspapers were misspelled—and no reference made to the Algerian pouvoir’s insistence that the Algerian press must print news of “terrorism” according to the regime’s instructions. Many of the articles reported massacres that the FIS had condemned. After I wrote about the American administration’s misuse of my articles in The Independent, all reference to them mysteriously disappeared from the U.S. Justice Department’s list of “exhibits” against Haddam.
124 On 16 December 2004, an investigator approved by the Algerian government admitted that Algerian security force members were believed to have killed 5,200 civilians. “. . . individually, agents of the state carried out these illegal acts,” Farouk Ksentini said. “The war was terrible and there were excesses. But the state itself has not committed any crime.” Two weeks later, Ksentini told Reuters that “agents of the state” had “disappeared” 6,146 civilians.
125 Under OPEC rules, Kuwait maintained a production quota of 1.5 million barrels a day but had recently been producing 1.9 million barrels. The favoured OPEC price of $18 a barrel had been falling to $14 and Saddam Hussein was claiming that a fall of $1 per barrel would cost Iraq $1 billion a year in lost revenue—and that the collapse in world prices had so far cost Iraq $14 billion. No one disputed the overproduction. But the Iraqis alleged that Kuwait had been taking oil from Iraq’s southern fields by boring northwards along their mutual frontier—in other words, Kuwait was thieving the resources of the nation whose war machine saved it from Iran’s revolution.
126 Mahmoud was a political dissident as well as an AP reporter in Nasser’s Egypt. He would always wear a broad smile when he recalled the experience of being questioned by police torturers while suspended by his feet above a vat of lukewarm human faeces in Cairo’s Citadel prison.
127 This was fully understood by Western oil analysts whose carefully argued if essentially dull studies made the same point. “Most Arabs are convinced that the U.S. intervention in the region is not motivated by a desire to uphold international law,” Robert Mabro wrote in October 1990. “They would have dearly liked the U.S.A to play this role in the region, to play it in Palestine and in Lebanon as it is now claiming to do in Kuwait. But the U.S.A’s consistent failure over decades to uphold international law when Israel’s policies and actions are involved leaves very deep doubt in the Arab mind about the true motivations on this occasion.”
128 As usual when we needed visas, they were not forthcoming. If the Saudis wanted to invite journalists to an Arab conference, however, their embassies were ready to issue us with entry permits within hours. When we wished to avoid these tiresome events, we merely declined to fill in the question in the visa application which asked for our religion. The Saudis would then assume that we were Jewish—and, abiding by their own outrageous and racist policy, decline to issue us with a visa.
129 Many were the brave expatriates—and Kuwaitis—who escaped their Iraqi captors. George Woodberry, the British temporary Securicor operations director in Kuwait, had approached the border in his four-by-four only to find 50 Iraqi tanks lined up in front of him. “We couldn’t see them until we were on top of the dune and by then it was too late to turn round,” he told us. “So we drove on between them with tanks 40 yards on each side of us. We didn’t wave or say anything, we just kept driving. The tank crews were just standing there, watching us . . . ” Woodberry described occupied Kuwait where “the place has stopped working. The Iraqi soldiers bang on people’s doors demanding money and food. Every shop has been looted. The Palestinians looted as well as the Iraqis—Palestinians who had lived there for years. There are safes and strongboxes lying in the streets where people dragged them out to break them open. There’s not a shop or an office in the centre of the city which hasn’t been cleaned out by the looters.”
130 Washing continuously in a shower was good advice for victims of a gas attack; the hat was an exotic addition unless it was an enclosed hood.
131 Simple. In June and August 1980, the UN Security Council declared Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem “null and void” under international law. In December 1981, the UN Security Council declared Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights “null and void” under international law. On 9 August 1990, the UN Security Council declared Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait “null and void” under international law. For the third declaration—but not for the first two—the West would insist on the strict application of “international law.” Arabs already knew, of course, that there was one rule of law for the Israelis, a quite different one for non-Israelis.
132 I visited the British unit on 26 October and every soldier I spoke to reminded me that as the Light Brigade, they charged into the valley of death at Balaclava exactly a hundred and thirty-six years and two days earlier. “It is one of the classics of British army tradition,” Lt. Col. Arthur Denaro admitted, “that we tend to celebrate defeats.” True to the statistics of imperial history, 35 per cent of the Hussars were from Ireland, which is why so many of the men preparing to fight Saddam had accents from Belfast, Derry, Dublin and Cork. Even their tanks bore the names of Irish towns.
133 This was the same Sheikh al-Owda whose release from custody bin Laden would demand when I met him in Afghanistan seven years later.
134 The question was also raised when Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir David Craig, the chief of the UK Defence Staff, visited the kingdom. Asked if any British officer would have a power of veto over an American decision, he replied, according to my notes at the time: “Well, I think that’s a difficult sort of way to put it because there is no question when you go to war, that you’re under command and you obey accordingly.” Stripped of its discretion, this meant that de la Billière would have to do as he was told once the shooting started.
135 The computer was returned by the patriotic thief, who left the following note with the machine: “Dear Sir, I am a common thief and I love my Queen and country. Whoever lost this should be bloody hung. Yours, Edwards.”
136 This was pushing the envelope of history a little far. Kuwait was part of the Ottoman governorate of Basra and the Turks regarded the Sabah family as Ottoman governors even after a new sheikh, Mubarak Sabah—who had killed his two half-brothers—agreed in 1899 to make Kuwait a protectorate of Britain for £15,000 a year. After the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, Iraq demanded a union with Kuwait and was only dissuaded from invading when British troops were rushed to the sheikhdom—much as U.S. forces flew to “save” Saudi Arabia in 1990.
137 The breakdown of this figure was as follows: non-repayable loans, $5,843,287,671.23; soft cash loans, $9,246,575,343.46; development loans, $95,890,410.95; military equipment and logistics, $3,739,184,077.85; petroleum, $6,751,159,583; industrial products for the reconstruction of Basra, $16,772,800; payments for industrial repairs, $20,266,667; trucks, tractors, caterpillars, asphalt rollers (270 vehicles), $21,333,333.50. The Saudi calculation was out by a $1.19.
138 It is instructive to compare this humane if cynical account of the BLU-82 with the gung-ho report by a Reuters correspondent on another American “super-weapon,” used in 1991 to destroy hardened underground bunkers. “The bomb, called a GBU-28, was five times more powerful than any non-nuclear weapon previously built. It was just hours old when dropped on Iraq’s strongest underground fortress and its designers had their fingers crossed that it would work. The new bomb, built at breakneck speed by Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. and Texas Instruments Inc. in an unprecedented team effort, was dropped from an F-111 onto a command complex at Al Taji airbase . . . the 4,700-pound superbomb—a howitzer barrel filled with explosives and guided by a laser—penetrated the massive concrete walls and blew up inside the bunker . . . ‘It’s a story of patriotism and unprecedented cooperation,’ said Merl Culp of Lockheed Corp . . . ”
139 The AWACS crewman noticed a profound difference between the Iraqi pilots’ behaviour during the 1991 war and “the smooth polished professionalism with which I heard these same pilots conducting strikes deep inside Iran scarcely three years previously. On one such mission the Iranians even managed to shoot one of them down, but they didn’t even discuss it other than to say that they didn’t have a ‘complete formation’ on the return trip.”
