The Great War for Civilisation (146 page)

According to the Kuwaiti authorities, Iraqi intelligence ordered the defendants to kill Mr. Bush in a plot that was uncovered by the Kuwaiti security services just a day before the former president arrived in the country. One of the defendants was said to have been found in possession of a car loaded with 180 pounds of explosives, while al-Ghazali was accused of planning to assassinate Bush with a belt-bomb strapped to his waist. However, he later retracted his confession, while others in the original trial claimed they had been beaten into making false confessions or had crossed the border on a smuggling expedition.

And although the earlier court had sentenced all of the men—six to death, the rest to prison terms—there was a host of reasons why Kuwaiti and foreign lawyers should have doubted the fairness of this particular trial. There had been plea retraction, other evidence of beatings by the security police, a scandalous lack of pre-trial access to the defendants by local lawyers and, most extraordinary of all, of course, a missile attack on Baghdad—based on the defendants' guilt but staged before their conviction. It was little wonder that Najib al-Wougayan, the small and persistent lawyer for the only Kuwaiti condemned to death, Badr al-Shaamari, claimed that the Clinton attack prejudiced the fairness of his client's trial.

“Clinton's missile attack on Baghdad placed the hearing in a political context,” he said. “Before the trial finished, Clinton said that he had evidence that Iraq was behind the bomb attack on Bush. How could he do this before the trial had been concluded? There are defendants who have admitted their guilt and I do not quarrel with this—they made confessions. But Badr did not. He is innocent and the Americans condemned him.” In fact, the White House had said that it had “certain proof” of Iraqi guilt in the plot, a claim that Amnesty International would later condemn as undermining the defendants' presumption of innocence. Eight years later, George Bush's son, during a speech intended to garner support for his invasion of Iraq, would recall how Saddam “tried to kill my dad.”

The explanation that the men were involved in routine smuggling rather than political assassination was given further credibility when Salim al-Shaamari, the brother of the accused Kuwaiti, began giggling during a court appearance after being asked by the judge why his face appeared familiar. He replied that he had been imprisoned on fifteen previous occasions for smuggling whisky into Kuwait. Further doubt was cast on the court's fairness when a public prosecutor referred to the accused as “this rotten group of defendants.”

For all this, Leila Attar died.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Plague

There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done. He has attempted (as I may call it) to poison the wells.

—John Henry, Cardinal Newman,
Apologia pro Vita Sua,
1864

IN OCTOBER 1994, we had another “Crisis in the Gulf,” as CNN liked to bill each would-be re-invasion of Kuwait. This time, according to the Pentagon, Saddam had “massed” 60,000 troops in southern Iraq, along with 900 tanks and even more armoured vehicles. None of the journalists sent off to report this latest drama apparently remembered how confidently they had described the routing of the Iraqi army in 1991, how Saddam's soldiers had been in “disarray,” his Republican Guards “decimated” by U.S. bombing, his logistics “annihilated.” But after being assured by the world's leaders that Saddam had been totally defeated, his “decimated” Republican Guard divisions were now supposedly returning to haunt the battlefields again. And those television pundits and reporters for the satellite channels were bombarding Middle East capitals with visa requests and booking themselves on to any aircraft that could reach the Gulf faster than President Clinton's carrier group. “Were they manipulating us or falling into the trap of believing their own reports?” I asked in my paper.

A Kuwaiti journalist probably got it right when he pointed out that Saddam was trying to force the UN to lift sanctions—as well as redeploy his own Iraqi army after a rumoured coup attempt in Baghdad—while Clinton wanted to distract attention from his indolence in Bosnia before congressional elections. But our preprogrammed response seemed to be unstoppable.
¹⁵⁷
As usual, no one bothered to assess the civilian casualties that would follow yet another strike on Iraq.

And sure enough, journalists who were transported up to Kuwait's border with Iraq found it hard to meet the demands of their editors. Many of us could discover only a solitary Kuwaiti tank in the desert, a vehicle that was subsequently used to tow our own press bus out of the sand. On the other side of the border, there were equally slim pickings. United Nations officers disclosed that their reconnaissance aircraft, whose flight path gave them a view over 20 kilometres north of the frontier, had not observed a single Iraqi tank or personnel carrier. The few Iraqi policemen beyond the border—now abiding by the line of the new border—could hardly be called aggressive; several of them, it transpired, regularly begged for food from the UN, pleading for clothes to replace their ragged uniforms. “We're not supposed to give them anything,” a UN officer admitted. “But it's hard to turn someone away when they're hungry.”

Yet by 12 October there were reported to be 39,783 U.S. troops back in the Gulf, along with 659 aircraft and 28 ships. The RAF was flying a Hercules C-130 into Kuwait every two hours through the night, some of them carrying 155-mm artillery, and the first elements of 45 Royal Marine Commando had just walked off a Tristar. We had seen it all before: the sultry night, the C-130s' propellers still racing on the tarmac, the accents of Sheffield and Oxford and Liverpool under the Gulf skies. Instead of “Operation Granby”—the 1990 British deployment to the Gulf—we now had Operation Driver, but the soldiers all carried the same little nuclear–chemical–biological warfare kits.

