The Great War for Civilisation (215 page)

60
The most comprehensive account of North's life and career, though it makes some naive errors about the Middle East and adopts a pro-Israeli view of the region, is Ben Bradlee Junior's
Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North
(Grafton Books, London, 1988).

61
And not just because more Western nations were taking Iraq's side in the war. At least 317 Iranians had been killed during the annual
haj
at Mecca on 31 July 1987, shot down—so Iran claimed—by Saudi police. Initial reports suggested that the pilgrims were battered and crushed in a stampede through the narrow, oppressive streets near the great mosque as an Iranian political demonstration became fused with religious emotion and anger at the presence of black-uniformed Saudi security police. In 1986, the Saudis said they had discovered explosives in the bags of 113 male and female Iranian pilgrims, but they had received a promise from President Ali Khamenei that this would not be repeated in 1987.

62
A measure of the Iranian victory may be gained from the number of senior officers captured in the attack. Among them were Col. Yassir al-Soufi, commander of the 94th Infantry Brigade, Lt. Col. Mohamed Reza Jaffar Abbas of the 7th Corps' Rangers Special Forces, Staff Lt. Col. Walid Alwan Hamadi, second-in-command of the 95th Infantry Brigade, Lt. Col. Madjid al-Obeydi, second-in-command of the 20th Artillery regiment, Lt. Col. Selim Hammoud Arabi, commander of the 16th Artillery Regiment and Lt. Col. Jaber Hassan al-Amari, commander of the 3rd Infantry battalion, 19th Brigade. From their names, at least three of these officers were Shia Muslims.

63
A captured pilot from the Iraqi 49th Air Force squadron at Nasiriyah, Abdul Ali Mohamed Fahd, said that Iran's air defences had improved significantly over the previous eleven months and forced Iraqi bombers to fly at much higher altitudes. His MiG-23 was apparently shot down by one of Oliver North's Hawk missiles. The same pilot also claimed that Soviet, French and Indian technicians were advising the Iraqi squadrons at Nasiriyah and that the Iraqis often used a Kuwaiti airbase to refuel during their bombing missions against Iranian oil tankers.

64
The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, had initially guaranteed their authenticity. I was passing by the foreign desk in London en route back to Beirut when the Reuters “bulletin” bell began to ping in the wire room and Ivan Barnes seized the copy. “Ah-ha!” he bellowed. “The diaries are forgeries!” The West German government, as it then was, stated that a forensic analysis confirmed the documents were postwar.

“Why don't you go and tell Charlie?” Ivan suggested. “I think Murdoch's with him at the moment.” Barnes, who like me had always suspected the diaries were false, sat back with a wolfish smile on his face. “Let me know how they react,” he said. I padded round to the editor's office and there was Charles Douglas-Home behind his desk and, on a sofa to his right, Rupert Murdoch. “Well?” Charlie asked. We had all been expecting a statement from the German government that morning. “They say they're forgeries, Charlie,” I said, looking at the editor and pretending to ignore the owner of the newspaper. Charlie looked at his boss and so did I. “Well, there you go,” Murdoch giggled after scarcely a moment of reflection. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” That, I tell Grigg, also pretty much sums up American policy in the Middle East.

65
Storm Center: The USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655
, co-authored by Rogers and his wife, Sharon, and published by the Naval Institute Press at Annapolis, was later the subject of fierce debate among other U.S. naval officers, including the commander of the USS Sides.

66
The
Vincennes
was named after the south-western Indiana city whose French-built fort was captured by American forces under George Rogers Clark in 1779. The ill-fated
Stark
bore the name of General John Stark, who fought at Bunker Hill in 1775.

67
“Monsieur Gayant, seigneur de Cantin, nommé Jehan Gelon, délivra au IXe siècle la Ville de Douai assiégée par les Northmans” (Gayant, Lord of Cantin, who was called Jehan Gelon, freed the City of Douai which was under siege by the Norsemen in the ninth century). Bill, who always carried a small French dictionary with him as a soldier, wrote sadly on the back of the card: “Don't know what this means.”

