The Great War for Civilisation (218 page)

124
On 16 December 2004, an investigator approved by the Algerian government admitted that Algerian security force members were believed to have killed 5,200 civilians. “. . . individually, agents of the state carried out these illegal acts,” Farouk Ksentini said. “The war was terrible and there were excesses. But the state itself has not committed any crime.” Two weeks later, Ksentini told Reuters that “agents of the state” had “disappeared” 6,146 civilians.

125
Under OPEC rules, Kuwait maintained a production quota of 1.5 million barrels a day but had recently been producing 1.9 million barrels. The favoured OPEC price of $18 a barrel had been falling to $14 and Saddam Hussein was claiming that a fall of $1 per barrel would cost Iraq $1 billion a year in lost revenue—and that the collapse in world prices had so far cost Iraq $14 billion. No one disputed the overproduction. But the Iraqis alleged that Kuwait had been taking oil from Iraq's southern fields by boring northwards along their mutual frontier—in other words, Kuwait was thieving the resources of the nation whose war machine saved it from Iran's revolution.

126
Mahmoud was a political dissident as well as an AP reporter in Nasser's Egypt. He would always wear a broad smile when he recalled the experience of being questioned by police torturers while suspended by his feet above a vat of lukewarm human faeces in Cairo's Citadel prison.

127
This was fully understood by Western oil analysts whose carefully argued if essentially dull studies made the same point. “Most Arabs are convinced that the U.S. intervention in the region is not motivated by a desire to uphold international law,” Robert Mabro wrote in October 1990. “They would have dearly liked the U.S.A to play this role in the region, to play it in Palestine and in Lebanon as it is now claiming to do in Kuwait. But the U.S.A's consistent failure over decades to uphold international law when Israel's policies and actions are involved leaves very deep doubt in the Arab mind about the true motivations on this occasion.”

128
As usual when we needed visas, they were not forthcoming. If the Saudis wanted to invite journalists to an Arab conference, however, their embassies were ready to issue us with entry permits within hours. When we wished to avoid these tiresome events, we merely declined to fill in the question in the visa application which asked for our religion. The Saudis would then assume that we were Jewish—and, abiding by their own outrageous and racist policy, decline to issue us with a visa.

129
Many were the brave expatriates—and Kuwaitis—who escaped their Iraqi captors. George Woodberry, the British temporary Securicor operations director in Kuwait, had approached the border in his four-by-four only to find 50 Iraqi tanks lined up in front of him. “We couldn't see them until we were on top of the dune and by then it was too late to turn round,” he told us. “So we drove on between them with tanks 40 yards on each side of us. We didn't wave or say anything, we just kept driving. The tank crews were just standing there, watching us . . . ” Woodberry described occupied Kuwait where “the place has stopped working. The Iraqi soldiers bang on people's doors demanding money and food. Every shop has been looted. The Palestinians looted as well as the Iraqis—Palestinians who had lived there for years. There are safes and strongboxes lying in the streets where people dragged them out to break them open. There's not a shop or an office in the centre of the city which hasn't been cleaned out by the looters.”

130
Washing continuously in a shower was good advice for victims of a gas attack; the hat was an exotic addition unless it was an enclosed hood.

131
Simple. In June and August 1980, the UN Security Council declared Israel's annexation of Jerusalem “null and void” under international law. In December 1981, the UN Security Council declared Israel's annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights “null and void” under international law. On 9 August 1990, the UN Security Council declared Iraq's annexation of Kuwait “null and void” under international law. For the third declaration—but not for the first two—the West would insist on the strict application of “international law.” Arabs already knew, of course, that there was one rule of law for the Israelis, a quite different one for non-Israelis.

132
I visited the British unit on 26 October and every soldier I spoke to reminded me that as the Light Brigade, they charged into the valley of death at Balaclava exactly a hundred and thirty-six years and two days earlier. “It is one of the classics of British army tradition,” Lt. Col. Arthur Denaro admitted, “that we tend to celebrate defeats.” True to the statistics of imperial history, 35 per cent of the Hussars were from Ireland, which is why so many of the men preparing to fight Saddam had accents from Belfast, Derry, Dublin and Cork. Even their tanks bore the names of Irish towns.

