The Great War for Civilisation (130 page)

The seafront restaurants had been torn down, the high, glass-covered landmark water towers machine-gunned. At Al-Ahmadi, the Iraqis set off explosives every hour at the two oil farms, each containing twenty tanks. The fine old British “White House” there was burned down along with the control room that operated the oil pipelines.

I suppose one sensed in Kuwait that something very wicked and—here it comes—something at times very evil had visited this city. Not just an occupation army, not even the Iraqi Baath party apparatus, but something that intrinsically links dictatorship and corruption. “Down with the dirty Fahd, Sabah and Hosni,” said a blood-red graffiti on the wall of one of the burned palaces. “Long live Saddam Hussein.” In the little, looted museum of Kuwaiti peasant art, I found a poster of Saddam stapled to a wall. “Most victorious of all Arabs, the great leader Saddam Hussein—God bless him,” the caption said.

Whoever uttered such prayers? Colonel Mustafa Awadi of the Kuwaiti resistance movement offered to show me. On a bleak housing estate in the suburb of Quwain, he took me to a school—the Iraqis used schools as interrogation centres—and in a classroom he introduced me to sixteen Iraqi soldiers. They sat on the floor, legs crossed, mustachioed, miserable, ordinary men with tired, dirty faces and grimy uniforms. “They were happy to surrender,” the colonel said. “See? We even give them food and tea. I promise they will be handed over unharmed to the Kuwaiti army.” Two of the men had been wounded in the face—their bandages were fresh—and they all smiled when I greeted them and when they heard me tell the colonel in Arabic that I would mention their presence to the Red Cross. One could not help but feel sorry for these defeated teenagers with their sad smiles. So what kind of men raped Kuwait?

And what—here, at last, was my opportunity—was it like under our bombardment, under the laser-guided munitions and the GBUs and the “Daisy Cutters”? What was it like to be an Iraqi soldier attacked by the Americans? “The Americans and British both bombed us,” Mohamed said. “We knew all the planes—Tornado, Jaguar, B-52, F-16, F-15—and we knew what was going to happen.” Mohamed was a thirty-three-year-old Iraqi reservist, one of the oldest of the men, and his fellow prisoners nodded in agreement as he described their suffering. He moved his left hand in a fast, sweeping movement from left to right. “All over the explosions went, one big bomb and lots of smaller bombs, everywhere, like this.” Mohamed was describing the effect of a cluster bomb.

After all the briefings and the bomb-aimer's video films, here at last was what it was like on the Other Side, in the words of those who tried to survive in the “target-rich environment.” Schwarzkopf had described the Iraqis as poorly fed, living in fear of their own execution squads. On the evidence of Mohamed and his comrades, it was true. Not one of the Iraqi soldiers I spoke to had eaten anything but rice and bad bread for months. All talked with disgust of the
kuwat al-khassa
, the “special guards.”

According to Ali, a twenty-two-year-old private from Diwaniya, it was the
kuwat al-khassa
that controlled the death squads. “They came to see us at the front at Wafra [in Kuwait] and told us what they would do to us. One of them said that if we ran away, we knew what would happen to us and he invited one of us to go and look at the bodies of fifty soldiers who had been executed. None of us would go to look at them. But later—a few days ago, at the end of the war—one of my friends, Salaam Hannoun, a soldier from Amara, ran away. They caught him and brought him back and made us watch his execution. He waited for his death and cursed Saddam Hussein. Then they shot him. He was twenty-three.”

Mohamed's description of the death squads was terrifying. “They were all members of the party. They change their names so they can never be identified. If a man is Mohamed, they call him Hussein. They have no emotion. They have no mercy.” The executions did not deter Ali. “Ten of us tried to run away at the end, under the bombing,” he said. “We were caught and our hands were tied and they put blindfolds on us. They said they would kill us. But then the order to withdraw came and they needed us to help drive the trucks out of Kuwait. So after a while, a captain came and said: ‘Release them.' ”

If the difference between life and death in the Iraqi lines was a matter of tactical convenience, the soldiers appreciated the dangers of the Allied bombing. “At night, during the bombing, we always hid in our shelters in the sand,” Mohamed said. “We hid there all the time, waiting for the bombing to end and for the ground attack. One of my friends, Abbas, from Baghdad, was thirsty one night when they were dropping cluster bombs on us. He kept complaining that he needed water. We said to him: ‘Don't go out there—it's too dangerous.' The water was kept in another shelter only ten metres from us. Abbas left despite our warnings and immediately a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head and killed him. We had to leave him there. He was not buried.”