140 The Arabs spent $84 billion underwriting Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, the two melodramatically named phases of the 1990–91 Gulf crisis and war, according to an Arab economic report published in 1992. This was more than three times what the Saudis paid for Saddam’s eight-year war with Iran. Prince Khaled bin Sultan would calculate Saudi Arabia’s individual contribution to the 1991 conflict at more than $27.5 billion, slightly more than it gave Saddam. In all, the Arabs sustained a loss of $620 billion because of the Iraqi invasion and subsequent conflict. Kuwait had been the first to contribute to the war coffers when it agreed to pay part of the $6 billion for America’s initial military deployment in September 1991. Washington complained in August 1991 that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait still owed $7.5 billion to the United States for their share of Gulf War costs. By that stage, the two had respectively already contributed $1.7 billion and $12.5 billion. The Middle East may have proved a new economic reality in the world economy: that wars can be fought for profit as well as victory, a lesson that the invasion of Iraq might have reinforced until the occupation ended in disaster.
141 Israel was constantly boasting of its superior intelligence about the Iraqi regime—as it did in 2003 when it added to the fraudulent warnings about the weapons of mass destruction that no longer existed in Saddam’s arsenal. Although American officers told me in 1991 that Israel’s “intelligence” on the location of Scud batteries in the Iraqi desert invariably turned out to be wrong, it is interesting that de la Billière—believing that Israel would enter the war after Saddam’s provocative Scud attacks on Tel Aviv and other cities—“began to devise a plan whereby we would allocate their [Israeli] ground forces a sector of Iraq in which to operate exclusively.”
142 The most thorough investigation of this scandalous attack was conducted by the same man who revealed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in 2004: Seymour Hersh. As usual, the “pool” journalists failed to uncover the extent of the 24th Division’s killings and presented it as an Iraqi assault on the Americans.
143 Journalists would subject Iraqi armed forces to unprecedented metamorphoses in the quarter-century between 1980 and 2005. When they invaded Iran, many of the Iraqi army units were obsequiously referred to in the Western media as “crack troops”—they were, after all, attacking “expansionist” Iran. After the same army invaded “friendly” Kuwait ten years later, they became the “enemy,” often described—not without reason—as ruthless or cruel. Once Iraqis—including many of the same “enemy” troops defeated in the Kuwait liberation—turned on Saddam in 1991, they became “rebels.” But when the surviving ex-soldiers then rose up against the American occupation after 2003, they turned into “terrorists,” “die-hards” or— incredibly—“Saddam loyalists.” Later, perhaps because they attacked the world’s only superpower so ferociously, we gifted them with the title of “insurgents.”
144 Among the many thousands of Americans who were decorated for their role in the Kuwait liberation was a young gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle who received the Bronze Star and several other medals. Timothy McVeigh, a promising young soldier, then tried to join the U.S. Special Forces, but dropped out and left the army embittered on 31 December 1991. He was executed on 11 June 2001 for the 19 April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 167 Americans.
145 As so often, American “intelligence sources” had contributed to this mind-set. As early as 2 February, Douglas Jehl of the Los Angeles Times, a “pool” journalist with American forces in Saudi Arabia, was referring to “intelligence reports issued to commanders last week warning that more than a dozen Palestinian terrorists were known to be operating in the sector now occupied by [the] 1st Armored Division.” These non-existent “terrorists” were linked by “most officers” with the disappearance of fifty American military vehicles from a U.S. base. How twelve Palestinians—or anyone else—could have stolen so many vehicles went unexplained. Jehl did suggest one possibility, far down in his dispatch: that U.S. soldiers were themselves stealing the trucks and Humvees to cannibalise for spare parts for their own vehicles.
146 There was no difficulty in gathering evidence of this. In Hawali, Sara Moussa told me how she watched her two sons, Tahseen and Amin, taken from their home on 1 March 1991 by six Kuwaitis armed with G-3 rifles. “They searched the house, they tied their hands and blindfolded them,” she said. “When they told the Kuwaitis not to touch their sisters, the gunmen beat them with their rifles. Then they put them both in the trunk of a car and drove them away. I have not seen them since.” Tamam Salman’s twenty-three-year-old son Ibrahim was taken by gunmen the same day, thrown into the trunk of a car and driven off. She said that when she asked a Kuwaiti policeman for help, he spat at her “because I am a Palestinian.” Other testimony to Kuwaiti persecution appeared in numerous European newspapers.
147 Unlike their government, Kuwaitis could show moving sympathy towards those who had also suffered. At Safwan stood a young Kuwaiti woman, Siham el-Marzouk, searching in vain among the wretched masses fleeing Iraq for her brother Faisal, kidnapped in the last days of the war. It was raining when she found a bedraggled Egyptian who had lived more than thirty years in Kuwait, working as a school caretaker, until abducted by the Iraqis. Now the Kuwaiti authorities would not let him return home. From bits of a shattered motorway intersection barrier, he had fashioned a hut to shield himself from the rain and pleaded for someone to tell the Egyptian ambassador in Kuwait of his plight, writing out the story of his grief on a piece of paper he had found in the sand, crying all the while. The Kuwaiti woman tried to comfort him, gave him food and money. When she saw a destitute Filipina woman, she took off her black woollen cloak and gave it to the refugee. Two days later, her kidnapped brother Faisal arrived safely at Safwan.
148 Al-Assadi’s purgatory had only just begun. At first housed in unsanitary refugee camps in southern Iran, he later moved to Qom, where he was associated with the Iraqi opposition Al-Wahda party. But the Iranian authorities suspected the group was an American espionage network and al-Assadi was beaten into videotaping a false confession that he was trying to overthrow the Iranian government. In 1996—five years after his escape from Basra—he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment but briefly freed, he said, when he agreed to collaborate with the Iranians. Given fifteen days’ leave from jail, he bribed his way across the border to Kurdish-held northern Iraq, received residency papers from Massoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party, then set off across the Tigris River to Syria and on to Lebanon, where the author met him in 1998 as he desperately sought UN assistance to travel to Europe. He eventually left for Finland to live with his brother.
149 Among the most interesting developments at the Beirut conference—in light of America’s later invasion and occupation of Iraq—was the performance of the secret anti-Saddam Dawa party. Widely regarded as the most influential Shia opposition group in the country—Saddam certainly thought so—its principal delegate from Tehran, Abu Bital al-Adib, promised to abide by a parliamentary constitution under which the party would stand in a general election. Coming from a group which—despite its own denials—had tried to kill the emir of Kuwait and had bombed the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, this desire for democracy was little short of extraordinary. U.S. hostages in Beirut were being held captive in return for the freeing of the Dawa men imprisoned after the attack on the emir. Yet when the United States was desperate to hold elections in Iraq in 2005, few parties were more enthusiastic to take part in the poll than the same Dawa party.
150 There were other eerie voices within the administration at this time. A Washington Post report on 14 April 1991 quoted an anonymous (of course) official saying that “the thing that could make it like Vietnam was to go into Iraq and get bogged down, establishing a new government, protecting a new government against a hostile population. That would be a recipe for disaster.” Ouch.
151 They did. For some unaccountable reason, Hodgson—a first-rate journalist and a good friend—failed to tell them.
152 The existence of Iraqi “raping rooms” became the object of an unnecessary controversy when the exiled writer Kanan Makiya claimed in 1993 that he had in his possession an official document which proved that rape was used as a political weapon. The card index, issued by the Iraqi “General Security Organisation,” contained the name Aziz Salih Ahmad and apparently described his activity as “Violation of Women’s Honour.” Several of Makiya’s critics—themselves no supporters of Saddam—claimed that he had misinterpreted the card and that the activity indicated Ahmad’s crime rather than his job; in other words, that this was a surveillance note written by the police rather than an employment card. The evidence suggests that Makiya’s critics are right. But ex-prisoners have described how female relatives of Saddam’s opponents were raped in front of them—my own first report on this during the Iran–Iraq War was the reason for that excoriating letter to The Times from the Iraqi ambassador in London—and I found evidence of the Dahuk police dungeons two years before Makiya produced the card index paper. However, whenever I later referred to rape in Iraqi prisons, I was accused of using Makiya as my source. An academic feud now obscured the reality of “raping rooms”—which did really exist in Saddam’s regime, however casually chosen the victims may have been.
