The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings

My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning quite chapfall’n?

And here is Omar Khayyam’s contemplation of a king’s skull at Tus – near the modern-day Iranian city of Mashad – written more than 400 years before Shakespeare’s Hamlet stood in the churchyard at Elsinore:

I saw a bird alighted on the city walls of Tus Grasping in its claws Kaika’us’s head: It was saying to that head, ‘Shame! Shame! Where now the sound of the bells and the boom of the drum?’

The swiftness with which disease struck the living in previous centuries was truly murderous. And I have my own testimony of how quickly violent death can approach. Assaulted by a crowd of Afghans in a Pakistani border village in 2001 – their families had just been slaughtered in an American B-52 air raid on Kandahar – an ever-growing crowd of young men were banging stones on to my head, smashing my glasses into my face, cutting my skin open until I could smell my own blood. And, just for a moment, I caught sight of myself in the laminated side of a parked bus. I was crimson with blood, my face was bright red with the stuff and it was slopping down my shirt and on to my bag and my trousers and shoes; I was all gore from head to foot. And I distinctly remember, at that very moment – I suppose it was a subconscious attempt to give meaning to my own self-disgust – the fearful ravings of the insane Lady Macbeth as she contemplates the stabbing of King Duncan: ‘… who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’

Shakespeare would certainly have witnessed pain and suffering in daily London life. Executions were staged in public, not filmed secretly on mobile telephones. But who can contemplate Saddam’s hanging – the old monster showing nobility as his Shi’ite executioners tell him he is going ‘to hell’ – without remembering ‘that most disloyal traitor’, the condemned Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, of whom Malcolm was to remark that ‘… nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it’? Indeed, Saddam’s last response to his tormentors – ‘to the hell that is Iraq?’ – was truly Shakespearean.

How eerily does Saddam’s shade haunt our modern reading of Shakespeare. ‘Hang those that talk of fear!’ must have echoed through many a Saddamite palace, where ‘mouth-honour’ had long ago become the custom, where – as the casualties grew through the long years of his eight-year conflict with Iran – a Ba’athist leader might be excused the Macbethian thought that he was ‘in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er’. The Iraqi dictator tried to draw loose inspiration from the Epic of Gilgamesh in his own feeble literary endeavours, an infantile novel which – if David Damrosch is right – was the work of an Iraqi writer subsequently murdered by Saddam. Perhaps Auden best captures the nature of the beast:

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…

In an age when we are supposed to believe in the ‘War on Terror’, we may quarry our way through Shakespeare’s folios in search of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush with all the enthusiasm of the mass murderer who prowls through Christian and Islamic scriptures in search of excuses for ethnic cleansing. Indeed, smiting the Hittites, Canaanites and Jebusites is not much different from smiting the Bosnians or the Rwandans or the Arabs or, indeed, the modern-day Israelis. And it’s not difficult to find a parallel with Bush’s disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq – and his apparent desire to erase these defeats with yet a new military adventure in Iran – in Henry IV’s deathbed advice to his son, the future Henry V:

… Therefore, my Harry,

Be it thy course to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, May waste the memory of the former days.

The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeare’s plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad. Here’s the father, for example, on discovering that he has killed his own child in Henry VI, Part III:

O, pity, God, this miserable age!

What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!

Our treachery towards the Shi’ites and Kurds of Iraq in 1991 – when we encouraged them to rise up against Saddam and then allowed the butcher of Baghdad to destroy them – was set against the genuine cries for freedom that those doomed people uttered in the days before their betrayal. ‘… waving our red weapons o’er our heads,’ as Brutus cried seconds after Julius Caesar’s murder, ‘Let’s all cry, “Peace, freedom, and liberty”.’

My own experience of war has changed my feelings towards many of Shakespeare’s characters. The good guys in Shakespeare’s plays have become ever less attractive, ever more portentous, ever more sinister as the years go by. Henry V seems more than ever a butcher. ‘Now, herald, are the dead numb’red?’ he asks.