And when the U.S. 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived to start live-fire training exercises, which location did they choose? The Mutla Ridge, of course. Many of the marines knew very well that this was the top of the “highway of death” where Iraq's fleeing convoys had been roasted out of existence just over three and a half years earlier. The men of the 15th MEU, 130 of them, weighed down with heavy machine guns and anti-armour weapons, set up their tripods and blasted thousands of rounds of ammunition into the dunes just below the hill where the anonymous mass graves still lay beneath the sand. “A lot of our marines were here at the time and some of the men here know what happened,” Lieutenant Colonel Rick Barry said, enthusiastically adding that marine units helped to trap the retreating Iraqi convoys in 1991. In the new, ever more contagious language of marine-speak, Colonel Barry's men talked of their amphibious helicopter-borne landings as an “evolution”—note the positive, progressive nature of that word—as a “sustainment exercise,” an “adventure” and, of course, a “photo-opportunity.”

The television camera crews scrummed around the marines, cursing and pushing each other—though taking care to avoid any frames that showed that the marine “evolution” was a journalistic circus. And so the machine-gun cartridges skipped across the concrete revetments below Mutla Ridge as the marines charged through smoke grenades across the sand, whooping and shrieking at Saddam's imaginary legions. Captain Stephen Sullivan, eyes turning into cracks against the piercing midday sun, tried to put it into a historical perspective which turned into a weird combination of morality and more marine-speak.

“Since this country was basically raped and plundered just a couple [
sic
] of years ago,” he said, “and there's a massive troop build-up on the border, that is a distinctive threat to this country and all the nations that represented the [allied] coalition. We are a forward deployed presence that's routine. We think this yields stability with power projection to show our presence . . .” But did he not ask himself why his marine unit's “power projection” didn't get focused on Bosnia, where rape was now on a somewhat larger scale than it had been in Kuwait? Captain Sullivan didn't hesitate for a moment. Bosnia came under the U.S. Mediterranean Command and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit was not tasked to cover the Mediterranean area. And that was that.

There were times, reporting all this, when one wondered if insanity was not an advantage in reporting the Middle East. A day after the marines deployed at Mutla Ridge, U.S. defence secretary William Perry, a chunky, short figure in a pale brown uniform, marched across the tarmac at Kuwait airport to threaten Saddam with war if he did not withdraw his soldiers from southern Iraq. Then, just half an hour later, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, tall and dapper in a pale blue suit and tie, walked into the airport's VIP lounge and threatened peace. Whom were we to believe? Mr. Perry, who bellowed that further American troop reinforcements would be sent to the Gulf, or Mr. Kozyrev, who said he'd just been told by Saddam that he would at last recognise the new frontiers of Kuwait? “I have brought good news to the people of Kuwait and to the whole Middle East,” Kozyrev whispered into the microphone. “Good news that this day the independence of Kuwait is reinforced.”

Perhaps it was as well that the Cold War was over. Back in the days of Jimmy Carter, the U.S. defence secretary would have been urging peace while Leonid Brezhnev's men would have been warning of war if America bombed Iraq. To add to this transformation came the assertion from Senator John H. Warner, the former chief of the U.S. Navy who was standing next to Perry. “The lessons learned from the Gulf War,” he said, “really made it possible for this swift deterrence to be put in place.” The real lesson of the Gulf War for more conservative Americans, of course, was that if Saddam Hussein's regime had been toppled at the time, it wouldn't be necessary to send all this “deterrence” back to the Middle East now.

The growing regularity of attacks on Iraq did more than dull the senses of journalists; it gave a continuity to their story, so when the United States and Britain, the sole surviving allies of the 1991 war—the French had wisely pulled out of the “no-fly” zone bombardments—attacked Iraqi “military positions” over the next decade, their actions became routine, part of a pattern, a habit which, as the years went by, ceased to be a “news story” at all. The southern “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Shiites from Saddam, even though the Shiite insurgents of 1991 were long in their mass graves or still hiding in their refugee camps over the border in Iran. In the north, the “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Kurds from similar aggression; but the “safe haven” created by the allies of 1991 at least still existed there, even if it was not enough to save the Kurds of Irbil when Saddam sent his tanks into the city to break up a CIA-run operation in 1996.

