The Great War for Civilisation (152 page)

Outside, an older woman in black pushes her way through the street urchins. “I have two crippled people in my family,” she pleads. “They have fever and sore throats. Can you take them with you to Europe?” We explain that we are not doctors, but she thrusts into our faces a thick piece of yellow paper with a history of muscular dystrophy from which her relatives are suffering. After half an hour, my writing hand grows numb listing the sicknesses and starvation. A child has anaemia, another has severe respiratory problems, a third cannot control its bowels; it appears to be dying. “When are you going to lift the sanctions?” yet another woman shouts at me. “Our children need food and clothes.”

At the end of the street, there is a tootling trumpet, a fat man with a drum and a stooped old soldier marking time for a squad of thirty-three middle-aged, half-bearded men, all carrying Kalashnikovs but most of them in shoddy uniforms. These are the local Dad's Army, Saddam's heroic volunteers, preparing to withstand the might of America. They march round a traffic island while the children chant the Iraqi national anthem:

A country that stretches its wings over the horizon
And clothes itself in the glory of civilisations . . .
This land is a flame and a light,
Like a mountain that overlooks the world . . .
We have the anger of the sword
And the patience of the Prophet.

Then the kids go back to sewer-jumping. And this, I remind myself, is the country which, according to Messrs. Clinton and Blair, threatens the whole world.

We drive across to Basra's old port, the harbour that the British invested in 1914, once visited in the late eighteenth century by the young Horatio Nelson. “Five Englishmen ran this port until 1958,” Ali al-Imara proudly announces. “The first chairman was John Ward, from 1919 until 1942, and then we had William Bennett until 1947. They were very good men. In 1958, Mr. Shaawi took over; he was a very good man too.” There is no mention of the 1958 Iraqi revolution that ended British stewardship of Basra's old harbour and of Iraq itself. But why be churlish in a place of such decrepitude? Today, the gates to the wharf are still adorned with well-polished Tudor roses, but the slates have cascaded off the roofs of the old colonial offices. The railway lines, laid down when Basra was an international terminal, are corroded.

The wide, sluggish waterway of the Shatt al-Arab, so fateful and laden with death in Iraq's recent history, drifts past the hulks tied up on the quays. Here is the
Yasmine
, a trawler under whose black paint it is still possible to read the words
Lord Shackleton, Port Stanley, F.I.
(Falkland Islands); and there the
Wisteria
, all 6,742 blackened tons of her, her mentors slowly dismembering the burned-out tanker. Who set fire to her? I ask three Iraqi officials on the quay. “An Iranian missile hit it in 1981,” one of them replies. But his friend mutters in Arabic: “Tell him it was the Americans.” Then they all chorus: “It was the Americans!”

Basra lives on lies: if only the Iranians hadn't attacked Iraq and closed the river in 1980, they tell you—but it was the Iraqis who invaded Iran; if only the UN had not slapped sanctions on Iraq after the Iran–Iraq War—and we are supposed to forget the little matter of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Even the ships have changed their names in embarrassment. The supply ship
Atco Sara
, according to a half-erased name, used to be the
Pacific Prospector
of Illinois and, before that, the
Northern Builder
. There is a Krupps hoist and a set of rusting cranes bearing the name “Thomas Smith and Sons of Leeds” on a black iron plate.

And I cannot but remember how I arrived at this city and its port eighteen years before. I had watched these ships burn. Just downriver was the island from which Jon Snow had embarked to rescue the crew of the trapped freighter
Al-Tanin
as I cowered on the riverbank waiting for him, the Iranian tracer fire zipping towards us across the darkened Shatt al-Arab River. It was on this very quayside, aboard a Yugoslav freighter, that I filched the maps of the waterway for Jon and the Iraqi frogmen who were to rescue the crew. From Basra each morning, Gavin Hewitt of the BBC and I would set out to watch the “Whirlwind War” that would destroy the Islamic Republic. And now the Iraqis had reaped the whirlwind.

