The Great War for Civilisation (201 page)

When an occupying power takes over another country's territory, it automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its civilians, their property and institutions. Thus the American troops in Nasiriyah became automatically responsible for the driver who was murdered for his car in the first day of that city's “liberation.” The Americans in Baghdad were responsible for the German and the Slovak embassies that were looted by hundreds of Iraqis, and for the French Cultural Centre that was attacked, and for the Central Bank of Iraq that was torched on 11 April and which, however contaminated it may be by the previous regime— Arab nations tend to deposit their most odious creatures in the role of central bank governor—is the core financial power in Iraq, the new version of Iraq just as much as the old.

But the British and Americans discarded this notion, based though it is upon conventions and international law. And yet again, we journalists allowed them to do so. We clapped our hands like children when the Americans “assisted” the Iraqis in bringing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the television cameras, and yet we went on talking about the “liberation” of Baghdad as if the majority of civilians there were garlanding the soldiers with flowers instead of queuing with anxiety at checkpoints and watching the looting of their capital. We journalists cooperated, too, with a further collapse of morality in this war. Take, for example, the ruthless bombing of the residential Mansour area of Baghdad in the attempt to kill Saddam. The Anglo–American armies claimed they believed Saddam and his two evil sons Qusay and Uday were present. So they bombed the civilians of Mansour and killed at least fourteen decent, innocent people, almost all of them—and this would obviously be of interest to the religious feelings of Messrs. Bush and Blair—Christians.

Now one might have expected the BBC World Service Radio next morning to question whether the bombing of civilians did not constitute a bit of an immoral act, a war crime perhaps, however much we wanted to kill Saddam. Forget it. The presenter in London described the slaughter of these innocent civilians as “a new twist” in the war to target Saddam—as if it was quite in order to kill civilians, knowingly and in cold blood, in order to murder our most hated tyrant. The BBC's correspondent in Qatar—where the Centcom boys pompously boasted that they had “real-time” intelligence that Saddam was present—used all the usual military jargon to justify the unjustifiable. The “Coalition,” he announced, knew it had “time-sensitive material”—i.e., that they wouldn't have time to know whether they were killing innocent human beings in the furtherance of their cause or not—and that this “actionable material” (again I quote this revolting BBC dispatch) was not “risk-free.”

And then he went on to describe, without a moment of reflection on the moral issues involved, how the Americans had used their four 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs to level the civilian homes. These were the very same pieces of ordnance that the same U.S. Air Force used in their vain effort to kill Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001. So now we were using them, knowingly, on the flimsy homes of civilians of Baghdad—folk who would otherwise be worthy of the “liberation” we wished to bestow upon them—in the hope that a gamble, a bit of “intelligence” about Saddam, would pay off.
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The Geneva Conventions have a lot to say about all this. They specifically refer to civilians as protected persons, who must have the protection of a warring power even if they find themselves in the presence of armed antagonists. The same protection was demanded for southern Lebanese civilians when Israel launched its brutal “Grapes of Wrath” operation in 1996. When that Israeli pilot, for example, fired his U.S.-made Hellfire missile into the Mansouri ambulance in Lebanon, killing three children and two women, the Israelis claimed that a Hizballah fighter had been in the vehicle. The statement proved to be untrue. But Israel was rightly condemned for killing civilians in the hope of killing an enemy combatant. Now we were doing exactly the same. So no more namby-pamby Western criticism of Israel after the bunker-busters have been dropped on Mansour.

More and more, we were committing these crimes. The mass slaughter of more than 400 civilians in the Amariya air-raid shelter in Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War was carried out in the hope that it would kill Saddam. In the 1999 bombardment of Serbia we repeatedly bombed civilian areas—after realising that the Yugoslav army had abandoned their barracks—and in one of the most vicious incidents towards the end of that war, an American jet bombed a narrow road bridge over a river. NATO said the bridge could carry tanks even if there was no tank on it at the time. In fact, the bridge was far too narrow to carry a tank. But another pilot returned to bomb the bridge again, just as the rescuers were trying to save the wounded. Victims of the second bomb included schoolgirls. Again, we forgot about this in our euphoria at winning the war.

