The Great War for Civilisation (147 page)

. .” Yet after six years, Ekeus had forced Saddam's regime to destroy 40,000 chemical shells and other munitions, 700 tons of chemical agents, 48 long-range missiles, an anthrax factory, a nuclear centrifuge programme and 30 missile warheads. Journalists were invited to photograph a vast fleet of Scud missiles as they lay, broken-backed, on the desert floor.

But like so many long-term operations of its kind, UNSCOM became contaminated. Ritter, who in 2002 would bravely and consistently—and correctly—claim that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction, had taken his information to the Israelis, proof positive for the Arabs that the UN was sharing its military secrets with Iraq's only enemy in the Middle East. Ritter went so far as to tell the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz
that Israel had been helping the UN inspectors in Iraq from 1994 to 1998. “I can honestly say that if it weren't for Israel, the commission wouldn't have been able to carry out the anti-concealment effort,” he said. On 5 August 1998, Baghdad had suspended all cooperation with UNSCOM, claiming that it was being used by American intelligence agents. It said it would continue to cooperate with UN officials in Baghdad—but not with its U.S. members.

The UN, without revealing the truth of Iraq's claims, decided on 13 November to withdraw its entire seventy-eight-strong team from Baghdad. Saddam, the Western media announced, had “defied” the UN Security Council—which was true only if the Iraqi allegations were false. President Clinton did not wait to explain. “Operation Desert Fox”—the nickname of Hitler's General Erwin Rommel, though that apparently didn't occur to U.S. military planners—involved another bombardment of 200 cruise missiles against Iraq, killing 62 Iraqi soldiers and 82 civilians. U.S. jets carried out 622 sorties against 100 targets, dropping around 540 bombs. The British flew 28 Tornado sorties against 11 targets. The Iraqis were not the only ones to note that many of the bombed facilities—including two buildings where Saddam was believed to meet his mistresses—had recently been visited by the American inspectors of UNSCOM. In early January, UNICEF and the World Food Programme reported that the attack also flattened an agricultural school, damaged at least another dozen schools and hospitals and knocked out water supplies for 300,000 people in Baghdad.

It was the endgame, the final bankruptcy of Western policy towards Iraq, the very last throw of the dice. As the missiles were launched, President Clinton announced that Saddam had “disarmed the inspectors,” which was a lie, and Tony Blair, agonising about the lives of the “British forces” involved—all eighteen pilots—told us that “we act because we must.” In so infantile a manner did we go to war, although the semantics of its presentation bore some intriguing clues about our future military aggression in the region. There were no policies, no perspective and not the slightest hint as to what might happen after the bombardment ended. With no UN inspectors back in Iraq, what were we going to do? Declare eternal war on Iraq? In fact, that's pretty much what we had already done—and would do for the next three years—though we didn't say so at the time.

We were “punishing” Saddam—or so Blair would have us believe at the time. Was there a computer that churned out this stuff? Maybe there was a cliché department at Downing Street that also provided British foreign secretary Robin Cook with Madeleine Albright's tired phrase about how Saddam used gas “even against his own people.” For little had we cared when he used that gas against the Kurds of Halabja—because, at the time, those Kurds were allied to Iran and we, the West, were supporting Saddam's invasion of Iran.

The giveaway was the lack of any sane, long-term policy towards Iraq. Our patience, according to Messrs. Clinton and Blair, was exhausted. Saddam could not be trusted to keep his word—they had just realised! And so Saddam's ability to “threaten his neighbours”—neighbours who didn't actually want us to bomb Iraq—had to be “degraded.” We were now, presumably, bombing the weapons facilities that the inspectors could not find. But how? For if the inspectors couldn't find the weapons, how come we knew where to fire the cruise missiles?