153 This indifference to the Geneva Convention did not apply, however, when Iraq paraded captured British pilots on television during the war, some of whom appeared to have been beaten. American and British officials then insisted on absolute observance by the Baghdad regime of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners-of-war. Some pilots bore the marks of their emergency ejection from their aircraft, although RAF crews later gave graphic accounts of their mistreatment at the hands of Iraq’s security goons.
154 The evidence of massive human suffering was now overwhelming. A UN humanitarian panel on sanctions reported in 1999 that “the gravity of the humanitarian situation of the Iraqi people is indisputable and cannot be overstated. Irrespective of alleged attempts by the Iraq authorities to exaggerate the significance of certain facts for political propaganda purposes, the data from different sources as well as qualitative assessments of bona fide observers and sheer common sense analysis of economic variables converge and corroborate this evaluation.” UNICEF reported in August 1999 that “if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998” (emphasis in original).
155 For example, the Iraqi National Spinal Cord Injuries Centre—set up with the help of a Danish team during the Iran–Iraq War to look after seriously wounded soldiers—lacked medicine and supplies throughout the period of sanctions. Staff were forced to re-sterilise gauze and catheters and were not permitted to receive new medical textbooks and journals.
156 There was to be a macabre return to this personal abuse against the Kuwaiti royal family at Saddam’s own macabre and American-arranged first trial hearing in Baghdad in 2004 when he accused the “animals” in the Kuwaiti government of trying to impoverish Iraqi women to become “whores.”
157 Even on The Independent on Sunday, where a nervous night sub-editor—seeing yet another “crisis” story on the agency wires on the night of 9 October—“pulled” my own sceptical report from the paper after the first edition for fear that war would have started by breakfast-time. It was the only occasion on which this happened to a report of mine in the paper, whose editors agreed next day that there wasn’t much point in asking a journalist to reflect his doubts about exaggerated reporting if those same exaggerations were to cause us to suppress the story.
158 The two best independent accounts of Ritter’s work and of the CIA’s infiltration of UNSCOM were published by The New Yorker: Peter J. Boyer’s “Scott Ritter’s Private War,” on 9 November 1998, from which the above quotation is taken, and Seymour M. Hersh’s “Saddam’s Best Friend: How the CIA made it a lot easier for the Iraqi leader to rearm,” on 5 April 1999.
159 Diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma three months earlier, he had received two cycles of cytotoxins. “But the third cycle is partial because he’s getting only cyclophosphamide adriamycin as a substitute for vincristine,” Dr. Ismael said. What Latif needed is produced by a company in Germany called Astra Medica. “We received twenty vials of this ten days ago. Before that, the patients’ families were buying it for 160,000 dinars—more than two years’ salary for many Iraqis. But still we can’t get enough. Latif needs the treatment as long as his malignancy continues.”
160 Readers wishing to learn more about DU munitions should refer to the voluminous reports of Swords into Ploughshares and—on the effect of pre-2003 sanctions as well as DU—to the regular bulletins of Voices in the Wilderness UK of 16b Cherwell Road, Oxford OX4 1BG.
161 This same scandalous indifference towards the effects of DU was to be repeated just over two years later when, in January 2001, reports began to emerge from Bosnia that hundreds of Serbs—living close to the site of U.S. Air Force depleted-uranium bombings in 1995—were suffering and dying from unexplained cancers. When I travelled to Bosnia to investigate these deaths, I found that up to 300 Serbian men, women and children living close to the site of a 1995 DU bombing of a military base in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici had died of cancers and leukaemias over the following five years—they lay next to each other in an extended graveyard at Bratunac in eastern Bosnia, the town to which they had travelled as refugees. One frozen winter’s morning in Bratunac, I interviewed twelve-year-old Sladjana Sarenac, who had picked up a bomb fragment outside her home in Hadjici. Her story was eerily and painfully familiar. “It glittered and I did what all children do,” she said. “I was six years old and I pretended to make cookies out of the bits of metal and soil in the garden. Within two months I got a kind of yellow sand under my fingernails and then the nails started to fall out.” Sladjana had been seriously ill ever since. Her nails had repeatedly fallen out of her fingers and toes, she had suffered internal bleeding, constant diarrhoea and vomiting, enduring a thirty-hour coma and a calvary of Yugoslav hospitals. It was the same old story. NATO said they had no evidence of the ill-effects of DU munitions in Bosnia but wanted to know if any existed; yet when offered the opportunity to investigate such reports, they showed no interest in doing so. On 17 January 2001, I appealed in The Independent for any NATO doctors in Bosnia to get in touch with me on my temporary Sarajevo telephone number, offering to take them to Bratunac and to introduce them to Sladjana. The phone never rang. The Iraqis were Muslims and the Serbs were Orthodox Christians—most of them hostile to Bosnia’s Muslim community—but they shared one characteristic: in 1991 and 1995, they were both, respectively, our “enemy” and thus could be ignored. Similarly, the UN was left to carry out an inconclusive survey of DU use during the 1999 Kosovo war after which the American military admitted that it had “lost count” of the number of DU rounds used during the NATO bombardment of Serbia. (See the author’s reports in The Independent, 4 October and 22 November 1999.)
162 Only six months before the attacks on the United States, it is fascinating to see that bin Laden was regarded as a secondary threat, lumped in with Russian criminals and nuclear expertise from the former Soviet Union. Saddam’s regime—which had no weapons of mass destruction at all—was still touted as the greatest danger. Once Afghanistan was bombarded and Osama had escaped, the same scenario was reintroduced by Messrs. Bush and Blair in 2002. But then again, Osama bin Laden’s existence was not likely to generate the obscene profits in weapons sales procured at Abu Dhabi and other arms fairs in the Middle East.
163 Palestinians were still trying to discover the nature of a gas canister now regularly used by Israelis, containing what they called “brown smoke.” Obviously feared by Palestinian protesters, it was described as having a far more potent effect even than the Federal Laboratories Pennsylvania-made gas. At least one “brown smoke” gas canister which I examined in Bethlehem was covered in Hebrew markings and carried the code 323 1-99. It did not appear to be of U.S. manufacture.
164 During my investigations, I was given a genuine end-user certificate from the state of Oman in the Gulf, already signed by the authorities. If I had wished to transport arms to the Middle East, I had only to write in the weapons of my choice for the shipment to be “legal.”
165 Michael Hitchcock, a press officer for the Department of Trade and Industry, told me in 1987 that “our policy is we don’t discuss whether a company has applied and been granted a licence because it was for civil use. We would consult the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office if we thought it necessary.”
166 The Israelis learned how to sell weapons by learning how to change their shape. Their first conflict—their war of independence, which drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel—was fought with the help of two Sherman tanks, two elderly Cromwells and ten French tanks made around 1935. The Israelis modified the gun barrels to lengthen their range and fitted pieces of new armour to the structure. By the 1950s, they were still buying up battlefield junk from the wreckage of the Second World War, including tanks from Italy and even the Far East. Many were simply cannibalised to re-create whole working tanks for the country’s new army. Some of the Shermans, painstakingly upgraded, later fought in the 1967 Middle East war and even the 1973 conflict. They were then discarded—as gifts to Israel’s brutal proxy “South Lebanon Army” militia, and to Uganda.
