The Great War for Civilisation (29 page)

Inevitably, the Iranians lost their patience with the foreign journalists in Tehran. The day after the “trial” statement, Abolhassan Sadeq walked into the Iranian Ministry of Islamic Guidance with the troubled expression of a headmaster forced at last to deal with a persistently unruly class. Harvey Morris, shrouded in his usual smoke haze—mercifully for him, it was to be at least a decade before Iran would ban smoking in government buildings—knew what was coming. “Well, Fisky, we'll see who's going to get the order of the boot today,” he murmured. The ministry contained an underground auditorium that looked uncomfortably like a school hall and there we waited to hear the worst. Sadeq, the school director, took his place at a desk on a small raised podium and stared down at us severely. We all knew that an expulsion or two was in the air.

“Gentlemen,” he began—Harvey always liked the “gentlemen” bit—“I want to share with you a bit of agony we are going through with regard to the foreign media. With great displeasure, we are expelling the entire
Time
magazine crew from Iran.” It mattered little that the “entire” staff of
Time
in the country numbered just two. This was not how Sadeq saw things. There were over three hundred foreign journalists in Iran from more than thirty countries, he said, but
Time
had gone too far. He flourished a clutch of front covers from the offending organ, one of which carried an unflattering portrait of Khomeini.

“Since the problem of hostages came up,” Sadeq said, waving the latest issue of
Time
in his hand, “this has done nothing but arouse the hatred of the American people. The front covers have been like a hammer on the brain. The magazine has created some very irrational reaction on behalf of the American people.”
Time
was not the only news organisation to feel Iranian wrath. Eight days earlier, Alex Efthyvoulos, a correspondent for the Associated Press—a bearded part-Russian Cypriot who looked like Rasputin—had been expelled for allegedly distorting news of rioting in the Azerbaijani provincial capital of Tabriz. Even the British had fallen foul of Iranian anger. In early December, Enayat Ettehad of Iranian television had been watching BBC News in a London hotel and was angered by a report on the hostages in which Keith Graves described in unpleasant detail how their hands were bound with rope and how they were forbidden to speak to each other or receive news from the outside world. I wasn't surprised. Over the next two and a half decades, Graves would infuriate the Taliban, the Israeli army, the U.S. government, the IRA, the British army, NATO, the Egyptians, the PLO, the Hizballah, the Syrians, the Turks and even the Cypriots—the latter an astonishing achievement even for a man of Graves's abrasiveness—and survive them all. But the BBC was made to pay for it. Ettehad instructed Iranian television to refuse BBC crews any further use of satellite facilities. The BBC was forced to ship all their film unprocessed by air to London, where it usually arrived a day late. It was clear, however, that Ettehad was far more upset by the BBC's Persian-language radio service, and Sadeq brandished a sheaf of papers above his head—complaints, he said, about the Persian service from “all over Iran.”

Sadeq was confident about his broadsides. He loudly referred to the fact that one of the two
Time
correspondents had once worked for the CIA. “Yet still I let him into Iran.” He was referring to Bruce van Voorst, who worked as a CIA research officer in the late 1950s but who now said that he had severed all links with the agency—whose own activities in the country were now, thanks to the embassy documents, a national Iranian obsession. The American CBS network was in trouble for comparing the students in the embassy to the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the ABC network for a State Department analysis “that would make any Iranian look like an idiot.” But there was a pettiness about the government's response to overseas coverage, a gut reaction that sprang from patriotic anger rather than forethought. Sadeq, who in argument was given to drawing unhappy parallels with events in American history, unconsciously revealed this when he reminded us that “in 1834, Colonel Travis defended the Alamo against the Mexican army and when he was told to surrender he replied with gunfire. He stood up for his principles. And that is what Iran is doing today.” I heard Harvey Morris sigh. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “I thought Travis lost the battle of the bloody Alamo.”

The revolution was a tempest and we were all trapped in its vortex. We interviewed Khomeini, we watched the epic demonstrations, we watched America writhing in impotence. U.S. warships entered the Gulf. Khomeini called for an army of tens of thousands of schoolboy volunteers to defend Iran. I travelled back from Iranian Kurdistan on a bus whose passengers spent an hour watching a weapons education programme on the coach's specially installed television: how to strip and reassemble an automatic rifle, how to pull a grenade pin, how to master the mechanism of a heavy machine gun. I swayed at the back of the fast-moving bus as the audience sat in silent attention. And today, I thought, we have naming of parts.

But I was seeking some other way of reporting Iran, away from the events which were so obstinately staged for our benefit, especially for American television reporters. I was in Harvey's office, staring at the stained map of Iran on his wall, when I had an idea. What if I closed my eyes and stuck a pin into the map and then travelled to the point I had marked and asked the people there about the revolution? “Close your eyes and I'll give you a pin,” Harvey announced. “And I bet you stick it in bloody Afghanistan.” He produced the pin, I closed my eyes, stabbed at the map and then opened my eyes again. The little sliver of silver had landed in the “h” of a village called Kahak, south-west of the city of Qazvin. I set off at dawn next morning.

