The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings

Thus the rhetoric becomes ever more revolting. Hamas calls its Jewish enemies ‘the sons of pigs and monkeys’, while Israeli leaders have variously bestialised their enemies as ‘serpents’, ‘crocodiles’, ‘beasts’ and ‘cockroaches’. Now we have an Israeli officer – according to the Israeli daily Ma’ariv – advising his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. ‘If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an [Israeli] officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even – shocking though this might appear – to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto.’

Pardon? What on earth does this mean? Does this account for the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners earlier this month? Does this mean that an Israeli soldier is now to regard the Palestinians as subhumans – which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944?

Yet from Washington comes only silence. And silence, in law, gives consent. Should we be surprised? After all, the US is now making the rules as it goes along. Prisoners can be called ‘illegal combatants’ and brought to Guantanamo Bay with their mouths taped for semi-secret trials. The Afghan war is declared a victory – and then suddenly explodes again. Now we are told there will be other ‘fronts’ in Afghanistan, a spring offensive by ‘terrorists’. Washington has also said that its intelligence agencies – the heroes who failed to discover the 11 September plot – have proof (undisclosed, of course) that Arafat has ‘a new alliance’ with Iran, which brings the Palestinians into the ‘axis of evil’.

Is there no one to challenge this stuff? Just over a week ago, CIA director George Tenet announced that Iraq had links with al-Qaeda. ‘Contacts and linkages’ have been established, he told us. And that’s what the headlines said. But then Tenet continued by saying that the mutual antipathy of al-Qaeda and Iraq towards America and Saudi Arabia ‘suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible’. ‘Suggests?’ ‘Possible?’ Is that what Mr Tenet calls proof?

But now everyone is cashing in on the ‘war against terror’. When Macedonian cops gun down seven Arabs, they announce that they are participating in the global ‘war on terror’. When Russians massacre Chechens, they are now prosecuting the ‘war on terror’. When Israel fires at Arafat’s headquarters, it says it is participating in the ‘war on terror’. Must we all be hijacked into America’s dangerous self-absorption with the crimes of 11 September? Must this vile war between Palestinians and Israelis be distorted in so dishonest a way?

The Independent, 30 March 2002

George Tenet resigned as CIA director on 3 June 2004, to be replaced by former Soviet analyst Robert Gates, who had joined the intelligence organisation while still a student at Indiana University.

‘You are not welcome’

President George W. Bush addressed the German Bundestag on 23 May 2002.

So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in Berlin – his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, ‘Hitler’ being the pathetic Arafat – have we had to listen to claptrap like this. But the fact that we Europeans had to do so in the Bundestag on Thursday – and, for the most part, in respectful silence – was extraordinary. Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war that was fought and won before most of us were born? Do we have to live forever with living, diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or Roosevelt? ‘He’s a dictator who gassed his own people,’ Bush reminded us of Saddam Hussein for the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time, was on Saddam’s side.

But there is a much more serious side to this. Mr Bush is hoping to corner the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, into a new policy of threatening Iran. He wants the Russians to lean on the northern bit of the ‘axis of evil’, the infantile phrase which he still trots out to the masses. More and more, indeed, Bush’s rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of bin Laden. And still he tries to lie about the motives for the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Yet again, in the Bundestag, he insisted that the West’s enemies hated ‘justice and democracy’, even though most of America’s Muslim enemies wouldn’t know what democracy was.

In the United States, the Bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding belts – note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America’s ever weirder ‘war on terror’ – and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous ‘national security adviser’, Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, you’ll find they’ve issued more threats against Americans than bin Laden. But let’s get to the point. The growing evidence that Israel’s policies are America’s policies in the Middle East – or, more accurately, vice versa – is now being played out for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee announcing that Hizballah – the Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israel’s demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year 2000 – is planning attacks in the US. After that, we had an American television network ‘revealing’ that Hizballah, Hamas and al-Qaeda have held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US.

American journalists insist on quoting ‘sources’ but there was, of course, no sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American media. Then take the ‘Syrian Accountability Act’ that was introduced into the US Senate by Israel’s friends on 18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards ‘operate freely’ on the southern Lebanese border. And I repeat: there haven’t been Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon – let alone the south of the country – for fifteen years. So why is this lie repeated yet again?

Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threat – its ‘terrorism’ status has been heightened by the State Department – and so is Iraq. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister held personally responsible by Israel’s own inquiry for the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, is – according to Mr Bush – ‘a man of peace’. How much further can this go? A long way, I fear. The anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East is palpable. Arab newspaper editorials don’t come near to expressing public opinion. In Damascus, Majida Tabbaa has become famous as the lady who threw the US consul Roberto Powers out of her husband’s downtown restaurant on 7 April. ‘I went over to him,’ she said, ‘and told him, “Mr Roberto, tell your George Bush that all of you are not welcome – please get out”.’ Across the Arab world, boycotts of American goods have begun in earnest.

How much longer can this go on? America praises Pakistani president Musharraf for his support in the ‘war on terror’, but remains silent when he arranges a dictatorial ‘referendum’ to keep him in power. America’s enemies, remember, hate the US for its ‘democracy’. So is General Musharraf going to feel the heat? Forget it. My guess is that Pakistan’s importance in the famous ‘war on terror’ – or ‘war for civilisation’ as, we should remember, it was originally called – is far more important. If Pakistan and India go to war, I’ll wager a lot that Washington will come down for undemocratic Pakistan against democratic India.

Now here’s pause for thought. Abdelrahman al-Rashed writes in the international Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat that if anyone had said prior to 11 September that Arabs were plotting a vast scheme to murder thousands of Americans in the US, no one would have believed them. ‘We would have charged that this was an attempt to incite the American people against Arabs and Muslims,’ he wrote. And rightly so. But Arabs did commit the crimes against humanity of 11 September. And many Arabs greatly fear that we have yet to see the encore from the same organisation. In the meantime, Mr Bush goes on to do exactly what his enemies want: to provoke Muslims and Arabs, to praise their enemies and demonise their countries, to bomb and starve Iraq and give uncritical support to Israel and maintain his support for the dictators of the Middle East.

Each morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding. There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it.

The Independent, 25 May 2002

Be very afraid: Bush Productions is preparing to go into action

I have always been a sucker for wide-screen epics. Ever since my dad took me to see Quo Vadis – which ends with centurion Robert Taylor heading off to his execution with his bride on his arm – I’ve been on the movie roller-coaster. My dad didn’t make a great distinction between the big pictures and B-movies; he managed to squeeze Hercules Unchained in between Ben Hur and Spartacus. But the extraordinary suspension of disbelief provided by the cinema carried me right through to Titanic, Pearl Harbor and Gladiator. Awful they may be. Spectacular they are.

Yet the important thing, as my dad used to tell me, was to remember that the cinema did not really imitate reality. Newly converted Christian centurions did not go so blithely to their deaths, nor did love reign supreme on the Titanic. The fighter pilots of Pearl Harbor did not perform so heroically, nor did wicked Roman emperors die so young. From John Wayne’s The Green Berets, war films have lied to us about life and death. After the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington last September, I suppose it was inevitable that the Pentagon and the CIA would call on Hollywood for ideas – yes, the movie boys actually did go to Washington to do a little synergy with the local princes of darkness. But when Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld turned up together for the premiere of Black Hawk Down, I began to get worried.

After all, if the Bush administration is so keen on war, it better work out the difference between Hollywood and the real thing. Yet what we’ve been getting is a movie version of reality, a work of fiction to justify the prospect of ‘war without end’. It started, of course, with all the drivel about ‘crusades’ and ‘war against terror’ and ‘war against evil’, the now famous ‘they hate us because we are a democracy’, the ‘axis of evil’ and most recently – it would be outlandishly funny if this trash hadn’t come from the Rand Corporation – the ‘kernel of evil’. The latter, by the way, is supposed to be Saudi Arabia, but it might just as well have been Iran, Iraq, Syria or anywhere west of the Pecos. Along with this tosh, history is being falsified. Even a crime movie supplies a motive for the crime, but after 11 September Bush Productions would allow no motives to be discussed. The identity and religion of the perpetrators was permissible information: they were Arabs, Muslims. But the moment any of us suggested glancing towards the area from which these Arabs came – an area rich in injustice, oppression, occupation and UN-sanctioned child death – we were subjected to a campaign of calumny.

As Bush’s regional enemies grew in number to include not just al-Qaeda but Iraq and Iran and their allies, a fabric of stories began to be woven. Last June, for example, we had Donald Rumsfeld spinning tales about Iran. At a press conference in Qatar – these lies can be spun, please note, just as well in the Arab world as in the West – Rumsfeld told us that Iranians ‘are engaging in terrorist activities and transporting people down through Damascus and into the Bekaa Valley. They have harboured al-Qaeda and served as a facilitator for the movement of al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan down through Iran.’ Now the implication of all this is that al-Qaeda men were being funnelled into Lebanon with the help of Iran and Syria. Yet we know that Iran, far from ‘transporting’ al-Qaeda men to Syria, has been packing them off to Saudi Arabia for imprisonment and possible death. We know that the Syrians have locked up an important al-Qaeda official. The Americans have since acknowledged all this. And, save for ten Lebanese men hiding in a Palestinian camp – who may have no contact with al-Qaeda – there isn’t a single Osama bin Laden follower in Lebanon.*

