Distant Voices Read online

  Long before the war started, in order to prepare them, the British people were denied an understanding of the complexity of reasons behind the crisis in the Gulf. It was not mentioned that Britain virtually invented Iraq and divested it of Kuwait in order to divide and rule the region, laying the roots of this war. That the Americans had helped to put Saddam Hussein in power, providing him with a hit list of his opponents, was regarded as irrelevant. That Britain, America and other ‘allies’ sustained his murderous regime was relegated to the letters pages.

  Remember the United Nations? The UN role is now hardly mentioned. Once the countdown to January 15 had begun, sanctions, the fraudulence of the American deadline and the dubious legality of Resolution 678, in relation to the UN Charter, were issues apparently unworthy of impartial scrutiny by those who wear their impartiality where others are said to wear their heart.

  Beware, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, of ‘your sham impartialists, wolves in sheep’s clothing, simpering honestly as they suppress’.

  January 25, 1991

  SALESMAN HURD

  I ONCE GLIMPSED Henry Kissinger in Bangladesh when he was Richard Nixon’s secretary of state. His visit was described by the American Embassy as a ‘hardship stopover’; and he was driven in haste to the ambassador’s residence, where he spent the night before being delivered back to the airport.

  Bangladesh was then in the grip of flood and famine; and I, and other reporters, enquired if Kissinger’s motorcade might be diverted a few miles to a camp where tens of thousands of desperate people had been herded. This seemed especially relevant, as Kissinger had earlier dismissed Bangladesh as a ‘basket-case’ and had established in the State Department the Office of Multilateral Diplomacy, better known as the ‘Zap Office’. It was here that the voting patterns of Third World members of the United Nations were scrutinised so that those countries which voted against US motions could be identified and warned and, if need be, ‘zapped’ – that is, their US food ‘concessions’ would be cut off.

  In a land of starving people, Kissinger probably saw not one. I mention this because Kissinger has always exemplified for me those who exercise imperial power and seldom see the consequences of their actions. There is also the ingredient of hypocrisy.

  Latter-day Kissingers, ‘statesmanlike’ men of equally impeccable manner if not repute, are prosecuting the colonial war in the Gulf without the slightest risk of confronting the consequences of their actions, such as human beings ‘zapped’ by British and American cluster bombs. I once saw a rare survivor of a cluster attack; minute shrapnel, like needles, were ‘swimming’ through her organs, according to a doctor, torturing her to death.

  Latter-day Kissingers often use a language few people speak: a semantic syrup that reveals nothing, omits a great deal and dispenses words like ‘principles’. In an article in the Guardian last week, Douglas Hurd managed to mention ‘principle’ and ‘oil’ in the same column. Addressing critics of the war, and those he described as ‘cynics’, Hurd wrote, ‘What of the charge that the problem of Saddam Hussein is of the West’s own creating? Critics claim we supported and armed him during the Iran–Iraq War. But . . . we refused to sell armaments to either side’.21

  In July 1981 Hurd, then a foreign office minister, flew to Baghdad as a ‘high level salesman’ (Guardian, July 17, 1981). His mission was to court Saddam; what he was hoping to sell, once the Iran–Iraq War was over, was a British Aerospace air defence system: a sale that ‘would be the biggest of its kind ever achieved’. Ostensibly, Hurd was in Baghdad to ‘celebrate’ with Saddam the coming to power of the Iraqi Ba’athists in 1968, one of the bloodiest episodes in modern Middle Eastern history, which, with Washington’s help, extinguished all hope of a pluralistic Iraq. Hurd would have known that the man whose hand he shook, the man to whom he came as a ‘super salesman’ of British technology, was renowned as an interrogator and torturer of Qasr-al-Nihayyah, the ‘Palace of the End’.

