The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

‘But here’s a little boy who would like to tell you his view of Khomeini,’ said the governor, and an urchin in a grubby yellow abaya shrieked ‘Khomeini is a traitor’ with a vacant smile. All the officials acclaimed this statement as the true feelings of the people of Najaf. Khadi had never met Khomeini but confidently asserted that the Imam had been a CIA agent, that even Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem al-Khoi of Najaf had sent a telegram to Qom, blaming Khomeini for killing the Muslim Kurds of northern Iran. Al-Khoi may have done that – his fellow teacher, Ayatollah Sahib al-Hakim, had been executed by the regime – but this did not spare his family. In 1994, just two years after al-Khoi’s death, his courageous 36-year-old son Taghi was killed when his car mysteriously crashed into an unlit articulated lorry on the highway outside Kerbala. He had been a constant critic of Saddam’s persecution of the Shia and told friends in London the previous year that he was likely to die at Saddam’s hands. At the demand of the authorities, his burial – and that of his six-year-old nephew who died with him – went without the usual rituals.

Four years later, Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al-Burujirdi, one of Najaf’s most prominent scholars and jurists, a student of the elder al-Khoi and another Iranian-born cleric, was assassinated as he walked home after evening prayers at the shrine of Ali. He had been beaten up the previous year and had escaped another murder attempt when a hand grenade was thrown at him. Al-Burujirdi had refused government demands that he no longer lead prayers at the shrine. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the principal marja al-taqlid – in literal Arabic, ‘source of emulation’ – was still under house arrest and the Baathists were promoting the more pliable Sayed Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, cousin of the executed Sadiq. But Sadiq al-Sadr himself was assassinated by gunmen in Najaf nine months later after he had issued a fatwa calling on Shiites to attend their Friday prayers despite the government’s objection to large crowds. Al-Khoi’s son Youssef – Taghi’s brother – blamed the Baathists, and rioting broke out in the Shia slums of Saddam City in Baghdad. But the history of Shia resistance did not end with the fall of Saddam. It was Sadiq al-Sadr’s son Muqtada who would lead an insurrection against America’s occupation of Iraq five years later, in 2004, bringing US tanks onto the same Najaf streets through which Saddam’s armour had once moved and provoking gun battles across Sadr City, the former Saddam City whose population had renamed it after the executed Bakr Sadr.

These were just the most prominent of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who would be murdered during Saddam’s twenty-four-year rule. Kurds and communists and Shia Muslims would feel the harshest of the regime’s punishments. My Iraqi files from the late Seventies and early Eighties are filled with ill-printed circulars from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, from Iraqi trade unions and tiny opposition groups, naming thousands of executed men and women. As I thumb through them now, I come across the PUK’s magazine The Spark, an issue dated October 1977, complaining that its partisans have been jointly surrounded by forces of Baathist Iraq and the Shah’s Iran in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja, detailing the vast numbers of villages from which the Kurdish inhabitants had been deported, and the execution, assassination or torturing to death of 400 PUK members. Another PUK leaflet, dated 10 December 1977, reports the deportation of 300,000 Kurds to the south of Iraq. Yet another dreadful list, from a communist group, contains the names of 37 Iraqi workers executed or ‘disappeared’ in 1982 and 1983. Omer Kadir, worker in the tobacco factory at Suleimaniya – ‘tortured to death’; Ali Hussein, oil worker from Kirkuk -‘executed’; Majeed Sherhan, peasant from Hilla – ‘executed’; Saddam Muher, civil servant from Basra – ‘executed’… The dead include blacksmiths, builders, printers, post office workers, electricians and factory hands. No one was safe.

This permanent state of mass killing across Iraq was no secret in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the West was either silent or half-hearted in its condemnation. Saddam’s visit to France in 1975 and his public welcome by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who bestowed upon the Iraqi leader ‘my esteem, my consideration, and my affection’, was merely the most flagrant example of our shameful relationship with the Iraqi regime. Within three years, agents at the Iraqi embassy in Paris would be fighting a gun battle with French police after their diplomats had been taken hostage by two Arab gunmen. A French police inspector was killed and another policeman wounded; the three Iraqi agents claimed diplomatic immunity and were allowed to fly to Baghdad on 2 August 1978, just two days after the killing. US export credits and chemicals and helicopters, French jets and German gas and British military hardware poured into Iraq for fifteen years. Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and ask him for permission to reopen the US embassy. The first – and last – time I called on the consulate there, not long after Rumsfeld’s visit, one of its young CIA spooks brightly assured me that he wasn’t worried about car bombs because ‘we have complete faith in Iraqi security’.

