The Great War for Civilisation (210 page)

I watched his funeral in Cairo, a grim, short journey on a horse-drawn gun carriage down a boulevard in which not a single Egyptian or Palestinian civilian was allowed to walk, before a phalanx of Arab dictators, some with blood on their hands. They had been chatting beside a mosque when a far gate in a palace wall opened and six black horses clip-clopped onto the road with the coffin, still bearing the Palestinian flag which the French had laid over it. And for almost a minute, no one noticed the horses or the coffin. It was like a train that steamed unnoticed into a country station on a hot afternoon. Yet when the body arrived in Ramallah, the Palestinians gave Arafat a more familiar funeral, shrieking and wailing—tens of thousands of them—fighting to touch the coffin and shooting cascades of bullets into the air. Arafat would have enjoyed it, for it was as chaotic, as dramatic, as genuine and as frightening as his own flawed character. And of course, the world was happy. Now that Arafat had gone, there was hope. That was our reaction. While the Palestinians grieved, they were told that life would now improve.

So, after democratic elections—something that Arafat never approved of—the colourless Mahmoud Abbas became president, a man whom the Americans and British thoroughly approved of. Abbas had written Palestinian documents for the Oslo accord, 600 pages in which he did not once use the word “occupation,” in which he referred only to the “redeployment” of the Israeli army rather than its withdrawal. Yet while he promised to end “terrorism”—Abbas's ability to use America's and Israel's lexicon was among his many accomplishments—the land of Palestine slipped from under him. Hamas and Israel broke ceasefires and then President George W. Bush announced, after a meeting in the United States with Ariel Sharon, that new realities had to be faced, that while he wanted a democratic Palestinian state “side by side” with Israel, the larger Jewish settlements built illegally on Palestinian land would have to stay. He had said this first in April 2004, when Arafat was still alive. It amounted to the destruction of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which said that land could not be acquired by war. Ariel Sharon was prepared to close down the puny little settlements in Gaza—housing just 8,000 Israelis—and this was a “historic and courageous act.” And the result? Vast areas of the Palestinian West Bank would now become Israeli, courtesy of President Bush. Land that belonged to people other than Israelis could now be appropriated with America's permission because it was “unrealistic” to accept otherwise. The Palestinians were appalled. This was just the sort of deceit and dishonesty that Osama bin Laden enjoyed talking about. Indeed, if George W. Bush thought he could define what was “unrealistic” in the Middle East, one was entitled to ask another question. Did he actually
work
for al-Qaeda?

We all have lands that “God” or our fathers gave us. Didn't Queen Mary Tudor of England die with “Calais” engraved on her heart? Doesn't Spain have a legitimate right to the Netherlands? Or Sweden the right to Norway and Denmark? Or Britain the right to India? Didn't the Muslims—and the Jews—have a right to fifteenth-century Andalusia? Every colonial power, including Israel, could put forward these preposterous demands. Every claim by Osama bin Laden, every statement that the United States represents Zionism and supports the theft of Arab lands, had now been proved true to millions of Arabs, even those who had no time for bin Laden. What better recruiting sergeant could bin Laden have than George W. Bush? Didn't he realise what this meant for young American soldiers in Iraq? Or were Israelis more important than American lives in Mesopotamia?

IN HIS LAST HOURS as U.S. proconsul in Baghdad in the summer of 2004, Paul Bremer decided to tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed across the land of Iraq. He drafted a new piece of legislation, forbidding Iraqi motorists to drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound their car horns except in an emergency. That same day, while Bremer fretted about the standards of Iraqi driving, three American soldiers were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of more than sixty attacks on U.S. forces over the same weekend.

It would be difficult to find a more preposterous—and distressing—symbol of Bremer's failures, his hopeless inability to understand the nature of the debacle which he and his hopeless occupation authority had brought about. It was not that the old Coalition Provisional Authority—now transmogrified into a 3,000-strong U.S. embassy, the largest in the world—was out of touch. It didn't even live on planet Earth. Bremer's last starring moment came when he departed Baghdad on a U.S. military aircraft, two U.S.-paid mercenaries—rifles pointed menacingly at camera crews and walking backwards—protecting him until the cabin door closed. And Bremer, remember, was appointed to his job because he was an “anti-terrorist” expert.