Kahak was the sort of place no one ever goes to visit. It lay, a rectangle of mud and clay single-storey houses, at the end of a dirt road with only a gaggle of children and a dung-heap picked over by fat chickens to welcome a stranger. Through the dust and the heat haze to the north, the Alborz Mountains ran along the horizon, forming the lower lip of the Caspian Sea basin. Foreigners never saw Kahak, except perhaps the passengers on the night train to the Soviet frontier as it skirted the village orchards. Even then, it was doubtful if they would notice anything. Kahak was so small that its 950 inhabitants could not even support a mosque of their own.

A prematurely ageing man of sixty-four with a slick of perspiration running down his face from beneath his turban and a shirt front covered in dirt had to travel up from Qom to minister to the faithful. But he was a man capable of extraordinary energy as he walked nimbly around the heaps of manure and puddles of gilded, foetid water, talking about the village in a possessive, slightly rhetorical, almost sermonising way, his voice rising and falling in the cadences of a formal speech rather than a conversation. What had the revolution done for these people, I asked, and Sheikh Ibrahim Zaude pointed to the hard, unwatered land beyond the mud huts, a desert of grey, unyielding earth.

“The villagers own everything on both sides of the road,” he said. “But they do not know how much land they have.” The heat shimmered and danced on the dried-up irrigation ditches: there were no deeds of ownership, no papers and no legal covenants in Kahak now that the landlords had gone. Just when the landlords did depart was something that bothered Sheikh Zaude. “In the past regime,” he explained, “there were two big landowners—Habib Sardai and Ibrahim Solehi. The villagers lived in very bad conditions. Some of them were so poor that they owed many debts but Sardai and Solehi came here and took their grain in payment. I remember seeing these villagers going to other villages to buy back their own grain at high prices. So the people had to borrow money for this and then pay interest on the loans.” More than a dozen villagers gathered round me as Sheikh Zaude talked on. They were poor people, most of them Turkish in origin with high, shiny cheekbones. Their grey jackets were torn and their trousers frayed where the rubble and thorns in the fields had scratched them. They wore cheap plastic sandals. There was only one girl with them, a thirteen-year-old with dark hair who had wrapped herself shroud-like in a pink and grey chador.

“Then things improved for us,” Sheikh Zaude said. “Sardai and Solehi left with the land reforms.” There was no perceptible change in the mullah's face. He had been asked about that year's Islamic revolution but he was talking about the Shah's “White Revolution” seventeen years earlier when the monarch's reform laws ostensibly curtailed the power of the big landowners. Private holdings were redistributed and landowners could retain only one village. Poor farmers were thereby brought into the economy, although most labourers and farm workers remained untouched. Kahak, it was clear, did not entirely benefit from the Shah's “revolution.” “There were good things for us in the reforms,” Sheikh Zaude said. “The number of sheep owned by the villagers went up from two thousand to three thousand. But the village itself, instead of being owned by two men, was now run by the government agent, a man called Darude Gilani, a capitalist from Qazvin. He was a bad man and he collected rent by demanding half of the villagers' crops.”

There was an old man with an unshaven chin and a cataract in his left eye who now walked to the front of the villagers. From his grubby yellow shirt and broken shoes, I could not have imagined that Aziz Mahmoudi was the village headman and the largest farmer. He looked at the mullah for a moment and said, very slowly: “Darude Gilani is in Qazvin prison now.” Mahmoudi walked across the village square, followed by a small throng of schoolchildren. He pointed to a crumbling, fortified mud house with two storeys, a sign of opulence amid such hardship. “That is where Solehi used to live,” he said, gesturing to the broken windows. “Now Gilani is gone too. He will not come back.” There was no reason why Gilani would return, even if he was released from prison. For on the first day of the revolution the previous February, when the villagers saw the imperial army surrendering in Tehran on the screen of a small black-and-white television set, they walked down to the fields that Gilani still owned on each side of the railway line. There they planted their own barley as a symbol that the revolution had arrived in Kahak.

Above the blackboard in the village's tiny clay-walled schoolhouse was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. It depicted the Imam bending over the bars of a jail while behind him thousands of Iranian prisoners wait patiently for their freedom. One after another, the boys in the seventh-grade class stood up and recited their admiration for Khomeini. Jalol Mahmoudi was twelve but talked about corruption in the Shah's regime, Ali Mahmoudi, who at fourteen was head of class, launched into a long speech about the Imam's kindness to children. “I am very pleased with the Ayatollah because in the past regime I was not taught well—now there are three extra classes and we can stay at school longer.” Master Ali might be expected to receive a firm clout round the back of the head from his colleagues for such schoolboy enthusiasm. But the other children remained silent until asked to speak. And I knew that if I had visited this same village in the aftermath of the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in which “Monty” Woodhouse had played so prominent a part, I would have heard the fathers of these same children talking about the corruption of Mossadeq and the Shah's kindness to children.

