The Great War for Civilisation (183 page)

An Australian Special Forces man had his own thoughts on the subject. The Kandahar garden in which we met was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. “This is a secret war,” the Special Forces man told me. “And this is a dirty war. You don't know what is happening.” And of course, we were not supposed to know. In a “war against terror,” journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights.

How many human rights did the mass killers of September 11 allow their victims? You are either with us or against us. Whose side are you on? But the man in the Kandahar garden was worried. He was one of the “coalition allies,” as the Americans liked to call the patsies who have trotted after them into the Afghan midden. “The Americans don't know what to do here now,” he went on. “Even their interrogations went wrong.” Brutally so, it seems. In the early weeks of 2002, the Americans raided two Afghan villages, killed ten policemen belonging to the U.S.-supported government of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating the survivors. American reporters—in a rare show of mouselike courage amid the self-censorship of their usual reporting—quoted the prisoners as saying they had been beaten by U.S. troops. According to Western officials in Kandahar, the U.S. troops “gave the prisoners a thrashing.”

On 17 March U.S. soldiers arrested at least thirty Northern Alliance gunmen at Hauzimated in Kandahar province: according to eighteen of the prisoners, the Americans refused to listen to their explanation that they were allies and—believing they were Taliban members—punched, kicked and kneed their captives before holding them in cages for four days. They then released them with an apology.

Now things had changed. The American forces were leaving the beatings to their Afghan allies, especially members of the so-called Afghan Special Forces, the Washington-supported thugs at the former Khad torture centre in Kabul. “It's the Afghan Special Forces who beat the Pashtun prisoners for information now— not the Americans,” the Australian Special Forces man said. “But the CIA are there during the beatings, so the Americans are culpable, they let it happen.”

This is just how the Americans began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky-clean with advisers, there were some incidents of “termination with extreme prejudice,” after which it was the Vietnamese intelligence boys who did the torture. The same with the Russians. When their soldiers poured across the border in 1979, they quickly left it to their Afghan allies in the Parcham and Khad secret police to carry out the “serious” interrogations. And if this was what the Americans were now up to in Afghanistan, what was happening to their prisoners at Guantanamo? Or, for that matter, at Bagram, the airbase north of Kabul to which all prisoners in Kandahar were now sent for investigation if local interrogators believed their captives had more to say? And what about civilian casualties of the Americans” increasingly promiscuous air raids? If so many hundreds of civilians were dying in these bombing attacks across Afghanistan, how many would die in Iraq if Washington redirected its forces to Mesopotamia?
¹⁹³
Of course, it was possible to take a step back from this frightening corner of America's Afghan adventure. In the aftermath of the Taliban's defeat, humanitarian workers achieved some miracles. UNICEF reported 486 female teachers at work in the five south-western provinces of the country, with 16,674 girls now at school. Only in Uruzgan, where the Taliban were strongest, had not a single female teacher been employed. UN officials could boast that in these same poverty-belt provinces, polio had now been almost eradicated. But the UN was fighting polio before the Taliban collapsed, and the drugs whose production the Taliban banned were now back on the market. The poppy fields were growing in Helmand province again, and in Uruzgan local warlords were trying to avoid government control in order to cultivate their own new poppy production centres. In Kabul, where two government ministers had been murdered in seven months, President Karzai was now protected—at his own request—by American bodyguards. And you didn't have to be a political analyst to know what kind of message this sent to Afghans.

The Australian Special Forces man saw things more globally. “Perhaps the Americans can start withdrawing if there's another war—if they go to war in Iraq. But the U.S. can't handle two wars at the same time. They would be over-stretched.” Prescient words for July 2002. So, it seemed, to end America's “war against terror” in Afghanistan—a war that has left the drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control of the Afghan government, many al-Qaeda men on the loose and little peace in the country—we had to have another war in Iraq.

All that year of 2002, I criss-crossed the Atlantic, reporting from the Middle East, lecturing in the United States, sometimes arriving in New York on a Friday evening only to be filing dispatches from Cairo the following Monday. Perhaps no one was travelling between East and West so often that year, and it was a paradoxical experience, the polemic of one continent about another—the American about the Arab or Middle Eastern—bearing as little relation to reality as the solecisms of Arab Muslims towards the world's sole superpower. Both sides of the world appeared to have retreated into their own illusions and fears. It produced weird results.

In Washington, before dawn on 11 September 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks, I flicked through six American television channels and saw the Twin Towers fall to the ground eighteen times. The few references to the suicide killers who committed the crime made not a single mention of the fact that they were Arabs. The previous week,
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
went to agonising lengths to separate their Middle East coverage from the September 11th commemorations, as if they might be committing some form of sacrilege or be acting in bad taste if they did not. “The challenge for the administration is to offer a coherent and persuasive explanation of how the Iraq danger is connected to the 9/11 attacks” was about as far as the
Washington Post
got in smelling a rat—and this was only dropped into the seventh paragraph of an eight-paragraph editorial. All references to Palestine or illegal Jewish settlements or Israeli occupation of Arab land were simply erased from the public conscience that week. When Hanan Ashrawi, that most humane of Palestinian women, tried to speak at the University of Colorado during the week of September 11th, Jewish groups organised a massive demonstration against her. U.S. television simply did not acknowledge the Palestinian tragedy. But maybe all this no longer mattered. When Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could claim—as he did when asked for proof of Iraq's nuclear potential—that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” we might as well have ended all moral debate. But when Rumsfeld referred to the “so-called occupied territories,” he revealed himself to be a very disreputable man.

