The Great War for Civilisation (122 page)

“We give these to the Americans,” the Saudi soldier told me. A tall, thin man with a goatee beard, he saluted and turned back to his lorry. It was an American truck, of course, and they were carrying American Kevlar helmets and were under American command. Indeed, it seemed to be the fate of so many Muslims to live under this Western “canopy.” It is an irony that the Saudis—like the Iranians— have to live in a country of American-built expressways and toll booths, of U.S.built airbases where the helicopters and fighter-bombers are American, that they have to live in nations whose infrastructure is American, whose princes—or, in the case of Iran, revolutionaries—were in many cases educated in the United States and speak English with American accents. So when in the days immediately following the Iraqi invasion, President George Bush explained that his military deployment in Saudi Arabia was also intended to “safeguard the American way of life”—and he presumably wasn't thinking of theocracy and Saudi head-chopping—he may have had a point.

But Saudi Arabia did not wear only American clothes. The country was awash with British hardware—including more aircraft than the Saudis had qualified pilots to fly—thanks to the 1988 $23 billion Al-Yamamah arms contract which included the sale of 132 Tornado and Hawk aircraft and commissions which were allegedly given to British middlemen as well as members of the Saudi royal family. The British National Audit Office was to launch an investigation into this folly in 1989 but its report was officially suppressed—to avoid upsetting the Saudis, according to the British government. The prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been personally involved in the project to prevent French and American competition.

Oil, of course, had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with the deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia. If General H. Norman Schwarzkopf's contention boded ill for those who feared that rhetoric and reality were parting company in the Middle East, it had to be said that the general made his claim with real imagination. As supreme United States commander in the Gulf, he used language with the subtlety of a tank.

“Absolutely not,” he roared at me when I was gullible enough to suggest that America's enthusiasm to defend Saudi Arabia might have something to do with petroleum. “I don't know why people keep bringing this up. I really don't. If anyone has any question in their mind about what Iraq has done, I suggest they look for another line of work. What you've got here is a situation where not only is this a mugging—but a rape has occurred.” The American television crews had switched the cameras and sound recorders back on. Here was a general who not only talked in soldiers' language—or what television crews thought was soldiers' language—but obligingly spoke in sound bites, too. “It is an international rape of the first order,” he boomed on. “We all ‘tsk-tsk' when some old lady is raped in New York and twenty-four people know about it and do nothing . . . it's not just a question of oil. There's not a single serviceman out there who thinks that—not any I've met.”

So all that history of American support for Saddam—for his invasion of Iran, his chemical assaults on Iranians and Kurds, Washington's blind eye to the torture chambers and the mass graves, all that “tsk-tsking” in the face of atrocities which the whole world knew about and did nothing about—didn't happen. History started yesterday. It was time I looked for “another line of work.” Those of us who had met scarcely a serviceman who did
not
think this was about oil would have to hold our tongues in future. When we asked the general why America had not used its troops to prevent the mugging and rape of other Middle Eastern nations, we were told not to be hypothetical.

General Schwarzkopf, a giant of a man with a barrel chest and a head the shape of an American football, loved all this. He, after all, was the general who'd served two combat tours in Vietnam, the second as 1st Battalion commander in the unhappy “Americal” Infantry Division whose units—not under Schwarzkopf's command—were responsible for the My Lai massacre, a man who held fourteen military awards including the Distinguished Service Medal, three Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Purple Hearts. No one asked about his dad, of course, the other Norman Schwarzkopf who helped to destroy Iranian democracy in 1953, along with Kermit Roosevelt and “Monty” Woodhouse. Iraqi morale? he was asked. “Jesus, I hope it's lousy! I hope they're hungry. I hope they're thirsty and I hope they're running out of ammunition . . . I think they're a bunch of thugs.” Any chance he thought the Iraqis would still invade Saudi Arabia? “The difference is we're here now. If they fight, they're going to have to fight me. It's not a question of taking on some weak neighbour.” Mistake. The Saudis didn't want to be regarded as a “weak neighbour.” They were strong, confident, able to defend themselves. Was not Lieutenant General Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz the commander of the “joint forces”?

