The Great War for Civilisation (184 page)

Indeed, anyone reading the weasel words of doubt that were insinuated throughout this text could only have profound concern about the basis on which Britain was to go to war. The Iraqi weapon programme was “almost certainly” seeking to enrich uranium. It “appears” that Iraq was attempting to acquire a magnet production line. There was evidence that Iraq had tried to acquire specialised aluminium tubes (used in the enrichment of uranium) but there was “no definitive intelligence” that it was destined for a nuclear programme. “If ” Iraq obtained fissile material, it could produce nuclear weapons in one or two years. It was “difficult to judge” whether al-Hussein missiles could be available for use. Efforts to regenerate the Iraqi missile programme “probably” began in 1995. And so the “dossier” went on. Yes, Saddam—we had to say this in every radio interview, every lecture, write it in every article in order to be heard—was a brutal, wicked tyrant. But were “almost certainly,” “appears,” “probably” and “if ” really the rallying call to send our Grenadiers off to the deserts of Kut-al-Amara?

There was high praise in the document for UN weapons inspectors. And there was more trickery in the relevant chapter about them. It quoted Dr. Hans Blix, the executive chairman of the UN inspection commission, as saying that in the absence of (post-1998) inspections it was impossible to verify Iraqi disarma– ment compliance. But on 18 August 2002—scarcely a month before the Blair “dossier”—Blix had told the Associated Press that he couldn't say with certainty that Baghdad possessed WMDs. This quotation, of course, was excised from the British government document. So there it was. If these pages of trickery were based on “probably” and “if,” we had no business going to war. If they were all true, we murdered half a million Iraqi children for nothing. How was that for a war crime?

Yet each day, someone said something even more incredible—even more unimaginable—about President Bush's obsession with war. In October, Bush was himself talking to an audience in Cincinnati about “nuclear holy warriors.” Forget for a moment that we still couldn't prove Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. Forget that the latest Bush speech was just a rehash of all the “ifs” and “mays” and “coulds” in Tony Blair's flimsy sixteen pages of allegations in his plainly dishonest “dossier.” We now had to fight “nuclear holy warriors.” That's what we had to do to justify the whole charade through which we were being taken by the White House, by Downing Street, by all the decaying “experts” on terrorism and, alas, far too many journalists. Forget the fourteen Palestinians, including the twelve-year-old child, killed by Israel a few hours before Bush spoke in Cincinnati, forget that when American-made aircraft killed nine Palestinian children in July, along with one militant, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon—a “man of peace” in Bush's words—described the slaughter as “a great success.” Israel was on our side in the “war on terror.” We had to remember to use the word “terror”—about Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Yassir Arafat, in fact about anyone who opposed Israel or America. Bush used the word in his Cincinnati speech thirty times in half an hour—that was one “terrorism” a minute.

What we had to forget if we were to support this madness, needless to say, was that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It was essential to forget this for three reasons. First, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians—which was one of the reasons we were now supposed to go to war with him. Second, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the U.S. embassy—in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad. And third, because the envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. One might have thought it strange, in the course of one of his folksy press conferences, that Rumsfeld hadn't chatted to us about this interesting tit-bit. You might think he would wish to enlighten us about the evil nature of the criminal with whom he so warmly shook hands. But no. Until questioned much later about whether he warned Saddam against the use of gas—he claimed he did, but this proved to be untrue—Rumsfeld was silent. As he was about his subsequent and equally friendly meeting with Tariq Aziz—which just happened to take place on the day in March 1984 that the UN released its damning report on Saddam's use of poison gas against Iran.

We had to forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds—when he “used gas against his own people” in the words of Messrs. Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw
et al.
— President Bush Senior provided Saddam with $500 million in U.S. government subsidies to buy American farm products. We had to forget that in the following year, after Saddam's genocide was complete, the elder Bush doubled this subsidy to $1 billion, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious “dual-use” material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons. And of course, we had to forget about oil. Indeed, oil is the one commodity—and one of the few things that George Bush Junior knew something about, along with his ex-oil cronies Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and countless others in the administration— which was never mentioned. In all of Bush's thirty minutes of anti-Iraq war talk in Cincinnati—leavened with just two minutes of how “I hope this will not require military action”—there wasn't a single reference to the fact that Iraq might hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stood to gain billions of dollars in the event of a U.S. invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war. We had to ignore all this before we went to war. And that's pretty much what we did.

In the continuing war against al-Qaeda, Washington trumpeted its victories, even when they set new records in extrajudicial executions. A “Clean shot” was
The Washington Post
's description of the murder of the al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen by a U.S. Predator unmanned aircraft in November 2002. The U.S. press used Israel's own definition of such deaths as “targeted killing”—the BBC parroted the same words on 5 November. No one explained why these important al-Qaeda leaders could not have been arrested. Or tried before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation. Instead, the Americans released a clutch of Guantanamo “suspects,” one of whom—having been held for eleven months in solitary confinement and then returned to Afghanistan—turned out to be around one-hundred years old, and so senile that he couldn't string a sentence together. Unsurprisingly, American intelligence never seemed aware of just how many of bin Laden's associates it had been fighting in Afghanistan.
¹⁹⁴

The very expression “targeted killing” had now become part of the lexicon of the “war on terror.” Ariel Sharon of Israel used the term. So too did the Russians in their renewed war on Chechnya. After the disastrous “rescue” of Moscow theatre hostages held by rebel Chechens in Moscow, Putin was supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya. In October 2002,
Newsweek
ran a brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a deeply moving account of Russian cruelty there, it told of a Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier began to rape her. “Hurry up, Kolya,” his friend shouted, “while she's still warm.” But no matter. The “war on terror” meant that Kolya and the boys would be back in action soon, courtesy of Messrs. Putin, Bush and Blair.

