The Great War for Civilisation (207 page)

The “Interim Council” and its twenty-five members, representing a dutiful balance between Iraq's Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and secular population, was already the subject of the deepest cynicism. Its first act—at the behest of the Pentagon's Shia accolyte Ahmed Chalabi—was to declare a national holiday for 9 April, marking the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Or at least, that is how it looked in the West. For Iraqis, their first new national holiday marked the first day of foreign occupation of their land. In the conference hall that now served as press centre for the occupation authorities in Baghdad, sets of handouts were laid carefully on a table for journalists to peruse. They read like a schizophrenic nightmare. “Al Saydia Public Health Clinic Grand Opening,” one would say. “Soldier Killed in Explosion” said the next. “Iraq National Vaccination Day for Children” said a third, just an inch from another flyer recording the killing of two more U.S. troops.

The Americans were buying time, making decisions on the hoof, failing to assess the effects of their every action. First it was Jay “pull-your-stomach-in-and-say-you're-proud-to-be-an-American” Garner—the man I'd last met in Kurdistan in 1991—and then the famous “anti-terrorism” expert Paul Bremer who washed up in Baghdad to fire and then rehire Baath party university professors, and then, faced with one dead American a day, to rehire the murderous thugs of Saddam's torture centres to help in the battle against “terrorism.” Sixteen of America's thirty-three combat brigades were now in the cauldron of Iraq—five others were also deployed overseas—and the 82nd Airborne, only just out of Afghanistan, was about to be redeployed north of Baghdad. “Bring 'em on,” Bush had taunted America's guerrilla enemies in June 2003. They took him at his word. There was so far not a shred of evidence that the latest Bush administration fantasy— “thousands” of foreign Islamist “jihadi” fighters streaming into Iraq to kill Americans—was true.

But soon that fantasy would be made manifest. What would we be told then? Wasn't Iraq invaded to destroy “terrorism” rather than to re-create it? We were told that Iraq was going to be transformed into a “democracy,” and suddenly it's to be a battleground for another “war against terror.” America, Bush was now telling his people, “is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or . . . Los Angeles.” So that was it, then. Draw all these nasty “terrorists” into our much-loved, “liberated” Iraq, and they would obligingly leave the “homeland” alone.

When the Twin Towers collapsed in New York, who had ever heard of Fallujah? When the killers of 11 September 2001 flew their plane into the Pentagon, who had heard of Ramadi? When the Lebanese hijacker flew his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would ever have believed that President George W. Bush would be announcing, in August 2003, a “new front line in the war on terror” as his troops embarked on a hopeless campaign against the guerrillas of Iraq? Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to arms against “terrorism” in “Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza”?

Gaza? What did the miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? Nothing, of course. Nor did Iraq have anything whatever to do with 11 September 2001. Nor did September 11 change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people—and the sympathy of the rest of the world—to introduce a “world order” dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. The Iraqi “regime change,” as we now all knew, was planned as part of a Richard Perle/Paul Wolfowitz campaign document to would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. That Tony Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising what it represented—a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists—truly beggared belief.

But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan—its American-paid warlords raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in their burqas, its opium production now making Afghanistan the world's number one exporter, and its people sometimes killed at the rate of up to a hundred a week—was a “success,” something that Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld still boasted about. By 2005, the Taliban were back and so was al-Qaeda, killing American soldiers rather than Russians. Iraq—a midden of guerrilla hatred, popular resentment and incipient civil war—was also a “success.” Now Bush wanted $87 billion to keep Iraq running, he wanted to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a “talking shop” in 2002, he wanted scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to die in America's occupation war, to share the burdens of occupation—though not, of course, the decision-making, which must remain Washington's exclusive imperial preserve.

What's more, the world was supposed to accept the insane notion that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was part of this monstrous battle. It was the planet's last war of colonisation, although all mention of the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza had been erased from the Middle East narrative in U.S. statements about the “war on terror,” the cosmic clash of religious extremism that President Bush invented after 11 September 2001. Could Israel's interests be better served by so infantile a gesture from Bush? The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers and the grotesque implantation of Jews and Jews only in the colonies had now been set into this colossal struggle of “good” against “evil,” in which even Ariel Sharon was “a man of peace,” according to Mr. Bush.

In the Pentagon, there was some sanity. They were re-showing Gillo Pontecorvo's film of the French war in Algeria.
The Battle of Algiers
showed what happened both to the guerrillas of the FLN and to the French army when their war turned dirty. The flyers sent out to the Pentagon brass to watch this magnificent, painful film began with the words: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas . . .” And, they might have added, give encouragement to every resistance force in the Middle East. “If Israel's superpower ally can be humbled by Arabs in Iraq,” a Palestinian official explained to me in one of the Beirut camps in 2003, “why should we give up our struggle against the Israelis, who cannot be as efficient soldiers as the Americans?”

That's the lesson the Algerians drew when they saw France's mighty army surrendering at Dien Bien Phu. The French, like the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, had succeeded in murdering or “liquidating” many of the Algerians who might have negotiated a ceasefire with them. The search for an
interlocuteur valable
was one of de Gaulle's most difficult tasks when he decided to leave Algeria. But what could the Americans do? Their
interlocuteur
might have been the United Nations. But the UN had been struck off as a negotiator by the suicide bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad. So had the International Red Cross, also suicide-bombed. The insurgents were not interested in negotiations of any kind. Bush had declared “war without end.” And it looked as though Iraqis—along with ourselves—were going to be its principal victims.