This note doth tell me of ten thousand French

That in the field lie slain; of princes, in this number, And nobles bearing banners, there lie dead One hundred twenty-six; added to these, Of knights, esquires, and gallant gentlemen, Eight thousand and four hundred…

Henry is doing ‘body counts’. When the herald presents another list – this time of the English dead – Henry reads off the names of Edward, Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Kikely, Davy Gam, Esquire:

None else of name; and of all other men

But five and twenty. O God, thy arm was here…Was ever known so great and little loss On one part and on th’other?

This is pure Gulf War Part One, when General Norman Schwarzkopf was gloating at the disparate casualty figures – while claiming, of course, that he was ‘not in the business of body counts’ and while General Peter de la Billière was telling Britons to celebrate victory by ringing their church bells.

Shakespeare can still be used to remind ourselves of an earlier, ‘safer’ (if non-existent) world, a reassurance of our own ultimate survival. It was not by chance that Olivier’s Henry V was filmed during the Second World War. The Bastard’s final promise in King John is simple enough:

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true.

But the true believers – the Osamas and Bushes – probably lie outside the history plays. The mad King Lear – betrayed by two of his daughters just as bin Laden felt he was betrayed by the Saudi royal family when they rejected his offer to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation without American military assistance – shouts that he will ‘do such things/What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be/The terrors of the earth.’

Lear, of course, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, a ‘terrorist’ conspiracy with potential 11 September consequences. Similarly, the saintly Prospero in The Tempest contains both the self-righteousness and ruthlessness of bin Laden and the covert racism of Bush. When he sends Ariel to wreck the usurping King Alonso’s ship on his island, the airy spirit returns with an account of his success which – despite his subsequent saving of lives – is of near Twin Towers dimensions:

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,

I flam’d amazement. Sometime I’d divide, And burn in many places… Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad, and play’d Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners Plung’d in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel; Then all afire with me; the King’s son, Ferdinand, With hair up-staring then like reeds, not hair Was the first man that leapt; cried “Hell is empty, And all the devils are here”.

In almost the same year, John Donne was using equally terrifying imagery, of a ‘fired ship’ from which ‘by no way/But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,/Some men leap’d forth…’ Prospero’s cruelty towards Caliban becomes more frightening each time I read of it, not least because The Tempest is one of four Shakespeare plays in which Muslims appear and because Caliban is himself an Arab, born of an Algerian mother.

‘This damn’d witch Sycorax,/For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible/To enter human hearing, from Argier/Thou know’st was banish’d…’ Prospero tells us. ‘This blue-ey’d hag was hither brought with child… /A freckl’d whelp, hag-born not honour’d with/A human shape.’

Caliban is the ‘terrorist’ on the island, first innocently nurtured by Prospero and then condemned to slavery after trying to rape Prospero’s daughter, the colonial slave who turns against the fruits of civilisation that were offered him.

You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!

Yet Caliban must ‘obey’ Prospero because ‘his art is of such power’. Prospero may not have F-18s or bunker-busters, but Caliban is able to play out a familiar Western narrative; he teams up with the bad guys, offering his help to Trinculo – ‘I’ll show you the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries;/I’ll fish for thee…’ – making the essential linkage between evil and terror that Bush vainly tried to claim between al-Qaeda and Saddam. Caliban is an animal, unworthy of pity, not honoured with a ‘human shape’. Compare this with an article in the newspaper USA Today, in which a former American military officer, Ralph Peters – arguing that Washington should withdraw from Iraq because its people are no longer worthy of our Western sacrifice – refers to ‘the comprehensive inability of the Arab world to progress in any sphere of organised human endeavor’.* Prospero, of course, prevails and Caliban survives to grovel to his colonial master: ‘How fine my master is! I am afraid/He will chastise me/… I’ll be wise hereafter,/And seek for grace…’ The war of terror has been won!