167 Israel, according to former army officers in Tel Aviv, shipped 2,000 Kalashnikov rifles and hundreds of RPG-7 anti-tank rockets to Nicaragua in 1983, all captured from PLO guerrillas during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the previous year.
168 In 1994, the Cameron Commission of Inquiry was appointed to look into alleged arms transactions between Armscor, the South African state weapons procurement body, and Christian militia groups between 1983 and 1993. After the Lebanese war ended in 1990, the Phalange were accused of sending surplus arms to Croatia and Slovenia at the height of the Balkans conflict, an accusation that became all too credible when the Yugoslav navy, which was in Serbian hands, seized a vessel carrying the weapons through the Adriatic, stored them in a warehouse in the port of Bar and then sent a bill to the Phalange for storage charges. According to the Lebanese government, the weapons included four French-made Gazelle helicopter gunships, several patrol boats, artillery shells and multi-barrelled rocket-launchers.
169 I have referred readers in the Preface to my own book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the Nation; those who want to understand the wider context to the Israeli killing of almost 200 Lebanese civilians in April 1996, including the massacre at Qana, can turn to the new British and American editions of the book, especially pp. 669–89.
170 Irish UN troops in Bradchit concluded that the booby-trap had been laid by the Israelis to kill Hizballah guerrillas attempting to infiltrate the Israeli-occupied zone. The Israelis denied planting the bomb and—given the impossibility of proving that it was Israel’s handiwork—the guerrillas committed an act of folly by retaliating when they must have known this would unleash an Israeli bombardment of civilians in southern Lebanon.
171 Even tragedy can contain its own dark humour. Some days after the destruction of the ambulance, Lindval called me in Beirut to say that the Fijians had unearthed the second, unexploded Hellfire. “What on earth did you ask the Fijians to do with it?” he asked me. I had asked them to send me the metal code sheet from the fuselage. Lindval was not amused. “Seems they didn’t understand you, Robert,” he said. “They thought you wanted the entire missile—I found them loading it onto a truck to bring to you in Beirut.” I had a brief image of my landlord’s horrified face as the entire projectile was delivered by UN soldiers to my apartment door. Hopefully defused.
172 Doubly so for Boeing. The executive’s question was used as one of the headlines on my report in The Independent on Sunday on 18 May 1997.
173 The Defense Department’s inspector general later found that 188 Stinger missiles had “gone missing” from U.S. armouries during the 1991 Gulf conflict. In the same year, the U.S. military’s General Accounting Office admitted that another 2,185 missiles—Stingers, Dragons and Redeyes—had disappeared from European U.S. weapons storage sites. Where did they go?
174 For the U.S. military, this was just a small provocation. It was the virtually unchallenged ability of Israel to rifle through U.S. military stocks that so upset serving and retired officers in the U.S. armed forces who, in the course of a two-week investigation by The Independent into arms transfers to Israel, spoke of their fury at watching thousands of tanks and armour taken from U.S. inventories over a period of twenty years, and transferred to Israel despite objections from the Department of Defense. In the late 1970s, according to one officer who was serving in northern Europe, senior U.S. military personnel objected to a vast quantity of armour being withdrawn from Germany for transfer to Israel. “I was in the headquarters in Germany with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and he went through the roof,” he told me. “We were ordered to hand over hundreds of tanks at very short notice—and this was at the height of the Cold War. We were opposite the Fulda Gap and the Warsaw Pact was on the other side and we were screaming that we were depleting our assets at a moment of high European tension. The general was saying ‘fuck them’—he used those words—but he was excluded from the decision. The Department of Defense was directed under orders to turn over the tanks. We didn’t do it voluntarily.” An air force officer recalled for me how, around the same period, he returned from leave to his naval air station in the United States to discover that half his squadron of aircraft were being repainted with Israeli markings. “We only had fifty per cent of our squadron left—I was flabbergasted,” he said. “I wasn’t consulted. I was told ‘They’ve got to go to Israel—we’re out of business for a while.’” Officially, arms transfers to Israel have to undergo a period of thirty days’ formal notice. Major U.S. defence equipment with a value of more than $14 million requires congressional notification—amounts of less than $14 million do not. “Anyone on the Hill knows that challenging any transfers to Israel is not going to help their political career,” a former American army officer commented to me. “The Israeli lobby is very, very powerful. It’s not going to be criticised.” In fact, after it used U.S. Navy anti-tank cluster bombs on civilian areas of west Beirut in 1982, Israel was taken to task in Washington. President Reagan briefly held up deliveries from Dover Air Force Base of U.S. F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers to Israel while congressional hearings investigated the use of the cluster bombs in Lebanon. But even after classified material was edited out of their final report, the State Department refused to publish the full findings on the grounds that the entire sessions were “classified.” “Classified” was a word that occurred fairly often in Washington when I asked about weapons transfers. The congressional branch of the National Archives contains numerous references to classified “legally approved transfers” to Israel. But they are not open to public inspection. No one in Washington was able to explain to me in June 1997, for example, why Israel needed—and had been given—98,000 new artillery shells from U.S. stocks. An American defence “analyst”—a breed that would normally court publicity but in this case did not— remarked to me that “an awful lot of shells are transferred to Israel and nobody knows a hell of a lot about it. The military here is downsizing and wants to get rid of some ordnance because it’s old. But an equal amount of good material just leaves our stocks for Israel without a by-your-leave. It goes through the legal channels but no one reports it, no one questions it, no one asks where it’s used or how it’s used. And if it kills innocent folk, do you think the Clinton administration is going to make a song and dance about it? They’ll say that criticising Israel may ‘damage the peace process.’ Every assurance has been given to Israel that it will not be touched.”
175 A British diplomat would remark in 1983 that to witness the king’s unhappy personal life was “a deeply saddening experience.” Even then, he regarded Hussein as a sick man, suffering a heart condition and exhausted after nine hours of negotiations with Yassir Arafat. The king’s fear at the time was that the Israelis would annex the West Bank and drive tens of thousands of Palestinians eastwards across the Jordan River. The same diplomat told me that “the Israelis would prefer a radical Palestinian state in Jordan to a friendly Western state under the Hashemites on the grounds that no one would expect them to make concessions to an extremist PLO nation on the east bank but that America would constantly be demanding negotiations with Hussein if Jordan survived in its present form.” He was constantly at a loss, he said, to know why the Americans failed to understand what was going on in the Middle East. “They have enormous resources for tapping information, but they never seem to interpret it correctly.” Not much was to change in the next twenty years.
176 There was nothing new in Hussein’s propensity to shock. In 1987, just after the revelation that Dr. Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary General and then president of Austria, had been an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht’s brutal Army Group “E” in Bosnia during the Second World War—a role he had hitherto carefully concealed—the king invited Waldheim on a state visit to Jordan. Hussein took his guest by helicopter to the heights of Um Quiess to overlook the Israeli-occupied West Bank, awarded him the Hussein bin Ali medal—named after his grandfather—and praised Waldheim for his patriotism, integrity, wisdom and “noble human values.” Watching him inspect a Jordanian guard of honour at Amman airport, I couldn’t help noticing Waldheim’s heels snapping smartly to attention, arms straight and head bowed, when saluted by the commander of the Royal Guard. German army discipline obviously ran deep.
