The Great War for Civilisation (125 page)

But the moment a conflict began, Britain would effectively lose its decision-making capability. Planning was one thing, execution quite another; national command in time of war would turn the multinational force into a shambles. Britain's position in the command-and-control chain was put most revealingly by de la Billière during a visit to Saudi Arabia by British defence secretary Tom King on 14 November, when he acknowledged the symbolic role of the Saudis and the military role of the Americans. “The commander in chief is Prince Khaled . . . his authority and that of General Schwarzkopf meets my requirements . . . for what the British services get involved in. The British ground forces and the British air forces are under the TACON [tactical control] of the Americans.”
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But my own sources within the Anglo-American command suggested that the relationship between the British and Americans was not as close—or as trusting— as the world was led to believe. This was particularly clear when word reached me during my Christmas holidays in Paris that a thief had stolen a briefcase and computer containing Gulf War briefing plans from an unmarked RAF car at Acton in West London. The documents were being carried, according to my source, in the hands of a senior RAF officer—subsequently revealed to be Wing Commander David Farquhar, the personal staff officer to Sir Patrick Hine, who was de la Billière's immediate superior—and were taken from the vehicle by a thief as Farquhar stopped to look at a second-hand car in an Acton showroom. The thief had thrown away documents—discovered a few hours later—but had kept the computer to sell, unaware that it contained military information. Far more serious, according to my source, was that the British had not told the Americans of the theft.

I called
The Independent
with this extraordinary story, only to be told that the British government had issued a “D-notice” on the information in the hope of preventing its disclosure in the press—and that our acting editor, Matthew Symonds, had agreed to abide by the request and keep the story secret. Symonds was one of the three founders of
The Independent
who had, in the most unlikely venture of its kind in the history of British journalism, set up a newspaper that would not be swayed by the power of press barons or governments. Andreas Whittam Smith never bowed to pressure, but Symonds, who had begun to show an embarrassingly romantic enthusiasm for war, failed to realise that the “D-notice” had primarily been issued not for “security” reasons but to prevent the Americans' hearing of the theft. So I mentioned the affair to a colleague on the
Irish Times
, which— printed in the Irish Republic and therefore not obliged to snap to attention when the British military establishment roars—immediately published the report of the theft. “I wouldn't have let the ‘D-notice' stop us,” Andreas exclaimed to me when he returned to the office from his own holiday and when I was back in Saudi Arabia.

It revealed an interesting rift in the management of my paper, which Andreas himself explained in our Sunday magazine six years later. The one thing he regretted, he said:

is being persuaded by him [Symonds], against my own views, about the Gulf war. I wish I had run the paper as being anti-war, but Matthew and everybody else persuaded me not to do this, because they didn't agree with my view.

Far more interesting was my informant's contention that the real reason for the D-notice was to conceal the theft from Britain's American allies. In his own account of the Gulf War, de la Billière admits that the Americans had indeed been left in ignorance by the British and that the
Irish Times
's disclosure—which, under different editorship that week, would have appeared in
The Independent
—created just the political embarrassment that newspapers were normally in the business of revealing:

This news put me in a devilishly awkward position. What was I to tell Norman Schwarzkopf? If I said nothing, he would certainly hear about the theft from somewhere else. I suggested that as the matter was of such crucial importance, Paddy [Hine] himself should fly out to brief the CinC personally and this he agreed to do. At the same time, the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Vincent, flew to Washington to brief Colin Powell, so dangerous did the whole incident seem and so potentially destructive of Anglo-American relations.