So Hizballah had to be lined up for attack. The Washington Post did the trick with the following last month: ‘The Lebanonbased Hezbollah organisation, one of the world’s most formidable terrorist groups, is increasingly teaming up with al-Qa’ida on logistics and training for terrorist operations, according to US and European intelligence officials and terrorism experts.’ This tomfoolery was abetted by Steven Simon, who once worked for the US National Security Council and who announced that ‘there’s a convergence of objectives. There’s something in the zeitgeist that is pretty well established now.’ Except, of course – zeitgeist notwithstanding – it is simply untrue. The Washington Post had already lined up the Palestinians as America’s enemies – again, ‘terrorism experts’ were the source of this story – by telling its readers in May that ‘the sheer number of suicide belt-bombers attacking Israel this spring has increased fear among terrorism experts that the tactic will be exported to the United States.’

A similar theme was originally used to set up Saddam Hussein as an al-Qaeda ally. Back in March, George Tenet, the CIA director, stated that Baghdad ‘has also had contacts with al-Qaeda’, although he somewhat diluted this bald statement by adding that ‘the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible.’ Note the discrepancy here between ‘has also had contacts’ and ‘is possible’. On the West Bank, Rumsfeld has already talked about the ‘so-called occupied’ territories, a step down from William Safire’s outrageous column in the New York Times last March in which he admonished us not to call the occupied territories occupied. ‘To call them “occupied” reveals a prejudice against Israel’s right to what were supposed to be “secure and defensible” borders,’ he wrote. Now we have Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, telling us that ‘Arafat is somebody who failed to lead when he had a chance. Ehud Barak gave him a terrific opportunity to lead. And what did they get in return? Arafat started the second intifada instead and rejected that offered hand of friendship.’

* Five years later, there would be: the al-Qaeda-inspired ‘Fatah al-Islam’ group opened an offensive on 20 May 2007 from the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon against Lebanese government troops. It took the national army three months to crush the insurgents – who included Saudis, Yemenis and Syrians – at a cost of 300 dead, 158 of them soldiers. Forty civilians also died in the fighting.

Now it’s true that Ms Rice’s knowledge of the Middle East gets dimmer by the week, but this palpable falsification is now the Washington ‘line’. No mention, you’ll note, that Arafat was supposed to ‘lead’ by accepting Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, no mention of a ‘right of return’ for a single refugee, of the settlements built illegally outside east Jerusalem, of the ten-mile-wide Israeli buffer zone round ‘Palestine’, of scarcely 46 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine under negotiation to be given to Palestinians.

It’s not difficult to see what’s going on. It’s not just al-Qaeda who are the ‘enemy’. It’s Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia. Bush Productions are setting up the Arab world. We are being prepared for a wide-screen epic, a spectacle supported by Hollywood fiction and a plot of lies. Alas, my dad is no longer with us to remind them all that cinema does not imitate reality, that war films lie about life and death.

The Independent, 17 August 2002

‘Our guys may kick them around a little…’

I think I’m getting the picture. North Korea breaks all its nuclear agreements with the United States, throws out UN inspectors and sets off to make a bomb a year, and President Bush says it’s ‘a diplomatic issue’. Iraq hands over a 12,000- page account of its weapons production and allows UN inspectors to roam all over the country, and – after they’ve found not a jam-jar of dangerous chemicals in 230 raids – President Bush announces that Iraq is a threat to America, has not disarmed and may have to be invaded. So that’s it, then.

How, readers keep asking me in the most eloquent of letters, does he get away with it? Indeed, how does Tony Blair get away with it? Not long ago in the House of Commons, our dear prime minister was announcing in his usual schoolmasterly tones – the ones used on particularly inattentive or dim boys in class – that Saddam’s factories of mass destruction were ‘up [pause] and running [pause] now’. But the Dear Leader in Pyongyang does have factories that are up [pause] and running [pause] now. And Tony Blair is silent.

Why do we tolerate this? Why do Americans? Over the past few days there has been just the smallest of hints that the American media – the biggest and most culpable backer of the White House’s campaign of mendacity – has been, ever so timidly, asking a few questions. Months after The Independent first began to draw its readers’ attention to Donald Rumsfeld’s chummy personal visits to Saddam in Baghdad at the height of Iraq’s use of poison gas against Iran in 1983, the Washington Post has at last decided to tell its own readers a bit of what was going on. Reporter Michael Dobbs included the usual weasel clauses (‘opinions differ among Middle East experts… whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction’), but the thrust is there: we created the monster and Mr Rumsfeld played his part in doing so.