Iraq’s vast literacy, public health, construction and communications projects were held up as proof that the Baathist government was essentially benign, or at least worthy of some respect. Again, my files contain many Western press articles that concentrate almost exclusively on Iraq’s social projects. In 1980, for example, a long report in the Middle East business magazine 8 Days, written with surely unconscious irony, begins: ‘Iraqis who fail to attend reading classes can be fined or sent to prison where literary classes are also compulsory. Such measures may seem harsh, but as Iraq enters its second year of a government drive to eliminate illiteracy, its results have won United Nations acclaim.’

In 1977, the now defunct Dublin Sunday Press ran an interview with former Irish minister for finance Charles Haughey in which the country’s human rights abuses simply went unrecorded. It was not difficult to see why. ‘An enormous potential market for Irish produce,’ it began, ‘including lamb, beef, dairy products and construction industry requirements was open in Iraq … Charles Haughey told me on his return from a week-long visit to that country.’ Haughey and his wife Maureen, it transpired, had been ‘the guest of the 9-year-old socialist Iraqi government’ so that he could inform himself ‘of the political and economic situation there and to help to promote better contact and better relations between Ireland and Iraq at political level’. Haughey, who had met ‘the Director General of the Ministry of Planning, Saddam Hussein’, added that ‘the principal political aspect of modern Iraq is the total determination of its leaders to use the wealth derived from their oil resources for the benefit of their people …’ The Baath party, the article helpfully informed its readers, ‘came to power in July 1968 without the shedding of one drop of blood’.

The British understood the Iraqi regime all too well. In 1980, gunmen from the ‘Political Organisation of the Arab People in Arabistan’ – the small south-western corner of Iran with a predominantly Arab population, which is called Khuzestan – had taken over the Iranian embassy in London; the siege ended when SAS men entered the building, capturing one of the men but killing another four and executing a fifth in cold blood before fire consumed the building.* Less than three months later, however, on 19 July 1980, I was astonished to be telephoned at my Baghdad hotel and invited by the Iraqi authorities to attend a press conference held by the very same Arab group which had invaded the embassy. Nasser Ahmed Nasser, a 31-year-old economics graduate from Tehran University, accused the British of ‘conspiring’ with Iran against the country’s Arabs and demanded the return to Iraq of the bodies of the five dead gunmen.

Nasser, a mustachioed man with dark glasses, a black shirt and carefully creased lounge trousers, spoke slowly and with obvious forethought when he outlined his group’s reaction to the killings. ‘We will take our vengeance,’ he said, ‘because now our second enemy is England.’ He claimed that he had been sentenced to death in absentia in Iran. But his arrival for the conference in the heavily upholstered interior of the Iraqi information ministry made it clear that the Baghdad government fully supported his cause and must have been behind the seizure of the embassy in London. A senior official of the ministry acted as interpreter thoughout Nasser’s resentful peroration against Britain and Iran.

The Arabs of Khuzestan had been seeking autonomy from Khomeini’s regime, and many Arab insurgents in the province had been executed or imprisoned, Nasser said. It was to demand the release of the jailed men that the gunmen had attacked the embassy in London. Nasser agreed that there was a ‘link’ between the insurgents and the Iraqi Baath party and we should have questioned him about this. ‘Iraq’s Arab Socialist Baath Party’s motto – one unified Arab nation – is a glorious motto and we are Arabs,’ he said. ‘We follow this motto.’ What did this mean? On reflection, we should have grasped its import: Saddam was preparing a little Sudetenland, another Danzig, a piece of Iran that he might justifiably wish to liberate in the near future.

