The Great War for Civilisation (191 page)

A group of foreign “peace activists” stood hand-in-hand along the parapet of Baghdad's largest bridge, old men and young American Muslims and a Buddhist in a prayer shawl, smiling at the passing traffic, largely ignored by Iraqi motorists. It was as if Iraqis were less caught up in this demonstration than the foreigners, as if their years of suffering had left them complacent to the terrible reality about to fall upon them. What did this portend for the Americans? Or the Iraqis?

So I went at dusk on this last night of peace to the great eggshell monument that Saddam erected to the Iraqi dead of his 1980–88 war against Iran, whose cavernous marble basements are inscribed with the names of every lost Iraqi. “Hope comes from life and brings fire to the heart,” one of the lines of Arabic poetry says round the base. But the couples sitting on the grass beside the monument had not come to remember loved ones. They were courting students whose only political comment—aware of that “minder” hovering over my shoulder—was that “we have endured war so many times, we are used to it.”

So I am left with a heretical thought. Might Baghdad ultimately become an open city, its defenders moved north to protect Saddam's heartland, the capital's people left to discover the joys and betrayals of an American occupation on their own? I suppose it all depends on the next few hours and days, on how many civilians the Americans and the British manage to kill in their supposedly moral war. Would Iraqis have to construct another monument to the dead? I asked in my report to
The Independent
that night. Or would we?

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Atomic Dog, Annihilator, Arsonist,
Anthrax, Anguish and Agamemnon

You ask me about the sack of Baghdad? It was so horrible there are no words to describe it. I wish I had died earlier and had not seen how the fools destroyed these treasures of knowledge and learning. I thought I understood the world, but this holocaust is so strange and pointless that I am struck dumb. The revolutions of time and its decisions have defeated all reason and knowledge.

—The Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz describing the sack of Baghdad by Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, 1258 (translation: Michael Wood)

A PULSATING, MINUTE-LONG ROAR of sound brought President George W. Bush's crusade against “terrorism” to Baghdad. There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defences and then a series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under us, the walls moving, the sound waves clapping against our ears. Tubes of fire tore into the sky around the Iraqi capital, dark red at the base, golden at the top. Looking out across the Tigris from the riverbank, I could see pin-pricks of fire reaching high into the sky as America's bombs and missiles exploded on to Iraq's military and communication centres and, no doubt, upon the innocent as well. Valhalla, I said to myself. This needed Wagner, the Twilight of the Gods,
Götterdämmerung
.

No one in Iraq doubted that the dead would include civilians. Tony Blair had said just that in the House of Commons debate that very same week. But I wondered, listening to this storm of fire across Baghdad, if he had any conception of what it looks like, what it feels like, or of the fear of those innocent Iraqis who were, as I wrote my report an hour later, cowering in their homes and basements. Just before the missiles arrived, I talked to an old Shia Muslim woman in a poor area of Baghdad, dressed in traditional black with a white veil over her head. I pressed her for what she felt. In the end, she just said: “I am afraid.” The explosions now gave expression to her words.

That this was the start of something that would change the face of the Middle East was in little doubt; whether it would be successful in the long term was quite another matter. It was a strange sensation to be on the ground, in at the start of this imperial adventure. The sheer violence of it, the howl of air-raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles, carried its own political message; not just to Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions announced. This is how we do business. This is how we take our revenge for 11 September 2001.

Not even President Bush had made any pretence in the last days of peace to link Iraq with those international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Yet the Americans were—without the permission of the United Nations, with most of the world against them—acting out their rage with a fiery consummation. Iraq, of course, could not withstand this for long. Saddam might claim, as he did, that his soldiers could defeat technology with courage. Nonsense. What fell upon Iraq on 19 March—and I witnessed in Baghdad just an infinitesimally small part of this festival of violence—was as militarily overwhelming as it was politically terrifying. The crowds outside my hotel stood and stared into the sky at the flashing anti-aircraft bursts, awed by their power. Did the British, I wondered as I later stood on my hotel balcony near the Tigris, know where this will lead? Did we British not walk down this same arrogant path against the petty tyrants of Mesopotamia almost a hundred years ago? And look what happened to the British empire. Now, listening to those great explosions around Baghdad, I wondered what time had in store for the American empire.

