The Great War for Civilisation (121 page)

The Americans were cheerful, happy to talk, not at all fazed that a journalist had found them injecting their thousands of troops and choppers into Saudi Arabia. U.S. Air Force Major Curt Morris was waiting for the bus that would take him back to his Galaxy. “We stayed at a real nice hotel in town. We ate some good Arabic food last night. Yeah, we enjoyed it. And it's been cool the last couple of days.” He smiled a lot. “In a couple of days, we'll be back in your country—at Mildenhall—we're looking forward to that.” Tourism. Cool weather, exotic food, home to southern England. On the other side of the airbase, Egyptian troops were filing down the steps of an Egyptair 737, the kind that normally takes holidaymakers to Luxor.

The Saudis, at least, appeared to understand the ironies of the events that they were witnessing. Their airport militiamen were equipped with coal-black gas masks with little eyeholes. “America says she has come to protect us,” one of them—a thin young man with a pencil moustache—said to me as we watched an RAF transport aircraft land out of the dawn, “Would America have come to protect us if we had no oil?” I knew the answer, with the same certainty that Major Morris brought to his optimism. The Saudi policemen and soldiers I would meet in the coming months were no fools; if they were not university graduates, their religion taught them enough to exercise the greatest concern—if not downright suspicion—towards the dangerous leap of imagination that the American arrival in their country represented.

American, Egyptian and Moroccan troops—from this very early stage, the U.S. forces managed to acquire religious camouflage from the most loyal of their Arab allies—were already being housed in makeshift camps far out in the desert. The border town of Khafji had been partly evacuated and turned into a barracks. So had Hafr al-Batn, the lorry-park town farther west where the territory of Saudi Arabia runs along the frontier of Iraq itself, whose airbase and residence blocks, built back in 1985 at a cost of $5 billion, could house 70,000 soldiers. So had the local Aramco oil workers' camp. Major Morris stood next to a tall, blond female soldier, her hair in a chignon, another item of American culture with which to shock the Saudis. “I sure don't want to think what will happen if our people have to wear their anti-gas clothes when the heat really gets up,” Morris said. “Oh boy, I tell you, people will die of heat-stroke in those things.”

When my Gulf Air flight took off for Bahrain after dawn, I could see that the whole of the Dhahran airbase had been surrounded by batteries of silver-and-white missiles. From my passenger seat, I shot several pictures of the lines of Galaxies and their brood of helicopters. History in the Middle East was moving too quickly to be grasped. Was it like this, I wondered—and these were parallels of surprise rather than scale—when the British went to war in 1914? We had no idea then what chaos the imperial powers of Europe would visit upon themselves. Who would have thought, just a fortnight ago, that Kuwait would disappear, that the British and Americans would be holding the line against Iraq in the sands upon which the Prophet Mohamed walked, that their battle, when it was joined, would lead them all the way—thirteen years later—to the most dangerous conflict the Middle East had witnessed since the fall of the Ottoman empire?

From Bahrain, I hitched a ride over the Gulf with my old mates among the U.S. television network crews with whom, only a few years earlier, I had patrolled the hot, fish-crowded waters when Iraq was our friend, when Iraq could attack an American warship and get away with it. Only two years ago, I reflected as our little white commercial aircraft buzzed over the soft waves with their shoals of flying fish, Saddam was still our friend, still the “rough, direct-talking leader” who he was to remain until he decided to steal Kuwait. Only a few months earlier, when Mubarak had packed a bunch of senators off to see Saddam, they had agreed that the Iraqi dictator's real problem was with the press. Much laughter. Yes, Saddam needed a public relations consultant. But now the PR men were employed by the Kuwaiti royal family and by the overweight commander of the Saudi “Allied Joint Forces Commander,” his Royal Highness Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, nephew of King Fahd and son of Prince Sultan, the Saudi defence minister.