Behind us now, the marshalling yards are filled with long freight trains, massive grey wagons hooked up to leave on a journey that should have started in 1980, the trucks now entangled with weeds and bushes. Mr. al-Imara strides along the docks. “Take as many pictures as you want,” he says. “If it wasn't for the sanctions, we would have this port dredged and running.” An old dog falls asleep on the tracks below the stern of the
Wisteria
, its steel ladders twisted against the hull to which they were welded eighteen years ago.

It is an odd affliction that now besets Iraq's Baathist bureaucracy. Tutored to boast of all that is best about Iraq, they now have to publicise all that is worst. It must be an awfully difficult transition. For who knows when the orders might come down from Baghdad to reverse the process yet again? Mr. al-Imara tells us he is a poet as well as being “foreign relations adviser” to Basra port. And he quotes, as we walk beside his decaying, marooned ships, a work of his which he calls “Confrontation”:

When you shoot with a bullet from anywhere,
The bullet will head straight for my chest;
Because the events through which we have passed
Have made my chest round.

And we look at Mr. al-Imara's diminutive chest and laugh politely. Whose bullets is the poet referring to? Surely not those that scar the façade of Basra's central police station, still a gutted marble shell beside one of the city's foetid canals. Certainly not those that smashed into the burning governorate building during the same 1991 uprising by Basra's Shiite majority, now replaced with masses of prestressed concrete. And not the bullets that were fired into the city's police cars, now replaced—as they have been throughout Iraq—with gleaming new Hyundai saloons, a final mockery to the starvation of the people the police are supposed to “control.” On the grainy old television in my Basra hotel room, Saddam is seated before his Revolutionary Command Council, making a joke at which his uniformed courtiers guffaw. “When he laughed, respectable senators burst into laughter.”

The Corniche of Martyrs corrects any misapprehension about the enemy. For along the west bank of the Shatt al-Arab, below the dank portals of the Basra Sheraton Hotel, stand the dead heroes of Saddam's “Whirlwind War.” For these three dozen Iraqi soldiers—out of perhaps half a million—death will not have been in vain. Each man, modelled in bronze from photographs, points across the muddy waterway towards the precise location of the war front, inside Iran, at which he died. “Corporals and Sergeants and Captains and Majors and Colonels—all martyrs of the
Qadisiya
war,” it says in brass on each pedestal.

The soldiers, three times life-size, are identified by name, along with a colossus down the bank representing Saddam's cousin General Adnan Khairallah, one of the greatest and most popular of Iraq's military leaders—too popular for Saddam perhaps. He stands facing his cannon-fodder, right arm raised in honour of their courage; he was to die—“tragically,” as the Iraqi press obediently announced at the time—in a helicopter crash not long after the Iran–Iraq War ended. Below these statues, the street urchins hawk nuts parcelled in old newspapers at 12 cents a package.

They are as far as they can get from the food chain, at the furthest corner of Iraq, clamped between Iran's suspicions to the east, and Kuwait's hatred to the south, and the West's contempt, dominated by rusting ships and the towering giants of the dead. Each night in Iraq, I pound away on my heat-cracked laptop with its partially damaged screen, writing about the suffering and the volcanic anger of Iraqis. It is 16 October 1998. This is the report I send to my paper that night from Baghdad, one that I will read again in 2003, after we have occupied Iraq and found ourselves facing a ferocious insurgency:

Fairy lights illuminate the Babeesh Grill Restaurant in President Street. Mock stained glass windows discreetly protect the clientele. For this is an up-market bistro for up-market eaters, most of them UN officials. The hungry Iraqis who are not dazzled by the fairy lights outside can just make out the candlelit tables and the foreigners inside as they wolf their way through beef and roast chicken, side-plates heaped with fruits and vegetables or—the Babeesh's speciality—shrimp salad. Soft music plays as white-jacketed waiters serve the UN's finest, the sanctions boys and the arms inspectors and the men and women who try desperately to undo the suffering caused by the gentlemen in the glass building on the East River 5,990 miles away.