But of course, we asked about the siege in London rather than the implications of Iraq’s support for the rebels. ‘When we went to the embassy in London, our aim was not to kill,’ Nasser said. ‘We were not terrorists. We selected the British government as our negotiator because Britain is a democratic country and we wanted to benefit from this democracy. The British knew – all the world knew – that we did not intend to kill anyone … But for six days, they did not answer our requests or publicise our demands. They cut off the telex and the telephone … They did not have to kill our youths – they could have taken them prisoner and put them on trial.’ Nasser blamed Sadeq Khalkhali, the Iranian judge, for the torture of Arabs in Khuzestan – ‘he employs torturers who break the legs and shoot the arms of prisoners before knifing them’ – and claimed that Arabs in the province had first accepted the Iranian revolution because ‘it came in the name of Islam’ but that they now wanted autonomy ‘just like the Kurds, Baluchis and Turks’. When we asked how the Arabs in the Iranian embassy had brought their weapons into Britain, Nasser replied: ‘How did the Palestinians get guns into Munich? How do Irish revolutionaries bring guns to Britain? We are able to do the same.’ Again, no one thought to ask if the guns reached Britain in the Iraqi diplomatic bag. Nasser himself came from the Iranian port of Khorramshahr, for which he used the Arab name ‘Al-Mohammorah’. So was al-Mohammorah going to be Danzig?

Britain, however, made no protest to Iraq over the siege – or over the extraordinary press conference so obviously arranged by the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It was an eloquent silence. Of course, there were those who questioned Britain’s cosy relationship with Iraq. There was an interesting exchange in the House of Lords in 1989 – a year after the end of the eight-year Iran – Iraq war and shortly after the arrest in Baghdad of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft and his friend, the British nurse Daphne Parish – when Lord Hylton asked how the British government ‘justify their action in guaranteeing new credits to Iraq of up to £250 million in view of that country’s detention of British subjects without trial, refusal to release prisoners of war following the ceasefire with Iran and its internal human rights record’. For the government, Lord Trefgarne replied that ‘the Iraqi Government are in no doubt of our concerns over the British detainee, Mrs Parish, and over Iraq’s human rights record … we are a major trading nation. I am afraid that we have to do business with a number of countries with whose policies we very often disagree … we do not sell arms to Iraq.’ Hylton’s response – that ‘while I appreciate that this country is a trading nation … is not the price that we are paying too high?’ – passed without further comment.

Bazoft, who was Iranian-born and held British identity papers but not citizenship, had visited the Iraqi town of Hilla in Parish’s car in a hunt for evidence that Iraq was producing chemical weapons. He was arrested as he tried to leave Baghdad airport, accused of spying and put on trial for his life, along with Parish. A month later, Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave was noting privately of Iraq that ‘I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly, nor can I think of any major market where the importance of diplomacy is so great on our commercial position. We must not allow it to go to the French, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, etcetera.’ He added that ‘a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal repression would make it more difficult’. Waldegrave’s words were written only months after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds of Halabja. Geoffrey Howe, the deputy prime minister, decided to relax controls on the sale of arms to Iraq – but kept it secret because ‘it would look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’

Bazoft was sentenced to death on 10 March 1990. The Observer attacked Saddam over the conviction – not, perhaps, a wise decision in the circumstances – and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd offered to fly to Baghdad to meet the Iraqi president. Saddam, according to the Iraqi foreign ministry, ‘could not intervene while under political pressure’. But by then, a grim routine had begun, one of which my own research back in Beirut had made me painfully aware. Back in 1968, convicted Iraqi ‘spies’ would confess their guilt on television. Then they would be executed. In 1969, the lord mayor of Baghdad had confessed – on television – to ‘spying’ and he had been executed. And Bazoft had appeared on television, and confessed to spying – only later did his friends discover that he had been tortured with electricity during interrogation. In February 1969, before the execution of seven ‘spies’, Baghdad radio had announced that the Iraqi people ‘expressed their condemnation of the spies’ – they were then put to death. In May 1969, the farmers’ trade union delegates had applauded President al-Bakr’s decision to ‘chop off’ the heads of a CIA ‘spy ring’. They were duly hanged. Now, on one of his interminable visits to Iraqi minority groups, Saddam asked in front of a large group of Kurds if they believed that the ‘British spy’ should hang. Of course, they chorused that he should. It was the same old Baathist technique; get the people to make the decision – once they knew what it should be – and then obey the people’s will.

