The Great War for Civilisation (200 page)

At the Olympic sports offices, run by Uday Hussein, they did the same, one old man staggering from the building with a massive portrait of Saddam which he proceeded to attack with his fists, another tottering out of the building bearing a vast ornamental Chinese pot. True, these were regime targets. But many of the crowds went for shops, smashing their way into furniture stores and professional offices. They came with trucks and pick-ups and trailers pulled by scruffy, underfed donkeys to carry their loot away. I saw a boy making off with an X-ray machine, a woman with a dentist's chair. At the Ministry of Oil, the minister's black Mercedes limousine was discovered by the looters. Unable to find the keys, they tore the car apart, ripping off its doors, tyres and seats, leaving just the carcass and chassis in front of the huge front entrance. At the Palestine Hotel, they smashed Saddam's portrait on the lobby floor and set light to the hoarding of the same wretched man over the front door. They cried
Allahu
akbar
. . . And there was a message there, too, for the watching Marines if they had understood it.

And so last night, as the explosion of tank shells still crashed over the city, Baghdad lay at the feet of a new master. They have come and gone in the city's history, Abbasids and Ummayads and Mongols and Turks and British and now the Americans. The United States embassy reopened yesterday and soon, no doubt, when the Iraqis have learned to whom they must now be obedient friends, President Bush will come here and there will be new “friends” of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who “liberated” them, and—equally no doubt—relations with Israel and a real Israeli embassy in Baghdad.

But winning a war is one thing. Succeeding in the ideological and economic project that lies behind this whole war is quite another. The “real” story for America's mastery over the Arab World starts now.

If 9 April was the day of “liberation,” 10 April was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and threw the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag—flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section—as a mob of middle-aged men, chadored women and screaming children rifled through the consul's office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later. At the headquarters of UNICEF, which had been trying to save the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing brand-new photocopiers on top of one another down the stairs and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition across the floors.

The Americans might have thought they had “liberated” Baghdad after the most stage-managed photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima, but the tens of thousands of thieves—they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty—seemed to have a different idea of what “liberation” meant. It also represented a serious breach of the Geneva Conventions. As the occupying power, the United States was responsible for protecting embassies and UN offices in their area of control, but their troops drove past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the front gate. It was a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania which American troops simply ignored. At one intersection of the city, I saw U.S. Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters— two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators— crammed the highway beneath them. Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth visiting because “we've already taken everything.”

Understandably, the poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam's regime who impoverished and destroyed their lives—sometimes quite literally—for more than two decades. I watched whole families search through the Tigris bank home of Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former interior minister, of a former defence minister, of Saadoun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security advisers, of Ali Hassan al-Majid—“Chemical” Ali— and of Abed Hmoud, Saddam's private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and donkey-drawn carts to make off with the contents of these massive villas.

It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath party members obviously cultivated: cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drink trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy that it took three muscular thieves to carry them, standard lamps concealed inside brass palm trees, inlaid wooden tables, mother-of-pearl chests of drawers and huge American fridges, so many fridges for so much booze to be drunk by so many of Saddam's acolytes. Outside the gutted home of one former interior minister, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

City buses passed me driven by leering young men while trucks backed up to living-room windows to load furnishings directly from the rooms. On the Saddam Bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed that he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still lay dead at the wheel. But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children were employed to unscrew door hinges and—in the UN offices—to remove light fittings. One stood on the ambassador's desk to take a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.

On the other side of the Saddam Bridge, an even more surreal sight could be observed. A truck loaded down with chairs but with two white hunting dogs—the property of Saddam's son Qusay—tethered by two white ropes, galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I even caught a glimpse of four of Saddam's horses—including the white stallion he used in presidential portraits—being loaded onto a trailer. Every government ministry in the city had now been denuded of its files, computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing the “liberation” of this property. One could hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen, but how was the government of America's so-called “New Iraq” supposed to operate now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted?

And what was one to make of the scene on the Hilla road, where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate armed attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks—and doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown were just 200 metres from a U.S. Marine checkpoint.

And already America's army of “liberation” was beginning to look like an army of occupation. The previous morning I had watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Doura, each man ordered by U.S. soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers—in front of other civilians, including women—to prove that they were not suicide bombers. Following a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt—then shot and killed a man who had walked onto his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in his vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place. In the suburb of Doura, the bodies of Iraqi civilians—many of them killed by U.S. troops in a clash with Iraqi forces earlier in the week—still lay rotting in their smouldering cars.

And this was just Day 2 of the “liberation” of Baghdad.