68
The politics of partition necessitate some statistics here. The 36th (Ulster) Division were almost all Protestants from the nine northernmost counties of Ireland—six of them now constituting Northern Ireland—who would have had no sympathy with the 1916 Dublin Rising. Their appalling casualties of 32,186 killed, wounded and missing were inflicted on the Somme and at Ypres. The 10th and 16th Irish Divisions, most of whom were Irish Catholics—many born in Britain—fought in Gaza and Palestine as well as the Somme and Flanders. Together, they lost 37,761 killed, wounded and missing. In all, 35,000 Irishmen are estimated to have been killed in the 1914–18 war.

69
After I first wrote about my father's billets in Louvencourt in
The Independent
, I received a letter from a reader who said she now owned the château. She was British and told me that many of the officers had carved their names on the table and walls in the basement. Bill's name, of course, was not among them.

70
The Armenians, descended from ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD 301, and had to defend their faith against the Persians, who were Zoroastrian before becoming Muslim, and then the Arabs. The Turks arrived from central Asia in the eleventh century. Armenia and Greece were both Christian nations within the Ottoman empire.

71
When Enver held the city of Edirne during the calamitous Balkan wars, thousands of babies were named after the future mass murderer; Enver Hoxha, the mad dictator of Albania, was one, Anwar Sadat, the sane dictator of Egypt, another.

72
The powerful Anglo-Armenian Association lobby group had been founded by Lord Bryce in 1890 and maintained constant pressure on the British government to ensure equal rights for Armenians within the Ottoman empire. A special supplement to the
Anglo-Armenian Gazette
of April 1895, in the possession of the author, contains a harrowing account of the massacre of Armenians at Sasun, a tub-thumping message of support from Lord Gladstone—“mere words, coming from the Turk, are not worth the breath spent in uttering them”—and a demand for a European-officered gendarmerie to protect “Armenian Christians.” Their religion, rather than their minority status in the empire, was clearly the spur to British sentiment.

73
At a conference in Beirut in 2001, Professor Wolfgang Wippermann of the Free University of Berlin introduced evidence that many German officers witnessed the Armenian massacres without intervening or helping the victims.

74
Strangely enough, the French national airline Air France had no qualms about discussing the Armenian bloodbath. In 1999, its own onboard airline magazine ran an article about a photographic exhibition of the mass killings, referring to “the genocide, still denied by the Turks today.” Yet Air France continued to be allowed to fly unhindered to Turkey.

75
Rivka Cohen, the Israeli ambassador in Yerevan, said on 5 March 2002 that while the Armenian genocide was “a tragedy,” the (Jewish) Holocaust “was a unique phenomenon, since it had always been planned and aimed to destroy the whole nation.” Understandably, the Armenian government in Yerevan issued a diplomatic note of protest.

76
There are no conspiracies on The Independent's copydesk; just a tough, no-nonsense rule that our articles follow a grammatical “house” style and conform to what is called “normal usage.” And the Jewish Holocaust, through “normal usage,” takes a capital “H.” Other holocausts don't. No one is quite sure why—the same practice is followed in newspapers and books all over the world, although it was the centre of a row in the United States, where Harvard turned down a professorial “Chair of Holocaust and Cognate Studies” because academics rightly objected to the genocide of other peoples—including the Armenians—being heaped in a bin called “cognate.” But none of this answered the questions of my Armenian friend. To have told him his people didn't qualify for a capital “H” would have been as shameful as it would have been insulting.

“Common usage” is a bane to all of us journalists, but it is not sacred. It doesn't have to stand still. My father, I told my editor, had fought in what he called the “Great War”—but common usage had to be amended after 1945, to the “First World War.” What's in a name? I asked in my paper. What's in a capital letter? How many other skulls lie in the sands of northern Syria? Did the Turks not kill enough Armenians? From that day,
The Independent
printed Holocaust with a capital “H” for both Jewish and Armenian genocides.

77
Elsewhere, it should be noted, Tahsin Bey does not appear in so favourable a light; but wasn't Oskar Schindler a member of the Nazi party?