Ghassan, a thirty-year-old Iraqi reservist from Nasiriyah, complained that there had been little chance of surrendering to the Allies although, three days ago, he and his comrades had handed themselves over to the Kuwaiti resistance. “After we read the leaflets dropped on us, we wanted to run away. We kept the leaflets with us all the time and we made some white flags to wave at helicopters if they came. But there were too many mines in front of us to run—and at the start, we were forty kilometres from the border.” The Iraqis said they had received only water, rice and bread “mixed with small pieces of sawdust” since they were posted to Kuwait. In Iraq, they said, their military rations had been five kilos of flour a month and three pieces of bread a day.

Several of the prisoners spoke with emotion of bereavement and suffering within their own families in Iraq. Adnan's eight-month-old baby boy was suffering from acute diarrhoea and a high temperature when he last saw him; his family could not obtain medicines from the doctor, he said, because of the UN blockade, and he did not know if the child was still alive. Ghassan's sister Nidal died two days after giving birth because two hospitals were unable to provide her with oxygen—again, he said, because of the blockade. This was the first evidence I found—even before the liberation of Kuwait—that the UN sanctions were lethal.

Shortages at home, death squads, starvation diets and twenty-four-hour bombing at the front destroyed the morale of the sixteen soldiers who spoke to me. One of them spoke bitterly of Saddam Hussein, no doubt hoping to impress his Kuwaiti captors but unafraid that his comrades might betray him later. “I want to go back to an Iraq where there is no Saddam Hussein,” he said. It was a wish devoutly held by many millions of Iraqis. Just a day earlier, we—the West—had urged the people of Iraq to bring this about, to rise up and destroy the tyrant.

How easily we did this. How natural it seemed. We had, after all, gone to war in alliance with “the Arabs.” Good men and true of the Christian and Islamic faiths had fought together against Saddam. This was the image portrayed when Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled, the “commander-in-chief of all foreign forces,” sat down at Safwan on 3 March 1991 to arrange the Iraqi ceasefire—and allowed Saddam to keep his helicopters and surviving Republican Guard divisions intact. In the years that followed, the memoirs of those who supposedly led this war proved that the alliance was a sham—and that our reporting of the conflict was as deeply flawed as the men who fought it.

Prince Khaled used to employ an American public relations company to manage his press conferences. Deep in the high-pile-carpeted interior of the Saudi defence ministry, an Irish-American of massive build—a certain Mr. Lynch from Chicago—would stand just behind Prince Khaled, choosing which journalists should be permitted to ask questions and suggesting to the rather portly Saudi commander how he should reply. It was, to put it mildly, an unbecoming performance. Prince Khaled would beam into the television cameras and pour out his effusive thanks to the American people for sending their sons to defend his land while Mr. Lynch nodded sagely at his shoulder. The prince's presentation was made all the more extraordinary by a hairline so thick and low that he appeared to have recently undergone a hair implant. His thin moustache added an even more surreal touch, making him look unhappily like those bewhiskered gentlemen who in silent movies used to tie ladies to railway lines in front of express trains.

King Fahd's decision to invite American troops to Saudi Arabia had been “one of the most courageous of his life,” Khaled told us. He himself saw nothing wrong with this invitation to the foreign “guests.” America would respect the laws of Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia respected the United States. “Respect” was the word the Saudis always used. The foreigners would respect Islam and would respect the Arabs. And of course, Arabs would respect America. Khaled expressed his “respect” for Schwarzkopf, and Schwarzkopf duly disclosed his own “respect” for Khaled's generalship. It sometimes seemed that there was no end to this mutual admiration, even when Saudi troops fled their posts at Khafji. After the Saudis and Qataris and their Pakistani mercenaries fought their way back into the town, there was the ever-smiling prince, now sporting a bright blue Kevlar helmet adorned with transfers of a general's four stars, declaring his pride in his army and their American allies.