177 In 2004, King Abdullah would in turn dismiss Hamzah as crown prince.
178 For an account of the killings and destruction of Hama, see the author’s Pity the Nation, pp. 181–87.
179 Tveit even found an ex-Phalangist militiaman who took him up a hillside east of Beirut and pointed to a former Christian Phalangist barracks, describing how 300 Palestinians whom the Israelis handed over to them after the camp massacre had been imprisoned in the barracks in a series of containers. The Phalangists had tried to use their Israeli-provided prisoners as hostages for Christians whom they believed to be in Muslim militia hands. But there had been no prisoner swap, so three weeks after the Sabra and Chatila mass murder, these 300 Palestinians were taken from the containers and machine-gunned to death in a mass grave. The grave, the Phalangist told Tveit, was beside a chapel in the barracks of what was now a Lebanese army base.
180 In the hours after the attacks, these were the first, highly exaggerated, casualty figures.
181 Arab elections are among the quaintest of the Middle East’s attempts to reproduce the Western-style “democracy” they claim they already possess. In 1993, for example, Mubarak “won” 96.3 per cent of the vote for his third six-year term in office (his fourth six-year victory in 1999 brought him a measly 93.79 per cent). His predecessor, Anwar Sadat, claimed a thumping 99.95 per cent victory for political reform in a 1974 referendum. Saddam Hussein supposedly gained 99.96 per cent for his presidency in 1993—the identity of the errant 0.04 per cent of disloyal voters was not disclosed, although they had obviously thought better by 2002 when Saddam’s minions announced a clear 100 per cent vote. In 1999, Hafez Assad of Syria scored what the official Syrian news agency called a “slashing victory” of 99.987 per cent for a new seven-year term in office—a mere 219 citizens voted against him—though he did not live to complete it. After this, Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s 73.8 per cent victory in Algeria in 1999 and Mahmoud Abbas’s 62.3 per cent as Palestinian president in 2005 were persuasive enough to believe. In 1992, a popular joke in Damascus had it that George Bush Senior, facing defeat at the polls in the United States, asked the Syrian security services to arrange an Assad-style victory for the Republicans; they did, and Americans duly voted 99 per cent—for Assad.
182 This may, however, be a poor translation from the Koran, in which we find in Sura 6, ayah 32: “And this world’s life is not but a play and an idle sport, and certainly the abode of the hereafter is better than those who guard [against evil].” Sura 6, ayah 70 advises: “And leave those who have taken their religion for a play and an idle sport and whom this world’s life has deceived . . .”
183 The plans for an assault on Afghanistan had bitter historical precedents. Tom Graham, V.C., the novel that so influenced Bill Fisk just before the First World War, was about the Great Game, which was supposed to be about frontiers—about keeping a British-controlled Afghanistan between the Indian empire and the Russian border—but it was a history of betrayals. Those we thought were on our side turned out to be against us. Until 1878, we had thought the Amir Sher Ali Khan of Kabul was our friend, ready to fight for the British empire—just as a man called Osama bin Laden would later fight the Russians on “our” behalf—but he forbade passage to British troops and encouraged the robbery of British merchants. He had “openly and assiduously endeavoured . . . to stir up religious hatred against the English,” our declaration of war had announced on 21 November 1878. The Amir’s aiding and abetting of the murder of the British Embassy staff was “a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people,” Sir Frederick Roberts announced in 1879 when the British occupied Kabul. The Amir’s followers “should not escape . . . penalty and . . . the punishment inflicted should be such as will be felt and remembered . . . All persons convicted of bearing a part [in the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts.” This truly Victorian warning was a preamble to the words we were now hearing from Bush.
184 The ritual of head-chopping was most graphically described by an expatriate Irishman who witnessed a triple execution in Jeddah in 1997. “Standing to the left of the first prisoner, and a little behind him, the executioner focused on his quarry . . . I watched as the sword was drawn back with the right hand. A one-handed back-swing of a golf club came to mind . . . The down-swing begins. How can he do it from that angle? . . . the blade met the neck and cut through it like . . . a heavy cleaver cutting through a melon . . . a crisp, moist smack. The head fell and rolled a little. The torso slumped neatly. I see now why they tied wrists to feet . . . the brain had no time to tell the heart to stop, and the final beat pumped a gush of blood out of the headless torso onto the plinth.”
185 I later reflected on the odd fact that while my passport and credit cards and money—of obvious use to refugees—had been left in my bag, my contacts book had been among the items taken. Two days later I returned to Kila Abdulla, met the sheikh of the village and offered $100— a very large amount for anyone in that region of Baluchistan—for the return of my all-valuable journalist’s book of names and numbers. It was never produced. Had it been thrown away? Or had someone else bought it?
186 Quite apart from the fact that most of the journalists who died in Afghanistan during the bombardment and immediately afterwards—three correspondents, one of them a woman, killed in the Kabul Gorge after the fall of the capital, for example—were killed by thieves who had taken advantage of the Taliban’s defeat, Steyn’s article was interesting for two reasons. It insinuated that I in some way approved of the crimes of 11 September 2001—or, at least, would “absolve” the mass murderers. More importantly, the article would not have been written had I ignored the context of the assault that was made on me. Had I merely reported an attack by a mob, the story would have fitted neatly into the general American media presentation of the Afghan war; no reference to civilian deaths from U.S. B-52 bombers and no suggestion that the widespread casualties caused in the American raids would turn Afghans to fury against the West. We were, after all, supposed to be “liberating” these people, not killing their relatives. Of course, yet again my crime—the Journal actually gave Steyn’s column the headline “Hate-Me Crimes”—was to report the “why” as well as the “what-and-where.”
187 After Pearl’s abduction, a Wall Street Journal correspondent called to ask if I would sign a petition pleading for his release—this from a paper whose headline said that I deserved to have faced death by beating in December 2001. I preferred to go one better and made a personal appeal to bin Laden—in an article in The Independent —for his intercession to save the life of Daniel Pearl, whom I referred to as “my friend.” I suspected—correctly as it turned out—that bin Laden, although on the run from the Americans, continued to read my reports. Tragically, Pearl had already been murdered.
188 See pp. 67–68.
189 This applied to both sides. Just before the fall of Kabul, an American cruise missile exploded inside the local office of Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel which had so infuriated the U.S. government with its bin Laden transmissions. No explanation was forthcoming, a particularly ominous precedent, since the station’s offices in Baghdad would be attacked by the U.S. Air Force only seventeen months later.
190 On 27 April 1994, for example, The New York Times carried a prominent review of our series which included some apparently wilful distortions. In his review, Walter Goodman claimed that “most of the three-hour report concentrates on Palestinians,” and that I had made only what he called “references” to the Jewish Holocaust. This was untrue. Less than a third of the series dealt with Palestinians, and we had fully covered the story of the Israeli family’s suffering in the Shoah, filming not only their original Polish home town but at the site of the Treblinka extermination camp. These sequences were not mere “references,” I wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, asking them to correct these errors of fact. “Mr. Goodman accuses our camera of ‘lingering’ . . . on [wounded] women and children. But why does he object to this?” I asked. “Because he feels these scenes are distasteful? Or because the wounded women and children were Arabs who had been bombed and shelled by Israel? Mr. Goodman may find the facts unpalatable, but that is no excuse for impugning the reputation of a working journalist in so unprofessional a manner.” I forwarded my letter through The New York Times’s London bureau to ensure it reached its head office in the United States. Of course, it was not published.
191 President Woodrow Wilson, who had demanded a new international order in the wake of the 1914–18 war, was one of the midwives of the League that gave birth to Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, a reshaped Europe and, of course, a new Middle East. The modern state of Iraq also owed its creation to the League. But Wilson fell ill, the U.S. Congress declined to join the world body and America turned to isolationism. The future superpower, whose influence for peace would have been so beneficial to the world—and whose growing economic and military power might have made Hitler revise his plans—turned its back on the League. George W. Bush was perhaps not the right man to be giving lectures on this subject.