Shakespeare lived at a time when the largely Muslim Ottoman empire – then at its zenith of power – remained an existential if not a real threat for Europeans. The history plays are replete with these fears, albeit that they are also a product of propaganda on behalf of Elizabeth and, later, James. In Henry IV, Part I, the king is to set out on the Crusades:

As far as to the sepulchre of Christ…

Forthwith a power of English shall we levy, Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb To chase these pagans in those holy fields Over whose acres walked those blessed feet.

* USA Today 3 November 2006.

Rhetoric is no one’s prerogative – compare King Henry V’s pre-Agincourt speech with Saddam’s prelude to the ‘Mother of All Battles’ where Prospero-like purity is espoused for the Arab ‘side’. This is Saddam: ‘Standing at one side of this confrontation are peoples and sincere leaders and rulers, and on the other are those who stole the rights of God and the tyrants who were renounced by God after they renounced all that was right, honourable, decent and solemn and strayed from the path of God until… they became obsessed by the devil from head to toe.’

Similar sentiments are espoused by Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s play. Tamburlaine is the archetypal Muslim conqueror, the ‘scourge of God’ who found it passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis.

But Othello remains the most obvious, tragic narrative of our Middle Eastern fears. He is a Muslim in the service of Venice – close neighbour to the Ottoman empire – and is sent to Cyprus to battle the Turkish fleet. He is a mercenary whose self-hatred contaminates the play and eventually leads to his own death. Racially abused by both Iago and Roderigo, he lives in a world where there are men whose heads supposedly grow beneath their shoulders, where he is black – most Arabs are not black, although Olivier faithfully followed this notion – and where, just before killing himself, he compares his terrible stabbing of Desdemona to the work of a ‘base Indian’ who:

… threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu’d eyes, … Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees … Set you down this:And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him thus.

That, I fear, is the dagger that we now feel in all our hearts.

The Independent Magazine, 30 March 2007

Flirting with the enemy

After the Second World War, Palestine was crumbling. Menachem Begin’s Irgun had blown up British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the British were executing Jewish ‘terrorists’, and the Jews had hanged two kidnapped British army sergeants. The Arabs were determined to destroy the future Jewish state of Israel. The old imperial mandate was in a state of incipient civil war. You have only to open Colonial Office file 537/2643 to understand why, in their moment of agony, the British toyed with the idea of negotiating with an Arab cleric whom they had, only two years earlier, tried to extradite as a war criminal.

Indeed, in 1941 Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had been chatting to Hitler in Berlin, urging the Reich to prevent the departure of European Jews to Palestine; and two years later he had been helping to raise a Muslim SS battalion in Sarajevo to fight on the Russian front. Later on, in 1944 claiming ignorance of the Jewish Holocaust, he told the German foreign minister Ribbentrop that if Jews were to be ‘removed’ from Germany, ‘it would be infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control [sic], as for example, Poland…’

When he attempted to flee Germany in 1945, the French captured the Grand Mufti, but allowed him to escape to Egypt. In 1947 he turned up in Lebanon as leader of the Palestinian Arabs, a powerful and influential voice that could pacify – or provoke – an Arab uprising against Britain in its last days of rule in Palestine. No wonder, then, that the old Colonial Office file was not released under the usual thirty-year rule, but kept secret for half a century. Its contents – astonishingly, they were overlooked by historians on their release last month – speak not only of hidden contacts between the Grand Mufti and British diplomats in Cairo, but also of imperial despair in Palestine and, most dramatically, of outrage at Jewish ‘reprisals’ against Arab civilians which constituted, according to the British High Commissioner, ‘an offence to civilisation’. Indignation and fury permeate the file. So does defeat.