It was a terrible summer. If they could not always strike at the Americans, the insurgents would produce their Wal-Mart suicide bombers and destroy those they deemed collaborators. On 28 July, for example, hordes of impoverished would-be police recruits were massacred, up to a hundred of them in the Sunni city of Baquba, as they lined up unprotected along a boulevard in the hope of finding work. The bomber—identity, as usual, unknown—drove his Renault car into a mass of 600 unemployed young men looking for jobs in the police force, detonated his explosives and cut them to pieces. The bomb left a 7-foot hole in the road and wounded at least another 150 men and women, many of them shopping in a neighbouring market.

It would be the last summer when it was still possible to move on the roads of Iraq with some hope of not being killed or kidnapped and decapitated. I took a boat out on the Tigris, where the boatman, a former Iraqi soldier called Saleh, who was wounded in the Iran–Iraq War, offered to take me to Basra. A bit far, I thought, a full week's journey on Saleh's barge. So I settled for a trip out of Baghdad, past Saddam's old school and the wreckage of the defence ministry and the armies of squatters in the ruined apartment blocks. And as we drifted down the pea-green waters of the Tigris, I asked Saleh, who was a Shia, if there was any hope for the Middle East, for Iraq, for us. “Our Imam Ali said that a man is either our brother in religion or our brother in humanity and we believe this,” he said. “You must live with all men in perfect peace. You don't need to fight him or kill him. You know something—Islam is a very easy religion, but some radicals make it difficult. We are against anyone who is killing or kidnapping foreigners. This is not the Muslim way.”

I call on Sheikh Jouwad Mehdi al-Khalasi, one of the most impressive Shia leaders in Baghdad. A tall, distinguished man who speaks with both eloquence and humour, he has the forehead and piercing eyes of his grandfather—the man who led the Shia Muslim insurrection against British occupation in 1920. He brings out a portrait of the grand old revolutionary, who has a fluffy but carefully combed white beard. One of the most eminent scholars of his day, he ended his life in exile, negotiating with Lenin's Bolshevik government and dying mysteriously— poisoned, his supporters believed, by British intelligence.

Sheikh Jouwad's shoulders shake with laughter when I suggest that there are more than a few parallels between the Iraqi insurrections of 1920 and 2004. “Exactly,” he says. “In 1920, the British tried to introduce an Iraqi government in name only—it looks like a copy of UN Security Council Resolution 1546. Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi had become the grand ‘marja' [the leading Shiite scholar] after the death of Mohamed al-Shiazi and he issued a fatwa telling his followers and all Shiites in Iraq not to participate in elections, not to give legitimacy to a government established by occupation forces.

“Not only the Shiites responded to it but the Sunnis and the Jewish, Christian and other minorities as well. The elections failed and so the British forced my grandfather to leave Iraq. They arrested him at his home on the other side of this religious school where we are today—a home which many years later Saddam Hussein deliberately destroyed.”

It was a familiar colonial pattern. The Brits were exiling troublesome clerics— Archbishop Makarios came to mind—throughout the twentieth century, but Sheikh Mehdi turned out to be as dangerous to the British abroad as he had been at home. He was transported to Bombay, but so great was the crowd of angry Indian Muslims who arrived at the port that British troops kept him on board ship and then transported him to the hot, volcanic port of Aden.

“He said to the British: ‘You don't know where to send me—but since the pilgrimage season is close, I want to go on the haj to Mecca.' Now when Sherif Hussein, the ruler, heard this, he sent an invitation for my grandfather to attend the haj. He met Sherif Hussein on Arafat Mountain at Mecca. And then he received an invitation to go to Iran, signed by the minister of foreign affairs, Mohamed Mossadeq. And in Iran, waiting for him, were many religious leaders from Najaf.” Thirty years later, the Americans would topple Mossadeq's Iranian government— with help from Colonel “Monty” Woodhouse of MI6.