Why? Why cannot we abide by the rules of war that we rightly demand that others should obey? And why do we journalists—yet again, war after war— collude in this immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and illegal act into a “new twist” or into “time-sensitive material”? Wars have a habit of turning normally sane people into cheerleaders, of transforming rational journalists into nasty little puffed-up fantasy colonels. But surely we should all carry the Geneva Conventions into war with us, along with the history books. For the only people to benefit from our own war crimes will be the next generation of Saddam Husseins. Isn't that what the insurgents were to learn within weeks and months of the occupation?

BUT WE COULD ALWAYS FALL BACK on the argument that would become our sine qua non in the months and years to come, the most quotable quote, the easiest line in the book, the very last resort of the scoundrel in Iraq: Saddam was worse. We weren't as bad as Saddam. We didn't kill and torture in the Abu Ghraib prison— these qualifications would be dropped later for obvious reasons—because we were civilised, liberators, democrats who believed in freedom. We were the good guys.

So in those first hours after the “liberation” of Baghdad, I did go and take a peek into the heart of darkness. I waded through the cartridge cases of the Jumhuriya Bridge battle that lay like winter leaves across the highway—the tank whose shell had killed my two colleagues was still there, hatches down—and walked through the great Raj-gate of Saddam's Presidential Palace. Inside was the holiest of holies, the ark of Saddam's Baathist covenant, his very own throne. The seat was covered in blue velvet and was soft, comfortable in an upright, sensible sort of way, with big gold arm-rests upon which his hands—for Saddam was obsessed with his hands—could rest, and with no door behind it through which assassins could enter the room. There was no footstool, but the sofas and seats around the vast internal conference chamber of Saddam's palace placed every official on a slightly lower level than the caliph himself.

Did I sit on Saddam's throne? Of course I did. There is something dark in all our souls which demands an understanding of evil rather than good, because—I suppose—we are more fascinated by the machinery of cruelty and power than we are by angels. So I sat on the blue throne and put my hands over the golden arm-rests and surveyed the darkened, gold-glistening chamber in which men of great power sat in terror of the man who used to sit where I was now sitting. “He knew human folly like the back of his hand,” Auden wrote of his eponymous dictator. Ah yes, the hands.

Behind the throne was a vast canvas of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem— minus the Jewish settlements—so that the third-holiest city of Islam hung above the head of the mightiest of Iraqi warriors. And opposite Saddam's chair—there was no electricity and the room was in darkness and the torchlight that illuminated the opposite canvas could only produce a gasp of astonishment and horrible clarity—was a different work of Baathist art. It depicted a clutch of huge missiles, white-hot flames burning at their tails, soaring towards a cloud-fringed, sinister heaven, each rocket wreathed in an Iraqi flag and the words “God is Great.”

The godly and the ungodly faced each other in this central edifice of Baathist power. The American 3rd Infantry Division who were camped in the marble halls and the servants' bedrooms had been searching in vain for the underground tunnels that were supposed to link this complex with the bomb-smashed Ministry of Defence next door. They had kept the looters at bay—though I found some of them thieving televisions and computers in the smaller villas of the palace grounds— because, so they said, General Tommy Franks would probably set up his proconsulship here and, if the Americans could create a compliant Iraqi government, a new U.S.-appointed administration might be running the country from this vast pseudo-Sumerian complex within a few months.