And indeed, as we delved through the military jungle that was entangling the Gulf, we discovered that in the month since U.S. forces started their deployment, not a single American tank crew or gunner had been permitted to test-fire their weapons. The Saudi authorities had refused to allow the Americans even to calibrate their guns—for fear that the sound might alarm the civilian population. Even the megalithic battleship USS
Wisconsin
, whose nine sixteen-inch guns could fire shells over more than 30 kilometres, was constrained to announce the time of its live-firing exercises to prevent panic on the Gulf coastline. At some points in the eastern desert, the U.S. 24th Infantry Division had to reposition its tanks lest their tracks damage camel-grazing fields.

If the Saudis could temporarily emasculate the United States military, the Iraqi army was undergoing an interesting psychological transformation of its own. When it invaded Kuwait on 2 August, it was a million-strong, “battle-hardened” army which had “polished its offensive capability,” a “powerful battle force.” Now, however, Saudi and American officers drew inspiration from the stories of Kuwait's wretched refugees; Iraqi troops were looting shops and homes, there had been rape and disciplinary hangings. British officers talked of the Iraqi army as a “shambles” with poor morale. “As far as we are concerned,” the captain of the British destroyer
York
told us, “there's far too much hype about chemical warfare.” Yet by the beginning of November, the
Desert Shield Order of Battle Handbook
prepared by the U.S. Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence was again describing the Iraqi army as “one of the best-equipped and most combat experienced in the world . . . distinguished by its flexibility, unity of command and high level of mobility.”

Maybe it depended on the audience. When General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the same supposedly liberal, thoughtful, eloquent secretary of state in the Bush Junior administration a decade later—addressed marines aboard the Wisconsin on 14 September, he talked down to U.S. servicemen. Saddam was “this joker we've got up here in Baghdad,” to whom the world had said: “We can't have this kind of crap any longer.” If somebody wanted to fight the United States, Powell instructed his men, “kick butt.” The Palestinians in Kuwait were meanwhile further denigrated by Alan Clark, the British junior minister, who claimed in Bahrain that they had created an “informal militia” in Kuwait. Many Palestinian “residents,” he claimed—untruthfully as it turned out—had “helped themselves to firearms.”

In Dhahran the flight line was witness to every arrival, to the thousands of young Americans who clambered down the aircraft ramps clutching plastic bottles of water, stunned by the temperatures, suddenly realising that they had just met their first enemy, right here on the tarmac. Some wound scarves over their faces, wedging Ray-Bans between the scarves and their helmets so that they looked like a hundred-strong version of the Invisible Man. The airbase howled and screamed with turbine engines, with F-15s and F-16s and Galaxies and Hawks shimmering through the dust bowl beside the still untested Patriot anti-missile missiles.

Journalists became part of this military deployment. They were brought to film these constant arrivals—initially, as Schwarzkopf admitted, to give the impression that there were more U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia than was the case—and to encourage the idea that American forces represented overwhelming strength. If war was to start, journalists would be allowed to accompany troops in “pools”— and reporters and their newspapers and television stations subsequently fought like tigers to join these “pools” in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield. The rest were supposed to abide by the rules of Captain Mike Sherman. Though a trifle shorter than the crusty old man who burned his way through Georgia, Sherman's eyes possessed the same kind of penetrating, weary reproach that you could discover in the monochrome portraits of his ancestor, General William Tecumseh Sherman. This was not surprising because Captain Sherman commanded one of America's most powerful weapons systems in the Gulf, a great beached whale of a vessel permanently anchored in a grotesquely decorated ballroom of dreams and expectations in the Dhahran International Hotel.