On the morning of 16 March 1990, Robin Kealy, a British diplomat in Baghdad, was informed that Bazoft was to be executed that day. He arrived at the Abu Ghraib prison to find the young man still unaware of his fate, still planning a personal appeal for his life to Saddam. It was Kealy’s mournful duty to tell Bazoft the truth. Kealy declined an invitation to be present at the hanging. Eight days later, four Heathrow luggage handlers heaved his coffin off a regular Iraqi Airways flight to London. No Foreign Office representative, relative or friend attended at the airport. The coffin was taken to a cargo shed to await burial. His friend Daphne ‘Dee’ Parish was given fifteen years. Bazoft’s last words to Kealy were: ‘Tell Dee I’m sorry.’

Throughout the early years of Saddam’s rule, there were journalists who told the truth about his regime while governments – for financial, trade and economic reasons – preferred to remain largely silent. Yet those of us who opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 were quickly accused of being Saddam’s ‘spokesmen’ or, in my case, ‘supporting the maintenance of the Baathist regime’ – this from, of all people, Richard Perle, one of the prime instigators of the whole disastrous war, whose friend Donald Rumsfeld was befriending Saddam in 1983. Two years after Rumsfeld’s initial approach to the Iraqi leader – followed up within months by a meeting with Tariq Aziz – I was reporting on Saddam’s gang-rape and torture in Iraqi prisons. On 31 July 1985, Wahbi Al-Qaraghuli, the Iraqi ambassador in London, complained to William Rees-Mogg, the Times editor, that:

Robert Fisk’s extremely one-sided article ignores the tremendous advances made by Iraq in the fields of social welfare, education, agricultural development, urban improvement and women’s suffrage; and he claims, without presenting any evidence to support such an accusation, that ‘Saddam himself imposes a truly terroristic regime on his own people.’ Especially outrageous is the statement that: ‘Suspected critics of the regime have been imprisoned at Abu Ghoraib [sic] jail and forced to watch their wives being gang-raped by Saddam’s security men. Some prisoners have had to witness their children being tortured in front of them.’ It is utterly reprehensible that some journalists are quite prepared, without any supporting corroboration, to repeat wild, unfounded allegations about countries such as Iraq …

‘Extremely one-sided’, ‘without presenting any evidence’, ‘outrageous’, ‘utterly reprehensible’, ‘wild, unfounded allegations’: these were the very same expressions used by the Americans and the British almost twenty years later about reports by myself or my colleagues which catalogued the illegal invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences. In February 1986, I was refused a visa to Baghdad on the grounds that ‘another visit by Mr Fisk to Iraq would lend undue credibility to his reports’. Indeed it would.*

So for all these years – until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – we in the West tolerated Saddam’s cruelty, his oppression and torture, his war crimes and mass murder. After all, we helped to create him. The CIA gave the locations of communist cadres to the first Baathist government, information that was used to arrest, torture and execute hundreds of Iraqi men. And the closer Saddam came to war with Iran, the greater his fear of his own Shia population, the more we helped him. In the pageant of hate figures that Western governments and journalists have helped to stage in the Middle East – peopled by Nasser, Ghadafi, Abu Nidal and, at one point, Yassir Arafat – Ayatollah Khomeini was our bogeyman of the early 1980s, the troublesome priest who wanted to Islamicise the world, whose stated intention was to spread his revolution. Saddam, far from being a dictator, thus became – on the Associated Press news wires, for example – a ‘strongman’. He was our bastion – and the Arab world’s bastion – against Islamic ‘extremism’. Even after the Israelis bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, our support for Saddam did not waver. Nor did we respond to Saddam’s clear intention of driving his country to war with Iran. The signs of an impending conflict were everywhere. Even Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, was helping stoke opposition to Khomeini from Iraq, as I discovered when I visited him in his wealthy – but dangerous – Paris exile in August 1980.

It had been the bright idea of Charles Douglas-Home, the foreign editor of The Times, to chase the remains of the Shah’s old regime. ‘I’m sure Bakhtiar’s up to something,’ Charlie said over the phone. ‘Besides, he knows a lot – and his daughter is stunningly beautiful!’ He was right on both counts, although Bakhtiar – so Francophile that he had joined the French army in the Second World War – looked more impressive in his photographs than he did in person. Newspaper pictures portrayed him as a robust man with full, expressive features, his eyes alight for the return of Iranian democracy. In reality, he was a small, thin man, his cheeks somewhat shrunken, his clothes slightly too large for him, a diminutive figure sitting on a huge sofa with seven heavily armed gendarmes outside to protect him.