  Far from ‘refusing to sell armaments’ to Iraq, the British Government has played a critical role in building what Hurd now constantly refers to as ‘the massive Iraqi military machine’. This has been done by subterfuge and sleight of hand. According to a report soon to be released by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, at least 20 British companies have been allowed to supply Saddam Hussein with missile technology, radar and computerised machine tools. Although ‘lethal defence equipment’ to Iraq has been banned, ‘existing contracts’ have been honoured. A number of British companies, including at least one owned outright by Iraqis tied to the Iraqi military, have exported equipment that has gone straight to weapons and ammunition factories. The ‘super gun’ is the most famous example. Others have exported machine tools said to have been designed for civilian production, which have ‘dual use’. Indeed, ‘lethal defence equipment’ apparently does not include British-machined shells, British-designed bomb shelters, British-made anti-gas kits, British uniforms and the training of Iraqi fighter pilots in the Lake District.22

  Following Saddam Hussein’s genocidal gassing of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, Trade Minister Tony Newton flew out with 20 British officials and offered ‘the Butcher of Baghdad’ £340 million worth of British trade credit – more than double that of the previous year. The flow of British largesse was not interrupted by Saddam Hussein’s murder of the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft.

  ‘Some people,’ wrote Douglas Hurd, ‘ask why if principle is involved, the West or the UN did not try to reverse Israel’s occupation of Arab territories? Again, the parallel is partial and false. Israel occupied the territories as a result of war in which her neighbours were clamouring for an end to Israel’s existence.’23

  No, it is Hurd’s reply that is partial and false. He makes no mention that the West has blocked all attempts to legally enforce Resolution 242 and most of the other UN resolutions on the Middle East. Only last October the United States blocked the Security Council from imposing sanctions on Israel after the massacre of unarmed Palestinians in Jerusalem. Similarly, Israel was able to invade and effectively carve off a piece of Lebanon, causing untold civilian deaths, without a single American or British bomb ‘taking out’ with ‘surgical precision’ the sources of this outrage.

  George Bush also refers incessantly to the ‘principle’ of the ‘Allied’ cause. As a former director of the CIA, Bush will know the facts. He will know that the CIA helped put Saddam and his Ba’athist fascists in power. He will know that Saddam and his gang competed for CIA favours; that a CIA-directed campaign oversaw the slaughter of the Iraqi opposition: socialists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists.24

  Like other American-sponsored tyrants before him – Diem in Vietnam, Noriega in Panama – Saddam Hussein outlived his usefulness, especially when he had the temerity to challenge America’s divine right to the resources of the Gulf. And for this ‘principle’ many thousands of people are about to be zapped.

  February 1, 1991

  TURKEY SHOOTS

  LAST WEEK, AN American fighter pilot, Colonel Richard ‘Snake’ White, described his bombing missions over Iraq as a ‘turkey shoot’. He elaborated: ‘It’s almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying, and we’re killing them.’25

  At the time of writing, some 60,000 ‘sorties’ have been flown against Iraq: that is, 30,000 more missions than were mounted against Japan during the last year of the Second World War. The target has been a country of mostly impoverished people, who live not in ‘hardened shelters’ but in the most fragile of structures. Indeed, as in most of the Third World, they are out in the open most of their lives, trudging along roads, spilling out of overcrowded transport, crossing and lingering on bridges.

  Last week, a ‘sortie’ against the bridge in al-Nasiriyeh city killed forty-seven civilians and wounded 102. One of the wounded was a thirteen-year-old boy, Quaser Said, whose leg was amputated. He was crossing the bridge with his uncle and aunt, both of whom were killed; no doubt they were scurryin
g for shelter, as cockroaches do.

  According to Patrick Cockburn, the Independent’s correspondent in Baghdad, there was ‘no reason to doubt [the number of casualties] since the accounts of survivors, doctors and witnesses all tally’. We owe much to the few like Cockburn who have dared to lift the stone off this war and allowed us to observe its true nature: the slaughter of people with whom we have no quarrel.26

  The killing of civilians is the story that, above all others, the warlords in Washington and London and their ‘media contractors’ (John Naughton’s concise description in the Observer) have sought to suppress.27 Witness the speed with which they moved to discredit Cockburn’s report of the bridge. The BBC even produced a cameraman to say that there were wounded in the hospital wearing military uniforms; no interviews with survivors and witnesses were broadcast. That the International Red Cross now believes that the civilian casualties are considerably higher than reported was mentioned briefly, but unexplored and lost. For the BBC, the priority seemed clear: to get over that the civilian horror at al-Nasiriyeh was a con.28 Not to do so would, of course, negate the nightly propaganda that Western technology discriminates between the ‘evil’ and the innocent.