There seemed to be no end to the fantasies in which we had to believe. Again, they appear, in retrospect, to be a dry-run for the phantom threat that Saddam represented in advance of the 2003 Anglo–American invasion. Saddam, we were told, could destroy the whole world, or—I enjoyed this particular conceit—could do so “twice over.” U.S. defence secretary William Cohen announced that there would be “serious consequences” for Iraq if it attacked Israel. Mr. Cohen, who was the American—not the Israeli—defence minister, did not explain what “consequences” there could be when we had already fired 200 missiles into Iraq. Then on 16 December 1998—and this was almost three years before the assaults on the United States—the Americans claimed that Osama bin Laden had been chatting on the phone to Saddam Hussein. In truth, bin Laden—who always referred to Saddam with contempt in his conversations with me—was as likely to call up the Beast of Baghdad as he was President Clinton. Clinton said he wanted “democracy” in Iraq. But no questions were asked, no lies contradicted.

Vice President Al Gore told Americans that this was a time for “national resolve and unity.” You might have thought the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor or that General MacArthur had just abandoned Bataan. When President Clinton faced the worst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. Faced with impeachment, he was now bombing Iraq. How far could a coincidence go? No wonder some of the UN inspectors called this “the War of Monica's Skirt.” So two Christian armies—America's and Britain's—went to war with a Muslim nation, Iraq. With no goals but with an army of platitudes, they had abandoned the UN's weapons control system and opened the door to an unlimited military offensive against Iraq. And nobody asked the obvious question: What happens next?

In Washington, we were informed that the impeachment hearings against Clinton—for it was he, rather than Saddam, who was in danger of being “degraded”— were delayed because “American forces were in harm's way.” In reality, the men firing missiles at Iraq from the safety of warships in the Gulf were about as much “in harm's way” as a CNN newsreader. The only people in danger were the Iraqis. Yet when the RAF joined in the bombardment, we were treated to an excited newsreader on the BBC World Service announcing that British aircraft had been “in action” over Iraq—as if this was the Battle of Britain rather than the bombing of an Arab country already crushed by near-genocidal sanctions.

When I called up a Saudi journalist friend and told him that Downing Street was claiming the attack on Iraq was intended to protect the Arab Gulf, he shouted one word down the phone to me:
Zbeili! Zbeili
is Arabic for “garbage.” “Why do you want to kill more of those poor people?” he asked. The British were trying to present this bombing offensive on Iraq in all its old 1991 Gulf War purity. Iraq's neighbours were under threat and must be safeguarded from its weapons of mass destruction. But with the exception of Kuwait—some of whose citizens had repeated their now familiar routine of fleeing over the Saudi border—the Arab Gulf states wanted none of the West's protection, especially when this “protection” involved even further destruction of Iraq's infrastructure.

For the Basra oil refinery was one of the Anglo–American targets. Clinton and Blair had promised that only military targets would be hit, but the refinery had allegedly been used to smuggle oil and thus became a “military target.” Maybe we would soon be told that oil refineries were weapons of mass destruction. What they most certainly were, of course, was a means of producing oil income to pay for the Oil-for-Food programme that was supposed to lessen the effect of UN sanctions. But it was not this blatant manipulation of words that angered the Arabs. What infuriated them—and non-Arab Muslims—was the hopelessly one-sided and hypocritical way in which we tried to justify the attack on Iraq.

Just going through the 1998 list of excuses for belligerency was enough. According to Clinton and Blair, Saddam Hussein (1) was refusing to abide by countless United Nations Security Council resolutions; (2) continued to build weapons of mass destruction; (3) blocked the work of UNSCOM arms inspectors; (4) abused human rights; (5) had used poison gas “on his own people.” Now we all knew that Saddam Hussein was awful; not as bad as Hitler and Stalin but probably worse than Laurent Kabila and certainly worse than Muammar Ghadafi and quite possibly worse than Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević.

But who else qualified in 1998 for the first crime? Israel and Serbia. Who qualified for the second? Iran, Israel, Syria, Pakistan, India and North Korea. Crime number 3 was exclusive because there was no UNSCOM to inspect other countries' weapons of mass destruction. But qualifying for crime number 4? Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey . . . Crime number 5? Only Iraq—with a caveat: for still no Western leader would admit that Saddam killed far more Iranians than he did Iraqi Kurds at a time when the State Department and the British Foreign Office were supporting Iraq.