133
This was the same Sheikh al-Owda whose release from custody bin Laden would demand when I met him in Afghanistan seven years later.

134
The question was also raised when Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir David Craig, the chief of the UK Defence Staff, visited the kingdom. Asked if any British officer would have a power of veto over an American decision, he replied, according to my notes at the time: “Well, I think that's a difficult sort of way to put it because there is no question when you go to war, that you're under command and you obey accordingly.” Stripped of its discretion, this meant that de la Billière would have to do as he was told once the shooting started.

135
The computer was returned by the patriotic thief, who left the following note with the machine: “Dear Sir, I am a common thief and I love my Queen and country. Whoever lost this should be bloody hung. Yours, Edwards.”

136
This was pushing the envelope of history a little far. Kuwait was part of the Ottoman governorate of Basra and the Turks regarded the Sabah family as Ottoman governors even after a new sheikh, Mubarak Sabah—who had killed his two half-brothers—agreed in 1899 to make Kuwait a protectorate of Britain for £15,000 a year. After the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, Iraq demanded a union with Kuwait and was only dissuaded from invading when British troops were rushed to the sheikhdom—much as U.S. forces flew to “save” Saudi Arabia in 1990.

137
The breakdown of this figure was as follows: non-repayable loans, $5,843,287,671.23; soft cash loans, $9,246,575,343.46; development loans, $95,890,410.95; military equipment and logistics, $3,739,184,077.85; petroleum, $6,751,159,583; industrial products for the reconstruction of Basra, $16,772,800; payments for industrial repairs, $20,266,667; trucks, tractors, caterpillars, asphalt rollers (270 vehicles), $21,333,333.50. The Saudi calculation was out by a $1.19.

138
It is instructive to compare this humane if cynical account of the BLU-82 with the gung-ho report by a Reuters correspondent on another American “super-weapon,” used in 1991 to destroy hardened underground bunkers. “The bomb, called a GBU-28, was five times more powerful than any non-nuclear weapon previously built. It was just hours old when dropped on Iraq's strongest underground fortress and its designers had their fingers crossed that it would work. The new bomb, built at breakneck speed by Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. and Texas Instruments Inc. in an unprecedented team effort, was dropped from an F-111 onto a command complex at Al Taji airbase . . . the 4,700-pound superbomb—a howitzer barrel filled with explosives and guided by a laser—penetrated the massive concrete walls and blew up inside the bunker . . . ‘It's a story of patriotism and unprecedented cooperation,' said Merl Culp of Lockheed Corp . . . ”

139
The AWACS crewman noticed a profound difference between the Iraqi pilots' behaviour during the 1991 war and “the smooth polished professionalism with which I heard these same pilots conducting strikes deep inside Iran scarcely three years previously. On one such mission the Iranians even managed to shoot one of them down, but they didn't even discuss it other than to say that they didn't have a ‘complete formation' on the return trip.”

140
The Arabs spent $84 billion underwriting Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, the two melodramatically named phases of the 1990–91 Gulf crisis and war, according to an Arab economic report published in 1992. This was more than three times what the Saudis paid for Saddam's eight-year war with Iran. Prince Khaled bin Sultan would calculate Saudi Arabia's individual contribution to the 1991 conflict at more than $27.5 billion, slightly more than it gave Saddam. In all, the Arabs sustained a loss of $620 billion because of the Iraqi invasion and subsequent conflict. Kuwait had been the first to contribute to the war coffers when it agreed to pay part of the $6 billion for America's initial military deployment in September 1991. Washington complained in August 1991 that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait still owed $7.5 billion to the United States for their share of Gulf War costs. By that stage, the two had respectively already contributed $1.7 billion and $12.5 billion. The Middle East may have proved a new economic reality in the world economy: that wars can be fought for profit as well as victory, a lesson that the invasion of Iraq might have reinforced until the occupation ended in disaster.