  Nevertheless, the truth is getting out. On Monday night, the BBC demonstrated a scepticism it seldom applies to Allied claims when it broadcast the figure of 6,000 to 7,000 civilian deaths.29 This is the estimate of the Iraqi Red Crescent, quoted by the former US attorney general, Ramsey Clark. Although ignored at first, Clark has been in Iraq, picking his way through the rubble of Basra, which he described as ‘a human and civilian tragedy’ and ‘staggering in its expanse’. The relentless Allied bombardment of Iraq’s second city, he said, had destroyed residential areas, night clubs, hospitals, coffee shops, clinics and law offices. ‘You don’t have to bomb cities,’ he said. ‘It has nothing to do with Resolution 9678.’30 A Vietnamese civil engineer working in Basra, Nguyen Hai Xuan, said the raids on Basra reminded him of the bombing by American B52s which devastated his home city, Haiphong. ‘I thought I was back in Vietnam,’ he said.31

  I saw Haiphong following the bombing of which he spoke. B52s had laid their ‘carpets’ with extraordinary accuracy: down one street, then down the next, then the next, leaving the shells of churches, hospitals, clinics, blocks of flats. When James Cameron and cameraman Malcolm Aird brought back exclusive film of earlier American raids on North Vietnam, a memo was circulated in the BBC instructing producers to have nothing to do with them. Cameron was castigated as a ‘dupe’: a charge, he later told me, he relished. ‘Only when they called you a dupe,’ he said, ‘did you know you’d broken the great mould that covered the reporting of the war and that maybe you’d got it right.’32

  The ‘great mould’, the cover-up, is similar today, though on a larger scale. One got a sense of this when President Mitterrand warned the Allies against employing weapons ‘whose use would mark a retreat into barbarity’; and his defence minister, Pierre Joxe, said that Allied bombing had ‘certainly’ killed ‘thousands’ of civilians. The Daily Mirror reported Joxe as ‘blowing the gaffe’ because many observers believe the top brass are keeping quiet about what they do know. ‘Allied chiefs are believed reluctant to reveal numbers because they know public opinion will turn against the war if a high death toll is shown on either side.’33

  On the rare occasions he has been asked about this, General Schwarzkopf has displayed irritation and discomfort. ‘I have absolutely no idea what the Iraqi casualties are,’ he said recently, ‘and I tell you, if I have anything to say about it, we’re never going to get into a body-counting business.’34

  Only the congenitally naive would believe this. The Schwarzkopf strategy of ‘denying the enemy an infrastructure’ means bombing water, fuel and electrical supplies. It also means ‘denying’ transport used by the emergency services and for food distribution, as well as killing the civilians who provide, live near and depend upon these supplies and services. The result has been amputations performed by candlelight, and shortages of blood for transfusions and of antibiotics and painkillers, even of water for doctors to scrub up in before operations.

  One of the thousands of videos never shown on the nightly Schwarzkopf Show, live from Riyadh, showed the look of horror on an Iraqi lorry driver’s face as a missile flew through the window of his cab. This is ‘classified’, of course. Likewise, when was it last explained in detail what the ‘heroic’ Allied air forces actually drop on Iraq? One of the most commonly used bombs is the Rockeye cluster bomb (Mark 20). This comprises 247 bomblets, each an ‘anti-personnel’ grenade that explodes into 2,000 high-velocity, needle-sharp fragments. According to Dr Paul Rogers of Bradford University, one bomb ‘wipes out anything that stands or moves over an acre . . . it shreds people’.35

  Equally, during the recent celebration of the ‘phenomenal’ precision and humanitarian effects of the Tomahawk cruise missile, we were not told that the Tomahawk delivers three ‘packages’ of ‘grenade sub-munitions’ that spray tens of thousands of small pieces of shrapnel aimed at ‘soft targets’: that is, people. Most of these cluster bombs were developed and tested in Vietnam, often against civilians, who made up 75 per cent of casualties. Little of this has emerged from the so-called ‘coverage’.