So what were we doing bombing Iraq? Back in February 1998, we wanted to bomb Iraq when Saddam prevented UN arms inspectors from entering his palaces. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan produced a “memorandum of understanding” to allow the UN to make a one-time inspection, in the company of foreign diplomats, of these supposed symbols of Iraqi sovereignty. But once Saddam objected to the American UN inspectors, it was “chocks away”: he now almost certainly wished to be bombed—because he had given up any hope of sanctions being lifted and knew that the Arab world would sympathise with Iraq. Journalists became frightened of the figure of half a million children dead under sanctions; it was safer to debate the rights and wrongs of killing eighty-two civilians in the December air raids. Arabs did not see events in so distorted a way. However deplorable their regimes, they were possessed of an overwhelming sense of fury and humiliation; the conviction that the raids on Baghdad were all staged to avoid Clinton's impeachment seemed to place events beyond the immoral.

Then—and only then, in the New Year, in the first week of January 1999, less than three weeks after the attacks were staged on Iraq because Saddam had “blocked” the UNSCOM teams—came the revelation. American arms inspectors
were
spies. CIA men had been planted among the UN teams—along with MI6 agents from Britain, if a report in
The Independent
was correct—and the UN was forced to admit that “UNSCOM directly facilitated the creation of an intelligence collection system for the United States in violation of its mandate.” U.S. agents had installed a “black box” eavesdropping system into UNSCOM's Baghdad headquarters that intercepted Saddam Hussein's presidential communications network. Operation Shake the Tree was supposed to uncover the regime's weapons concealment system, but UN officials quickly realised that the SIGINT operation run by the CIA's Near East Division—which was led by Ritter's nemesis Steve Richter—was not sharing its intelligence information with UNSCOM. The UN arms mission to Iraq had become a U.S. spying operation against the regime. Few bothered to recall that Saddam's reasons for expelling the U.S. inspectors—the official cause of the December bombardment—had now been proved true. But UNSCOM was finished.

The military assault on Iraq was not. For with little publicity—and amid virtual indifference in Western capitals—U.S. and British aircraft staged well over seventy air strikes against Iraq in just five weeks during January and February 1999, inflicting more damage than the pre-Christmas Anglo–American bombardment. Pilots flying out of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were now given new rules of engagement that allowed them to open fire on Iraqi installations even if their aircraft were not directly threatened. The air offensive was carefully calibrated to avoid criticism or public debate, although it coincided with further attempts by Washington to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime.

At my home in Beirut that great rain-washed winter, I spent hours searching through back copies of the Arab and British press for details of these raids. I visited Tewfiq Mishlawi, a veteran Palestinian-Lebanese journalist whose daily
MiddleEast Reporter
was meticulous in recording each Western air attack on Iraq—and its political consequences in the Arab world—and found that his own archives were filled with small, often apparently inconsequential quotations from Western military spokesmen. Yet, sitting in his cold drab offices near the centre of Beirut, I placed these paragraphs of copy next to one another and found myself reading a coherent and all too disturbing account of a near-secret war. One-inch news items—
nibs,
as we call them in the trade—would turn into longer stories as I photocopied them and pinned them, one after the other, into my file. The file began to thicken. Every hour, I would have to open a new folder for the next stack of cuttings.

Iraqi missile sites were being attacked without warning and radar stations targeted solely because their presence—rather than any offensive activity—was said to menace American forces in the Gulf. In early February, for example, U.S. aircraft bombed a CSSC-3 “Seersucker” anti-ship missile battery on the Fao peninsula which, according to a spokesman, “could [
sic
] have threatened shipping in the Gulf.” Military sources said that there was no evidence the missiles were about to be fired, although American and British government officials continued to maintain for more than a year afterwards that pilots responded only to specific threats against their aircraft. In an article in
The Independent
on 7 August 2000, for instance, Foreign Office minister Peter Hain—the same Peter Hain who had condemned Halliday and von Sponeck for their outspoken criticism of UN sanctions—wrote that “there have been about 850 direct threats against our aircrew in the past year and a half, including missile attacks and heavy anti-aircraft fire. Our pilots have taken action
only to defend themselves against this kind of
attack
” (my emphasis).