But despite the white-liveried waiters, whatever you do, don't mention the
Titanic
. Iraqi state television has shown James Cameron's film three times (he can forget about the royalties) as a balm for hardship, the Baghdad equivalent of bread and circuses. But unlike the
Titanic
, the Babeesh has no third class diners. This is a restaurant for those who measure money by the kilo rather than the Iraqi dinar note. Now that the dinar is worth 0.0006 of a dollar (thanks to the employers of the Babeesh's clientele), my own meal for three needed a stack of 488 one hundred dinar notes, a wad of cash a foot thick. No wonder some cafes have given up counting their takings—they check the bills by stacking the dinar notes on a weighing machine.

So you can forget the Weimar Republic in a land where an average villager can expect to earn a mere 3,400 dinars a month. Let me repeat that: 3,400 dinars—
two dollars—
a month. Which means that our little snack at the Babeesh—and there was no wine because alcohol is banned in restaurants on orders from the man whose name no one says too loudly—cost fourteen times the monthly salary of an Iraqi. So why no food riots? Why no revolution?

Take a stroll off Rashid Street in the old part of town and you can see why. The sewage stretches in lakes, wall-to-wall, a viscous mass of liquid so pale green in colour that it possesses its own awful beauty. This is what happens when the electricity cuts out and the water treatment plants and sewage facilities go unrepaired. Electrical appliance vendors—for Rashid Street is where you go for a light-bulb, an adapter, a piece of wire—hug the walls like nuns to keep the mess from their plastic shoes. “You have done this to us,” a thin, bearded man said to me as I asked (heaven spare me) for an electric kettle. The kettle could only be obtained at a foreign goods shop in the suburbs for just over $20—around nine and a half times the monthly salary of the Iraqi villager.

Grind down the people to this abject level and survival is more important than revolution. Unless you choose highway robbery. I'm not talking of the kind practised at the Babeesh, but on the long motorways west to Jordan or south to Basra. “That's where they shot the Jordanian,” my driver said to me 100 kilometres out of Baghdad on the Amman road, a carefree reference to the diplomat who chose to travel after dark and paid the price. You don't drive to Basra overnight for fear of deserting soldiers, so the rumour goes, who've turned to banditry to keep their families alive. By night, the gunmen lurk, by day the village women who sell themselves for “temporary marriage” and a few more dinars. The latter I didn't believe.

Until I left Basra one hot afternoon and drove out through the slums with their own lakes of sewage—warmer than the Baghdad variety, for the Gulf temperatures drive up the heat of every liquid—and saw a crazed mass of men and women, tearing at their faces with their nails, carrying in front of them the body of a child, pushing it into a battered orange and white taxi on the main road. And a young man, maybe only 16, suddenly jumped into the sewage lake beside the highway and plastered his body in filth, screaming and raging and smacking his hands into the green water so that it splattered all the mourners with filth.

To what does poverty and hunger drive a people? I soon found out. Seventy miles north of Basra, where the road mirages in the heat between the endless encampments of Saddam's legions who are suppressing the Marsh Arabs, a group of girls could be seen, dressed in red turbans and black dresses, their faces cowled like Touaregs, dancing—actually twirling themselves round and round—in the fast lane of the motorway until we drew to a halt. One of them approached the driver's window, her eyes soft, her voice rasping. “Come buy our fish,” she whispered. “Come see our fish and you will want to buy them.”

She pronounced the Arab word for fish—
sumak—
with a hiss, and the driver giggled in a cruel, lascivious way. She was maybe 16 and she was selling not fish but herself. And when they realised we were not customers, the fish girls of Iraq twirled back into the motorway lane to offer themselves in front of a speeding Jordanian truck. Yes, you can forget the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, let alone the destruction of his magnificent palaces and ornamental lakes and colonnaded halls. But I do wonder how the Iraqis in President Street can resist the temptation of breaking through the windows of the Babeesh restaurant and tearing its customers to pieces, perhaps even choosing the odd remaining foreign limb to supplement their diet.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Now Thrive the Armourers . . .