  The British have not yet begun to die in this war, but, as in the early summer of 1914, the ‘enemy’, that is, a large human community, has already been dehumanised and caricatured in the third person singular of ‘he’ or ‘Saddam Hussein’: the tyrant equipped and sustained by the West is now, as Edward Said has written, ‘transformed into a worldwide metaphysical threat’.36

  In Britain, the media and the opinion polls reflect each other’s distortion. When the question is put, ‘Do you support the Government on the war?’ no real alternative is offered, just as no alternative to the Authorised View is available on the television news, the nation’s principal source of information. When an alternative is offered, the difference is striking. At the start of the war a Washington Post poll found that 63 per cent of those polled supported the war. However, when people were asked what their attitude would be if 1,000 Americans were killed, the support dropped by a third.37 So we can understand why the Pentagon has banned, for the first time since Vietnam, the filming of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover air force base, and why estimates of American casualties have been classified Top Secret; and why ‘body bags’, now in the American lexicon along with Coca-Cola, have been renamed ‘human remains pouches’.

  The other day, a leading item on the television news told us much about the corrupting effects of this war on its bystanders. The verbose Schwarzkopf produced his latest video and invited his captive audience of journalists, many of them in uniform, many of them young and reporting on their first war, to observe ‘the luckiest guy in Iraq’.

  We saw the outline of a lorry on a bridge, then the bridge between the cross hairs, then the bridge blown away by a cluster bomb; and the ‘lucky’ lorry scurrying away. No mention here of the other ‘unlucky’ lorry driver. We heard no explosion, no screams; what we heard was the belly laughter of the journalists in the ‘briefing room’. In every metaphorical sense, their laughter drowned the cries of the people of Iraq.

  Bush speaks of war crimes as if the Geneva Convention was designed for ‘us’, never for ‘them’. International law prohibits the use of all indiscriminate weapons, including those that cause unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury. Exploding dum-dum bullets are specifically banned. Cluster bombs are hi-tech dum-dums, designed deliberately as terror weapons, to cause unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury. The use of B52s laying ‘carpets’ of bombs a mile long – by any definition indiscriminate – is also unlawful. ‘These are violations’, said Ramsey Clark, America’s former chief law officer, ‘of the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Conventions and Nuremberg; they are war crimes.’38

  The Vietnam War was a war of such atrocities. For all the protestations to the contrary, it is in many ways the model for this war. Like
the Gulf now, Vietnam was a war of rampant technology directed against a Third World people. It was a war in which the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army, dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, pursued a military strategy deliberately aimed at forcing millions of people to abandon their homes and used chemicals in a manner that profoundly changed the environment and genetic order. Some two-and-a-half million people were killed, and many more maimed and otherwise ruined.

  These truths are the truths of history, not of Hollywood or the version studiously recast during the Reagan years. Nor are they the ‘old slogans’ of ‘ageing radicals’ now derided by liberal commentators who seem proud of their glib ignorance and their effete ability to adopt mutually contradictory positions without feeling their feet squirm underneath them. Every ‘noble cause’ has had such apologists far from the bloodshed. Let Michael Ignatieff of the Observer stand beside an Iraqi doctor amputating the limb of a child without anaesthetic and still declare that we should ‘press on until the bitter end’.39

  It is often said disingenuously of the Vietnam War that the United States fought ‘with one hand tied behind its back’. If seven-and-a-half million tons of bombs dropped on a peasant land and two-and-a-half million people killed is the result of such constraint, the prospect of both hands free ought to bring pause to those who believe the end justifies the means. Echoing his president, an American pilot said, ‘Listen, we don’t have the manacles on us this time.’40

  How long must the present silence be contrived? How long will the outspokenness of a former Tory prime minister, Edward Heath, continue to shame the Labour Party? How long will the Labour leadership acquiesce in bombing which, according to the British commander in the Gulf, is ‘minor compared with what’s coming’? Or is the question disingenuous?