Baghdad had always been a harsh place for me. Over the years, I had made many friends in the city—businessmen and their families, artists, retainers from the old regime, and, yes, Baathists and their families and at least one minister, Naji al-Hadithi, first the information minister then the foreign minister, a man whose first response to pointed questions would be to look at the ceiling of his office. Up there, he would be telling us. Up there, in the ceiling, was the microphone. But in the homes of Iraqis, I felt safe. Old photographs would show grandfathers in British army uniform, young women shopping at Harrods in the 1950s and—much later—the same women, middle-aged, enjoying the oil wealth of Saddam's Iraq, walking in Knightsbridge in the late 1970s and 1980s. But the insufferable heat of Baghdad in summer and the constant “minders” whom the information ministry would attach to reporters on the most innocent of stories would have a claustrophobic effect. After a while the minders took our money and worked for us rather than the regime. We could “buy” them, and during this last Saddamite war they would move imperceptibly from being servants of the regime to servants of the television networks. In the weeks following the “liberation” of Baghdad, they would become our employees, and a few months later we would find them working as employees of the U.S. occupying power.

When we could shake off the minders, persuade them we were only taking a taxi to the grocery store when in fact we were heading to the slums of Saddam City, we could hear the men of the Shiite opposition, the rage of the Dawa party, the courageous voices of families who lived amid filth, who rose up at our bidding in 1991 and were betrayed but who still waited for their moment of freedom. The senior ministry men knew we were making these illicit visits, but for $100 or $200 they would disregard them. The regime was as corrupting as it was corrupt. Standing on the world's greatest wealth, it had given its people war and more war and yet more war. I had been in Baghdad as the Iranian Scud missiles had crashed into the nighttime city, on the front lines in the assault on Khorramshahr in 1980; I had seen the Iraqi dead inside Iran in 1982 and inside Kuwait in 1991; and now I would see the Iraqi dead again. Inside my brain was a memories box in which I would see as many Iraqis dead as alive, their bodies as vivid as the living.

And it dawned on me over a long period that Iraqis must have seen themselves this way. They were both dead and alive. War had become not just part of their lives, but the very fabric of their existence. To fight and die—for Saddam, for Iraq, for Arab nationalism, for patriotism, out of fear—was a natural phenomenon. Between 1980 and 1988 they fought the Iranians to prevent the occupation of their country. Occupation, for Iraqis, for Arabs—for anyone of any race or religion— was not just humiliation. It was a form of rape. The enemy came into your country, your city, your street, your home, your bedroom. They would tie you up, insult your family, torture you, kill you. Saddam's own secret policemen did that. They, too, were occupiers. Woe betide anyone who tried to take their place.

The night before the first raids, I had walked around the Jadriya suburb of Baghdad, mixed Sunni–Shia middle class, watching soldiers with their children on their shoulders, hugging their wives goodbye, kitbags over their shoulders, rifles in hand. Snapshot. Paris and Berlin and London 1914. Berlin 1939. Warsaw 1939. London 1939. The Soviet Union 1941. The United States 1941. And before Korea and during Vietnam and among all the armies of the world as they set off on their wars to defend or promote civilisation or fascism or communism. Second Lieutenant Bill Fisk, perhaps, in Birkenhead, 1918? And now. I called at a pharmacy to buy bandages and plaster and lavatory paper. The chemist was a thoughtful man, explaining to the other glowering customers that the foreign journalist was going to share their dangers, that they should treat him with kindness. I told the man that he was especially generous since I thought my own air force, the RAF, would soon be bombing Baghdad. “Yes,” he said with a sad smile, “I rather think they will.”

