The Great War for Civilisation (154 page)

But while the armourers peddled the linguistics of power, beauty, excellence, protection, reliability, potency and brawn, the gospel preached at Abu Dhabi had nothing to do with John Hurst's god. It was ultimately about fear and threats: the fear of Iraq and Iran, the threat of Saddamite aggression, the constant, reiterated warnings that these gentle, soft, sandy, unspeakably wealthy Arab Gulf oil states must arm and rearm to defend themselves against chemical, biological or nuclear attack. This grim and entirely false scenario, of course, was to become wearily familiar eighteen months later when President Bush and Prime Minister Blair used exactly the same demons to propel us to war. But in Abu Dhabi in March 2001 they were introduced for entirely commercial gain: to terrify “our friends” in the Gulf, to persuade them that only by purchasing billions of dollars of weaponry could they be safe. In retrospect, these tactics were a dress rehearsal for the reuse of the same inaccurate material to justify our invasion of Iraq in 2003.

How this gospel was defined—and preached—was all too evident in the large, air-conditioned hall on the other side of the arms bazaar. The “Gulf Defence Conference” was the place to learn about threats. On the very first day, there was Neil Patrick of the Royal United Services Institute, lecturing his audience about “countries of concern in the Gulf.” We heard all about Iran's medium-range ballistic missile capability, Iraq's potential capability to reconstruct mobile missile-launchers. “So what happens . . . when Iran goes nuclear?” the Arabs were asked.

Mr. Patrick's offerings were hedged with conditional clauses. But the message was clear enough. “The important thing is building a coalition with Gulf Arabs . . . building a coalition with the Americans and the European allies . . .” Osama bin Laden—“not by any means a one-man operator”—was a threat, along with criminals in the former Soviet Union and Russia's possible transfer of high-tech weaponry to Iran.
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Across the Abu Dhabi arms bazaar, the warnings were pursued more crudely. At the British Aerospace stand (“BAE Systems provide you with the total package, tailored to your needs”), a massive video-production demonstrated how British military know-how could end a border dispute. The warring parties in this absurd film were “Orange” (the aggressor) and “Blue” (the victim), whose territory—and here was the clue—contained “oil and gas reserves in the border area.” Which of course meant Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and the Emirates. The only power sharing a common border with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was Iraq. So colour Saddam orange. Handed out to Arab visitors to the fair, Western military journals carried a parallel theme. “Now is the time for the Persian Gulf States to get serious about their collective security,” thundered Gannett's
Defense News
of Springfield, Virginia. Threats to the area “underscore the importance of bolstering defensive systems across the Middle East's soft underbelly, the Arabian peninsula . . . in the absence of greater cooperation, their security situation grows more tenuous by the day.”

In vain did the Kuwait deputy chief of staff, Major General Fahad Ahmad al-Amir, tell delegates that Israel remained a threat to the Arabs, that “the security situation in the Gulf and the security situation in the Arab–Israeli conflict are linked.” Hopeless was his plea that “if we want to create a paradigm of peace in the Gulf region, we must have a paradigm of peace in Palestine.” Pointless was his warning that the fate of Jerusalem lay close to every Arab heart. The Emirates arms bazaar organisers had ignored the faxed appeals from Israeli arms manufacturers to exhibit in Abu Dhabi. But free copies of
Jane's Intelligence Review
handed out to the arms boys contained an article with all the usual myths about the Arab–Israeli dispute. The illegal Jewish settlement built on Arab land at Har Homa was referred to only as a “disputed . . . project” (its Arab name of Jebel abu Ghoneim was omitted), the occupied Palestinian West Bank was given its Israeli name of Judaea and Samaria, while the latest death toll of 450 in the latest intifada failed to add that the vast majority of these victims were Palestinian Arabs. The article was written by David Eshel, a “defence analyst” who just happened to be a former Israeli army officer.