Imagine, therefore, Khaled's surprise when, browsing through Schwarzkopf's autobiography a year later, he found that the American commander's “respect” for him was not quite as deeply held as he apparently thought. Khaled, according to Schwarzkopf, complained that American troops were wearing T-shirts bearing a map of Saudi Arabia (maps were “classified”), that a rabbi had boasted of blowing the Rosh Hashanah ram's horn on Islamic soil (the rabbi was in America and quoted in an Israeli newspaper), that the Americans were bringing “dancing girls” into Dhahran; Khaled wanted the Americans to launch their ground offensive from Turkey rather than Saudi Arabia and told Schwarzkopf that the Syrians didn't want to fight. Khaled was chosen for his job, Schwarzkopf wrote, by two American generals.

The Saudis should have expected such treatment. In the months that followed the liberation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia emerged as America's main financial client in the Middle East, a vassal state supporting the finances of Washington's poorer allies in the region—Egypt, for example—and buying off the suspicions of those less enthusiastic about American policy, especially Syria. In return for American firepower and political support, Saudi Arabia became Washington's bankroller.

Predictably, an embittered Prince Khaled launched a series of attacks on the “respected” Schwarzkopf, accusing him of concocting stories and distorting facts “to give himself all the credit for the victory over Iraq while running down just about everyone else.” Poor Khaled. Did he really believe that the Americans would accept him as a four-star general alongside the Schwarzkopfs and the de la Billières? Typically, he failed to object to one of the most offensive passages in Schwarzkopf's book, perhaps because he failed to understand its implications. Readers are invited to spot the insult:

Khalid [
sic
] was ideal; he'd been educated at Sandhurst, the British military school, had attended the U.S. Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, held a master's degree in political science from Auburn University, and was the highest ranking prince in the Saudi Armed Forces. His military credentials were nowhere near as important as his princely blood, since almost all power in Saudi Arabia resides in an inner circle of the royal family. Simply put, unlike the other generals, Khalid had the authority to write cheques.

Cheques for transportation. Cheques for water. Cheques for fuel. This is why Prince Khaled was important. For the Gulf War, after massive arms purchases from the West had discredited George Bush's promise to reduce the level of weapons in the Middle East, ended as a net profit to the Western alliance, fought by young men from Detroit and Glasgow but paid for by Prince Khaled's uncle and king, the “Custodian of the Two Holy Places.” Could two such partners show each other anything more than mercantile respect?
¹⁴⁰

Curiously, the commanders of the two largest Western armies in the Gulf spent a good deal of their memoirs trying to persuade us that they do “respect” the Arabs and the Muslim Middle East. Visiting the Gulf as head of the U.S. Central Command in 1989, Schwarzkopf claimed to admire the Arab way of life, hunting with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in the Emirates, even dressing up in Kuwaiti robes for dinner. His Arab counterparts welcomed him into their palaces and mosques, Schwarzkopf wrote, “now that they knew of my fascination with their culture.”

General Sir Peter de la Billière seemed even more smitten with Arab “culture.” “I liked and respected Arabs and understood their way of life,” he wrote. “I came to appreciate the Arabs well, to appreciate their fine culture.” A few pages later, he is boasting again of “my understanding of Arabs and their way of life.” Yet a good part of de la Billière's previous service in the Middle East had involved hunting down Arabs as an officer in the SAS. In Oman, he says, he failed to “eliminate” or capture the three dissident Arab leaders but succeeded in forcing them into exile. At Wadi Rawdah, the SAS attacked two guerrilla strongholds and “effectively put them out of business.” Oddly, de la Billière does not choose to mention the Iranian embassy siege in London when the SAS—of which he was then director—broke into the building, rescued the civilian captives held there and then proceeded to execute all but one of the Arab hostage-holders.

Perhaps it was necessary, so many months after the Gulf War, to romanticise the relationship between the West and the Arabs, between Christians and Muslims, unconsciously to simplify and reconstruct the reasons why the Western armies embarked on their crusade to save the biggest oil lake in the world and to prevent Saddam from becoming the largest controller of the world's oil. Schwarzkopf, who at least understood the need for America to maintain its relations with the Arab world, stated that one of the war's aims was to “eliminate Iraq's ability to threaten the Arab world.” Millions of Arabs suspected that the war—and the invasion of Iraq twelve years later—was to eliminate Iraq's ability to threaten Israel, which, given the enormous effort to destroy the mobile Iraqi Scud-launchers which were firing at Israel, may not have been far from the truth.
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