The Great War for Civilisation (126 page)

He did actually leave the tent, his robes flowing at his heels, until Mohamed went to persuade him to return. Another man arrived, along with his wife, an unprecedented breach of custom and etiquette and—many Saudis would say— morality. She was a dark-haired woman with a gentle smile who did not wear a veil but sat silently beside her husband at one side of the tent, clutching a black gown around her shoulders. The men talked vigorously, Mohamed all the time asserting that he would not leave his home if there was a war. “Where would I go?” he asked. “What is the point? The war can go anywhere.”

On the screen, Dan Rather was telling us now of the probability of war. He spoke of massive bombardments of Iraqi forces, of devastating air strikes, of “neutralising” Iraq's military potential. Sitting amid these Saudis, his words seemed obscene, unnatural. He was a Westerner, talking with promiscuous ease about the possible violent death of thousands of Arab Muslims at the hands of America. The Saudis listened to this with great discomfort. So did I. Imbibing the poisoned fruits of the West, they were about to experience its killer instincts.

They might have spoken of this had there not come from behind us, through the tent's fragile green wall, a growl of sound, long, persistent, gradually increasing in depth and intensity. We all knew what it was. Its howl penetrated every corner of the tent, drowning out Rather's voice, making the picture jump nervously until our ears were swamped with the sound. We were all familiar with it. One of President Bush's great C-5 military transports on the final approach to the nearest airbase, 30 metres over our heads, filling our vulnerable tent with its decibels.

In the last days before the onslaught, it was still possible to drive up the highway to the Kuwaiti border. They were days of gales and irony. The stormclouds gusted in over the coast and fanned the white smoke that trailed in a friendly way from the chimneys of the Kuwaiti power station. You could see it all quite clearly from the Saudi frontier, the pale white generating station and its twin chimneys still providing electricity to Iraq's occupying soldiers and their captive citizens on the other side of the border. It spoke of normality, of life going on as usual.

Down the hill from the deserted customs shed, I found a Pakistani at the till of his grocery store, its shelves half empty. No point in restocking just now, he told me. Round the corner in the playpark by the sea, a man in a white robe stood with his black-veiled wife and their tiny child. Change their clothing and it could be any rainy day on the seafront at Margate or Coney Island. No sign of Iraq's half-million soldiers on the other side of the frontier. And on this side, only a fat Westerner with grey hair in a pick-up truck—Vietnam generation, unable to hide his paunch under a parka jacket—stared towards Kuwait to represent the half-million Americans and their allies.

I walked around Khafji, but the integrity of the Arab quarrel was elusive. Most of the women and children had fled but a few Saudi soldiers were phoning home from the local post office, a war film playing on the television set in the lounge of the Khafji Beach Hotel, watched intently by a policeman. I had to drive down the bypass before I found a three-vehicle U.S. army patrol, its soldiers helmeted and perched high in their armoured vehicles, obeying the speed limit, halting at the traffic lights. For months I had watched the armour streaming up this highway. Like the Kuwaiti power station, it had become a sight so familiar that it had acquired its own permanence. I could imagine that in another six months, even in a year's time, the tanks and guns would still be advancing up this road, that Bush would still be threatening to evict Iraq from Kuwait, that the power station would still be emitting its white smoke, as if the preparations for war were eternal, like the desert.

On the day before Schwarzkopf commenced his bombardment of Iraq—“I have already issued the terrible orders that will let the monster loose,” he wrote to his wife on 17 January 1991—American journalists seemed almost disappointed. Like the British press, the big American papers had been telling their readers—up to the point where war really was imminent and a certain reticence became obligatory—that the fighting would be a pushover. “K” Day for the headline writers was a relief. When Baker and Tariq Aziz were still talking, there was an almost palpable sense of unease among some of the American media experts. Peace fears loomed. But once Baker admitted failure, they were happy. War hopes rose. This was not mere cynicism. One U.S. radio reporter warned his listeners in the first week of January that the Gulf crisis was “sliding” towards a settlement. Like Shewmaker's hero General Patton—who ended up admiring the beauty of war and distrusting the horrors of peace—many of the reporters had psyched themselves into a state of mind in which peace was immoral and war represented goodness.