That very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who tried to warn the West of Israel's massive nuclear war technology, imprisoned for twelve years of solitary confinement—and betrayed, so it appears, by Robert Maxwell—wrote a poem in his confinement. “I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver,” Vanunu wrote. “They said, ‘Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.'”

Kolya would have understood that. So would the U.S. Air Force officer “flying” the drone that killed the al-Qaeda men in Yemen. So would the Israeli pilot who bombed the apartment block in Gaza, killing nine small children as well as well as his Hamas target, the “operation” described by Sharon as “a great success.” Was this not part of the arrogance of colonial power? Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during the 1956–52 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting in October 2002 of his prowess at the guillotine. “You must never give the guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head around and that's when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through his jaw, and you have to use a butcher's knife to finish it off. It is an exorbitant power—to kill one's fellow man.” So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom.

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he wrote, in his
Gallic Wars:
“
Alea
iacta est.
” The die is cast. Just after 11 a.m. on 8 November, when the United Nations Security Council voted 15–0 to disarm Iraq, President George W. Bush crossed the Rubicon. “The world must insist that that judgement must be enforced,” he told us. The Rubicon is a wide river. It was deep for Caesar's legions. The Tigris would be more shallow—my guess was that the first American tanks would be across it within one week of war—but what lay beyond? “Cheat and retreat . . . will no longer be tolerated,” Bush told the UN. And after eight weeks of debate in the Security Council, no one any longer mentioned the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, because, of course, Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with September 11th. “Should we have to use troops,” Bush told a 7 November press conference, “. . . the United States, with friends, will move swiftly— with force—to do the job.” In other words, he would invade Iraq, the “friends,” presumably, being British.

The United Nations could debate any Iraqi non-compliance with weapons inspectors, but the United States would decide whether Iraq had breached UN resolutions. In other words, America could declare war without UN permission. The BBC, with CNN and all the other television networks, billed Resolution 1441 as “the last chance” for Saddam Hussein. In fact, it was a “last chance” for the United Nations. It was easy to identify the traps. America's UN ambassador, John Negroponte—later to be his country's ambassador in Iraq—insisted that the Security Council resolution “contains no hidden triggers.” But it did. It allowed the Security Council to discuss non-compliance without restraining the United States from attacking Baghdad. “One way or another,” Negroponte said, “. . . Iraq will be disarmed.” Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's nightmare headmaster at the UN, performed appropriately. “Crystal clear,” “unequivocal choice,” “serious consequences,” no more “ambiguous modalities.” You could almost feel the cane. No mention, of course, of the CIA's manipulation of the last team of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. Washington wanted a UN fig leaf for a war on Iraq and was willing to go through an inspection process in the hope that Iraq obstructed it.

I AM IN ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, preparing to give a lecture to university students on the coming war in Iraq. It is mid-November, and in my hotel room I am dusting off my description of bin Laden, of how I met him in Sudan and Afghanistan. Not since the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan have we heard his voice, although my contacts have insisted to me that he is alive. I turn on CNN. And there, sitting in my room above the Mississippi, I hear his voice. He is alive. It takes only a brief round of phone calls to the Middle East and South-West Asia for my sources to confirm that it is Osama bin Laden's gravelly voice that is threatening the West in the short monologue transmitted by the Al-Jazeera television channel. So the Saudi billionaire, the man in the cave, the “Evil One”—I quote a
Newsweek
headline—the bearded, ascetic man whom the greatest army on earth has sought in vain, is with us still.

“U.S. intelligence”—the heroes of September 11th who heard about Arabs learning to fly but didn't quite manage to tell us in time—come up with the usual rubbish for the American media. It may be him. It's probably him. The gravelly voice may mean he's been hurt. He is speaking fast because he could have been wounded by the Americans. Untrue. The United States was finally forced to acknowledge on 18 November that the man some of them had claimed to be dead was still very much in the land of the living—and uttering the kind of threat that confirms the darkest fears of Western leaders. “Just like you kill us, we will kill you,” bin Laden said.

When he was recorded, bin Laden was not talking into a tape-recorder. He was talking into a telephone. The man on the other end of the line—quite possibly in Pakistan—held the recorder. Bin Laden may not have been in the same city as the man with the recorder. He may well not have been in the same country. Osama bin Laden always speaks slowly. His voice is rapid, and the reason for this is apparently quite simple: the recorder's battery was low. When replayed by Al-Jazeera at real-time speed, the voice goes up an octave.

Writing about bin Laden now is one of the most difficult journalistic tasks on earth. I have to say what I know. I have to say what I think must be true. I have to ask why he made this tape. I start to tap out my report for
The Independent
. My story moves deeper into questions. Why? What for? Why now? It requires a new, harsh way of writing to tell the truth, the use of brackets and colons. Knowledge and suspicion, probability and speculation, keep grinding up against each other. Bin Laden survived the bombing of Tora Bora. Fact. Bin Laden escaped via Pakistan. Probability. Bin Laden is now in Saudi Arabia. A growing conviction.