LADY BRITOMART: There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.

UNDERSHAFT (determinedly): No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an armourer . . . To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes . . .

—George Bernard Shaw,
Major Barbara,
Act III

JUST BEFORE I ENTER the 24,000-square-foot exhibition centre close to Abu Dhabi airport, I receive an elaborate invitation on vellum parchment. “Under the patronage of His Highness Lt. General Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed al Nahyan,” it says, “it is the pleasure of His Highness Sheikh Falah Bin Zayed al Nahyan, Chairman of Ghantout Racing and Polo Club, to cordially invite you for The Final of the Idex Al Basti Polo Tournament at 7.30pm followed by dinner . . . Formal Dress.” A few minutes after I have cleared the security gates, I am offered a fine Persian silk carpet—from Qom, I recall—and, at a mercifully smaller price, a set of Arab brass cooking utensils and coffee pots. There are tea stands and flowers, purple and gold and green in the early spring heat. The Arabs wear their white robes with dignity, the Western visitors dark blue suits and ties, their wives, bright, tightfitting dresses, often with those slightly silly racing hats that come with purple stalks and fake blooms on top. Several of the ladies drop off to look at the jewellery shop with its gold bangles and rings. One of Sheikh Mohamed's military pipe bands plays English and Scottish marches. Smartly attired Indian and Pakistani workers labour to erect Arab tents before the midday sun reaches its height.

What was it George Bernard Shaw's armourer, Andrew Undershaft, told his daughter in
Major Barbara
when she visited his massive arms factory at Perivale St. Andrews? “Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification . . . they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness.” And he was right. Polo, silk carpets, coffee pots, flowers, a highlander's lament and tea and jewellery while the natives protect pink faces from the oriental sun. It is as civilised as fine art; which is what the sale of weapons has become for the world's armourers.

For behind the tents and trinket shops and the pipe band in this vast compound in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, there lay on display some of the most sophisticated and most lethal ordnance ever made by man, so new you could smell the fresh paint gleaming in the sun, so clean, so artistically bold in their design that you might never guess their purpose. And each time I wandered over to examine a French missile, a German tank, an American Hellfire rocket, a British armoured vehicle, a Dutch self-propelled gun, a shelf of Italian pistols, a Russian automatic rifle, a South African army video-screen of crimson explosions, up would come a charming gentleman in another of those dark blue suits, a merchant of death brandishing a file of glossy, expensively produced brochures, offering a powerful handshake and another cup of tea.

Occasionally, they were a bit portly—selling death on a large scale means a lot of hospitality—and often they carried a small purple or blue flower in their button hole. Ballistics was their fascination. “As the day warms up, a bullet flies faster,” a cheerful Australian confided to me. “In the evening, the air grows heavier and the bullet goes more slowly.” Smiling field marshals and jolly generals from across the Arab world drifted through the arms pavilions, peering through sniper rifles, clambering like schoolchildren onto howitzers and tanks, running their hands repeatedly along the sleek missile tubes, masturbating the instruments of death.

I have to admit a grim fascination of my own in all this, a professional interest. It is the spring of 2001. For twenty-five years now, the crudest and most fabulously designed bullets, rockets, missiles, tank shells, artillery rounds and grenades have been hurled in my direction by some of the nastiest and most “moral” armies on earth. Israelis with American Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, Syrians with Russian T-72 tanks, RAF pilots with American cluster bombs, Afghan mujahedin with Russian AK-47 rifles, Russians with Hind helicopter gunships, Iraqis and Azerbaijanis with Russian-manufactured Scud rockets and Iranians with U.S.-made sniper rifles and Americans with Boeing fighter-bombers and battleships whose shells were the size of Volkswagens: they have all sent their produce swishing in my direction. Even as I walk between the immaculate stands of this exhibition, the tinnitus hisses viciously in my ears from that Iraqi 155-mm gun that so seriously damaged my hearing back in 1980. In a quarter of a century, I've seen thousands of corpses—women and children as well as men—blasted, shredded, eviscerated, disembowelled, beheaded, lobotomised, castrated and otherwise annihilated by the multi-billion-dollar arms industry. Almost all of them were Muslims. This is a symbol of our triumph over the Middle East in Abu Dhabi this hot March day of 2001, our ability to kill Muslims—and to help Muslims kill other Muslims—with our weapons. They have no weapons that can touch us. Not yet. Not for another six months.