Nor did it save the Kurds from the Turks, as John Pilger was to reveal. In March 2001, RAF pilots flying out of the Turkish airbase at Batman complained that, far from protecting the Kurds, they were frequently ordered to return to their airfields to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the very people they were supposed to be protecting. British pilots returning to patrol the skies over northern Iraq— having been ordered to turn off their radar so they could not identify the Turkish targets—would see the devastation in Kurdish villages after the Turkish raids. U.S. pilots, also ordered back to base, would pass American-made “Turkish F-14s and F-16s inbound, loaded to the gills with munitions,” one pilot was to recall. “Then they'd come out half an hour later with their munitions expended.” On returning to their mission, the Americans would see “burning villages, lots of smoke and fire.” In 1995 and 1997, up to 50,000 Turkish troops with tanks, fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships attacked alleged Kurdistan Workers' Party bases in the “safe haven.”

Despite much obfuscation by the Americans and the British—to the effect that the “no-fly” zones were part of, or supported by, UN Security Council Resolution 688—they had no UN legitimacy, nor were the zones ever discussed or approved by the United Nations. But they were to become the excuse for a continuing air war against Iraq, undeclared and largely unreported by the journalists who were so keen to focus on Saddam's own provocations, especially when they involved his refusal to help—or his deliberate misleading of—the UNSCOM arms inspectors. The UN team had entered Iraq immediately after the 1991 ceasefire and was engaged in seeking out and destroying the chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons that Saddam had long sought and in some cases acquired. This was the same Saddam who had used gas against the Kurds of Halabja and hundreds of other villages—his equally ruthless gassing of the Iranian army was recalled less emotionally, if at all, in the West—and he had to be “defanged.” Within three years, the inspectors had achieved considerable success.

Their operation, which was eventually to be compromised by the Americans themselves, has been catalogued in detail many times; but it is fascinating to compare these efforts with later attempts by the U.S. and British administrations to send UN inspectors back into Iraq in 2002—and then to persuade the world that Saddam was continuing to produce and hide weapons of mass destruction. By the end of April 1992, the al-Atheer nuclear weapons establishment in Iraq had been destroyed and the explosives-testing bunker filled with concrete, a process in which a thousand Iraqi workers were forced to help. In 1994, Rolf Ekeus, the head of UNSCOM, reported that most of the information demanded of the Iraqis had been given and that weapons-monitoring systems were being set up. While Iraq was still trying to avoid handing material to the UN inspectors, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft—borrowed from the United States—had flown 201 missions over Iraq and UN helicopters had flown 273 missions to 395 suspected sites.

Iraq claimed all the while that the inspectors were working not for the UN but for the CIA; UNSCOM, according to Saddam, was “an advertising agency” for Washington. He could hardly be blamed for this contention. The CIA had asked Congress for $12 million for covert operations in Iraq and the Iraqi authorities feared that the UN's information would be used not just for further inspections but for missile-targeting next time the U.S. president wanted to fire cruise missiles at Baghdad. In May 1995, Ekeus expressed concern about 17 tons of missing material that could be used to manufacture biological weapons, but in August 1995, Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel Hassan and Lieutenant Colonel Saddam Kamel Hassan, two sons-in-law of Saddam Hussein, defected to Jordan, where they told UN inspectors—though this was not divulged until 2003—that all weapons of mass-destruction programmes in Iraq had been abandoned.

Yet the Americans never accepted the UN's assurances. While Saddam's
mukhabarat
did frequently try to impede the work of the inspectors—UN inspector Scott Ritter's Hollywood appearances at the most sensitive of Saddam's security headquarters were proof enough of that—the U.S. government was constantly raising “evidence” from Iraqi defectors that nuclear production continued, that the Iraqis were burying biological bombs in the desert, that Saddam's refusal to comply with all requests for information on chemical materials was proof of his dishonesty. Iraqi claims that many archives on such weapons had been destroyed in the 1991 uprising were dismissed—not always without reason—as obfuscation. But as the UN hunt for Iraq's libraries of scientific research continued, Saddam came to the conclusion that the UN was now spying—on behalf of Iraq's enemies—into the country's military future as well as its past.

Ritter's experiences as a U.S. Marine Corps officer who had dismissed Schwarzkopf's claims about Scud missile destruction while serving in Riyadh during the 1991 war were important. Even after promising that it had no interest in germ warfare in its first submission to the UN, Iraq had 90 gallons of a microorganism that causes gas gangrene, more than 2,000 gallons of anthrax, 5,125 gallons of botulinum toxin (which paralyses and strangles its victims) and 2.7 gallons of the toxin ricin. Iraq reluctantly admitted that it had produced VX nerve gas and up to 150 tons of sarin gas.

Ritter's own dramatic, successful and sometimes farcical confrontations with Saddam's security men provide a chilling portrait of the regime, as well as a remarkable insight into the mind of an American weapons inspector.
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“The Iraqis, they're like sharks,” he once famously remarked. “Fear is like blood. They smell it and they'll come in at you. Once that game of intimidation starts, you're never going to win . . . I am the alpha dog. I'm going in tail held high. If they growl at me, I'm gonna jump on 'em . . . When we go to a site, they're gonna know we're there, we're gonna raise our tails and we're gonna spray urine all over their walls .