Across the gently-moving waves we flew, over motorised dhows whose symmetry and curved prows demonstrated the fragility of another age and culture. But even travelling at more than 100 miles an hour above the water, the perspiration ran in streams down our faces and backs. After five or six hours in 130 degrees of heat, the sea and the sky became a yellow-grey fog in which only the sun retained its faded gold. How could anyone contemplate a war in this natural oven? The evidence was there. One hundred kilometres out of Dubai, we found the French frigate
Commandant Ducuing
taking on supplies from a freighter, a giant tricolour heaving from her stern, her deck-crew huddled around an anti-aircraft gun. The water played sunlight off its hull number—F795—and then it was lost in the mist. Turn 180 degrees in the haze and there is the
Ducuing
again, making steam, propellers frothing the grey sea green.

Through the humidity glided other reminders of the Iraqi invasion to the northwest, empty oil tankers heading east out of the Gulf, a natural contradiction, since they should head west empty and leave east heavy with Kuwaiti crude, their Plimsoll line beneath the surface. The
T. M. Regulus
of Singapore, miserably high in the water, showing its rust-red hull, lay at anchor in the fog; even the old Kuwaiti tanker
Chesapeake City
, which—reflagged as an American tanker—had been a symbol of America's protection from Iranian “aggression” in the tanker war only two years earlier, was riding the swell off Bahrain. In the banks of mist, we even found a cargo ship, its hold and decks piled high with Toyotas, yet more luxuries for the richest emirate in the Gulf, now fleeing for Hormuz and the open seas. The good days were over.

Save for the few Western journalists marooned in Kuwait itself—Victor Mallet of the
Financial Times
was among them and emerged across the desert with a powerful story of brutality and fear
¹²⁹
—the world's reporters now filed from Baghdad or from the uninvaded cities of the Arab Gulf. From there, we tried to leaven the propaganda war with question marks, little hand grenades of doubt that might prompt the reader to ask as many questions as we did in the long dry evenings of steak and orange juice in Saudi Arabia. Kidnappers in Lebanon had long demanded the release of seventeen Shia Muslims imprisoned in Kuwait in return for American hostages, including my old friend Terry Anderson, AP's bureau chief in Beirut. Two of the fifteen had been freed. All were members of the Islamic Dawa party. Had Iraq liberated the other fifteen? Answer: no, they had escaped. Thirteen years later, the Dawa would become a political party in “liberated” Iraq, demanding elections from the Americans who seemed oblivious to the fact that the Dawa members to whom they politely talked had been the “super-terrorists” of the 1980s. Diplomats said that Palestinians living in Kuwait had connived with the Iraqi intelligence service, supplying them with the home addresses of Kuwaiti officials prior to the invasion. Was the PLO helping Saddam to occupy Iraq? Answer: No, because some Palestinians even joined the slowly forming Kuwaiti resistance movement. But Iraqi-trained Palestinians had later been brought down from Baghdad and could be seen with guns on the streets of Kuwait. And what an opportunity this presented for the now-exiled Kuwaiti royal family—who could one day return to their emirate and demand the expulsion of the 300,000 Palestinian “traitors,” some of whom had been born there. Which is what they did.

The Syrians sent a brigade of soldiers to join the Americans in Saudi Arabia, the “Vanguard of the Arab Nation” now aligning itself with the friends of Zionism—or so it seemed—against their Baathist enemies. And every day, the network crews and hundreds of other television teams from around the world were bussed out to the Dhahran airbase—to the same runways I had surveyed immediately after the invasion—to watch the Americans arrive, companies and battalions and regiments and brigades and divisions, tens of thousands of them to augment an army that would—by the new year of 1991—place half a million men and women against Saddam's armies. In 1991 the United States thought it needed this many soldiers to liberate Kuwait. In 2003 the Pentagon calculated they would need less than half that number to capture and occupy the whole of Iraq. But in 2003, nobody made that comparison.

If it wasn't statistics we got, it was advice. RAF officers coaxed journalists on how to don their gas masks. They advised us to use the “buddy-buddy” system, whereby you helped your fellow scribe to fit the filter onto his mask but ensured your own was fitted first—while your colleague presumably suffocated to death. The whole wretched business involved “hunkering down”—a phrase I suspect the military got from the press—while gallons of Saddam's vile cocktail clouded around us. A visit to the French Foreign Legion—red wine in the desert seemed a lot more sensible than a British ration of lukewarm water—convinced me that there were simpler methods of avoiding chemical extinction. A British member of the Legion's Second Infantry Regiment from the East End of London told me that his unit—battle honours included the Marne—had its own unique operational instructions. “Basically,” he said, “when there's a red gas alert, someone blows a whistle and we all pile on our lorries and drive like fuck out of the area.”