I regularly prowled the arms bazaars of the Middle East, seeking an answer to the same old questions. Who are the men who produce this vile equipment? How can they justify their trade? How will the victims respond to this pulverisation of their lives? What language can compass science and death and capital gains on such a scale? For there is, I was to discover in Abu Dhabi, an integral, frightening correlation between linguistics and guns, between grammar and rockets. It's all about words. Thus I circle the arms-sellers' pavilions with a large canvas bag and a kleptomaniac's desire to hoard every brochure, pamphlet, book and magazine from Americans, Russians, British, Chinese, French, Swedes, Dutch, Italians, Jordanians and Iranians, squirrelling away thousands of pages of the stuff. “Take some more,” a Pakistani arms technician shouts to me as I scoop cardboard cutouts of general-purpose bombs and ship-borne missiles into my bag. And back in my tiny hotel room, I rifle through the lot.

The Russians are the mildest in their language. “You will feel protected by our smart weapons' shield,” promises Russia's KEP Instrument Design Bureau. Uralvagoncavod's latest T-90 tank—the descendant of all those old Warsaw Pact T-55 clunkers—is advertised simply as “the Best.” The State Enterprise Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant's anti-aircraft missiles give an “awesome punch” to their buyers. The British are smoother. Vickers Defence Systems are trying to flog the new Challenger 2E, “optimised to represent the best balance of fightability, firepower and mobility . . . its ability to deliver combat effectiveness . . . has been proven . . .” Well yes, I recall. The earlier Challenger 2 was used by our chaps in the Gulf. And the Challengers fired, I remember, depleted uranium munitions. “Proven” indeed.

Australian Defence Industries—by a bizarre arms globalisation, they are now part of the French manufacturer Thales—are selling a “live fire defence training system” which includes “a ruggedised portable unit.” This is taken right to the battlefield so that soldiers can practise shooting computerised human beings in between killing real ones. “Target movers”—a real favourite of mine, these—were “able to respond to programmable functions, including ‘appear on command' . . . ‘fall when hit,' ‘reappear after hit,' ‘hold up to accept and count automatic fire' and ‘bob'”—to “cycle up and down as desired until hit.” A huge Australian later demonstrates this fearful little toy for me. The computerised dead on the screen are obliging. They really do pop up when I ask them to. I kill them. Then they are resurrected so that I can shoot them again and again, cycling up and down as desired.

The Italians like their verbal trumpets. Beretta firearms provide “quality without compromise,” “experience, innovation, respect for tradition . . . the Beretta tradition of excellence.” The compact size and “potent calibres” of Beretta's new 9000 S-TYPE F pistols are “developed to deserve your trust.” Benelli, which like Beretta makes hunting guns, promotes its animal killer as “black, aggressive, highly technological.” Benelli's pump-action shotgun is described as “gutsy in character.” Finland's Sako 75 hunting gun manufacturers boast that their designers have been asked a simple question: “What would you do if given the resources to design the rifle of your dreams, the new ultimate rifle for the new millennium?” And later, of course, just a few months later, I will look at this question again and wonder what Osama bin Laden would have said—or did say—if or when he was asked to design the weapon of his dreams, the new ultimate weapon for the new millennium.

“Excellence” crops up again and again in the brochures. Oshkosh of Wilmington manufactures military trucks with “a tradition of excellence,” the company's produce “grounded in history, focused on another century . . .” Then comes Boeing's Apache Longbow attack helicopter. “It's easy to talk about performance,” their ad runs. “Only Apache Longbow delivers.” The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company are among the few to let the cat out of the bag. “True respect,” their advertising brags, “can only be earned by making superior weapons systems. Only by owning them.”