192 A series of tables that Alford sent me showed that the “Iraq” story started growing—and the Osama saga, by extension, diminishing—just as the Enron scandal broke. Back in January 2002, Enron was receiving 1,137 “mentions” in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the LosAngeles Times, Iraq only 200. The Iraq stories grew by almost 100 per cent by early spring as Enron “mentions” declined by 50 per cent to 618. After a slight dip in early summer, Iraq soared up to 1,529 “mentions,” with Enron down to a mere 310.
193 A broad count of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, taken from journalists, aid workers and government authorities since October 2001, included the following details: four UN employees killed by a missile in Kabul on 9 October 2001; between 160 and 200 dead when U.S. bombs destroyed the village of Karam on 11 October; up to 190 dead when the Sultanpour mosque in Jalalabad was bombed twice on 17 October, between 40 and 47 dead in Kandahar bombings the same day; on 18 October, at least 10 killed when the bazaar near Kepten was bombed, 40 killed in Kabul on the same day, several dozen killed in Tarin Kot on 19 October; 60–70 killed in Herat and 50 in Kandahar on 20 October; on 21 October, bombs accidentally hit a 300-bed hospital in Herat, killing approximately 100 civilians, another 20 (including 9 children) killed the same day when their tractor-trailor was bombed at Tarin Kut. Within twenty-four hours, 61 more civilians were killed—including an eight-year-old girl—mostly in Kabul and Kandahar. On 21 October, during bombing of roads and fuel trucks by U.S. forces, another hundred civilians were reported killed; at least 28 dead in the bombing of the villages of Darunta, Torghar and Farmada on 23 October, and at least 52 more the same day at the village of Chowkar Kariz. On 29 October, 25 more civilians were killed in Kabul. On 5 November, 36 civilians were killed by stray U.S. bombs in Ogopruk village, near Mazar. On 10 November, 125 civilians were killed in three villages near Khakrez. On 17 November, 62 were killed when a religious school was bombed in Khost, 42 nomads lost their lives near Maiwand, 30 people were killed in Charikar, 28 in Zani Khel and 13 elsewhere. The following day, scores of gypsies were killed by U.S. bombs in Kundar, up to 150 people in villages near Khanabad, 35 in Shamshad and 24 in Garikee Kha. On 20 November, 40 civilians were killed when their mud huts were hit by stray bombs near Kunduz. On 25 November, 92 people, including 18 women and 7 children, were killed by bombing in Kandahar, another 70 by cluster bombs in Kunduz. On 1 December, about 100 were killed by 25 bombs in the village of Kama Ado. At least 30 died when bombs hit trucks and buses outside Kandahar the same day. Another 20 died in the Agam district, 15 in refugee vehicles in Arhisan, over 30 near Herat. On 2 December, 150 civilians died across Afghanistan and in the same week over 300 villagers were killed during the Tora Bora offensive. False intelligence about a Taliban base led the Americans to bomb Mashikhel in Paktia, killing 10 in the city’s mosque. On 20 December, U.S. AC-130 gunships attacked a convoy—thought to belong to the Taliban but in fact containing tribal elders en route to Hamid Karzai’s inauguration—killing up to 65 people. That same night, between 25 and 40 people were killed in Naka. On 31 December, a B-52 bomber and two helicopters killed over 100 civilians in a village near Gardez. One woman lost 24 members of her family. On 24 January 2002, U.S. commandos accidentally killed 16 government soldiers— the Pentagon’s own figure—in Uruzgan. On 30 June 2002, 48 civilians at a wedding party at Del Rawad in Uruzgan were killed and another 117 wounded when they were bombed by U.S. aircraft; celebratory gunfire was mistaken for hostile fire by the Americans. President Bush later expressed “deep condolences” for this loss of life. On 30 October 2003, 6 civilians, including 3 children and an old woman, died in the home of a provincial governor. On 6 December, U.S. Special Forces killed 6 children and 2 adults in Gardez. Seven boys, two girls and a twenty-five-year-old man were killed when A10 aircraft attacked them with other villagers sitting under a tree at Hutala. Many of the above attacks were carried out near front lines or on villages which were wrongly thought to contain wanted Taliban commanders, or because of sloppy intelligence. Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire was to calculate that between 3,000 and 3,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 7 October and 7 December 2001, more than were murdered on September 11th. The “mantra” of the “U.S. mainstream corporate media” over each bombing, he wrote, was: “The report cannot be independently verified.”
194 Ahmed Zeidan, a Syrian Al-Jazeera correspondent who met bin Laden several times and attended the wedding feast of bin Laden’s son Abdullah, gave a remarkable account of al-Qaeda’s order of battle in his Arabic-language book Al-Qaeda Unmasked. This 215-page treasure trove revealed that there were 2,742 Afghan “Arabs” from al-Qaeda—in other words, Muslims who fought for bin Laden—in Afghanistan during the Taliban era: they included 62 Britons, 30 Americans, 8 Frenchmen, 1,660 North Africans, 680 Saudis, 480 Yemenis, 430 Palestinians, 270 Egyptians, 520 Sudanese, 80 Iraqis, 33 Turks and 180 Filipinos. During the Taliban rule, Arab fighters were dispersed across Afghanistan as follows: 260 Arabs in four bases around Kandahar, 145 Arabs in Uruzgan in two bases, 1,870 fighters in Kabul in seven bases, 404 around Mazar-e-Sharif, 400 in three bases around Kunduz, 300 in Laghman province, 1,700 in 12 bases in Nangahar opposite Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, 160 in Kunar, 600 in Khost and 740 in Paktia.
195 For a long time, British tabloid newspapers had been setting up their readers for war. During the critical first anniversary of the New York and Washington attacks, Express newspapers slavishly followed the Blair–Bush line and their bogus “intelligence.” On 8 September 2002, the Sunday Express announced that a “senior Washington intelligence source” had revealed to it “the chilling extent of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” Under the headline “Saddam: We Have the Evidence,” the paper listed Saddam’s weapons as “Enough germ weapons to kill everyone in London and New York, 30,000 litres of deadly botulism and six tons of nerve gas, Six nuclear plants run by Russian and Korean scientists” and, incredibly, “Kidney machines adapted to trigger atom bombs.” On the following day, the Daily Express, under the headline “Nuclear Attack in Just Months,” claimed that Blair was warning that a “devastating assault by the Butcher of Baghdad against Britain could ‘explode’ in a matter of months.” All of this later proved to be fiction.
196 The Egyptian retreat may have been hastened by the Israeli execution of at least forty-nine Egyptian soldiers who had been taken prisoner in the Sinai Desert. According to Arye Biro, the Israeli officer who ordered the killings, he and his men had been stranded with the prisoners behind Egyptian lines. “I didn’t have the troops to guard them,” he said years later. “We had to move on to Ras Sudar. So I decided to liquidate them.” The murders only came to light in 1995 after the publication of an internal Israeli army research paper, Political and Military Aspects of the 1956 Sinai War. The soldiers responsible for the executions were members of Israeli Parachute Battalion 890, commanded by Rafael Eytan, who was later to become chief of staff of the Israeli army and a Knesset member for the right-wing Tsomet party. The Egyptians initially censored the revelations from Cairo newspapers but later demanded an explanation from the Israeli government.