Sheikh Jouwad uses his hands when he talks—Shia prelates are far more expressive with their hands than Anglican clergymen—and each new episode in his grandfather's life produces a pointed finger. “When Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi arrived at the Iranian port of Bushehr, he received a big welcome but an official of the Iranian Oil Company fired ten bullets at him. Many people said at the time that this was a plot by Colonel Arnold Wilson, who had been the head of the British occupation in Iraq in 1920. All the great religious leaders from Qom in Iran were waiting for him—Al-Naini and al-Asfahani, Sheikh Abdulhalim al-Hoeri al-Yezdi, who was the professor of the future Ayatollah Khomeini—and then King Feisal, whom the British had set up in Baghdad, announced that exiled religious leaders could return to Iraq—providing they promised not to interfere in politics.”

Sheikh Mehdi angrily dismissed the invitation as “an attack on our role as religious leaders and on the independence of Iraq.” Instead, he travelled to the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashad and established there an assembly “to protect the holy places of Iraq,” publishing treatises in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Russian and Turkish.

“There was even an indirect dialogue between my grandfather and the Bolshevik revolutionaries of Lenin,” Sheikh Jouwad says. “They wanted to use difficulties in the international situation to help Iraq to become a really independent country. There would be a revolution in Iraq. That was the idea. But then in 1925, my grandfather suddenly died. They claimed he had a disease. But my father always believed that the British consul in Mashad had Sheikh Mehdi poisoned. On the afternoon that he died, the consul had invited all the doctors in Mashad to a reception outside the city and so when my grandfather became ill, no one could find a doctor and there was no one to care for him.”

And now? I ask Sheikh Jouwad. What of Iraq now? He chairs the Iraqi Islamic Conference—which combines both Shia and Sunni intellectuals, and which is demanding independence for Iraq, just as Sheikh Jouwad's grandfather did more than eighty years ago. “The Shia will not separate and they will not isolate themselves from the Sunni. They will have their rights when all the people of Iraq have rights. We have the right also to resist occupation in different ways and we do so politically . . . The Americans want civil war—but they will fail, because the Iraqi people will refuse to fall into civil war.”

But there are Arabs who might also like to provoke a civil war and who want to portray Islam as a religion of revenge and fear. I start to look at the videotapes, the kidnap tapes, of men and women pleading for their lives. The pictures are grainy, the voices sometimes unclear. But when Kim Sun-il from South Korea shrieks “Don't kill me” over and over again, his fear is palpable. As the heads of the kidnap victims are sawn off, Koranic recitations—usually by a well-known Saudi imam—are played on the soundtrack. At the beheading of an American, the murderer ritually wipes his bloody knife twice on the clothes of his victim, just as Saudi officials clean their blades after public executions in the kingdom. Terror by video is now a well-established part of the Iraq war. The “resistance” or the “terrorists” or the “armed Iraqi fighters”—as U.S. forces now referred to their enemies—began with a set of poorly made videos showing attacks on American troops in Iraq. Roadside bombs would be filmed from a passing car as they exploded beside U.S. convoys. Guerrillas could be seen firing mortars at American bases outside Fallujah. But once the kidnappings began, the videos moved into a macabre new world. More than sixty foreigners had been abducted in Iraq by July 2004; most were freed, but many were videotaped in captivity while their kidnappers read their demands. Angelo de la Cruz's wasted face was enough to provoke street demonstrations in Manila and the early withdrawal of the small Filipino military contingent in Iraq.

But the scenario has become horribly routine. The potential victim kneels in front of three hooded men holding Kalashnikov rifles. Sometimes he pleads for his life. Sometimes he is silent, apparently unaware of whether he is to be murdered or spared. The viewer, however, will notice something quite terrible which the victim is unaware of. When the hostage is to be beheaded, the gunmen behind him are wearing gloves. They do not intend to stain their hands with an infidel's blood. There is a reading of his death sentence and then—inevitably—the victim is pulled to the right and one man bends over to saw through his throat. The latest victim had been Bulgarian. Just as Ken Bigley from Liverpool was to turn up, trussed like a Guantánamo prisoner, crying out for help from Tony Blair, so Romanian, French, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and other foreign nationals are paraded before the cameras.