So at the start of this new and one-sided war, we reporters would be recording two different conflicts: the suffering of Iraqis and the death throes of the regime. The latter wanted us to view the two as identical. The Americans and British insisted that they were destroying the regime in order to end the suffering. In fact, the suffering and the dying struggle of Iraqi Baathism could no more be separated than you could tear the bandages off a wound without causing the patient to shriek in pain. It was easy to argue that Saddam's wickedness was the cause of all their woes, but wounded and dying Iraqis did not see their fate in quite those terms. They were being attacked by Americans, not by Iraqis. American missiles and bombs were destroying their homes. Had they fought and died on the Iran front, only to be attacked and occupied by another foreign power? The Pentagon clearly understood this equation. Why else would the American military refuse to do what any professional army—or occupying power—would do: to count the number of civilian deaths during and after the war?

Donald Rumsfeld was to assert that the American attack on Baghdad was “as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed.” But he could not have told that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looks at me on the first morning of the war, drip-feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tries vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her legs—they were bound up with gauze—and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. Her mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg, which the little girl thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha's mother thinks that if her child's two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from her paralysis. She was the first of the patients brought to the Mustansariya University Hospital after America's blitz on the city began.

There is something sick, obscene, about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we reporters turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi minister of health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to emphasise the “bestial” nature of the American attack. The Americans say that they don't intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain. So let's forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the cocky moralising of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip—this bright morning in March 2003—around the Mustansariya College Hospital. For the reality of war—and here I unashamedly make my point again—is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about “coalition forces” which our “embedded” journalists were already telling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy—which this war does not—is primarily about suffering and death.

Take fifty-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs, but who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders—they are now twice their original size. She was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missiles struck Baghdad. “I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere,” she told me. “It was on my arms, my legs, my chest.” Amel Hassan still has multiple shrapnel wounds in her chest. Her five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt's front door when the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding, although the blood has clotted around her toes and is stanched by the bandages on her ankles and lower legs. Two boys are in the next room. Saad Selim is eleven, his brother Omar fourteen. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest.

Isra Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel wounds to the legs, sustained when she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the blitz began. Imam Ali is twenty-three and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover her head with a black scarf but she cannot hide the purple wounds to her legs. Multiple shrapnel wounds. After a while, “multiple shrapnel wounds” sounds like a natural disease, which I suppose—among a people who have suffered more than twenty years of war—it is.

So was all this, I asked myself, for 11 September 2001? All this was to “strike back” at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than had the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wondered, that these children, these young women, should suffer for September 11th? Wars repeat themselves. Always, when “we” come to visit those we have bombed, we have the same question. In Libya in 1986, American reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991, “we” asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And now a doctor found himself asked by a British radio reporter—yes, you've guessed it—“Do you think, Doctor, that some of these people could have been hit by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire?”

Should we laugh or cry at this? Must we always blame “them” for their own wounds? Certainly we should ask why those cruise missiles exploded where they did, at least 320 in Baghdad alone, courtesy of the USS
Kitty Hawk
. Isra Riad came from Sayadiyeh, where there is a big military barracks. Najla Abbas's home was in Risalleh, where there were villas belonging to Saddam's family. The two Selim brothers lived in Shirta Khamse, where there was a storehouse for military vehicles. But that's the whole problem. Targets are scattered across the city. The poor—and all the wounded I saw were poor—live in cheap, sometimes wooden houses that collapse under blast damage.

It's the same old story. If we make war, we are going to kill and maim the innocent. Dr. Habib al-Hezai, whose FRCS was gained at Edinburgh University, counted 101 patients of the total 207 wounded in the raids in his hospital alone, of whom 85 were civilians—20 of them women and 6 of them children—and 16 soldiers. A young man and a child of twelve died under surgery. No one will say how many soldiers were killed during the attacks.