197 British military papers of the time—many others, like Eden’s records of the secret Sèvres meeting, were deliberately destroyed in the months after Suez—make no reference to Othman’s allegation, although I spent three weeks at the Public Record Office in London trying to find some record of the interrogation of prisoners. One file showed that intelligence officers of the British 2nd Corps reported after the Port Said battle that “interrogation of Prisoners of War in Port Said has not produced the full result which was hoped for. No HQs have been located . . .” Oddly, the files from Port Said contain no entries for the dates 6 to 8 November 1956. PRO archives did show that the International Red Cross in Egypt asked if any prisoners had been transferred to Cyprus. The War Office was also questioned as to whether Egyptians had been asked to speak over a British propaganda radio station in Cyprus. “We have not extended our enquiries to the radio station which operated from Cyprus under the name of the Voice of Britain during the Suez landings,” a British official responded unhelpfully, “but although you may like to ask the Ministry of Defence to follow this line of enquiry I do not think it is likely to be fruitful.” Sefton Delmer, who was the Daily Express correspondent in prewar Berlin and the director of a wartime “black” German propaganda station during the Second World War, was flown to Cyprus to help operate this mysterious radio station.
198 By mid-January of 2003, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Rockwell Schnabel, was also comparing Saddam to Hitler. “You had Hitler in Europe and no one really did anything about him,” Schnabel lectured the Europeans in Brussels. “We knew he could be dangerous but nothing was done. The same type of person [is in Baghdad] and it’s there that our concern lies.” Mr. Schnabel ended this infantile speech by adding that “this has nothing to do with oil.” History, said Blair—who had never seen a war in his life—had important lessons for this crisis. Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler were the work of “a good man who made the wrong decision,” he told us. President Jacques Chirac, defending France from charges of political cowardice, recalled that when his country wanted to take action in the Balkans, it found itself alone, recalling “the West’s appeasement of Hitler.” Provoked by a promised French veto at the UN Security Council, the New York Post printed a photograph of American soldiers’ graves in Normandy. “They died for France but France has forgotten,” the paper announced—as if liberation from the Nazis in 1944 involved France’s surrender of free speech fifty-eight years later. “Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their soldiers on the line to fight today’s Hitler, Saddam Hussein?” the Post asked. Saddam himself joined in these contemptible parallels. In an interview with the British elder statesman Tony Benn, the “Hitler of Baghdad” advised his British visitor that “if the Iraqis are subjected to aggression or humiliation, they would fight bravely—just as the British in the Second World War had defended their country in their own way.” Saddam’s prime minister, Tariq Aziz, later told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that “the truth is that Bush is dismantling the United Nations, like the Third Reich in the 1930s nullified the League of Nations.” And so it went, on and on. Barbara Amiel, wife of the former Daily Telegraph owner Conrad Black, told readers of the Canadian Maclean’s magazine that “destroying Saddam’s regime will genuinely be a liberation for the people of Iraq, and when it happens the liberators will be greeted with the same extraordinary joy that met the Allies in France in 1945 . . .” The “liberators” of Iraq were not, of course, greeted with such joy—and France was liberated in 1944, not 1945. But no matter. We had to forget that one of those nations that wanted to use its veto in the UN Security Council—Russia—lost up to 30 million citizens in its battle against the Nazis. Yet even the BBC was by early 2003 talking about the “Allies” who would invade Iraq. When Bush, Blair and Spanish prime minister Aznar met in the Azores on 16 March, the Second World War symbolism reached its apogee. The Big Three—Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin—met in Yalta to decide the future of the post-Nazi world. Now the Little Three were meeting on an obscure Portuguese island to decide the future of the Middle East. Everyone, it seemed, suffered under Second World War delusions. In his second interview with me, in 1996, bin Laden himself drew a parallel between the French resistance to German occupation and Muslim resistance to U.S. “occupation” in the Gulf.
199 And all the while, the American media continued their servile support for the Bush administration. As I reported in my own paper on 26 January, we were now being deluged with yet more threats from Washington about “states that sponsor terror.” “Take Eric Schmitt in The New YorkTimes a week ago. He wrote a story about America’s decision to ‘confront countries that sponsor terrorism.’ And his sources? ‘Senior defence officials,’ ‘administration officials,’ ‘some American intelligence officials,’ ‘the officials,’ ‘officials,’ ‘military officials,’ ‘terrorist experts’ and ‘defence officials.’” Why not, I asked, “just let the Pentagon write its own reports in The New York Times?”
200 A 27 January 2003 CNN instruction— Reminder of Script Approval Policy—fairly took the breath away. “All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval,” it said. “Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved . . . All packages originating outside Washington, LA [Los Angeles] or NY [New York], including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW in Atlanta for approval.” The “ROW” was the row of script editors in Atlanta who could insist on changes or “balances” in the reporter’s dispatch. “A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorised manager and duped [duplicated] to burcopy [bureau copy] . . . When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority.” I noted the key words: “approved” and “authorised.” CNN’s man or woman in Kuwait or Baghdad—or Jerusalem or Ramallah—may know the background to his or her story; indeed, they would know far more about it than the “authorised manager” in Atlanta. But CNN’s chiefs would decide the spin of the story. The results of this system were evident from an intriguing exchange in 2002 between CNN’s reporter in the occupied Palestinian West Bank town of Ramallah, and Eason Jordan, one of CNN’s top men in Atlanta, who resigned in 2005 over a remark about the American military shooting of journalists in Iraq. The correspondent’s first complaint was about a story by reporter Michael Holmes on the Red Crescent ambulance-drivers who were repeatedly shot at by Israeli troops. “We risked our lives and went out with ambulance drivers . . . for a whole day,” Holmes complained. “We have also witnessed ambulances from our window being shot at by Israeli soldiers . . . The story received approval from Mike Shoulder. The story ran twice and then Rick Davis [a CNN executive] killed it. The reason was we did not have an Israeli army response, even though we stated in our story that Israel believes that Palestinians are smuggling weapons and wanted people in the ambulances.” The Israelis refused to give CNN an interview, only a written statement. This statement was then written into the CNN script. But again it was rejected by Davis in Atlanta. Only when, after three days, the Israeli army gave CNN an interview did Holmes’s story run—but then with the dishonest inclusion of a line that said the ambulances were shot in “crossfire” (i.e., that Palestinians also shot at their own ambulances). The reporter’s complaint was all too obvious. “Since when do we hold a story hostage to the whims of governments and armies? We were told by Rick that if we do not get an Israeli on-camera we would not air the package. This means that governments and armies are indirectly censoring us and we are playing directly into their own hands.” All this was relevant to the coming war in Iraq. Clearly a U.S. Army officer would have to be ready to deny anything contentious stated by the Iraqis if Baghdad reports were going to get on air. In fact, a 31 January 2003 memo ensured that CNN’s system of “script approval” became stricter. CNN staff were now told that a new computerised system of script approval would allow “authorised script approvers to mark scripts [i.e., reports] in a clear and standard manner. Script EPs [executive producers] will click on the coloured APPROVED button to turn it from red (unapproved) to green (approved). When someone makes a change in the script after approval, the button will turn yellow.” Yellow indeed.
201 You could observe this cockiness when Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, the jovial but far from funny information minister, spoke of Tony Blair. “I think the British nation has never been faced with a tragedy like this fellow.” Fellow. Ah yes, Sahaf knew how to mock the Brits. He would read out daily casualty reports which—given the years of controversy to come about the number of Iraqi civilian dead—now have an archival importance they did not possess at the time. On this, the third day of the invasion, he gave the following figures for dead and wounded: in Baghdad, 194 wounded; in Nineveh, 8 wounded; in Karbala 10 killed and 32 wounded; in Salahuddin, 2 killed and 22 wounded. In Najaf, the figures were 2 and 36; in Qadisiya, 4 and 13; in Basra, 14 and 122. In Babylon, the Iraqi government claimed 30 killed and 63 wounded. In all, 62 civilians had been killed so far.
