The Great War for Civilisation (161 page)

She took up painting, watercolours and oils, still life and portraits. Her diary testifies to the difficulties of living with Bill in his old age but she would talk quietly about the life of independence she would lead afterwards. She wanted to travel, to visit Lebanon, to go to Ireland. She saw a lifetime of painting in front of her. But after the onset of Parkinson's, she steadily lost the physical ability to live a dignified life—as surely as she maintained the will to survive. Within four years, she could scarcely speak or walk. So she communicated by pointing with a stick to letters on a piece of cardboard. Then she could no longer point. She insisted on being pushed about the garden of her home in a wheelchair. Then Peggy became too ill to move. Her last attempt to paint ended when she threw her brush onto the floor in frustration. Almost to the end, she believed they would find a cure for Parkinson's—the same “they” who might one day find a cure for mortality.

In her last days, Peggy lost the power to swallow or eat and caught pneumonia. Bibby visited her and told her that she had been “the apple in your mother's eye” and Peggy had managed a smile. When I arrived home, she was desperately trying to cough, apparently drowning in her own lungs, weeping with pain. And as I watched her dying, I remembered the cost of Bill Clinton's latest adventure in the Middle East. In all, the U.S. government spent $100 million in five minutes firing those cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan. How much had it spent on investigating Parkinson's disease? How much, for that matter, had the British government spent?

On 11 September 1998, the day after Peggy died—there was no glimmer of recognition or emotion, Peggy just stopped breathing—I called the Parkinson's Disease Society in London. Each year, they put up between $1.5 and $2 million on research. So did the British government. But in 1997, an official for the society told me, the Medical Research Council stopped funding neurological research. I called New York to talk to one of the top Parkinson's groups in the United States. Around $45 million was spent by the U.S. government on neurological research (not all on Parkinson's), another $10 million by private organisations, just over $3 million by the U.S. Defense Department (for veterans), and pharmaceutical companies spent about $35 million. So we—the West—were spending less on Parkinson's research in a year than we spent in five minutes on weapons.

It was the kind of human folly that would have angered Peggy. And at her flowered funeral, I decided to point this out. I suggested to her friends who came to Barming church that we spent far too much time accepting cruel deaths, uncomplaining when money that might have cured cancer or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's was spent on weapons or military adventures. “Why do we not rage against those who accept the shameful idea that sickness must be ‘incurable,' that our betters know what they are doing when they prefer missiles to medicine?” I asked. If resources had been better spent, I said, Peggy would not have been in that coffin in front of the altar.

All this had an odd effect. You could have heard a flower petal drop when I was speaking. But the rector, a kindly, intelligent man though evidently not from the Church Militant, responded with a prayer, saying he would “commit this anger to God”—which, of course, entirely missed the point. Unless there is a Heavenly Post Office which redirects packages of anger to our presidents and prime ministers, there wasn't much point in bothering the Almighty. It was Peggy's friends I was addressing. Some of them had told me of their own relatives who were dying of supposedly incurable diseases; yet I felt afterwards that I had failed to make them understand as surely as I had the rector.

They talked about Peggy being “at rest” now that she was no longer suffering. Letters arrived that spoke of Peggy's “release”—as if my mother wanted to die. I heard from one old lady about “God's will,” which would suggest, if taken to its logical conclusion, that God was a sadist. If the message of Peggy's life was optimism and joy for others, the manner of her death—courtesy of our society's inverted values—was totally unnecessary. My father, an old-fashioned man, would have condemned my remarks in the church. It was also, I suppose, the first time Osama bin Laden's name had been mentioned in the sanctuary of the Church of England. Peggy might have objected to the vehemence of my words. But she would have wanted me to tell the truth.