On 15 December 1947, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham sent a top-secret memorandum to the British colonial secretary Arthur Creech Jones, outlining the civil war in Palestine in fearful detail. ‘Situation now is deteriorating,’ he wrote,

into a series of reprisals and counter-reprisals between Jews and Arabs, in which many innocent lives are being lost, the tempo of which may accelerate… I have been considering what steps could be taken to mitigate this dangerous situation. As far as the Arabs are concerned it is undoubtedly a fact that word from the Mufti in the right quarter is probably now the only chance of inducing them to hold their hand until we have gone.

Haj Amin had arrived in newly independent Lebanon in early October 1947, and the British Legation in Beirut immediately set out to discover how much freedom he would be given. The Grand Mufti’s sudden appearance, the legation noted, had not surprised the Lebanese prime minister, Riad Solh,* but the Lebanese insisted that ‘a member of the Sû reté’ was in constant attendance on Haj Amin, that his activities would be ‘controlled and restricted’ by the Lebanese and that he ‘would not be allowed to indulge in any activities directed against British interests’. As our diplomats in Beirut were well aware, however, the British Middle East Office in Cairo had already made contact with the man whom Britain and the Allied Forces Command in Europe regarded as a war criminal.

* Lebanon’s first post-independence prime minister. He was assassinated in 1951.

On 29 September, our man in Cairo had sent a secret note to the Foreign Office enclosing the report of an interview with the Mufti from ‘an unimpeachable source’. The carefully typed notes – presumably from a British intelligence officer – portray a man who realised that disaster faced the Arabs of Palestine. The Mufti refused to contemplate the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. ‘He was not bargaining with the Zionists about a possession in dispute,’ says the report. ‘Palestine, including Jaffa and the Negev, belonged to the Arabs, and he did not recognise the right of anyone to “offer” them what was theirs as a condition of consent to partition. ‘It was like a robber trying to make conditions on which he would return stolen property.’ Besides, Haj Amin said, ‘no form of partition… would finally satisfy the Zionists. Whatever they got would merely be a springboard from which to leap on more.’

The Grand Mufti, who had supported the Arab revolt against British rule in the Thirties and had subsequently sought refuge in Iraq after a pro-German coup, then lectured his interviewee in words that must have taken the Briton’s breath away. ‘Put yourselves in the Arabs’ place,’ Haj Amin advised. ‘Remember yourselves in 1940. Did you ever think of offering the Germans part of Britain on condition that they let you alone in the rest? Of course not, and you never would.’ The answer to partition or a federal Palestine was ‘NO, categorically NO.’ Jews would have the same rights as Arabs in a Palestinian nation ‘but the Arabs would never agree to any bestowal on the Zionists of political power or privilege that put them above… the Palestinian state government’.

There was no reason why Arabs and the British should not cooperate, Haj Amin said. But common interests ‘should not deceive the British into thinking that any Arab leader would weaken where Palestine was concerned… Palestinian Arab enmity towards the British was purely political – they hated the policy that had founded… the Zionist national home.’ If Britain did not support Zionist claims to Palestine, and rejected partition, ‘she would gain Arab friendship in a moment’. But if the British continued their support, ‘they could never hope for Arab co-operation, for the Arabs would then be co-operating in bringing about their own destruction’.

Then, in words which have an ironic historical resonance, the Grand Mufti talked of the future. ‘He did not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah [gangs]. The Arabs might lose at first, they would have many losses, but in the end they must win.’ The Zionists ‘will eventually crumble into nothing, and he did not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America… intervened, and even then the Arabs would fight and the Arab world would be perpetually hostile’. When his British visitor suggested that the Arabs might do better to accept part of Palestine rather than risk losing all, Haj Amin replied: ‘Who are we? A handful of exiles. Nothing. But we shall never give in or surrender our principles no matter what bribe is offered.’

