The Great War for Civilisation (136 page)

The real wounds—the tens of thousands of desperately wounded survivors of the Iraqi insurgency, the broken, decimated families of the Shias and Kurds, the even greater number of executed fighters and civilians now entombed beneath the sands of Iraq by Saddam's killers—were not part of Cheney's “healing process.” Their catharsis was to die. They did our bidding. They had served their purpose. They had failed to topple Saddam. This was their fate. But “we” had been “healed.” Bush had called for the overthrow of Saddam and then said he never intended to help the rebels in their struggle. An Associated Press report bluntly outlined the Bush policy in early April. The president, it said, “is betting that Americans are more concerned about getting U.S. troops back from the Gulf than helping Iraqi rebels topple Saddam Hussein.”

But the yellow bunting and the church bells with which we Westerners were enjoined to celebrate the “end” of the 1991 Gulf War were now a mockery. The splintering of the fragile glass upon which the Middle East rests had now stretched 800 kilometres up the Tigris and Euphrates. More human lives—most of them civilians—were being destroyed every day inside Iraq than at any time since Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. “We warned them of this,” a senior Gulf Cooperation Council official told me in Riyadh. “We told the Americans that the liberation of Kuwait might set the region on fire. We told them they might have to stay, even though our people did not want this. But they never, never learn.”

You only had to talk to the Kuwaitis, let alone the Iraqi opposition or the Syrians, that dreadful spring to realise that for them the events in the Gulf represented not an isolated, dramatic moment in their history—bloody yet controllable—but a tragic continuum that began before the break-up of the Ottoman empire and which was now growing more terrible in the mountains of Kurdistan. Historically, no Western involvement in the Arab world has been without its betrayals, although treachery followed more swiftly on this occasion than anyone could have guessed. What was supposed to have started as a noble Western crusade to free Kuwait from aggression had turned into a tragedy of catastrophic proportions. “Future historians,” I wrote in my paper in April 1991, “may well decide that the liberation of Kuwait marked only the first chapter of the Gulf War, the massacre of Shiites and Kurds inside Iraq the second. History itself suggests the West will not be able to avoid involvement in the forthcoming chapters.”

By the first week of April, 2 million Kurdish refugees were clustered along the icy frontiers of Turkey and Iran, up to 12,000 of them dying on the borders. And America, along with its Western allies, now decided that the tragedy—far from being the logical result of their own appeals for an insurrection—was yet another of Saddam's crimes against humanity. Kurdish suffering, and the brutality of Saddam's killer-squads,
did
represent a crime against humanity by the Iraqi regime. But all Western involvement in the Iraqi insurgents' predicament would now be expunged in a welter of humanitarian aid. Guilty consciences would be drowned in meals-ready-to-eat, tents and millions of dollars' worth of aid. And in the weeks to come, as U.S. and British troops deployed in northern Iraq to protect the Kurdish refugees, dropping thousands of tons of blankets and food in hundreds of air-drops—several of which actually killed the recipients when they crashed into the mountains—a new and deeply unpleasant message would be put forth by the West. Come, see what happened to the Kurds. See what Saddam's murderers were capable of. Who could now doubt the moral case for war against Saddam? Here was final proof—amid the refugee camps in the mountains—of Saddam's viciousness. Just as we would dig up the mass graves of the insurgents and their families twelve years later as more “final proof” of Saddam's iniquities—to “prove,” of course, that we were right to have invaded Iraq in 2003—here in 1991 we were displaying an equal body of evidence to display his wickedness. The Shia dead, needless to say, had already been largely forgotten.

History now had to be rewritten to take account of these less than subtle shifts of U.S. policy. “We will not countenance interference in refugee operations,” Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, ponderously warned Saddam on 14 April. Then, in the very same breath, he added, “We are not going to intervene, as we've said before, in a civil war.” This was outrageous. Without anyone challenging these deceitful remarks, Scowcroft turned the insurgency that his own government had called for into a “civil war” between Iraqis. The rebels were now participants in an internal dispute. Those whom we had called upon to overthrow Saddam were taking part in a conflict that now had nothing to do with us. These Iraqis, of course, believed what we had originally told them: that they were trying to overthrow a dictator at our request.