Schwarzkopf “seemed relaxed” at the news, according to de la Billière, although the latter's contemporary notes reveal another little secret hitherto kept from Washington. “Cock-up No 2,” de la Billière wrote, “is when I'm told to tell NS [Norman Schwarzkopf] we are with him all the way, whatever happens, and he finds out Brit ministers will not delegate ROE [rules of engagement] for me to release aircraft for rapid response to a pre-emptive Iraqi strike . . . ”
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It was an unsettling Christmas. My friend and colleague Terry Anderson was still a hostage in Lebanon, held by men who were demanding the release of those Dawa party prisoners in Kuwait—if, indeed, they were still in jail. Because I was able to maintain some slight contact with Terry via his kidnappers, I flew to New York to talk to Terry's boss at AP, Louis D. Boccardi—a small, dapper man with the disconcerting habit of talking to visitors while playing taped music very loudly in his office—and to Terry's close friend, Don Mell. Mell, or Donald C. Mell the Third as we were constrained to call him, had been Terry's photo editor in Beirut and took me out for a memorable turkey dinner in the Rainbow Room of the GE building in Manhattan. I say “memorable” although, like most of Mell's dinners in Beirut, it was difficult to remember the last part of it. While not as slim as he was in his nimble wartime days in Lebanon, Mell had the disconcerting ability to attract throngs of gorgeous waitresses the moment he entered the restaurant, an effect he greeted with a wicked smile.

“Fisky, there's going to be a war and the old U-S-of-A will win, as usual,” he said once we'd sat down. “Remember Lebanon? Remember what a giant fuck-up that was? Well, I'm sure we'll do just as well in Iraq.” He might have been talking of events thirteen years later, although, for tens of thousands of Iraqis—at least half a million if we were to include the long-term aftermath of the 1991 war—his assessment would be all too accurate. Mell was also travelling back to the Gulf for the liberation of Kuwait—we didn't doubt that this would be accomplished—and we drank champagne together over the Manhattan skyline. The Empire State Building was patriotically illuminated in red, white and blue and the World Trade Center simmered at the tip of Manhattan. Mell and I both agreed that the impact of America's actions in the Middle East would eventually come to haunt the West— we even talked about this over dinner—although we never guessed that the explosion was less than eleven years and less than four miles away.

I arrived back to a cold, damp, bleak Saudi Arabia. The three hundred thousandth Kuwaiti refugee had long ago crossed the border—the Iraqis had reduced the indigenous population of their “nineteenth province” to two-thirds of its pre-invasion level—and King Fahd and Saddam Hussein were engaged in a bitterly personal dispute in which both God and Satan were invoked. It related directly to Saudi Arabia's original support for Iraq's 1980 aggression against Iran. Saddam had complained of Fahd's meanness at this time—an extraordinary insult to any Arab, let alone a Saudi—and Fahd's response was as devastating in its exposure of their quarrel as it was revealing in its detail of just how much the Saudis had spent in their attempt to destroy Iran a decade before:

Why did you not fulfil your promise to me and Egyptian President Hosni Moubarak that you would not launch an aggression in Kuwait? After only a few days from your pledge, you committed the most vicious crime in the history of mankind when you crept in with your army in the darkness and shed blood and expelled an entire nation [in]to the desert in violation of all norms and values . . . you have . . . insisted on continuing aggression, claiming that Kuwait was part of Iraq. God knows that Kuwait was never under the Iraqi rule and the members of the family of Sabah were rulers of Kuwait since about 250 years.
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. . . Who authorised you to kill [a] million Iranian and Iraqi Muslims? . . . Who authorised you to occupy Kuwait and kill its sons, rape its women, loot its property and destroy its landmarks? No doubt Satan and your covetousness have urged you to do so at the expense of the Arab Gulf countries which were proud of the Iraqi army.

It was instructive that King Fahd should have blamed Saddam for a million Muslim lives lost during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War—since Saudi Arabia had been Iraq's principal bankroller in that war—but the details of just how much money the Saudis had been prepared to spend on Saddam's behalf in that conflict were as shameful as they were revealing:

You said in your message that we had only extended to you $11.53 million to contribute to [the] reconstruction of al-Basra in addition to one million dinar[s] worth of equipment to reconstruct Fao.

But we would like to make [the] facts clear:

Oh Ruler of Iraq, the Kingdom extended to your country $25,734,469,885. 80¢.

The implications of this took some time to sink in. Saudi Arabia, whose king called himself the custodian of Mecca and Medina, had given Saddam $25 billion to fight and kill fellow Muslims in Iran.
¹³⁷
The Americans had supplied the intelligence and some of the chemicals (along with the Germans). The Russians gave most of the armour. But the Saudis largely supplied the cash. I mused for some seconds on the eighty cents tacked on the end of the bill, an addition which suggested that a truly eccentric mind was at work in the Saudi royal treasury.