This seemed to me eminently sensible. For more prosaic advice, we could turn to the
Saudi Gazette
, the newspaper that failed to inform its readers that 100,000 Iraqi troops had invaded Kuwait, shot the Emir's brother and were standing on the borders of Saudi Arabia. “Do's and don'ts in a gas attack,” read the headline—on page 3. This was to be one of the world's most exclusive doctors' advice columns, one that turned out to say as much about Saudi Arabia as it did about chemical warfare. And those who remembered that King Fahd had that very year laid responsibility for the death of more than 1,400 Muslim pilgrims in Mecca on “God's will” would have found the initial advice faintly familiar.

“If you are outside your home and in the open, you cannot do anything except to accept your destiny,” the article announced. If you were at home, on the other hand, “look out your windows for birds dropping from the trees, cats, dogs and people dropping and choking, cars crashing and general panic which are all signs of a gas attack. When you see such things happen, barricade doors and windows and let nobody in or out of the house.” Other helpful hints included the advice to “dress yourself to the hilt in long sleeves, socks and hat . . . cover your entire head with a wet towel or blanket . . . get into the shower and stay there.”
¹³⁰
But the
Saudi
Gazette
was not a paper to frighten its readers. Its front page on 4 August 1990 contained a single, curious paragraph in bold type. “King Fahd and Bush exchanged views on the situation in the region in the light of current developments,” it said. That was the paper's sole concession to reality. The “current development” was the Iraqi
anschluss
of Kuwait.

The Americans were given cultural assistance. Some were eminently sensible: don't drink alcohol, don't show any interest in Arab women, don't lose your temper. Others betrayed the real problems of America's Middle East policy. The American army's official guide to Saudi Arabia included a section headed “Sensitive areas” which urged U.S. personnel not to discuss “articles or stories which discuss the friendship ties between the U.S. and Israel,” “anti-Arab demonstrations or sentiment in the U.S.” or “support for Israeli actions and presence [!] in Lebanon.” The fact that this military guide could not even refer to Israel's invasions or occupation in those words suggested that these subjects were even more “sensitive” for the Pentagon than they might have been for Arabs—who
could
discuss them. An earlier volume instructed U.S. personnel to avoid discussion of the “Jewish lobby and U.S. intelligence given to Israel”—a category that was meekly deleted by the Pentagon after the World Jewish Congress wrote to U.S. defence secretary Dick Cheney to express its “sense of distress” and “deep sense of hurt and anger” that U.S. troops were being asked to “submerge entirely those values of tolerance, pluralism, and open-mindedness that have made the U.S. a unique democratic society.” The Jewish lobby thus succeeded in erasing all discussion of the Jewish lobby.

American soldiers were also urged to remember that “the Prophet Mohamed, founder of the Islam [
sic
] religion, was born in Arabia in 570 AD . . . That fact has had a deep impact on Saudi Arabia, making it the recognized center of the Islamic religion.” I came across the Saudi version of this “guidance” late one night when I was travelling back to Dhahran from a visit to the Kuwaiti border and stopped at a petrol station. A Saudi army truck pulled up and two soldiers walked over to my car. “Sir, we want you to have these,” one of them said, handing me two pamphlets produced in English by the “World Assembly of Muslim Youth” and published by the “Islamic
Dawa'a
and Guidance Centre” in Dammam. The first document was entitled
The Sword of Islam
and claimed that the mere shine of this sword “eliminates falsehood just like light wipes away darkness.” It included a series of quotations from Westerners who had converted to Islam, including Cat Stevens—who was to be refused entry to the United States in 2004 on the totally false suspicion that he was involved in “terrorism”—whose name was now Yusuf Islam. “It will be wrong to judge Islam in the light of the behaviour of some bad Muslims who are always shown on the media,” the pamphlet quoted Stevens as saying. “It is like judging a car as a bad one if the driver of the car is drunk . . . ” The second pamphlet urged foreigners—“atheist or . . . agnostic . . . or a believer in democracy and freedom”—to study the life and teachings of the Prophet.