President Bush then proceeded to expand on this new and mendacious narrative of events. In a speech in Alabama the same day, he said that Washington would “not tolerate any interference” in international relief efforts, but then said, “I do not want one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq that's been going on for ages.” Note the semantics here. Saddam must not interfere in the distribution of international relief—but he
wasn't
interfering, or even planning to interfere, in what the Americans were to call “Operation Provide Comfort.” Saddam's helicopters and murder-squads were annihilating the insurgents and their civil populations
before
they could reach the relief centres, machine-gunning and bombing the Kurds as they desperately tried to reach the shelter of the mountains. When they arrived there, they were evidence of Saddam's brutality. But while they were on their way, they were participants in a “civil war”—and therefore unworthy of intervention. Furthermore, they were—before they reached the location of our “international relief efforts”—taking part in a civil war that had been “going on for ages.”

It was a mystery to most Iraqis that they were involved in a civil war in the first place, let alone one that had been going on for so long. True, Saddam's persecution of the Kurds might have been intended to ignite just such a conflict. But civil war was the one form of violence from which Iraq had been historically free. There had never been a civil war in Iraq. And this remained true when, twelve years later, the American and British occupation forces in Iraq claimed that their enemies in the country were trying to foment a civil war—having presumably forgotten that Bush Senior thought one had already occurred in Iraq. All this, it should be recalled, was a pre-run for our refusal to save the lives of the innocent in the Bosnian war in 1992, just a year after the Iraq war was declared to be at an end. In Bosnia, as the Muslims were slaughtered by the Serbs, European and American statesmen repeated the same mantra: that this was a “civil war”—indeed, that this “civil war” had been going on for “ages.”

Maybe the American line troops and the marines understood the truth, along with the aircrews who now found themselves home from Kuwait and turned round within days and sent all the way back to the country they thought they'd finished with. They were there in their thousands, another army, this time an army of conscience—of guilty conscience, I suspected—ordered to save lives rather than to kill. The Shia lives were gone, of course, the last execution pits filled north of Basra, but the Kurdish lives were still there, some of them. The Americans were smart guys. A helo ride was to plug into real small-town America, cassette in my hand as we flew over the making of a new country which one day, if the Kurds weren't betrayed yet again—as I rather thought they might be—would be a nation called Kurdistan. The first break-up of Iraq.

As usual, the Americans wanted to be tourist guides. “OK, Bob, we'll show you some of Iraq.” Warrant Officer Tim Corwin meant exactly what he said. He guided the CH-47 Chinook—“Cyclone-Seven-Five”—off a mountain wall above a 600-metre chasm where the valleys and the great fertile plains of Mesopotamia spread out below us. On the aviation chart, which bounced on Corwin's knee in time to the engines, we were indeed moving deep into Iraq. In reality, we were flying over a country called Kurdistan. Woe betide the Iraqi soldier who fired on us or on the British troops snaking down the mountainsides below us.

Corwin's voice, crackling through the headphones to Chief Warrant Officer “Chuck” Lancaster, told the whole story. “Iraqi half-track on the right. Three Brits beside it. Very pretty valley, this whole place. If you see any bad guys, let me know.” On the end of a rubber-coated radio wire, Sergeant James Sims swung his heavy machine-gun barrel out of the American helicopter's starboard door, traversing the valley walls that raced past us. “No one,” he replied, his eyes scanning the outcrops of rock above him, feet braced against the turbulence that wafted up out of the crevasse. “Ain't no bad guys.”

Outside al-Amadia, there were more “Brits,” Royal Marine berets moving along a road, green flowers against the black tarmac, and a string of Land Rovers. Corwin pressed his radio button. “The Brits are all over the place.” Lancaster nodded and pressed his own button. “I like to see that.” More Land Rovers now on the long straight road to Zakho, and civilian cars piled high with bedding.

On the hilltops, the Iraqi bunkers lay abandoned, the muddy tracks of armour and guns slinking away towards the nearest roads. An Iraqi fortress, complete with gunslits and four stone turrets, drifted past to port, its Iraqi flag in tatters, its doors open to the wind, the last wreckage of Saddam's persecution of the Kurds. This was no longer Iraq. It had become something different, a new creation shaded onto our maps, ever deeper down the rift valleys towards the heat haze over Mosul.