They would find Saddam's swimming pool intact, along with his spacious palm groves and rose gardens. Indeed—how often are brutal men surrounded by beauty—the scent of roses drifted even now through the colossal marble halls and chambers and underground corridors of the Republican Palace. There were peonies and nasturtiums and the roses were red and pink and white and crimson and covered in white butterflies, and water—though the 3rd Infantry Division had not yet found the pumps—gurgled from taps into the flower beds. There was even a miniature zoo with a cuddly old bear and lion cubs to which the Americans were feeding a live sheep per day. In Saddam's pool-side washing room, piles of books had been tied up for removal—Iraqi poetry and, would you believe it, volumes of Islamic jurisprudence—while exercise machines waited across the floor to keep the second Saladin in moderate physical shape. His sixty-sixth birthday would fall in two weeks' time. Over the door were the initials “S.H.”

Walking the miles of corridors—after walking the 2-mile road to the palace itself, through yet more fields of roses and palms and piles of spent ammunition and the smell of something awful and dead beyond the flower beds—one was struck by the obsessive mixture of glory and banality. The 15-foot chandeliers inspire admiration, but the solid gold bathroom fittings—the solid gold loo holder and the solid gold loo handle—created a kind of cultural aggression. If one was supposed to be intimidated by Saddam's power—as the Coliseum and the triumphal arches were meant to impress the people of Rome—what was one to make of the narrow unpolished marble staircases or the great marble walls of the antechamber with their gold-leaf ceilings, walls into which were cut quotations from the interminably dull speeches and thoughts of “His Excellency President Saddam Hussein.”

Fascist is the word that sprang to mind, but fascism with a touch of Don Corleone thrown in. In that great conference room would sit the attendant lords—the senior masters of the Baath party, the security apparatchiks upon whom the regime depended—desperately attempting to keep awake as their leader embarked on his four-hour explanations of the state of the world and of Iraq's place within it. As he talked of Zionism, they could admire the Al-Aqsa mosque. When he became angry, they could glance at the fiery missiles streaking towards that glowering sky with the clouds hanging oppressively low in the heavens.

His words were even cut into the stonework of the outer palace walls where four 20-foot-high busts of the great warrior Hammurabi, clad in medieval helmet and neck-covering, stare at one another across the courtyard. Hammurabi, however, had a moustache and—amazing to perceive—bore an uncommon likeness to Saddam Hussein. Could the government of the “New Iraq” really hold its cabinet meetings here while these four monsters stared at their American-supplied Mercedes? Answer: no. The statues were removed by crane within six months.

The gold leaf, the marble, the chandeliers, the sheer height and depth of the chambers took the breath away. In one hall, a Pantheon-like dome soared golden above the walls, and when I shouted “Saddam” I listened to the repeated echo of “Saddam” for almost a minute. And I had an absolute conviction that Saddam did just that. If he could instruct his masons to carve his name upon the walls, surely he wanted to hear it repeated in the heights of his palace.

Far below was the Saddam private cinema, with its blue patent leather seats and two rolls of film—one French, one Russian—still waiting for the final picture show. Outside, beyond the great lawns and the fountains, stood the American Abrams tanks of the 3rd Infantry Division, their names containing the banality and power of another nation. On their barrels I could read how the crews had dubbed their armoured behemoths.
Atomic Dog
.
Annihilator
.
Arsonist
.
Anthrax
.
Anguish
.
Agamemnon
. Saddam would have approved.

BAGHDAD WAS BURNING. I counted sixteen columns of smoke rising over the city on the aftenoon of 11 April. At the beginning, there was the Ministry of Trade. I watched the looters throw petrol through the smashed windows of the ground floor and the fire burst from them within two seconds. Then there was a clutch of offices at the bottom of the Jumhuriya Bridge which emitted clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. By mid-afternoon, I was standing outside the Central Bank of Iraq as each window flamed like a candle, a mile-long curtain of ash and burning papers drifting over the Tigris.

As the pickings got smaller, the looters grew tired and—the history of Baghdad insists that anarchy takes this form—the symbols of government power were cremated. The Americans talked of a “new posture” but did nothing. They pushed armoured patrols through the east of the city, Abrams tanks and Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but their soldiers did no more than wave at the arsonists. I found a woman weeping beside her husband in the old Arab market. “We are destroying what we now have for ourselves,” she said to him. “We are destroying our own future.”