141
Israel was constantly boasting of its superior intelligence about the Iraqi regime—as it did in 2003 when it added to the fraudulent warnings about the weapons of mass destruction that no longer existed in Saddam's arsenal. Although American officers told me in 1991 that Israel's “intelligence” on the location of Scud batteries in the Iraqi desert invariably turned out to be wrong, it is interesting that de la Billière—believing that Israel would enter the war after Saddam's provocative Scud attacks on Tel Aviv and other cities—“began to devise a plan whereby we would allocate their [Israeli] ground forces a sector of Iraq in which to operate exclusively.”

142
The most thorough investigation of this scandalous attack was conducted by the same man who revealed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in 2004: Seymour Hersh. As usual, the “pool” journalists failed to uncover the extent of the 24th Division's killings and presented it as an Iraqi assault on the Americans.

143
Journalists would subject Iraqi armed forces to unprecedented metamorphoses in the quarter-century between 1980 and 2005. When they invaded Iran, many of the Iraqi army units were obsequiously referred to in the Western media as “crack troops”—they were, after all, attacking “expansionist” Iran. After the same army invaded “friendly” Kuwait ten years later, they became the “enemy,” often described—not without reason—as ruthless or cruel. Once Iraqis—including many of the same “enemy” troops defeated in the Kuwait liberation—turned on Saddam in 1991, they became “rebels.” But when the surviving ex-soldiers then rose up against the American occupation after 2003, they turned into “terrorists,” “die-hards” or— incredibly—“Saddam loyalists.” Later, perhaps because they attacked the world's only superpower so ferociously, we gifted them with the title of “insurgents.”

144
Among the many thousands of Americans who were decorated for their role in the Kuwait liberation was a young gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle who received the Bronze Star and several other medals. Timothy McVeigh, a promising young soldier, then tried to join the U.S. Special Forces, but dropped out and left the army embittered on 31 December 1991. He was executed on 11 June 2001 for the 19 April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 167 Americans.

145
As so often, American “intelligence sources” had contributed to this mind-set. As early as 2 February, Douglas Jehl of the
Los Angeles Times
, a “pool” journalist with American forces in Saudi Arabia, was referring to “intelligence reports issued to commanders last week warning that more than a dozen Palestinian terrorists were known to be operating in the sector now occupied by [the] 1st Armored Division.” These non-existent “terrorists” were linked by “most officers” with the disappearance of fifty American military vehicles from a U.S. base. How twelve Palestinians—or anyone else—could have stolen so many vehicles went unexplained. Jehl did suggest one possibility, far down in his dispatch: that U.S. soldiers were themselves stealing the trucks and Humvees to cannibalise for spare parts for their own vehicles.

146
There was no difficulty in gathering evidence of this. In Hawali, Sara Moussa told me how she watched her two sons, Tahseen and Amin, taken from their home on 1 March 1991 by six Kuwaitis armed with G-3 rifles. “They searched the house, they tied their hands and blindfolded them,” she said. “When they told the Kuwaitis not to touch their sisters, the gunmen beat them with their rifles. Then they put them both in the trunk of a car and drove them away. I have not seen them since.” Tamam Salman's twenty-three-year-old son Ibrahim was taken by gunmen the same day, thrown into the trunk of a car and driven off. She said that when she asked a Kuwaiti policeman for help, he spat at her “because I am a Palestinian.” Other testimony to Kuwaiti persecution appeared in numerous European newspapers.

147
Unlike their government, Kuwaitis could show moving sympathy towards those who had also suffered. At Safwan stood a young Kuwaiti woman, Siham el-Marzouk, searching in vain among the wretched masses fleeing Iraq for her brother Faisal, kidnapped in the last days of the war. It was raining when she found a bedraggled Egyptian who had lived more than thirty years in Kuwait, working as a school caretaker, until abducted by the Iraqis. Now the Kuwaiti authorities would not let him return home. From bits of a shattered motorway intersection barrier, he had fashioned a hut to shield himself from the rain and pleaded for someone to tell the Egyptian ambassador in Kuwait of his plight, writing out the story of his grief on a piece of paper he had found in the sand, crying all the while. The Kuwaiti woman tried to comfort him, gave him food and money. When she saw a destitute Filipina woman, she took off her black woollen cloak and gave it to the refugee. Two days later, her kidnapped brother Faisal arrived safely at Safwan.