Cyclone-Seven-Five thumped away beneath us as the hills receded. “Sure is
beeeoootiful
country,” crowed Corwin. “This is like home in Arizona.” The mountains to the north blocked the horizon, gashed with snow, a trail of fluffy white clouds clinging to the granite, “trash” in Lancaster's aviation language. The four American army flyers looked at it all intently, back-chatting like Vietnam aircrews, filling the radio lines with complaints and transponder checks and torque calculations. They were humorous, intelligent men who happily mixed politics with avionics. At the back of the helo, Sergeant Charles Nabors sat in silence most of the time. You learned a lot by flying with them and listening to them, the lines crackling, mud huts slipping beneath the hull of Cyclone-Seven-Five, another little womb-bubble in which I could crouch with my cassette recorder and feel safe, with a Cyclopean eye on the world. Far to the west, the Tigris glistened.

CORWIN: Sure I know this is history. I guess this is going to be the state of Kurdistan, whatever they say.

LANCASTER: If we have to stay here more than three months, my humour level will be going down.

CORWIN: I just hope it's not going to be a quagmire like Beirut, Lebanon. I just hope Bush knows what he's doing.

LANCASTER: He'll have to, 'cos I tell you the people won't put up with shit. This is costing a whole bunch of money. We're costing between 2,500 and 3,000 dollars here on this helo every hour in maintenance alone. Moment. Contact provider on 375, I've got a mission up to Five-Delta. Only thing I'm concerned about is the fuel pump in that altitude. Just look at that village. It looks like the Old Testament.

CORWIN: It's just like you read in the Bible. Tarsus is west of here, that's where Paul came from. And Mount Ararat's to the east. Isn't that something? I was in Izmir where they imprisoned Richard the Lionheart. I was fifteen miles from Troy earlier. Just think, Homer, the Odyssey . . . There's so much blood on this ground, it's unbelievable. All in the name of Christianity—all that blood and gore.

LANCASTER: How long do you reckon this quagmire will last? CORWIN: I'll bet you a can of beer not a month and a half—Bitburg Pils. What about the Kurds?

LANCASTER: They don't trust us.

CORWIN: No—rightly so.

LANCASTER: Did we help them out when the rebellion happened? NABORS (at the back of the helicopter): I had a four-year-old kid die in my arms. I guess she had dysentery. She was very dehydrated. We took her on board with all her family for Zakho to try and save her. She began breathing very bad and I held her in my arms, like. All the men in the family knelt beside me on the helo and put their hands on her. They were praying, you see. Her father put his hand on her forehead and prayed and looked away. That's how the Kurds all prayed for her on the Chinook, for the little girl. You see, they knew she was gonna die. Then she just died. She went like that. In my arms.

I walked to the back of the Chinook. Nabors's eyes were filled with tears.

Below us drifted the remains of a medieval—perhaps neolithic—village, grass-covered circles and roads of antiquity in what was once Iraq. They were good men on Cyclone-Seven-Five. They were transporting food into Yekmal camp, high in a Turkish mountain ravine, and Lancaster took us in, cursing the ground control, swearing when he tore refugee tents out of the ground with the wash of his rotors. There were 60,000 people under canvas below us and when Corwin switched off the engines we suddenly heard the sound of 60,000 people talking. When we took off, we were back in our glassed, Olympian world, swooping over pine stands and waterfalls, victorious in flight, safe in our little existence of transponders and torques and oil pressure above Kurdistan. Perhaps it is with this detachment that we create nations.

Certainly, the operation to save lives sometimes bore an uncanny similarity to the opposite. It was the daily mission report that gave you a palpable sense of unease. “This is the twenty-eighth day of Operation Provide Comfort,” it would announce. “As of six a.m. . . . a total of 1,954 missions have air-dropped 8,713 tons of supplies . . . All sorties are being flown by the U.S., the UK, France, Canada, Italy and Germany . . . total coalition forces . . . continue to grow, with over 13,146 military personnel from eight countries now participating . . . ” Where had we heard this language before? Why, only two months earlier, the same literary hand was welcoming us to the twenty-eighth day of Operation Desert Storm. The number of missions and sorties, the number of coalition partners, the strength of military personnel were presented to us then with the same bravado and pride. Then, the F-16s and A-10s delivered ordnance on a target-rich environment. Now the CH-47s delivered rations and blankets on a refugee-rich environment. War-speak had become peace-speak, a unique but almost imperceptible linguistic shift. Only the uniforms had changed: instead of kitty-litter yellow, they wore mountain green.