Yes, what was being preached at Abu Dhabi was the new George W. Bush doctrine: the threat comes from war criminal Saddam Hussein, not from peace-loving Israel. The Arabs need to defend themselves—quickly; a policy that necessitates the wholesale milking of the Arab Gulf's wealth, the Arab squandering of billions of dollars on Western arms to protect the Gulf from the wreckage of Iraq and the chaos of Iran. The statistics told it all. In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to $92 billion. Since 1997, the Emirates alone had signed contracts worth more than $11 billion, adding 112 aircraft to their arsenal, comprising 80 F-16s from Lockheed Martin and 32 French Mirage 2000-9s. The figures are staggering, revolting. Between 1991 and 1993, the United States Military Training Mission was administering more than $31 billion in Saudi arms procurements from Washington and $27 billion in new U.S. acquisitions. The Saudi air force already possessed 72 American F-15 fighter-bombers, 114 British Tornadoes, 80 F-5s and 167 Boeing F-15s. At Idex, 800 exhibitors from forty-two countries displayed their weapons. The Russian military pavilion contained fifty Russian military enterprises selling tanks, armoured vehicles, surface-to-air missiles and warships. Incredibly, Philippe Roger, the French armament directorate's international relations director, announced in Abu Dhabi that “while [Gulf] governments could consider using the higher receipts [from oil] for servicing their debt, we believe that higher allocations could go for defence-related spending . . .”

And if the Arab people—as opposed to their rulers—objected to this insanity, there was even available, at the arms bazaar, the means to end their protest. South Africa's Swartklip Products was advertising smoke generators for “large scale clearance operations,” a 37-mm baton round that “neutralises a rioter by delivering a hefty, non-lethal punch,” a smoke round to fire into buildings, and a 12-gauge shotgun baton to provide an “accurate means of disabling selected activists.”

In despair, I walked to the Russian pavilion. And it was here that I met him. Indeed, I could scarcely believe that a name so notorious in all the world's wars and atrocities, so redolent of insurgency and revolution, so frequently used in battle dispatches that the very word has become a cliché of war reporting, really bore corporeal form—other than that of the AK-47, the most famous rifle in the world. This was the rifle I had seen in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Serbia. This was the rifle I had held in my hands on that frozen Soviet army convoy to Kabul when we came under attack from the Afghan mujahedin twenty-one years ago. It was a sign of Russian times that to sell their tanks and MiGs, they had enlisted the help of the eighty-one-year-old inventor of that most iconic of weapons and freighted him all the way here to Abu Dhabi.

I found him sitting in a small room, Mikhail Kalashnikov himself, a small, squat man with grey, coiffed hair and quite a few gold teeth, hands unsteady but Siberian eyes alert as a wolf, still wearing his two Hero of Socialist Labour medals. “Hasn't it ever occurred to you that you should change your faith?” a Saudi army major had asked him a few years earlier. “By Christian standards, you are a great sinner. You are responsible for thousands, even tens of thousands, of deaths around the globe. They've long prepared a place for you in hell.” But, said the major, Kalashnikov was a true Muslim. “And when the time of your earthly existence is over, Allah will welcome you as a hero . . . Allah's mercy is limitless.”

At least, that's how Mikhail Kalashnikov tells the story. And he is at least one of the very few arms-sellers to have experienced war. Born in November 1919, he was one of eighteen children of whom only six survived, a Soviet T-38 tank commander in 1941, wounded in the shoulder and back when a German shell smashed part of the tank's armour into his body. “I was in hospital and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men when the Germans have automatics?' So I designed one. I was a soldier and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Automat Kalashnikova—the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov—AK—and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947.”

The AK-47, the battle rifle of the Warsaw Pact, became the symbol of revolution—Palestinian, Angolan, Vietnamese, Algerian, Afghan, Hizballah. And I asked old Mikhail Kalashnikov how he could justify all this blood, all those corpses torn to bits by his invention. He had been asked before. “You see, all these feelings come about because one side wants to liberate itself with arms. But in my opinion it is good that prevails. You may live to see the day when good prevails— it will be after I am dead. But the time will come when my weapons will be no more used or necessary.”