Nor, at first, did it seem there was much place in this new war for print reporters. We all knew that the air bombardment of Iraq would begin after Saddam refused a United Nations deadline to withdraw from Kuwait. So when my phone rang in the early hours of 17 January and a young journalist on
The Independent
's night shift snapped that “CNN are showing the first bombs dropping on Baghdad—when can you file?” I told him that I was watching the same pictures in Dhahran and that we knew the bombs would drop this morning. The real story, I said, was that the most powerful armies in Christendom were now poised to fight the largest military force in the Muslim world. “So when can you file on this?” the voice asked again. I already have, I said. The Christian–Muslim “clash of arms” had been on our front page the previous day.

But I drove across to the airbase at Dhahran and there were the American jets taking off by the squadron, bomb-heavy and leaving a trail of gold-and-purple exhaust fires across the sky. It made good television, an Eastman Color insert into the pale electric greens of CNN's Baghdad anti-aircraft fire and distant explosions. In the early hours of that same morning, twelve Saudi fighter-bombers also took off from an airbase in the Eastern Province to attack Iraq. The decision to dispatch the Tornadoes on their sorties—they were purchased as part of the Saudi–British Al-Yamamah project—was taken personally by King Fahd and warmly applauded by President Bush. No attention was paid to the fact—no reporter mentioned—that at dawn, eleven of the twelve jets returned with their bombs still attached to their wings, their pilots saying they failed to find their targets. The twelfth plane unloaded its ordnance over the western Iraqi desert. But did they really lose their way?

The following night, a further seven Saudi-piloted Tornadoes took to the air from the same base, en route for western Iraq. Of these planes, no fewer than six failed to drop their bombs. But appearances had been preserved. The pilots were duly paraded before the press. The Saudis were fighting. President Bush could claim that Arab as well as Western forces were at war with Iraq. You only had to look at the Tornadoes to see the irony involved. The tail of each fighter-bomber displayed the Saudi flag, upon which was inscribed in Arabic the first words of the Koran. “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his Prophet.” Thus did the first sura of Islam's holiest book constitute the battle flag of the Arabs who had gone to war against another Muslim nation. “Yes, Iraq is Arab,” one of the Saudi pilots explained to me before leaving on a third sortie. “But when a brother Arab attacks you, he is your enemy. Saddam is our enemy now.”

Or so it appeared. One day after the beginning of the bombardment—calling this blitzkrieg a war was pushing the margins of reality a little far at that stage— Fahd himself announced that the battle constituted “the sword and voice of truth” and that God would “register victory for His army.” The House of Saud had now committed itself irrevocably to the Western military forces. King Fahd remained overall commander of the “joint forces,” another of the quaint epithets behind which America's overwhelming strength within the alliance was supposed to be hidden. The Saudis thought they had muzzled criticism of the Americans from their own religious hierarchy, allowing sheikhs to vent their anger on domestic targets—upon women drivers, for example—and generously acting as hosts to the distraught if intensely arrogant Kuwaiti royal family.

As the “war” progressed—as the pictures of bombers streaking across Saudi Arabia and the skies above Kuwait became routine—those of us who did not join the infamous “pools” discovered a conflict that did not fit so easily into the television studios, with their super-patriotic anchormen, their verbose ex-generals, their model tanks and their bloodless sandpits. Saudi military checkpoints were ordered to prohibit all journalists from travelling towards the border unless they had signed up for the military “pool” and censorship. So along with a bunch of recalcitrant French reporters and photographers, I dressed myself up in the camouflaged anti-gas kit which
The Independent
had purchased for its staff and stuck on my head a large British steel helmet. This was a gift from Major Alan Barnes, a sympathetic and highly subversive member of the British army's education corps. His selection of First World War poetry, apparently nicked from an army library, travelled with me throughout the conflict. The French contrived to dress up in the sloppy battledress of their own national army—Gitanes dangling from lower lips only enhanced their cover—while in my airless anti-gas cape and Barnes's commando-style helmet, I was able to pass myself off as a vaguely bored liaison officer. The key to success, we quickly discovered, was to approach each checkpoint without looking at the soldiers guarding the road. Our lack of courtesy proved we were genuine.

By the time I reached Khafji in this way, the Saudi border town had been transformed. A towering column of smoke rose 3 kilometres high over the abandoned streets. Iraqi shells—forty in all, fired from a 130-mm gun in a clump of trees on the Kuwaiti side of the frontier—had found their target. Flames bubbled around the base of the smoke inside the Arabian oil company's storage depot, crimson and yellow, taunting U.S. Marine Sergeant Bill Iiams and his nine men who stood in the sand, dismantling their long-range radio aerials and preparing, without much enthusiasm, to enter the town. A transistor radio was broadcasting from the back of his Humvee, from which came the voice of a Washington reporter extolling the track record of the U.S. Air Force. Marine Rafee Saba, a twenty-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, with a disconcerting Yorkshire accent—he had spent his childhood in Sheffield—was more interested in the radio than in the evidence that the Iraqis just might be able to hit back. “Only one plane lost in one thousand sorties,” he shouted. “Can you beat that?”

Sergeant Iiams was still watching the fires from the oil terminal and the canopy of smoke that was now spreading 15 kilometres out to sea. “No one's attending the fire, are they?” he asked. My French colleagues and I had already done the rounds of Khafji and knew more than the marines. No, we said, no one had called the fire brigade. In fact, there was not a soul in Khafji to lift a telephone. The entire population—every family, the owner of the barber's shop, the Pakistani store owner, the managers of the town's three restaurants, the staff of the local hotel, even the local Khafji constabulary—had fled.

And we had already discovered Khafji's unhappy secret. Street after street bore the evidence of panic: clothes lying in the middle of the road where they had fallen from trucks and jeeps, limousines left unlocked, a police car abandoned in the main highway, its driver's door open. When we drove right down to the Kuwaiti border, well within range of the Iraqi gun-line, we found the Saudi army's positions unmanned, their sandbagged emplacements empty, their tents deserted. Only a lone Saudi National Guard patrol—three tall young men with very long beards and red berets—was left to represent the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

They were proud men who shook our hands because they were pleased to see friendly faces so close to the Iraqis. How many Iraqis there were beyond the trees it was impossible to say, but their shells had tracked across the town in a straight line, next to the empty customs post, through the wall of a garden, in the middle of a street, until one of the last rounds hit the oil terminal and provided this scruffy place with its landmark plume of smoke. Not long after the shelling, we watched a helicopter fly up the coast and fire two missiles into the trees and the artillery stopped firing. There were other fires, deep inside Kuwait. Perhaps 25 kilometres from us, an immense curtain of smoke, kilometres in length and height, rose magisterially into the pale winter sky. It must have been an ammunition dump or a petrol store which the Americans had set alight.

The French were good in the desert. Some of my French reporter colleagues had served in their army in Africa and used compasses to move off the highway and drive through the sand to avoid the American checkpoints that wouldn't be fooled by our outlandish military clothes. A journalist from the French military magazine
Raids
was later bombed by one of his own country's Mirage aircraft; the ordnance failed to explode, so he lifted the unexploded bomb onto the back of his jeep and took it off to a French airbase to complain.

The wet sand clung to our tyres and turned the roads into mud-rinks. The soldiers were cold. The troops of the U.S. 24th Mechanized Infantry Division sat on their vehicles in their rainproof ponchos, slapping their sides for warmth. Across the mud, the British were huddled in their trucks with blankets or sitting in tents with an oil stove sputtering between them. No one could believe that the temperature would fall to almost zero in the Saudi desert. The wind came from the southwest, blasting over the sodden mass of grey earth, filling the
sabkha
depressions with water, turning the oil-soaked supply routes into death traps. A Humvee lay almost unrecognisable in the sand after its collision with a truck. A massive American M1A1 battle tank lay upside down in the desert, its turret and barrel half buried in the mud, a lone soldier watching over its vast hulk.