She missed September 11, 2001, by three years and a day. Would her love of life, her optimism, have been tarnished by the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? Or would the sense of right and wrong which had provoked her anguished phone call to besieged Beirut in 1982 have surfaced? She had a sense of proportion that was quite lacking in the aftermath of 2001. I think it was because she had lived through the Second World War. She always complained when politicians used parallels with that Golgotha of a struggle. She knew that perhaps 50 million perished in those years, that thousands were slaughtered around the world every day between 1939 and 1945. Hard-hearted though it may be to ask, what are 3,000 dead compared with such a testament of blood? Certainly, Peggy—and, it has to be said, in old age my father too—would curse at the mendacity of our presidents and prime ministers. Peggy had finely tuned political antennae and—in the way that the dead come back to us and talk in our imaginations—I could hear her anger in the years to come, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, just as I could feel her confidence in life. And now that this life was becoming more dangerous—especially to journalists, especially for us—I could remember with ever greater clarity the words I had muttered to myself as Peggy lay dead in bed in the front room of her home. I suppose every child without brothers and sisters says the same thing: I'm next.

I flew back to Beirut that wet September. I had known the Lebanese airline crews for years and I sat as so often behind the pilot's seat. A journalist has a magpie's instinct for the collection of useless facts, a rag-bag of inane details conjured from a thousand flights, visits to a hundred hospitals. The Lebanese pilots were political beasts, mines of gossip and information. They would soak up every story I told them and—by way of return, I suppose—they would try to interest me in their job. They would teach me to read the aircraft instruments, help me to understand the principles of powered flight, the purpose of the engine reverse thrust, the system of communication with ground control. Could it really be this easy to learn to fly?

“I am lucky to be alive,” a local taxi-man said to me when I climbed into his car on the Beirut Corniche four years ago. “And you are also lucky to be alive.” And it was my companion who noted the significance of these words—and then I thought yes, I was lucky, very lucky to be alive. I had travelled so far over those years, I had criss-crossed the Middle East month after month, and by the mid-Nineties I was lecturing across Europe and America, flying to the United States from Beirut, often twice a month. One evening I would be lecturing in Los Angeles, next morning I would be in Paris and twenty-four hours later Abed would be driving me through southern Lebanon. I would wake up on airliners, perspiring, quite forgetting where I was travelling, anxiously peering through the windows. Was it morning or dusk? Had I arranged to call the office from Paris? Should I have filed a report from California last night—“last night” being mid-morning in London? My parents could never have imagined such a life.

I was still Northern Ireland correspondent when I first visited New York in 1975. I was flying to see a girl from Clonmel who worked in Wall Street and I arrived in a snowstorm, bashed my hire-car against the side of a bus on the Verrazano bridge and then—with my date sitting beside me, impatient for dinner—I misread the route to our restaurant and got lost beside the East River. I brushed the ice off a phone booth and dialled the restaurant. They'd keep open for us, the waiter said, just follow the direction of the new World Trade Center towers and I'd drive past the restaurant. It was blizzarding across New York but we watched those two towers far across Manhattan for more than an hour until we drove right up to them and there was the waiter standing in the snow with an umbrella.

The United States did not seem so aggressive then. The British were angry that the IRA could raise funds in America—since these were the years before the “war on terror,” the RAF did not choose to take the conflict to the enemy and bomb Boston—and the United Nations seemed able to handle “peace” in the aftermath of the 1973 Middle East war. I had visited pre–civil war Beirut on holiday from Belfast and noticed that there were too many Lebanese soldiers in the streets, that the Palestinians lived, armed and resentful, in the slums of Lebanon's refugee camps. But I was too involved then with the conflict in Britain's own dependency of Northern Ireland to comprehend the fires that were being lit so far away.

Sometimes the beauty of the sea off Beirut would discourage me from travelling. I would be due to leave on a 6 p.m. flight for Jordan but then, halfway through the afternoon, seduced by the sun and the bright green of the trees against the waves, I would call Ahmed Shebaro, my travel agent, and plead with him to find an early morning flight next day. And so I would sleep early and wake to the cooing of doves in the palms and then head off to that little sandpit that Winston Churchill created for the Hashemites, whose ruling family was still represented by the man we called the “PLK,” the Plucky Little King.