78
She later wrote to the Aghajanians. “I will do my best to continue working on the recognition of the genocide,” she said in her letter, “and make a difference, even a small one.”

79
See Chapter Five.

80
Shortly after it was refused passage through the Bosporus, the ship exploded and 767 of its passengers were drowned.

81
Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator, had engineered several truces. On 17 September 1948, he was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Stern Gang, who regarded the Swede as a British agent. One of the three men who sanctioned the murder was Yitzhak Shamir, another future Israeli prime minister.

82
Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War
(Oxford University Press, 2001)—in the United States,
Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon
(New York: Nation Books, 2002), especially pp. 12–47, 161–400.

83
Isaam Sartawi, a PLO official and heart surgeon who successfully urged Arafat to negotiate with moderate Israelis, had been murdered in Portugal in April of 1983—just under two months before my conversation with Arafat—by gunmen paid by Abu Nidal's “Fatah Revolutionary Council.” The claim of responsibility was made in that “beating heart of Arabism” which was even now besieging Arafat: Syria.

84
UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, which emphasised “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” demanded “the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for the acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” The latter implied an Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist. Israel, with its continuing colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza, repeatedly pointed out that the UN's demand for withdrawal employed the word “territories” without the definite article—and thus meant that Israel did not have to withdraw from
all
the territories it had occupied in 1967. It is inconceivable that the framers of 242 intended that Israel should pick and choose which bit of occupied land they would leave and which they would keep. Israel's claim that it was permitted to keep Arab territory because the 1967 conflict had been an act of aggression by the Arabs and that the territories had been occupied during a defensive war was undermined by the UN resolution's emphasis on “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Israelis and Arabs continue to nit-pick over the semantics of this short and perfectly succinct resolution.

85
It was typical of the mood of anger in Madrid that no one pointed out that UN Resolution 181 of 1947, while it called for the partition of Palestine—which the Arabs rejected—laid down borders that Israel ignored once it had expanded its territory after the 1948 war.

86
Resolution 338 of 1973 was essentially a reiteration of 242. Resolution 425 called for an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Israel retreated from its occupation zone in Lebanon in 2000, twenty-two years after 425 had been voted by the Security Council.

87
Arafat always carefully arranged his kuffiah in the shape of Mandate Palestine, the “Negev desert” of this cloth map always concealing his right ear.

88
When I questioned CNN's Jerusalem bureau chief about this meretricious commentary, he replied that the film was “generic.” I grasped at once what this meant. The film was “generic” because the violence was “generic,” because Palestinians were a “generically” violent people. They protested, threw stones, objected to “peace” and were therefore, I suppose, anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-peace and, of course, “pro-terrorist.”

89
A Palestinian driver subsequently arrived back in our dust bowl with a handwritten note from Sarah, the kind of message one doesn't want to receive from colleagues. It read: “It seems you cannot come further so I will stay here. Almost no journalists are here. Sorry guys. Have fun. Love S.”

90
The Oslo II (Taba) agreement, concluded by Rabin in September 1995—two months before he was assassinated—promised three Israeli withdrawals: from Zones A, B and C. These were to be completed by October 1997. Final status agreements covering Jerusalem, refugees, water and settlements were to have been completed by October 1999, by which time the occupation was supposed to have ended. In January 1997, however, a handful of Jewish settlers were granted 20 per cent of Hebron, despite Israel's obligation under Oslo to leave all West Bank towns. By October 1998, a year late, Israel had not carried out the Taba accords. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu negotiated a new agreement at Wye River, dividing the second redeployment promised at Taba into two phases—but he only honoured the first of them. Netanyahu had promised to reduce the percentage of West Bank land under exclusively Israeli occupation from 72 per cent to 59 per cent, transferring 41 per cent of the West Bank to Zones A and B. But at Sharm el-Sheikh in 1999, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak reneged on the agreement Netanyahu had made at Wye River, fragmenting Netanyahu's two phases into three, the first of which would transfer 7 per cent from Zone C to Zone B. All implementation of the agreements stopped there.