Even in his Paris apartment, with the noise of the city’s traffic murmuring away outside and the poplar trees swaying in the breeze beyond the sitting-room window, you could feel the presence of the Iranian assassination squads that Tehran had ordered to kill Bakhtiar. When they had called less than two weeks earlier under the command of a 29-year-old Lebanese Islamist called Anis Naccache, they left behind a dead woman neighbour, a murdered French policeman and a bullet-smashed door handle, a souvenir of bright, jagged steel that lay beside the little table next to Bakhtiar’s feet.

This had not served to dampen Bakhtiar’s publicly expressed hatred of Khomeini or his theocratic regime. He admitted to me, uneasily and only after an hour, that he had twice visited Iraq to talk to officials of the Baath party – an institution that could hardly be said to practise the kind of liberal democracy Bakhtiar was advocating – and had broadcast over the clandestine radio that the Iraqis operated on their frontier with Iran, beaming in propaganda against the regime. ‘Why shouldn’t I go to Iraq?’ he asked. ‘I have been in Britain twice, I have been to Switzerland and Belgium. So I can go to Iraq. I contacted people there. I was invited to deal with the authorities there. I have a common point with the Iraqi government. They, like other Muslim countries, are against Khomeini by a large majority. It is possible to work together. This radio that is on the border with Iran is broadcasting what the Iranian people like to listen to. It has broadcast my statements on cassette. That is the only possible way when a dictatorship is established somewhere.’

Bakhtiar, like many Western statesmen, suffered from a Churchill complex, a desire to dress himself up in the shadow of history. ‘When Khomeini arrived in Iran, I said we had escaped from one dictatorship [the Shah’s] but had entered an even more awful one. Nobody believed me. Now, they have plenty to complain about but they do not have the courage to say it. So why do people talk about a coup d’état? I know that I have people on my side in the army … I remember when I was a student in Paris, there was an English leader by the name of Winston Churchill who saw the dangers of dictatorship. Other people were very relaxed about it all and wanted to do deals with Hitler. But Churchill told them they were on the point of extinction. In the same way I knew that Mr Khomeini could not do anything for Iran: he is a man who does not understand geography, history or the economy. He cannot be the leader of all those people in the twentieth century, because he is ignorant about the world.’

The Shah had died in a Cairo hospital six days before my interview with Bakhtiar, although he seemed quite unmoved at his former king’s departure. ‘The death of a person does not give me happiness. I am not the sort of man who dances in the streets because someone is dead and I am alive – I did not even do that when Hitler died. And God knows, I am an anti-fascist as you know yourself. The king was a sick man, a very sick man – and I think that even for him, death was a deliverance, morally and physically.’ What Bakhtiar wanted was a provisional government ‘which would go to Iran and which, under the 1906 constitution, would call for a constituent assembly, calmly and without emotion, and would study the different constitutions for Iran’.

Bakhtiar was already painfully out of touch with Iran, unaware that Khomeini’s revolution was irreversible, partly because it dealt so mercilessly with its enemies – who included Bakhtiar himself. Naccache and his Iranian hit squad had bungled the first attempt to kill him.* Just over eleven years later, on 9 August 1991, more killers arrived at Bakhtiar’s home. This time they cut his head off. Accused of helping the murderers, an Iranian businessman told the Paris assize court that Bakhtiar ‘killed 5,000 people during his thirty-three days in power. Secondly, he was planning a coup d’état in Iran … thirdly, he collaborated with Saddam Hussein during the Iran – Iraq war …’†

Just as Saddam was planning the destruction of the Iranian revolution, so Khomeini was calling for the overthrow of Saddam and the Baath, or the ‘Aflaqis’ as he quaintly called them after the name of the Syrian founder of the party. After learning of Bakr Sadr’s execution and that of his sister, Khomeini openly called for Saddam’s overthrow. ‘It would be strange,’ he wrote on 2 April 1980,