Dinner with the PLK. That's how the news would go the rounds of the Middle East press corps. Informal, the royal court would insist. Off the record, we would assume. And when we turned up for dinner at the palace—this was in September 1993—and saw the candlelit table, more candles nestling amid the bookshelves, the
mezze
laid out along the flower-smothered marble table, it seemed that informality meant confidential. So when King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan said “on the record,” the notebooks fluttered like doves into our laps, the pocket cassette recorders clacking onto the marble table top. If invited, the king might visit Arafat in Jericho. The Israeli government was “courageous and far-sighted” in recognising the PLO. The world should support this historic initiative. It was “a last chance.”

How often had we heard those words “last chance”? Camp David had been a “last chance.” Now the Arafat–Rabin accord was a last chance. And it was inevitable that an American reporter should enquire after the king's health. Of course, he told us, he had returned from the United States minus one kidney. “But the last check-up did not show any trace of cancer.” There would be a check-up every six months. “I'm trying to exercise as much as I can—and I'm still trying to give up smoking.” And we all looked at the packet of Marlboro Lights that appeared in the king's left hand at the end of the meal. Not a frail man, but the PLK was aware of his mortality, an elder statesman now with nothing to lose by speaking his mind in public. Though when the lady from the
Washington Post
dared to question his right to postpone elections, he quoted the Jordanian constitution—and the king's prerogatives—in a faintly irritated way. Not a man to be crossed, one thought, not a man to brook opposition. But it was often difficult to fault the PLK. He promised equality for those Palestinians in Jordan who chose to remain Jordanians after Arafat's self-autonomy elections. And after acknowledging in Rabat back in 1974 that the PLO was the sole representative of the Palestinian people, he remained the only Middle East leader in half a century to formally relinquish his claim to Arab lands rather than demand more.

We sat round the table and listened to all this, the half-American Queen Noor supervising the pourers of orange juice and the purveyors of spiced chicken and fruit, we scribes almost too respectful to raise, Banquo-like, the ghost of Saddam Hussein. But he had to appear at the feast. What, we asked the king, would be Saddam's role in a Middle East peace? And out it tumbled. Jordan had suffered for its humanitarian concern for the Iraqi people during the 1991 Gulf War. Aqaba, Jordan's only artery to the rest of the world, was moving towards desuetude. “It's no secret that I've not seen eye-to-eye with the Iraqi leadership for a very long period of time, since before the war . . . my whole concern was . . . for every country in this region.” Jordan had tried and failed to persuade the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait. But had we read the report by UNICEF that by the end of 1993, a million Iraqi children would die as a result of UN sanctions? Yes, “in a context of peace and if Iraq can pull itself together—a democratic, pluralist Iraq, respecting human rights—the country has a tremendous part to play.” That seemed to exclude Saddam, although the king did not say so. And the PLK talked about democracy, that unique phenomenon which he claimed could save the Middle East from extremism.

Were we taken in by this? The king may not have wanted to run his country without a parliament, as he told us, but Jordan was not exactly a Western-style democracy. “More democracy, more participation, more human rights,” he said at one point. What did this mean? He hoped, he said, to live to see Jerusalem again. The candlelight gleamed off the king's balding head. He hoped nothing would happen to “Chairman Arafat.” Mortality had made its appearance at the dinner table. King Hussein had just over five more years to live.

The PLK was a tough man and his refusal to oppose Saddam Hussein after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait kept the Jordanians and their half population of Palestinians loyal. He had the disarming—and disconcerting—habit of calling everyone “Sir,” which must have been a hangover from his days at Sandhurst, but which led us journalists into the trap of thinking that he felt respect for his interlocutors. He had been damned by the usual American media for not supporting America's war against Saddam; newspaper readers were then forced to make their way through endless analyses of the king's likely fate. Was this the end of the Hashemites? Would Jordan cease to exist? The same outcome had already been predicted for Arafat. Was this the end of the PLO? But of course, the same international isolation that made Arafat weak enough to make peace with Israel also made King Hussein friendless enough to make peace with Israel.