Should the British talk directly to Haj Amin? As fighting continued in Palestine, the British Legation in Beirut reported to the Foreign Office on 27 November that Haj Amin ‘no longer regards us as Arab Public Enemy No 1’. But ‘if a decision unfavourable to the Arabs is reached at the United Nations… it is probable that the ex-Mufti [sic] will be exposed to pressure from his extremist followers… Contact even of a most informal sort with British officials might serve as a safety valve.’ The British memorandum, marked ‘Secret’, adds that although Haj Amin’s ‘dubious past renders the prospect of even unofficial contact with him distasteful’, it could not be denied ‘that he enjoys very considerable prestige and influence and he may still play a part in the future government of Palestine’. The Mufti had ‘learnt a lesson through backing the wrong side in the last war,’ and ‘advantage might be taken of his anti-Communist leanings’.

Riad Solh, the Lebanese prime minister, had already offered to arrange a meeting between the Mufti and a Beirut-based British diplomat called Evans, over cups of tea – Evans had been ‘non-committal’ to the idea – but ‘I think it would be all to the good for a member of my staff to see him occasionally,’ the Legation head wrote. It would now pay the British ‘hand over fist’ to exert any influence to avoid a wholesale clash with Palestinian Arabs. Meeting the Mufti as ‘an individual’ would not mean ‘that His Majesty’s Government had abandoned their principles or condoned the Mufti’s misguided [sic] past… if… he has had a change of heart, mild and discreet contacts with the British might give him a chance to prove it. If the leopard is still the same we shall soon find the spots under his henna.’

Beneath this eloquent letter, the British diplomat added in his own hand the damning remark that the US assistant military attaché in Lebanon had already paid a visit to the Mufti. By mid-December, General Cunningham was pleading from Jerusalem for pressure on Haj Amin ‘to get him to dissuade local Arabs from further violence… while we are still here’. But, the High Commissioner noted, ‘it is clear that we cannot approach the Arabs without taking parallel action against the Jews. We are, of course, doing all we can to point out to Jews the unmitigated folly of their actions which can only end in future bitterness which may well in the end mean disaster for their new State.’ Jewish claims that their actions were carried out by ‘dissident groups’ had proved to be untrue and ‘it can be seen that the Jews have inflicted many more casualties on the Arabs than the reverse. Practically all [Jewish] attacks have been against buses or in civilian centres.’ In a remarkable moment of anger, Cunningham concluded that ‘we have never at any time on the slightest excuse escaped vociferous and hysterical accusations by Jews that we were a people who were prone to brutal reprisals. Now they [the Jews] have themselves come out with reprisals of a kind which would not have crossed the mind of any soldier here, and which are an offence to civilisation.’

Cunningham’s plea for discussions with the Mufti was forwarded to the Foreign Office. Within days, however, the Legation in Beirut was ordered to make no contact with Haj Amin. British MPs had long demanded his trial for war crimes, and our ally King Abdullah of Jordan – the late King Hussein’s grandfather – hated the Mufti. The British departed from Palestine in disgrace, leaving Arab and Jew to fight for the land. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. The Arabs did not eventually win, as Haj Amin had predicted, and the Israeli state did not end in disaster as Cunningham suggested it might. Israeli spokesmen regularly condemn the Mufti for his flirtation with Nazism, and have sought to demonise the Palestinians with his name. But recent research suggests that he was an Arab nationalist rather than a national socialist – his fairest biographer is a former Israeli military governor of the occupied West Bank.*

The Mufti died in Beirut in 1974, ignored and largely forgotten even in Lebanon. Among the mourners at his funeral was Yasser Arafat.

The Independent, 20 February 1999

* Zvi Elpeleg,The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (London, Frank Cass, 1993).

‘Thank you, Mr Clinton, for the kind words’

In August, 1998, following attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam and at the height of the scandal over his affair with intern Monica Lewinski, President Bill Clinton launched a cruise missile attack on Sudan and on a base in Afghanistan at which Osama bin Laden was supposed to be living. In Khartoum, the missiles destroyed a factory which the Americans claimed was producing chemical warfare components. They later admitted that it was manufacturing medicine for Sudan’s deprived population. Several al-Qaeda supporters – including two British citizens – were killed in the Afghan raid. But bin Laden was not there.