202 A Pentagon investigation showed that U.S. soldiers on the Jumhuriya Bridge thought they had identified an “enemy hunter/killer team on the balcony of a room on the upper floors of a large tan-colored building.” Reporters Without Borders carried out its own investigation into the Palestine Hotel deaths on 8 April 2003, interviewing both journalists and U.S. forces involved in the incident. It concluded that while the killings were not deliberate, the failure of U.S. commanders to inform their forces that the Palestine Hotel was a base of hundreds of journalists was “criminal” and that the U.S. Army had lied when it continued to insist that “direct firing” had come from the hotel when this was clearly untrue. The headquarters of Major General Blount “bore a heavy responsibility” for not providing information “that would have prevented the death of the journalists.” The question, the report said, “is whether this information was withheld deliberately, because of misunderstanding or by criminal negligence.” Regrettably, Reporters Without Borders did not investigate the attack on the Al-Jazeera office the same day.
203 This appalling incident is recalled in David Zucchino’s Thunder Run: Three Days in the Battle for Baghdad (Atlantic Books, London, 2004), which covers the journey of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade from southern Iraq to Baghdad during the invasion. In this account of the motorway killings (pp. 231–46), Hubbard and his comrades are confronted by “suicide vehicles” on Highway 8 that were “relentless” and “kept speeding north.” Hubbard, the book says, “couldn’t comprehend the repeated, futile forays—each one ending in an eruption of flames and flying metal as one vehicle after another was destroyed by high-explosive rounds.” Zucchino quotes a young army private complaining that “Damn, we’re killing a lot of people here.” Another private “saw one of the first vehicles get hammered . . . He saw the car explode, and he saw human beings explode, too.” A few hours later, according to Zucchino, “from the west and north came suicide cars, nearly twenty of them by mid-afternoon.” Yet the book makes no reference to the large number of civilians who died under U.S. tank fire, many of whose bodies I had seen with my own eyes. If so large a number of suicide bombers were really deployed against the Americans on Highway 8, then this was a major turning point in the war—and a key to the forthcoming insurgency. But my own evidence as an eyewitness to the aftermath suggests that, while there clearly was a military ambush, most of the dead were civilians and that American fear of suicide bombers led them to fire at any vehicle which did not clear the road. As Hubbard told me, “a lot of people sped up . . . I had to protect my men.” Zucchino’s book, incidentally, gives a fairly convincing account of the military confusion surrounding the killing of the journalists at the Palestine Hotel (pp. 296–307), although it repeats the canard that gunmen were firing from the building. It is worth adding that if it is true, as Zucchino’s book says, that the 3rd Infantry Division endured “one of the most brutal and decisive battles in combat history” in Baghdad, then the Pentagon’s contention that Iraqi forces simply declined to fight and “melted away” in the capital is untrue.
204 A report on the military assessment of “the lessons of the war with Iraq” in The New York Times on 20 July 2003 stated that the approval of Donald Rumsfeld was required if “any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed and all of them were approved.” So the Christian families of Mansour stood no chance.
205 This one file of letters and court documents is now deposited—appropriately enough and courtesy of The Independent —in the royal Hashemite archives in Amman.
206 In all, 15,000 objects were looted from the Baghdad Museum. Despite much fanfare by the Western authorities when some treasures were later recovered, 11,000 were still missing in June 2005, including the famous 3,500-year-old “Mona Lisa” ivory depicting the head of an Assyrian woman. Of the 4,000 artifacts discovered, 1,000 were found in the United States, 1,067 in Jordan, 600 in Italy and the remainder in countries neighbouring Iraq.
207 By far the most damning document on U.S. treatment of prisoners—including their “rendition” to countries where they would also be tortured—is Amnesty International’s 200-page report published on 27 October 2004, United States of America: Human Dignity Denied; Torture and Accountability in the “War on Terror” (AMR51/145/2004).
208 In a 21 May 2005 email to The Independent, Karpinski wrote that she had visited Guantánamo for “less than an entire day and I was there to resolve some issues between two officers, nothing related to the detention operations at all. I had access to all cellblocks at Abu Ghraib. When the prison compound was transferred to the Military Intelligence Commander in November 2003, my access remained unimpeded. The limitation was in the hours I was allowed to visit Abu Ghraib. I was not allowed to go out to Abu Ghraib during the hours of darkness . . . due to the increased danger of travelling at night . . .” Most of the mistreatment and torture at Abu Ghraib appears to occur at night.
209 By midsummer 2005, disclosures of torture by U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were being made almost weekly. In The New York Times on 23 May, Bob Herbert described the military torturers as “sadists, perverts and criminals,” quoting theTimes’s own report of 20 May of a U.S. Army document on torture in Afghanistan: “In sworn testimony to army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.” This original report, by Tim Golden, described how an innocent man was kicked a hundred times on the leg by guards and later died in his cell, handcuffed to the ceiling.
210 For years, Americans—not least Tom Friedman—had been lecturing the Palestinians on the principles of non-violence, suggesting that a Gandhi-like approach to occupation might yield benefits. Arab pleading at The Hague proved, of course, that such peaceful protest did not amount to the proverbial hill of beans.
211 This terrible period of Muslim–Christian history brought an end to a miniature caliphate during which scholars—Christians as well as Arabs and Jews—translated from Arabic some of the greatest works of classical literature which had been stored in Baghdad. The Edict of Expulsion was signed on 31 March 1492, and marked, for the Jews, their greatest disaster since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. It also gave rise to a long tradition of near-pornographic anti-Islamic tracts which presented the Prophet as the Antichrist.
212 Bin Laden’s self-righteousness was such that he clearly could not grasp the response of Americans to his long address; the nation that was the victim of the 11 September 2001 crimes against humanity was not going to open a discussion on the al-Qaeda leader’s theories of bankrupting the United States by forcing them into wars. Bin Laden also named reporters on CNN and Time magazine who had quoted him as saying that if “defending oneself and punishing the aggressor” is terrorism, “then it is unavoidable for us.” He added—and this is the kind of advertising a foreign correspondent doesn’t need—that “you can read it in . . . my interviews with Robert Fisk. The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at the White House . . . able to run an interview with him so that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?” Quite apart from bin Laden’s erroneous belief that I was a “compatriot” American—and I’m not sure I want to be a “co-religionist” of anyone—I could have done without bin Laden’s imprimatur on my work. And I certainly wasn’t going to play patsy by agreeing to act as al-Qaeda’s new interlocuteur valable.
213 The flourishing new democracy that President George W. Bush identified in Afghanistan began to fragment as the old drug barons also took power in the government while the Taliban and al-Qaeda gradually returned to the country from which they had been ejected, attacking U.S. troops and pro-government Afghan soldiers. The elected president, Hamid Karzai, had been a paid consultant of Unocal, the Calfornian oil company which once negotiated with the Taliban for a trans-Afghan oil pipeline to Pakistan. America’s special envoy to Afghanistan was Zalmay Khalilzad, a former employee of Unocal. Once in power, Karzai and President Musharraf of Pakistan agreed to restart the pipeline project. It was the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv which shrewdly noted that “if one looks at the map of the big American bases created [in Afghanistan], one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected pipeline to the Indian Ocean.” By 2005, Afghanistan was exporting more opium than it had ever produced before. Even Karzai was forced to complain bitterly after revelations in 2005 that the Americans had treated their Afghan prisoners just as cruelly as their Iraqi victims.