ONE OF THE DHAHRAN AIRPORT Saudi immigration officers had invited us to dinner in his desert tent, and it seemed a good place to watch the sands of peace run out in Geneva. Mohamed poured the hot, over-sweet tea. Abdullah handed round the plates of grapes, bananas and carrots. James Baker flickered on a black-and-white screen in the corner of the Arab tent. It was a strangely comforting place to hear the news. There we were, surrounded by six Saudis in their white-and-brown robes and kuffiah headdress, lying on brightly coloured carpets, our shoulders hunched against camel saddles, munching away on spiced chicken and shish kebab as the path to war was laid out before us. When Baker suddenly looked up and began with those all important words—“Regrettably, ladies and gentlemen,” dreadful, hollow words which should have frightened us all—the Saudis merely glanced at the screen with the same attention they would later apply to a videotape of a dance band.

And when the U.S. secretary of state, his image floating up and down on the big old screen, pronounced his fatal judgement—“in over six hours, I heard nothing that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever”—only Mohamed's younger brother paid attention. He raised his hands level with his shoulders like a man in the act of surrender. “So it will be war,” he said. “What can we do?”

This must have been how the tribes regarded impending disaster hundreds of years ago, lying on their carpets, tearing the legs off a roast chicken under the protection of a cloth roof. In front of us, a charcoal brazier glowed, its iron legs buried deep in the sand. Mohamed and Abdullah passed around more tea and fruit; the others paid more attention to Baker now. Khaled, a thin youth with a pointed beard, clucked his tongue. “On the day this starts,” he said, “I shall pack up and leave.”

Mohamed had rigged up his television set to a home-made aerial which sucked in CNN's live broadcast from the Geneva press conference. The signal was poor but we could read the words “Intercontinental Hotel, Geneva” on the lectern in front of Baker, and listen to his explanation of why he would not accept “linkage” between the Gulf crisis and the Arab–Israeli conflict. To a Westerner, Baker made sense. He insisted that Iraq was opposed by “twenty-eight nations” rather than by the United States. “Now the choice lies with the Iraqi leadership.” But when Tariq Aziz appeared on the television, his Arab accent drawing the attention of all in our little tent, Baker's words seemed somehow less convincing, not because Iraq had right on its side—everyone agreed that Saddam Hussein was a bad man—but because Baker was an American and Aziz, like the six Saudis, an Arab.

Why, I asked Mohamed, had the Saudis for so long been Saddam Hussein's closest friends? Had they really trusted him and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz? Had they not believed the reports of Iraq's use of poison gas in the war against Iran? Or had they been friends because Saddam was an Arab or, more to the point, a strong Arab whose power was feared as well as respected? It was Abdullah who replied. “We were never told bad things about Saddam,” he said. “We were told in our newspapers—by our government—that he was a good man. Governments always say what they want their people to understand. That is what happens here. We were not told the truth.” Then he paused for a few seconds. “But I will do anything my government tells me.”

One of the Saudis walked into the tent with a tray of whisky bottles, perhaps half a dozen of them, which Mohamed proceeded to pour into pint-size mugs. Jameson, Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniel's, I couldn't believe this. “We confiscate them from the passengers who try to smuggle alcohol into the airport,” Mohamed beamed. Given the vast quantities his guests were now drinking, glugging the stuff back as if it was juice instead of liquor, I realised that Saudi Arabia's strict antialcohol laws had as much to do with consumption as they did with religion. Saudis didn't know how to drink.

I knew something was wrong when I asked Abdullah if he really thought the Americans would leave Saudi Arabia. At this, Khaled suddenly stood up and announced angrily: “I will not stay here in this tent if you continue this conversation.” It was a dark, unnerving moment, as if the disaster presaged on that flickering screen had at last penetrated the minds of the six Saudis, creating some kind of disorder in the tent. Mohamed asked if the Kurds should have a state. “Why should they?” Khaled asked, his face flushed.