But no American – or British – newspaper has dared to investigate another, almost equally dangerous, relationship that the present US administration is forging behind our backs: with the military-supported regime in Algeria. For ten years now, one of the world’s dirtiest wars has been fought out in this country, supposedly between ‘Islamists’ and ‘security forces’, in which almost 200,000 people – mostly civilians – have been killed. But over the past five years there has been growing evidence that elements of those same security forces were involved in some of the bloodiest massacres, including the throat-cutting of babies. The Independent has published the most detailed reports of Algerian police torture and of the extrajudicial executions of women as well as men. Yet the US, as part of its obscene ‘war on terror’, has cosied up to the Algerian regime. It is helping to rearmAlgeria’s army and promised more assistance. William Burns, the US assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, announced that Washington ‘has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism’.

And he’s right. The Algerian security forces can instruct the Americans on how to make a male or female prisoner believe that they are going to suffocate. The method – US personnel can find the experts in this particular torture technique working in the basement of the Châteauneuf police station in central Algiers – is to cover the trussed-up victim’s mouth with a rag and then soak it with cleaning fluid.* The prisoner slowly suffocates. There’s also the usual nail-pulling and the usual wires attached to penises and vaginas and – I’ll always remember the eyewitness description – the rape of an old woman in a police station, from which she emerged, covered in blood, urging other prisoners to resist.

Some of the witnesses to these abominations were Algerian police officers who had sought sanctuary in London. But rest assured, Mr Burns is right, America has much to learn from the Algerians. Already, for example – don’t ask why this never reached the newspapers – the Algerian army chief of staff has been warmly welcomed at Nato’s southern command headquarters at Naples. And the Americans are learning. A national security official attached to the CIA divulged last month that when it came to prisoners, ‘Our guys may kick them around a little in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath’. Another US ‘national security’ official announced that ‘pain control in wounded patients is a very subjective thing’. But let’s be fair. The Americans may have learned this wickedness from the Algerians. They could just as well have learned it from the Taliban.

Meanwhile, inside the US, the profiling of Muslims goes on apace. On 17 November, thousands of Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Afghans, Bahrainis, Eritreans, Lebanese, Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, Somalis, Tunisians, Yemenis and Emiratis turned up at federal offices to be fingerprinted. The New York Times – the most chicken of all the American papers in covering the post-9/11 story – revealed (only in paragraph 5 of its report, of course) that ‘over the past week, agency officials… have handcuffed and detained hundreds of men who showed up to be finger-printed. In some cases the men had expired student or work visas; in other cases, the men could not provide adequate documentation of their immigration status.’ In Los Angeles, the cops ran out of plastic handcuffs as they herded men off to the lockup. Of the 1,000 men arrested without trial or charges after 11 September, many were nativeborn Americans.

* The Americans, of course, did subsequently adopt – and use – a suffocation torture technique called ‘waterboarding’, during which the (usually Arab Muslim) prisoner is almost drowned before being ‘saved’ from death by his captors.

Indeed, many Americans don’t even know what the chilling acronym of the ‘US Patriot Act’ even stands for. ‘Patriot’ is not a reference to patriotism. The name stands for the ‘United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’. America’s $200 m ‘Total Awareness Program’ will permit the US government to monitor citizens’ e-mail and internet activity and collect data on the movement of all Americans. And although we have not been told about this by our journalists, the US administration is now pestering European governments for the contents of their own citizens’ data files. The most recent – and most preposterous – of these claims came in a US demand for access to the computer records of the French national airline, Air France, so that it could ‘profile’ thousands of its passengers. All this is beyond the wildest dreams of Saddam and the Dear Leader Kim.

The new rules even worm their way into academia. Take the friendly little university of Purdue in Indiana, where I lectured a few weeks ago. With federal funds, it’s now setting up an ‘Institute for Homeland Security’, whose eighteen ‘experts’ will include executives from Boeing and Hewlett-Packard and US Defense and State Department officials, to organise ‘research programmes’ around ‘critical mission areas’. What, I wonder, are these areas to be? Surely nothing to do with injustice in the Middle East, the Arab–Israeli conflict or the presence of thousands of US troops on Muslim lands. After all, it was Richard Perle, the most sinister of George Bush’s pro-Israeli advisers, who stated last year that ‘terrorism must be decontextualised’.