The Great War for Civilisation (131 page)

Neither Schwarzkopf nor de la Billière chose to mention the killing of hundreds of Palestinians in Kuwait and the “ethnic cleansing” of tens of thousands of others by the Kuwaitis that followed the war. Schwarzkopf has only three references to Palestinians in his book, the second of which shows an insensitivity that might well have provoked Khaled. It records a conversation between the general and the prince in October 1990, after Israeli police shot down twenty-one Palestinian civilians in Jerusalem. Schwarzkopf says he “cautioned General Khalid not to be too quick to condemn America's historic support of Israel, particularly just after the American people have absorbed ten accidental deaths incurred while defending Saudi Arabia.” That Schwarzkopf could compare military accidents— however tragic—with what was, in effect, a massacre shows just how removed from reality was his “fascination with Arab culture.”

Both men thunder their condemnation of Saddam's iniquities, although even here de la Billière's history is skewed. At one point, he talks of Saddam's war against “expansionist Iran” when in fact it was Saddam who was expansionist. It was Iraq that invaded Iran in 1980, not the other way round. So much for understanding “the Arab way of life.” If “respect” there was for the Arabs and Muslims, however, it was squandered when de la Billière made his jubilant demand at the war's end—as the corpses of tens of thousands of Iraqi Muslim soldiers lay across Kuwait and Iraq, many of them thrown unidentified into mass graves—that British people should “get out there and ring the church bells.” However unconscious he may have been of its content or effect, could there have been a clearer revelation of Christian triumphalism over Islam?

But even de la Billière's outrageous self-promotion does not touch Prince Khaled. For when the latter's own memoirs duly appeared in 1995, he felt able to tell his readers that the approval of his application to enter the war college at Maxwell Air Force Base suggested that “God [was] guiding my career to prepare me for what was to come.” He is “touched” when Chinese diplomats compare him to Henry Kissinger. Before the war, Khaled slept in a room beneath the Saudi defence ministry. “I suffered from loneliness,” the general who called his book
Desert Warrior
tells us. “ . . . To calm myself and to take my mind off the war, I developed a night-time addiction to American TV comedies. After chortling over one of these for half an hour, I would fall peacefully to sleep.”

It got worse. Arguing with the French defence minister, Prince Khaled indirectly compares himself to Churchill, whose Cross of Lorraine (de Gaulle) was also hard to bear. He fusses because Schwarzkopf's chair is bigger than his, insists that Schwarzkopf must visit his office for meetings rather than the other way round, and describes the Khafji fighting as “a pivotal battle of the war.” His task, Khaled solemnly informs us, was “more difficult and complicated” than Schwarzkopf's. Khaled cannot kneel when he accepts an honour from Queen Elizabeth and goes on to pick up Légions d'Honneur and other decorations from France, Bahrain, Hungary, Kuwait, Morocco, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Senegal and, of course, Saudi Arabia. This was, the general informs us, “something of a record . . . for an Arab soldier in war,” adding happily that “I would like to thank those who gave me a medal.” Is this really what soldiering is all about?

Khaled tells us about the need to protect Saudi Arabia's unique culture and “traditions.” The latter, though he doesn't say so, include lopping off the heads of criminals—shooting in the back of the head if the condemned prisoner is a woman—and virtual apartheid for the entire female population of the kingdom. Khaled spends two pages dictating the need for loyalty to the royal family—the system by which 5,000 or so princes, including himself, dominate a land of around 9 million people after inviting the Americans to protect them. Khaled's own father, Prince Sultan, he constantly reminds us, was defence minister and played a role “as important as that of Defence Secretary Cheney in the United States.” Yet it was Prince Sultan who suggested as America prepared for war that the West should perhaps do a deal with Saddam after all.

In Khaled's sahara of a book, there are occasionally revealing moments; how the Iraqi intelligence service infiltrated the postwar Iraqi refugee camps in Saudi Arabia, for example, and Schwarzkopf's stunning lapse at Safwan when he gave the Iraqis permission to use helicopter gunships after the ceasefire. “Absolutely no problem,” the American told the amazed Iraqi generals. “ . . . this is a very important point, and I want to make sure that's recorded, that military helicopters can fly over Iraq . . . ” Thank you, the Iraqis said. And went on to slaughter the Shia of Basra and the Kurds of the north.