TO ABU GHRAIB PRISON. It is September 2003. It will be another seven months before the torture and abuse perpetrated by the Americans in Saddam's old murder house are revealed. No talking to the prisoners, we are told. We can see them beyond the dirt lot, standing in the heat beside their sand-brown tents, the razor wire wrapped in sheaths around their compound. No pictures of the prisoners, we are told. Do not enter the compound. Do not go inside the wire. Of the up to 800 Iraqis held here, only a handful are “security detainees”—the rest are “criminal detainees”—but until now almost all of them have lived out here in the heat and dust and muck. Which is why the Americans were so pleased to see us at Saddam's vile old prison. Their message? Things are getting better.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, commander of the U.S. 800th Military Police Brigade, has cleaned up the burned and looted jail cells for hundreds of prisoners. A new medical section with stocks of medicines, X-ray machines and even a defibrillator has been installed for the prisoners. In the newly painted cells, there are blankets and toothpaste, toothbrush, soap and shampoo for every man, neatly placed for them—and for us, I suspect—on top of their prison blankets. These are the same cells in which the prisoners will later be held naked, or forced to wear women's underclothes or bitten by dogs. This is the corridor in which a young American military policewoman will hold a naked prisoner on a dog leash, where Iraqi prisoners will be piled naked on top of each other on the floor. General Karpinski will later be the Pentagon's fall-gal for what is happening here.

General Karpinski was obviously a tough lady—she was an intelligence officer in 7th Special Forces at Fort Bragg and served as a “targeting officer” in Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990—but back in September 2003 she had a little difficulty at first in recalling that there was a riot at the jail four months earlier in which U.S. troops used “lethal force” when protesting prisoners threw stones and tent-poles at American military policemen. The troops killed a teenage inmate. Most of the “security detainees”—the 800th MP Brigade's publicity said that they have the responsibility of “caring” for prisoners rather than guarding them—were across at Baghdad airport where, General Karpinski said, there were men who “may be part of a resistance force.” Note the word “resistance,” rather than terrorist. Then when I asked if there were any Western prisoners being held, she said that she thought there were “six claiming to be American and two claiming to be from the UK.” General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, who would also be blamed for the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2005, will deny this within twenty-four hours. No explanation given.

Then came the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison, a Dr. Majid. When I asked him what his job was when Saddam used the place as a torture and execution centre, he replied that he had been—er—the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison. Indeed, half his staff were running the medical centre at Abu Ghraib under the Saddam regime. “No, I didn't ever attend the executions,” he said. “I couldn't stand that. I sent my junior doctors to do the death certificates.” Except at night, of course, when the security services brought in political prisoners for hanging. Then Dr. Majid would receive an instruction saying “no death certificates.” The politicals were hanged at night. During the day, the doctor said, it was the “killers” who were hanged. Killers? Killers? What did his use of that word imply?

The new Iraqi prison guards at Abu Ghraib, we were informed, had been trained in human rights—including two, it turned out, who had been police officers under the Saddam regime. No wonder General Karpinski said that the Americans hadn't chosen the doctors—that had been the work of the new Iraqi Ministry of Health. There were U.S. intelligence officers in Abu Ghraib but no, the military police were not present during interrogations. Yes, General Karpinski had visited Guantánamo Bay for “a few days,” but she had not brought any lessons learned there to Baghdad.
²⁰⁸

Of course, we were taken on a statutory visit to Abu Ghraib's old death chamber, the double hanging room in which poor Farzad Bazoft of
The Observer
and thousands of Iraqis were put to death. General Karpinski gave the lever a tug and the great iron trapdoors clanged open, their echo vibrating through the walls. Dr. Majid said he had never heard them before, that he was never even a member of the Baath party. So let this be written in history: the chief medical officer at Saddam's nastiest prison—who was now the chief medical officer at America's cleanest Iraqi prison—was never a member of the Baath party and never saw an execution.

Of course, there are things which only a heart of stone cannot be moved by, the last words written and carved on the walls of the filthy death row cells, just a few yards from the gallows. “Ahmed Qambal, 8/9/2000,” “Ahmed Aziz from Al-Najaf governorate, with Jabah, 2/9/01,” “Abbad Abu Mohamed.” Sometimes they had added verses from the Koran. “Death is better than shame.” “Death is life for a believer and a high honour.” What courage it must have taken to write such words, their very last on Earth.

But there was something just a little too neat about all this. Against Saddam's cruelty, any institution looks squeaky clean. Yet there was a lot about Abu Ghraib which didn't look as clean as the new kitchens. There was still no clear judicial process for the supposed killers, thieves and looters behind the razor wire. The military admitted that the transcription of Arabic names—with all the Ellis Island mistakes that can lead to—meant that families often could not find their loved ones. There was no mention—until we brought it up—of the guerrilla mortar attack that killed six prisoners in their tents. The Americans had sent psychologists to talk to the inmates afterwards and found that they believed—surprise, surprise—that the Americans were using them as human shields. And, as we know, much, much worse was to come.

OWEID POINTS ACROSS the dry earth and sweeps his hand across the grey desolation of sand, dust and broken homes to the north. “I knew all these villages,” he says. “Take this down in your notebook—you should remember the names of these dead villages: Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal, Daoudi, Djezeran Nakbia, Zalal, Abu Talfa, Jdedah, Ghalivah, Um al-Hamadi, Al-Gufas, Al-Khor, Al-Hammseen . . .” It is too much. I cannot keep up with Abbas Oweid. The sheer scope of Saddam's destruction of the Marsh Arabs has outpaced the speed of my handwriting. But then, far across the rubble of bricks and broken doorframes and dried mud, there comes the cry of a bird.