AND SO TO DOURA. Something terrible—how many times have I written those words—happened there, on Highway 8, in the last hours of the “liberation” of Baghdad. Some say a hundred civilians died there. Others believe that only forty or fifty men and women and children were cut to pieces by American tank fire when members of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division's Task Force 315 were ambushed by the Republican Guard. Many of their corpses lie rotting in their incinerated cars, a young woman, burned naked, slumped face-down over the rear seat on the Hilla flyover bridge next to half of a male corpse which is hanging out of the driver's door. Blankets cover a pile of dead civilian bodies, including that of a cremated child, a few metres away. A red car, shot in half by an American tank shell, lies on its side with the lower half of a human leg, still in a black shoe, beside the left front wheel.

No one disputes that the American troops were ambushed here—nor that the battle only ended thirty-six hours later. On the flyover I found a dead Iraqi Republican Guard in uniform, his blood drained into the gutter, one foot over the other, shot in the head. A hundred metres away lay a car with an elderly civilian man dead under the chassis. Two fuel trucks—one of them still burning—lay in a field. A burned-out passenger bus stood beside the main motorway. Hundreds of Iraqis stared at the corpses in horror, most of them holding handkerchiefs to their faces and swatting the flies that buzzed between the living and the dead.

Captain Dan Hubbard, commanding the 315th's Bravo Company whose ten tanks and four Bradley Fighting Vehicles hold the flyover bridge, described to me how his men came under fire “from 360 degrees” with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 rifles at 7 a.m. on the morning of 6 April when civilian traffic was moving along the motorway. “We're here to fight the Iraqi regime, not the civilians,” he said. “There were cars on the road when we were ambushed and we fired over their heads two or three times to get them to stop. Ninety per cent of the vehicles turned away after a warning shot.” And here the captain paused for a moment. “A lot of things go on in people's heads at such times,” he said. “A lot of people speed up . . . I had to protect my men. We tried our very best to minimise any kind of injuries and death to civilians . . . I have got to protect my soldiers because we don't know if it's a carload of explosives or RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. We'll have the cars removed. The bodies will be taken care of.”

Captain Hubbard was a thoughtful man, a thirty-four-year-old from Tennessee who named his tank “Rhonda Denise” after his wife who is “the toughest woman I've ever met”—though what she would make of the civilian horror on Highway 8 doesn't bear thinking about. Hubbard's M1A1 Abrams tank took five direct hits from RPGs—one on the engine—and it was his tank that opened fire on a motorcycle carrying two soldiers at dusk on the first day of the fighting. “In the morning, I went to look at the bodies. There was the Republican Guard whom you saw, who was hit in the head and chest. But his friend was wounded and still alive—he had survived the whole night on the flyover—so I carried him back to our tank, placed him on top and gave him medical aid. Then we got him to our medics and he survived.” Clearly the Iraqi Republican Guard also have a responsibility for this carnage, since they started their ambush, knowing full well that civilians would be on the motorway.

On the front of the incinerated bus, for example, I found part of a Kalashnikov rifle, its wooden butt in cinders but its ammunition clip still intact. There were crude slit trenches beneath the flyover and the wreckage of a military truck. In all, two American soldiers were killed in the battle and up to thirty wounded. Special Forces were involved in the shooting and six U.S. vehicles destroyed, including two tanks. Captain Hubbard said he had been fired at from a row of civilian houses beside the road and had shot a tank round on to one of the roofs. Its impact was clearly visible.

Many families had come to find their dead relatives and bury them, but I counted at least sixteen civilian bodies—and parts of bodies—still on the highway, several of them women. And of course, this killing field raised a now familiar question. Americans fired tank shells at civilian motorists. Still their bodies lay mouldering beside the road—along with the dead soldier—and still no one had buried them. Sure, the Americans tried not to kill civilians. But all would have been alive today had President Bush not ordered his army to invade their country.
²⁰³

There would be no inquiry. Nor would there be any inquiry into any of the dreadful events that occurred during the
Gone With the Wind
epic of looting and anarchy with which the Iraqi population chose to celebrate our gift to them of “liberation” and “democracy.” It started in Basra, with our own shameful British response to the orgy of theft that took hold of the city. The British defence minister, Geoffrey Hoon, made some especially childish remarks about this disgraceful state of affairs, suggesting in the House of Commons that the people of Basra were merely “liberating”—that word again—their property from the Baath party. And the British army enthusiastically endorsed this nonsense. Even as tape of the pillage in Basra was being beamed around the world, there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards cheerfully telling the BBC that “it's absolutely not my business to get in the way.” But of course it
was
Colonel Blackman's business. Pillage merits a specific prevention clause in the Geneva Conventions, just as it did in the 1907 Hague Convention upon which the Geneva delegates based their “rules of war.” “Pillage is prohibited,” the 1949 Geneva Conventions say, and Colonel Blackman and Mr. Hoon should have glanced at
Crimes of War
, published in 2002 in conjunction with the London City University Journalism Department, to understand what this means.