Even to say that the ballroom was in Dhahran was enough to earn one of Captain Sherman's famous “letters of admonition.” For there were rules aboard his ship and the journalists who enjoyed its warlike facilities were expected to obey them. “Violations of ground rules” by any of the 1,300 newspaper and television folk who had signed up to cover the war—including the identification of military bases, even Dhahran, which Iraqi pilots used during the Iran–Iraq War (though Sherman was unaware of this)—would be “dealt with on a case-by-case basis.” There was something of the schoolmaster in all this, for Captain Sherman's command—officially known as the Joint Information Bureau or “JIB”—was itself an education. It provoked, confused, infuriated and misled.

In the old days, back in mid-August when war seemed closer, Sherman ran the JIB with only six military officers, corralled behind a stable-like door of the hotel. In an identical room beside them sat two representatives of the Saudi information ministry. But as America's military goals widened—as President Bush's decision to liberate Kuwait was transformed into a decision to destroy Saddam Hussein— so Captain Sherman's ship turned into a behemoth and moved upstairs, beneath a roof of giant blue and gold eggshell design, into a bigger ballroom of high-pile carpets, telephone bells, word processors, kitbags, rifles, notebooks and more information than any sane person would ever need to obtain about the mechanics of killing fellow human beings.

On the right, behind a long wooden arras, sat the representatives of the Western military alliance, thirty uniformed officers from the U.S. Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force and—new crew members aboard Sherman's hulk—a team of British defence ministry functionaries. On the other side of the ballroom, with fewer computers and more telephones, sat eighteen Saudis, each dressed in red kuffiah and white
dishdash
robe. At an isolated desk, there also sat a representative of Kuwait's government-in-exile, dispensing coloured snapshots of torture victims. Like girls and boys at dancing class, the Westerners rarely crossed the ballroom to talk to their Saudi opposite numbers. Only the journalists moved between these two cultures, perhaps 6 metres separating the power of the West from the cradle of Islam. At opposite ends of the ballroom were two massive television sets. At the Arab end, Saudi television broadcast football matches and prayers. At the U.S. end, CNN portrayed the American way of life. The Saudis much preferred CNN.

Within this emporium of war, journalists from fifty nations could seek information about Patriot missiles, arrange an overnight visit to the 82nd Airborne, set up breakfast with fighter pilots from an RAF Tornado squadron, demand to know the range of an F-15, the explosive power of a Sidewinder or the calibre of a Challenger tank barrel. They could sign up for buses and planes to take them to U.S. battleships, Egyptian armoured brigades, Syrian commandos, the U.S. 101st Infantry Division, the American 1st Cavalry or the Puerto Rico reservists. The Saudis would even escort reporters to the Hofuf camel market.

It took a few days before one realised that while this might seem exciting, there was also something very disturbing about the JIB. All the promises of military potential, the inescapable firepower, the expressions of confidence, the superiority of technique and equipment, took on a subliminal quality. For while you might learn all you wished about the squash head of a 155-mm shell or the properties of a cluster bomb, you were not permitted to dwell upon the results of its use. What happens when the shell or the Sidewinder explodes? There was much talk of “neutralising” targets and the “loss of assets” and the way in which “enemy” units would be “negativised.” You might demand a visit to the British 7th Armoured Brigade, but not to a mortuary. Requests to visit medical facilities were politely granted. Ask about the body-bags arriving in Dhahran and a reporter was quietly told that his question was “morbid.” For this was war without risks, war made acceptable. It was clean war—not war as hell, but war without responsibility, in which the tide of information stopped abruptly at the moment of impact. Like sex without orgasm, the USS
Jib
was easy to view, drama and entertainment suitable for all the family. If you believed in the JIB, there was nothing X-rated about the future.

It was Saddam Hussein who had cornered the market in death. The Iraqis dispensed no information about their military machine, there were no facility trips to the Republican Guard. But over the airwaves each night, it was Saddam who talked of the desert turning into a graveyard, of bones bleaching in the sun, or corpses rotting in the heat. Iraqi radio described the putrefaction of death as the ultimate cost of war for the United States, martyrdom as the highest price for Iraqi patriotism. The Americans talked about confidence, the Iraqis about worms.