In 1905, Shaw's Andrew Undershaft said exactly that. Asked whether he would choose honour, justice, truth, love and mercy, or money and gunpowder, Undershaft replies: “Money and gunpowder; for without enough of both, you cannot afford the others.” After a while, I begin to feel a little sick. There is something infinitely sad and impotent about the frightful language of the merchants of death, their circumlocutions and macho words balanced by the qualities the weapons are designed to eliminate, their admission that guns mean power, the final definition of “excellence.” But worse is to come.

Bofors (from peace-loving, Nobel-awarding Sweden) is a “provider of technologies for a safer future . . . reliable and innovative.” Pakistan Ordnance Factories make ammunition “chiselled to perfection.” Mowag (from peace-loving, cuckoo-clock Switzerland) manufactures a Piranha III armoured personnel carrier with a “family concept for many mission role variants.” But Lockheed Martin of Dallas scoops them all with a “winning portfolio” of missiles and bombers; the “timeless” F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter; new target-acquisition systems that are “the brains and brawn” of Lockheed's Apache helicopters; the F-22 Raptor, “a new breed of superfighter” that will “dominate the skies” and bring “unequalled capability” to U.S. fighter pilots; the Javelin “fire-and-forget” missile that will give “maximum gunner survivability”; and the new multiple-launch rocket system that the Iraqis, in their terror, called “steel rain” in 1991—Lockheed actually quotes the Iraqis—and which gives its users a “shoot and scoot” capability. “Shoot and scoot” was General Norman Schwarzkopf's sneering description of the supposedly cowardly Iraqi Scud missile gunners—no reminder of that here.

And so the glossy magazines pile up on my bedroom floor. It is a linguistic journey into a fantasy world. Half the words used by the arms-sellers—protection, reliability, optimisation, excellence, family, history, respect, trust, timelessness and perfection—invoked human virtues, even the achievements of the spirit. The other half—punch, gutsy, performance, experience, potency, fightability, brawn and breed—were words of naked aggression, a hopelessly infantile male sexuality to prove that might is right. The Americans named their weapons—the Apache helicopter, the Arrowhead navigation system, the Kiowa multiple launch platform, the Hawkeye infrared sensors—after a Native American population that their nation had laid waste. Or the Western manufacturers called them raptors or piranhas. The only thing they didn't mention was death.

Perhaps amnesia has something to do with it. At an arms fair in Dubai on 12 November 1993, I spent three hours watching guests—European ladies in gowns and miniskirts along with government agents and Arab potentates— passing the Hughes missile stand where a photograph showed an American Ticonderoga-class warship firing a missile into the sky. It was an identical missile, fired by a Ticonderoga-class anti-air warfare cruiser equipped with a “combat-proven” Aegis “battle management” system—the USS
Vincennes
, equipped with that very same Aegis system—that brought down the Iranian Airbus on 3 July 1988, killing all 290 passengers and crew. No mention of that at the pavilion, of course. I still have my notes of my brief conversation at the stand with Bruce Fields of Hughes International Programme Development. “Yes, it was one of our standard missiles,” he said. “I didn't want them to use any photographs of a Ticonderoga-class ship in our publicity this week. It was only when I got here that I saw this picture on our wall. Fortunately, we're not passing it out with our publicity.” I watched a trail of smiling dignitaries, thoughtful Arab defence ministry officials and U.S. defence attachés inspecting the hardware, and finally—threading his way between British fighter-bombers and Royal Navy missiles—our very own Charles, Prince of Wales.

There were flowers everywhere, as if this were a wedding rather than an arms bazaar. Roses, lilies, birds of paradise, chrysanthemums, all potted neatly between the missiles. But the brightest flower to be seen in Dubai was as artificial as it was ironic; the blood-red poppy of Flanders. Did the captains of British aviation industry, the British ambassador and consuls—did Prince Charles himself, who wore a poppy on the lapel of his grey suit—grasp this paradox?