Karim Khalaj was a teacher in his late forties and he said little as we sat in the staff room. He poured cups of tea from a large silver urn and sweetened it by drinking the tea sip by sip and nibbling lumps of sugar at the same time. Outside, we walked across the dusty fields towards the railway line. He was briefly imprisoned in the Shah's time. He was fired from his job for complaining about a government teacher's bribery.

The wind was picking up and the trees in the orchard were moving. A far belt of smog moved down the horizon. Somewhere near Kahak, more than a quarter of a century earlier, “Monty” Woodhouse must have buried his guns. Did any of the villagers support the Shah? I asked Khalaj. “None,” he said firmly. “At least I never knew any who did.” Savak never came to the village. It was too small to capture anyone's attention. So whose picture hung above the blackboard in class seven before the Ayatollah returned to Iran? Mr. Khalaj shrugged. “They had to put a picture there. Of course, it was the Shah's.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Path to War

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

—W. H. Auden, “Epitaph on a Tyrant”

IN MARCH 1917, TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment carefully peeled a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It was a turning point in his life. He had survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 250 kilometres from its capital of Constantinople. He had then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate and enduring the “grim battle” for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens's attention was Maude's official “Proclamation” to the people of Baghdad, printed in both English and Arabic.

That same 11 by 18 inch poster—now framed in black and gold—hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this chapter. Long ago, it was stained with damp—“foxed,” as booksellers say—which may have been Dickens's perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times, witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall eighty-six years later, “to having travelled in his knapsack for a length of time.” She called it “his precious document” and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy, of the false promises of the world's greatest empire, commitments and good intentions and words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens's death. They read now like a funeral dirge:

PROCLAMATION

. . . Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British

troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hulagu
³⁵
your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers . . . and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile . . . But you, people of Baghdad . . . are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals . . . It is the hope and desire of the British people . . . that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth . . . Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain . . . so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.

(sd.) F. S. Maude, Lieutenant General,
Commanding the British Forces in Iraq

Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army—which included Arab soldiers— in Mesopotamia. My father, Bill, was originally in the Cheshire Regiment but was serving in Ireland the year Charles Dickens entered Baghdad, and would be sent to the Western Front in 1918. Dickens had a longer war. He “spoke, often & admirably,” his daughter Hilda would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at fifty-five had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion. But Munro's leadership did not save Dickens's married sister's nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers “my father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his ‘nephew.' I don't know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.”
³⁶

The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than eighty years later, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan sent me an amused letter along with a series of twelve very old postcards which were printed by
The Times of India
in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms, another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him, others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab River and the Turkish-held town of Qurnah, a building shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by “local [Arab] notables” that “we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition.” But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle. The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of UN sanctions that followed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait when spare parts for pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague at
The Independent
, Patrick Cockburn, found “tombstones . . . still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed . . . a quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage.” In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign.

Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets

gaped emptily, the shops were mostly closed . . . In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia coffins and half mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town (three hundred people were dying of it every day) the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves . . . There was no longer any life in the town . . .

The British held out wildly optimistic hopes for a “new” Iraq that would be regenerated by Western enterprise, not unlike America's own pipedreams of 2003. “There is no doubt,”
The Sphere
told its readers in 1915, “that with the aid of European science and energy it can again become the garden of Asia . . . and under British rule everything may be hoped.”

The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army, but who “always entertained friendly ideas towards the English,” found that in prison in India they were “insulted and humiliated in every way.” These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand over Iraq to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz—to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of “independence” for the Arab world if it fought alongside the Allies against the Turks—on the grounds that “some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia.”

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia—the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that—and that “clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end”—which was not how General Maude expressed Britain's ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917. Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that “taking Mesopotamia . . . means spending millions in irrigation and development . . .” Once they were installed in Baghdad, the British decided that Iraq would be governed and reconstructed by a “Council,” formed partly of British advisers “and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants.” Later, they thought they would like “a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives.”

The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became “oriental secretary” to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion. “. . . The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased . . . they can't conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it.” Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude's proclamation eleven months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told—which, of course, they were not— that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name and which was in fact written by Sir Mark Sykes, the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with François Georges Picot for French and British control over much of the postwar Middle East.

By September of 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain's plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. “I imagine,” the
Times
correspondent wrote on 23 September, “that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination . . . from the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration.”

Within six months, Britain was fighting an insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. “Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression. What would happen if we withdrew?” Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to “anarchy and confusion.” By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on “local political agitation, originated outside Iraq,” suggesting that Syria might be involved. For Syria 1920, read America's claim that Syria was supporting the insurrection in 2004. Arnold Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq, took a predictable line. “We cannot maintain our position . . . by a policy of conciliation of extremists,” he wrote. “Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money . . . We must be prepared . . . to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions.”

There was fighting in the Shiite town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The authorities demanded “the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot” and the leading Shiite divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a British target. “Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out,” a political officer wrote. The British now realised that they had made one major political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq: the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. Wilson put it all down not to nationalism but “anarchy plus fanaticism.” All the precedents were there. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi in 1920, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004. For Badr in 1920, read Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004. For “anarchy and fanaticism” in 1920, read “Saddam remnants” and al-Qaeda in 2004.