The good prince quotes Clausewitz, but had to take a holiday after the war “to recover my composure after the stress of the great events in which I had played a part.” He often suffered, it transpires, “from nightmares about fighting, about death . . . Had I done a good job? I leave this to the judgement of my contemporaries—and to history.”

AS PRINCE KHALED WAS RECOVERING from the war and preparing for his holidays, the wreckage of the Iraqi army was streaming home, still under ferocious attack by the Americans. After the ceasefire, for example, General Barry McCaffrey's 24th U.S. Infantry Division staged a four-hour assault against retreating Iraqis near the Euphrates River, destroying more than 750 vehicles, including a busload of women and children, and killing thousands of soldiers. An Apache helicopter crewman was heard yelling “Say hello to Allah” as he launched a Hellfire missile at them. Not a single American was killed.
¹⁴²
Western news agency journalists in Baghdad interviewed fleeing soldiers who described the horrific battlefield massacres. “It was dark,” one Iraqi told the Associated Press. “I was stepping on bodies, arms, legs and heads of dead soldiers.” Another described how “we were taken in army trucks and cars from the battlefield, and scores of dead bodies covered the 12-lane highway. We would not stop to pick up the living wounded. We ran for our lives.”

In the years to come, I would meet many of the Iraqi soldiers who survived those terrible last days. Lieutenant Ehsan al-Safi was a junior officer in the Iraqi 15th Engineering Brigade when he and a friend found themselves under American air attack on a Kuwait bridge. “Covered in flesh” from other soldiers, they lay on the ground as two more Iraqis leaped to safety from their armoured personnel carrier. The blast of the American bomb hurled the abandoned vehicle forward towards el-Safi's friend. When he got to his feet, he grabbed his friend's arm “but there was nobody attached to it.” On two wide parallel highways north of Kuwait, the Iraqis were burned alive in convoy traffic jams. Many of them were conscripts. Some survivors whom I met came from the Kurdish and Turkoman communities in Iraq, a number were Armenians, one of whom had grandparents murdered in the 1915 genocide. One Kurd to whom I spoke had endured the firestorm on the highway and escaped back to Iraq, only to find himself homeless in the mountains of the far north when the Kurdish uprising—encouraged by the Americans—was crushed by Saddam.

SADDAM'S ROAD TO RUIN stretches for 100 kilometres up the highway from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border at Safwan. It is a road of horror, destruction and shame; horror because of the hundreds of mutilated corpses lining its route, destruction because of the thousands of Iraqi tanks and armoured vehicles that lie charred or abandoned there, shame because in retreat Saddam's soldiers piled their armour with loot. Shame, too, because we punished them all with indiscriminate, unnecessary death.

The dead are strewn across the road only 8 kilometres out of Kuwait City and you see them still as you approach the Iraqi frontier where the burning oil wells are squirting fire into the sky. It is, of course, the horror that strikes you first. Scarcely 25 kilometres north of the city, the body of an Iraqi general lies half out of his stolen limousine, his lips apart, his hands suspended above the roadway. You can see his general's insignia on his stained uniform. He had driven into the back of an armoured vehicle in the great rout. Farther up the road, corpses lay across the highway beside tanks and army trucks. One Iraqi had collapsed over the carriageway, curled up, his arms beside his face, a neat moustache beneath a heavy head with its back blown away.

Only when ambulance drivers arrived and moved his body did we realise that his left leg had also gone. In a lorry which had received a direct hit from the air, two carbonised soldiers still sat in the cab, their skulls staring forward up the road towards the country they never reached. Kuwaiti civilians stood over the bodies laughing, taking pictures of the Iraqis' mortal remains.

The wholesale destruction begins another 25 kilometres on, beneath a motorway bridge that stands at the bottom of a low hill called Mutla. It was here, trapped by American and British bombing of the road at the top of the hill, that the Iraqis perished in their hundreds, probably their thousands. Panic-stricken they must have been, as they jammed themselves in their vehicles, twenty abreast, a vast column 6 kilometres long, picked off by the American and British pilots. There were tanks and stolen police cars, artillery and fire engines and looted limousines, amphibious vehicles, bulldozers and trucks. I lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smouldering wreckage or slumped face-down in the sand. In scale and humiliation, it was, I suppose, a little like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. There must have been all of two divisions spread up this road.