Strange events were now going on in the Middle East. Arab military intelligence reported the shifting of massive U.S. arms shipments around the region— not just to Qatar and Kuwait, but to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. American and Israeli military planners and intelligence analysts were said to have met twice in Tel Aviv to discuss the potential outcome of the next Middle East war. The destruction of Saddam and the break-up of Saudi Arabia—a likely scenario if Iraq crumbled, so the “experts” claimed—had long been two Israeli dreams. As the United States discovered during its fruitful period of neutrality between 1939 and 1941, war primes the pumps of the economy. Was that what was going on today—the preparation of a war to refloat the U.S. economy?

Then in one brisk, neat letter to Kofi Annan, Saddam Hussein pulled the rug from right under George W. Bush's feet. At the United Nations, Bush had been playing the unlikely role of the multilateralist, warning the world that Iraq had one last chance—through the UN—to avoid Armageddon. “If the Iraqi regime wishes peace,” he had told us all in the General Assembly, “it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related material.” So now Saddam welcomed the UN arms inspectors. No conditions. Just as Bush had demanded. Saddam would do everything he could to avoid war. Bush, it seemed, was doing everything he could to avoid peace.

No wonder that the United States immediately began to speak of “false hopes.” No wonder, I wrote in
The Independent
, that the Americans were searching desperately for another
casus belli
“in an attempt to make sure that their next war keeps to its timetable.” But for now, the Americans had been stymied. It would take at least twenty-five days to put the UN inspection team together, another sixty for their preliminary assessment, then another sixty days for further inspections. Bush's latest war had been delayed by more than five months. But a careful examination of the Bush UN speech showed that a free inspection of Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction was just one of six conditions which Iraq would have to meet if it “wishes peace.” The other Bush demands included an “end of all support for terrorism.” Did this mean the UN would now be urged to send inspectors to hunt for evidence inside Iraq for Saddam's previous—or current— liaisons with guns-for-hire? Bush had also demanded that Iraq “cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans and others.” Notwithstanding the inclusion of Turkomans—worthy of protection indeed, though no doubt because they sat on very lucrative oil deposits—did this mean that the UN could demand human rights monitors inside Iraq? In reality, such a proposal would be both moral and highly ethical, but America's Arab allies would profoundly hope that such monitors were not also dispatched to Riyadh, Cairo, Amman and other centres of gentle interrogation.

Yet even if Saddam was prepared to accede to all these demands with a sincerity he had not shown in response to other UN resolutions, the Americans had made clear that sanctions would only be lifted—that Iraq's isolation would only end— with “regime change.” For Bush's sudden passion for international adherence to UN Security Council resolutions—an enthusiasm that never, of course, extended to Israel's flouting of UN resolutions of equal importance—was in reality a manoeuvre to provide legitimacy for Washington's planned invasion of Iraq.

Tony Blair's adherence to this cynical policy must remain one of the more mystifying elements in this chapter of Middle East tragedy. The coalescence of Bush's born-again Christianity with Blair's High Church pronouncements—and the unique combination of Blair's own self-righteousness and legal casuistry— was to produce one of the strangest alliances of our times. The hollowness of the British political contribution—symbolised by the Downing Street “dossier” of 24 September 2002—should have made this obvious months before its warning of a “45-minute” WMD attack came to be debated in Parliament and in the later Hutton Report.

I first read this document in Beirut and—as always in the Middle East—its contents appeared quite different to a reader 3,000 kilometres from London than they did to an MP in Westminster or an editor in what used to be called Fleet Street. I found it truly shocking—but not for any 45-minute warnings. Reading it, I wrote, “can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof—if the contents are true—that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction are correct—and I will come to the ‘ifs' and ‘buts' and ‘coulds' later—it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us—for nothing.” In May 1996, as we know, Madeleine Albright had told us that sanctions worked and prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction. Our then Tory government agreed, and Tony Blair toed the line. But when asked by an interviewer if the “price”—the death of half a million children—was worth it, she had replied to the world's astonishment: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

Now we were being told—if Blair was telling us the truth—that the price was
not
worth it. The purchase bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of children wasn't worth a dime. For the Blair “dossier” was telling us that, despite sanctions, Saddam was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction. All that nonsense about dual-use technology, the ban on children's pencils—graphite could have a military use—and our refusal to allow Iraq to import equipment to restore the water-treatment plants that we bombed in the Gulf War, was a sham. This grievous conclusion was the only moral one to be drawn from the sixteen pages that supposedly detailed the chemical, biological and nuclear horrors that the Beast of Baghdad had in store for us. It was difficult, reading the full report, to know whether to laugh or cry. The degree of deceit and duplicity in its production spoke of the trickery that informed the Blair government and its treatment of MPs.

Let us take just one example of the document's dishonesty. On page 45, we were told—in a long chapter about Saddam's human rights abuses—that “on March 1st, 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, riots broke out in the southern city of Basra, spreading quickly to other cities in Shia-dominated southern Iraq. The regime responded by killing thousands.” What's wrong with this paragraph is the lie in the use of the word “riots.” These were not “riots.” They were part of a mass rebellion specifically called for by President Bush Junior's father and by that CIA-RUN radio station in Saudi Arabia. The Shia Muslims of Iraq obeyed Bush Senior's appeal. And were then left to their fate by the Americans and British, who they had been given every reason to believe would come to their aid. No wonder they died in their thousands. But all this was cut out from the Blair “dossier.”