This was incredible, preposterous. The AK-47 has mythic status. Kalashnikov admits this. “When I met the Mozambique minister of defence, he presented me with his country's national banner which carries the image of a Kalashnikov sub-machine gun. And he told me that when all the liberation soldiers went home to their villages, they named their sons ‘Kalash.' I think this is an honour, not just a military success. It's a success in life when people are named after me, after Mikhail Kalashnikov.” Even the Lebanese Hizballah have included the AK-47 on their Islamic banner—the rifle forms the “l” of “Allah” in the Arabic script. There was no point in asking the old man what his children thought of him. His fiftyseven -year-old son Viktor is a small-arms designer and was part of the Russian delegation to Abu Dhabi.

So we embarked down the Russian version of a familiar moral track. “My aim was to protect the borders of my motherland,” Kalashnikov tells me. “It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well known in the world, that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the weapons designers. Man is born to protect his family, his children, his wife. But I want you to know that apart from armaments, I have written three books in which I try to educate our youth to show respect for their families, for old people, for history . . .”

He was now in nostalgic mode. “I lived at a time when we all wanted to be of benefit to our [Soviet] state. To some extent, the state took care of its heroes and designers . . . In the village where I was born, according to a special decree, a monument was erected to me, twice my height. In the city of Ishevsk where I live, there is now a Kalashnikov museum with a section dedicated to my life—and this was erected in my lifetime!” No, Mikhail Kalashnikov tells me, he is not rich, he has little money. “I would have made good use of this money if I had it. But there are some qualities which may be more important. President Putin called me on my birthday the other day. No other president would telephone an arms designer. And these things are very important for me.” And God? I asked. What would God say of Mikhail Kalashnikov? “We were educated in such a way that I am probably an atheist,” he replied. “But something exists . . .”

There was only one other place to seek an answer. I walked over to a small stand hidden away in the corner of one of the farthest pavilions, where brown-painted models of mobile-launched rockets lay on a shelf. This was the Iranian arms bazaar. Their missiles were called “Dawn” or “Morning Sunrise,” although one caught my eye, a big V-2-look-alike 125-kilometre-range monster produced by the S. B. Industrial Group of Tehran, called the Nazeat. It's a Persian word meaning “Horror of Death.” Yes, Iran—the only nation in all of the world's arms market to tell the true purpose of a weapon—had actually named a missile after the extinction of life. Did the answer to all my questions, I wondered, lie here?

These missiles were not for sale, I was solemnly informed by Morteza Khosravi. They were only to show Iran's “capabilities”—although in the year 2000, Iran had sold $31 million worth of “defence” products to Asia and Africa. Khosravi, a young man from the Iranian Ministry of Defence with a small beard and an intense expression and a family that lost its own “martyrs” in the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, explained carefully—he took half a minute to reflect on each question before replying—that “the defence equipment in our production lines belongs to all Islamic nations—we are here to establish a joint cooperation with them.” But, he swiftly added, Iran sold only according to strict rules, under the UN's Export Control Act. Once more, Lady Britomart had come to the rescue. In any case, more than 60 per cent of Iran's military capacity had been switched to civilian production.

I knew all this. What I wanted to hear about was the immorality of arms production. Morteza Khosravi seemed puzzled. Was it not perfectly clear? “There are two main purposes for the production of weapons,” he said. “Some provide them for aggression, others for self-defence. The latter is the case for our country; we produce weapons only for self-defence and for the protective policy of our government. We have had a peaceful state but others have invaded us—we had the eight years ‘Imposed War.' The only policy of our troops at that time was to defend their borders and their country. We always had a policy of defending ourselves.” There was another long pause. Then Khosravi uttered the mantra of every arms-seller. “It is a fact that each human being must defend himself.”

I had heard this from Derek Turnbull, from Mikhail Kalashnikov, from John Hurst. If only the world was full of nice human beings who did civilised things. The Lord wants us to defend ourselves. Man is born to protect his family. Protection, respect, trust, history, timelessness. It seemed useless to listen to these words any more. They were unstoppable, unarguable, impossible. Now thrive the armourers indeed. The merchants of death sell death in the form of protection, killing as defence, as God's will, human destiny, patriotic duty. The bills—human and financial—come later. And we poor humans are the “target movers,” frightened folk to fleece with talk of threats and aggression. The threat is inside ourselves, of course, as we travel through the world. It is our task to “cycle up and down as desired until hit.”