Napoleon's army left Moscow burning and Saddam's army tried to burn Kuwait, but the French did not carry back this much loot. Amid the guns and armour, I found heaps of embroidered carpets, worry beads, pearl necklaces, a truckload of air conditioners, new men's shirts, women's shoes, perfume, cushions, children's games, a pile of hardback Korans on top of five stolen clocks. There were crude rubber gas masks and anti-gas boots—the Iraqis had prepared themselves for chemical warfare of a kind—and thousands of rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, shells and bayonets.

My car bumped over unspent grenades and rifle barrels. I discovered several tanks and armoured vehicles abandoned in such terror that the keys were in the ignition, the engines still running. I found one that was loaded with suitcases full of matches, rugs, food mixers and lipstick. A child's musical box lay in the sand still playing “and a happy new year, and a happy new year . . . ” Iraqi equipment— daggers, belts, berets and helmets—lay everywhere with their owners' names written on the straps.

On top of one armoured vehicle, its engine still idling, I found the helmets of Lieutenant Rabah Homeida and Private Jamal Abdullah. They had stood no chance, for in front of their vehicle lay another 3 kilometres of burned Iraqi military traffic, at the end of which stood a squad of American soldiers from the U.S. 2nd Armored Division whose motto—
Hell on Wheels
—appropriately summed up the fate of the thousands in the ghoulish traffic jam below. No film could do credit to this chaos. It was both surreal and pathetic. Saddam Hussein called it an “orderly withdrawal.”

Around the carnage and dust drove two British Land Rovers of the 26th Field Regiment Royal Artillery, a giant Union flag floating above both of them. It was Staff Sergeant Bob Halls and Gunner Barry Baxter who showed us the track through the sand to reach the Mutla Ridge, picking their way past unexploded cluster bombs and live shells. “You can't really take in what war does till you've seen it,” Baxter says to me. “Why did this happen? Saddam's forces are nothing to be reckoned with, are they? They didn't want to go to war. They just wanted to put their hands up. They are our enemy but they didn't want to be in the war in the first place. They are a sorry sight to see.”

They were. The prisoners we saw—remnants of the world's fourth-largest army—were unshaven and exhausted, herded by soldiers of the 16th/5th Lancers, trudging through the desert, throwing personal arms onto a pile of weapons 4 or 5 metres high, guarded by U.S. troops. All the way to the Iraqi border, we found the detritus of the Iraqi retreat, tanks and armour across the road, on their backs in ditches, scattered over the flat desert on either side. Some were still burning. The Americans and British looked at all this with a mixture of awe and relief.

Lieutenants Andrew Nye and Roy Monk of C Company, 1st Battalion, the Staffordshire Regiment, had spent part of the morning burying the dead. They included women and children, Iraqis or Kuwaitis or Egyptian refugees fleeing the battlefront and caught in the last American and British air attacks. Lt. Nye had lost one of his own men in the fighting. “One of our blokes was killed,” he said. “He was hit in the chest by a rocket-propelled grenade after some Iraqis had raised the white flag. It may be that some of the Iraqis didn't know others had surrendered. By then we had grown so used to the prisoners, we had seen so many of them and heard about the huge numbers of POWs on the radio. You have to feel this to believe it. There are booby-traps here and the Iraqis who died on this road were stripping Kuwait City. But I shudder to think what it would have been like in their position.”

We did. Imagining death—the end of life—can leave one gasping with horror at the vacuum, with the nothingness to follow. But to become one with these burned creatures at the moment of immolation, the seconds of indescribable pain, the brief awareness, the
knowing
of such suffering, this was surely too much. Yet we looked into these carbonised faces. I sought something from them, I suppose, some terrible mystery which I was not entitled to search for and which they were not entitled to reveal.

My AWACS friend was flying the day after the highway of death had been bombed. “I remember,” he wrote to me six years later: