The Great War for Civilisation (135 page)

All the Iraqis in Beirut talked in code. When they proclaimed their desire for popular elections and a democracy, they were trying to assuage American fears that an Iran-style Islamic republic would be set up in a post-Saddam Iraq. When they talked of unity, they were attempting to convince each other that Iraq would not be divided into a Shia state, a Sunni state and a newly-born Kurdistan. And when they condemned the presence of foreign forces on Iraqi soil—for which read American troops—they were denying that they were Western stooges. “We will not accept foreigners on the sacred banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates,” one of the delegates shouted from the platform. At which point, the Americans lost interest in this display of democracy.

This wasn't the only reason. For while the Islamic parties were largely Shia groups, the Sunnis who constituted about 40 per cent of the population were not represented by a single political organisation. Nor could Christians and communists have taken much inspiration from the start of the conference, at which delegates listened to a long reading from the Koran. Lebanese Shia leaders were closely linked to some of the Iraqi movements. Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim, the man believed to be behind the Basra insurrection—who would be assassinated in a massive bomb explosion in Najaf during the American occupation twelve years later—was the first cousin of Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, regarded as the spiritual adviser to the Lebanese Hizballah movement and the secret inspiration of the Iraqi Dawa party. Hakim's mother was from the Lebanese Bazi family.

But there was one small feature of the make-up of this conference that went unmentioned. We all knew that among the Iraqi parties were the seventeen who made up the “Joint Action Committee for Iraqi Opposition” which had met in Damascus in December 1990 to seek a new and democratic Iraq. They included the Dawa, the Islamic Council—the most important of the pro-Iranian groups with close links to Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the former Iranian minister—the Iraqi Communist Party, and at least four Kurdish parties and two groups, the “Islamic Movement” and the “Independent Nationalists,” supported by Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis also insisted that Salah Omar al-Ali's “Nationalist Iraqi Constitution” and Saad Saleh Jaber's “Free Iraq Congress” participate in the conference. And Salah Omar al-Ali was the very same former Baathist who had issued that devastating, fateful call for an uprising over the CIA's radio station on 24 February.

In days to come, these American-organised appeals for an insurgency against Saddam would be compared to the Soviet demands for a Polish uprising against the Germans in Warsaw in 1944, when Russian troops reached the eastern suburbs of the city and appeared ready to liberate the Polish capital once the insurrection began. In the event, the Poles obeyed the call to rise up against the Nazis—and the Soviets waited until the Germans had annihilated the rebels, efficiently destroying the Polish nationalist forces that would have opposed communist rule. The Iraqis working for the Americans and the Saudis had now done much the same. They appealed for an insurrection and watched Saddam annihilate the rebels, thus destroying any chance of an Islamic republic—or any other kind of state—in Iraq. Later—twelve years later—they would take Baghdad and appoint their own “interim government,” much as the Soviets did in postwar Poland.

In Beirut, I interviewed Ayatollah al-Mudaressi, who agreed that Basra had probably fallen but claimed that Amara, Nasiriyah, Diwaniyah, Samara, Najaf and Kerbala were still holding out against Saddam's forces. While the Americans might be tempted to support a toothless Saddam out of fear that an Islamic republic might take its place, he told me, the United States should realise that the Iraqi rebellion focused on the rebuilding of Iraq, not on revolution:

This fear the West has is directly linked to Iran. The West does not have good relations with Iran—so it is worried about what happens now in Iraq. But this is a misjudgement. The uprising did not take place during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. It has happened because of what Saddam has done. You cannot copy a revolution from one country to another. I think we must ask the people what kind of republic we want. Personally, I would like an Islamic republic—but not by force. If the people choose this road, I am with them. If they choose another road, I am with them. But Iraqis will not forget America's lack of support when they overthrow Saddam.

But within twenty-four hours, the Iraqi opposition was admitting what we all knew: that the Shia insurgency was collapsing. The most convincing evidence of this came from Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, brother of Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim, who acknowledged that Najaf and Kerbala were no longer “in the hands of revolutionaries.” Even the communists admitted that the uprising now faced “serious difficulties.” Only the Kurdish delegates were able to encourage the conference with claims that their own guerrillas were still capturing villages north of Kirkuk.
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The most dignified figure in Beirut was that of old Mohamed Mahdi Jawahiri, Iraq's finest living poet. Ninety years old, he sat on the dais in a crumpled jacket with a soft cap on his bald head, speaking in the language of verse. “I didn't expect to participate in this conference,” he said:

The children of Iraq are smiling at this moment, old men too. Our people under the regime of Saddam Hussein are suffering—all of us are suffering—execution, torture and deportation. But we are patient and united. My heart is with you. My hand is in yours. The intifada in Iraq needs your help . . . There is a limit to everything and for every crime there is a punishment . . .

In the end, the Iraqi opposition could only end its deliberations with an uninspiring demand for a host of “committees”—those get-out institutions so loved by Arab leaders who want to avoid serious decisions—the most important of which was supposed to be the “Committee for National Salvation,” the nearest they could agree to a government-in-exile, and the most ridiculous of which was the creation of a delegation to tell the rest of the world what was happening in Iraq—as if the world did not already know. For it was now clear that when the American 1st Armored Division halted its tanks north of Safwan, the killing fields went on moving northwards into Iraq without them, consuming the land in fire and blood. As many—perhaps more—Iraqis were now perishing each day than died in the allied air assaults of the previous month. It was Ayatollah al-Mudaressi who graphically summed up his people's tragedy. “Kuwait has been liberated,” he said, “at the cost of the blood of the Iraqi people.”

As the truth of this was made manifest in the execution grounds of southern and central Iraq, Washington watched in cruel silence. The administration, according to The Washington Post, could not decide whether it wished to keep U.S. troops in Iraq to restrain “Hussein's ability to suppress the rebellions” or withdraw “so Iraqi military forces could consolidate control and then possibly challenge his claim to leadership.” The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, was at his most craven. “What's the better option to get rid of Mr. Saddam Hussein?” he asked rhetorically. “I really don't know.” The Bush administration had taken no position on the issue “because it really is an internal problem” within Iraq. Powell had “no instructions to do anything” that would benefit either side.

American aircraft were now flying at will over Iraq, low enough for their pilots to see the battles with their own eyes. Their reconnaissance pictures picked up the street barricades, burning buildings and Iraqi tanks—and in some cases the attacking Iraqi helicopters which Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled had obligingly allowed them to keep flying—in the streets of Iraq's major cities. If the Americans would reluctantly move in to protect the Kurds—as they were later forced to do by public opinion—no such inclination was shown towards the Shia of southern Iraq. Despite the eyewitness evidence of terrible crimes against humanity, there would be no attempt to save the Shia population whose religious links with Iran so frightened Washington and its Arab allies in the Gulf.

On the American lines in southern Iraq, further descriptions of these atrocities were now being given by Iraqi ex-soldiers. Ibrahim Mehdi Ibrahim, a thirty-two-year-old army deserter, told how Republican Guard units lured families from their homes with promises of safe passage and then trained artillery on them. Saddam's soldiers, he said, were trying “to harvest them, the wheat with the chaff, with helicopter gunships while they hid in the fields.” A U.S. Army medic told of treating terrified Shia refugees who had been “beaten with pipes, with burns and a lot of kids beaten with barbed wire. A lot had families killed off. A couple of girls, twelve and thirteen, were beaten on the face with fists or blunt objects.” Several weeping men arrived at an American checkpoint at Suq as-Shuyukh with identical stories of entire families massacred together by Iraqi Republican Guard forces. Another Iraqi army deserter said that “families that wanted to leave, they were surrounded and mowed down on the street. We saw with our eyes how they brought the wounded out of hospitals and shot them along with the doctors treating them. When the Iraqi army entered one week ago, the families that had fled the fighting returned with their children. They lined them up against walls and executed them.” The secrets of the mass graves outside Musayeb—revealed so many years later— proved that this man's story was no exaggeration.

In America,
The New York Times
announced that the United States had “consigned the Iraqi insurgents to their fate,” quoting a “senior official”—as usual, anonymous—who said, “We never made any promises to these people. . . . There is no interest in the coalition in further military operations.” This was certainly the case among America's Arab allies. For if the behaviour of the United States and Britain was both shameful and immoral, the reaction of most of the Arab regimes was humiliating. Many Arab journalists had expressed their revulsion that the Iraqi army—the largest and supposedly the most sophisticated in the Middle East—had been routed so ignominiously. In Arab newspapers, the destruction on Mutla Ridge was called a
nakba
, a catastrophe—the same word used for the Palestinian exodus of 1948. But except in Syria, there were few words of sympathy in Arab capitals for the desperate men fighting on against Saddam in the ruins of southern Iraq or in the Kurdish mountains. The massacres in Basra and Najaf and, later, in Kirkuk elicited no expressions of horror from the Gulf kings and emirs, nor among the ageing presidents supported by the West. Almost all had their own minorities to repress—many of them Shia minorities—and were in no mood to rouse their people to indignation at the outcome of the Iraqi insurgency. To his disgrace, Yassir Arafat—a man whose own people's exile should have awoken in him an equal sympathy for the fleeing Kurds—expressed not the slightest compassion for them.

The calvary of the Shia went largely uncovered by Western reporters— certainly by television—and its dimensions could only be gathered from the desperate men and women arriving at the American checkpoints north of Kuwait. In Kurdistan, however, television and newspaper reporters were on the ground, living—and in at least four cases dying—among the fighters and refugees as Saddam's counter-attack set off a tragedy of biblical proportions. Journalists trudged alongside the tens of thousands of Kurdish men and women as they fled north into the snow-thick mountains along the Turkish border, old men dying of frostbite, women giving birth in the snow, children abandoned amid the drifts. As
The Independent
was to say with bleak accuracy, “the mightiest military machine assembled since the Second World War watches the atrocity show from the sidelines.”

So, despite the anguished dispatches of their own correspondents, did the great American newspapers and the East Coast heavyweight “opinion formers.”
The
Washington Post
was in favour of non-intervention, while
The New York Times
columnist Leslie Gelb complained that “the logic of intervention leads on, inevitably, to capturing Baghdad . . . While Iraqi troops failed to fight in Kuwait, we cannot count on similar timidity in their citadel. And who will fight on our side? No one. And what of civilian casualties? Many more. And what do we do after we have occupied Baghdad? And for how long? And at what cost?”

Here again, the ghosts of the future might visit the past. Yes, if American forces had continued towards Baghdad, as Schwarzkopf quite soon believed they should have done, what would have happened? The Arab coalition would have fallen apart. America—probably alongside Britain—would have had no “friends.” But there can be little doubt that if the Americans had pressed on to destroy Saddam's regime, they would have received the welcome from the Iraqis that they confidently expected—but did not get—in 2003. Indeed, after the betrayal of 1991, the Americans could never receive that welcome. In 1996, President George Bush Senior was to speak on television in a series of interviews that his own son would rashly ignore when he illegally invaded Iraq in 2003. If U.S. forces had pursued Saddam to Baghdad, Bush Senior said haltingly, “there would be, downtown Baghdad . . . America occupying an Arab land, searching for this brutal dictator who had the best security in the world, involved in an urban guerrilla war.”

Which, of course, subsequently came to pass, even if Bush failed to realise that it was the capture of Saddam that would encourage the “urban guerrilla war” of which he presciently spoke.
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The moral issue, however, is that Bush had supported the call for the Iraqi rebellion. He had enthusiastically endorsed the rising. The CIA's radio station had broadcast appeals to the Iraqi population to overthrow Saddam. These appeals, it was plain, burdened the Americans with a moral obligation to protect those they had called to arms on their side. To ignore these brave and desperate men when they responded—to leave them and their families to be exterminated—was not only an act of dishonour but a crime against humanity. Yet even after the American government was forced to offer military protection to the Kurds—albeit when their insurrection had been substantially crushed—they could still regard the Gulf War as a moral conflict, indeed an uplifting one for Americans. By August 1991, U.S. defence secretary Dick Cheney was able to describe the war as a “catharsis” for post-Vietnam America. “It was almost a healing process for a wound that had been open for a long time,” he said.