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

Even now, Saddam had to add his own propaganda line, although it neatly dovetailed with Reagan’s own distorted view of the conflict. Iran’s ‘rejection’ of appeals from the ‘international community’ alluded to Iran’s refusal to accept UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions which failed to demand punishment for the ‘aggressor’ nation. White House spokesman Dan Howard also said Reagan’s vilification of Iran was because of its refusal ‘to go to the bargaining table’.* Shipping officials in the Gulf always suspected that the Iraqis made their night-time attack on the Stark in the hope that the United States would believe an Iranian aircraft tried to destroy the frigate and would therefore retaliate against Tehran. In the event, they didn’t need to waste their time with such conspiracy theories: America blamed Iran anyway. A few days later, Reagan called Iran ‘this barbarous country’.

Saddam compared the American relatives of the Stark to the families of Iraqis killed during his aggression against Iran, thus turning the US navy personnel into the surrogate dead of his own atrocious war. Saddam’s plaintive call for a ‘just and lasting peace’ was almost Arafat-like in its banality. The final American abasement came when Washington dispatched a full-scale US navy inquiry team under Rear Admiral David Rodgers to Baghdad, where they were told they would not be permitted to question the Iraqi pilot who fired the two Exocet missiles; nor did the Iraqis agree with the Americans that the Stark was outside Iraq’s self-imposed ‘exclusion zone’ when it was hit. The Americans said the vessel was at least 10 nautical miles outside, Iraq claimed it was at least 20 nautical miles inside. Weinberger’s call to produce the Iraqi pilot was ignored. Captain Brindel of the Stark was relieved of his command, his weapons officer was reprimanded and left the navy, and his executive officer disciplined for ‘dereliction of duty’.

The Americans always assumed that the Iraqi pilot had been executed – hence Iraq’s refusal to produce him – but the ex-deputy commander of the Iraqi air force insisted to me in Baghdad that this was untrue. ‘I saw him a few months ago,’ he said. ‘Like me, he’s out of work. But he obeyed all our rules. We were fighting a cruel enemy. It was a mistake. We weren’t going to get rid of one of our senior pilots for the Americans. The Americans were inside our “forbidden zone”. We told them not to enter it again – and they obeyed.’

A visit by a group of US senators to the melted-down crew quarters on the Stark was sufficient to set them off in a spasm of rage at the one country that had nothing to do with the American deaths. Republican Senator John Warner, a former secretary of the US navy, described Iran as ‘a belligerent that knows no rules, no morals’. Senator John Glenn was reduced to abusing Iran as ‘the sponsor of terrorism and the hijacker of airliners’. Thus Saddam’s attack on the Stark was now bringing him untold benefits. Americans were talking as if they were themselves contemplating military action against Iran.

Reagan pretended that the Americans were in the Gulf as peacemakers. ‘Were a hostile power ever to dominate this strategic region and its resources,’ he explained, ‘it would become a chokepoint for freedom – that of our allies and our own … That is why we maintain a naval presence there. Our aim is to prevent, not to provoke, wider conflict, to save the many lives that further conflict would cost us …’ Most Americans knew, Reagan said, that ‘to retreat or withdraw would only repeat the improvident mistakes of the past and hand final victory to those who seek war, who make war’. The Iranians, needless to say – the victims of Iraq’s aggression – were those ‘who seek war, who make war’, not ‘friendly’ Iraq which had anyway been taken off the State Department’s list of ‘international terrorist countries’ in 1982, two years after its invasion of Iran and in the very year that Iran reported eleven Iraqi poison gas attacks against its forces. The truth was that the Stark – one of seven US warships in the Gulf – was sailing under false pretences.

Iraq had placed its ‘exclusion zone’ around Kharg Island in January 1984 because it was losing the land war it had initiated two years earlier; by attacking tankers lifting oil from Iran’s Kharg Island terminal, Saddam hoped to strangle his antagonist economically. His aircraft henceforth fired at ships of any nationality that were moving to and from Iranian ports. Iran retaliated by targeting vessels trading with Iraq through the Arab Gulf states. Iraq’s massive imports of arms for the war were transiting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose funding of Iraq’s war effort was close to $404 billion; any ship trading with either nation was now threatened with Iranian air attack. Between 18 April 1984 and 18 May 1987 – the day after the Stark was hit – 227 ships had been attacked in the Gulf, 137 of them by Iraq and 90 by Iran; several had been struck by missiles and repeatedly repaired, and of the 227 total, 153 were oil tankers. Between May 1981 and 18 May 1987, 211 merchant seamen, most of them foreigners, were killed on these ships, of which 98 were oil tankers; it was a tiny figure compared with the hundreds of thousands of combatants in the land war, but it internationalised the conflict – as both Iraq and Iran probably hoped that it would.

American warships were now ostensibly keeping the sea lanes open for international shipping, to prevent the Gulf becoming, in Reagan’s odd term, a ‘chokepoint’. But US vessels were not shielding Iranian tankers from Iraqi attack. Nor were they seeking to protect foreign oil tankers lifting Iranian oil for export at Kharg. America’s mission in the Gulf was to protect only one side’s ships – Iraq’s – in the sea lanes. Already the Americans were proposing to escort Kuwaiti-flagged tankers in the Gulf, which did not carry Iranian cargo. They carried Iraqi oil for export. Iraq might not be able to gain any victories in its land war with Iran, but with American help, as the Iranians realised at once, it could win the sea war. Reagan claimed that the United States was fighting ‘war against war’ in the Gulf. In fact, Washington was fighting a war against Iran.

Eleven days after the Stark was rocketed, the Iranians complained that a US warship in the Gulf had ‘threatened’ an Iran Air passenger jet flying from Shiraz to Doha, in Qatar, and ordered the pilot to alter course. My own investigation among Dubai air traffic controllers established that the American warning came from one of four naval vessels escorting a Kuwaiti-registered ship with a cargo of arms to Bahrain. ‘The incident provided just the sort of scenario for a … tragedy in the Gulf,’ I wrote in my dispatch to The Times that night. ‘Iran Air flies scheduled routes to both Doha, the capital of Qatar, and to the Gulf emirate of Dubai further east, regularly overflying the waters in which American … frigates patrol. Although the Iranians did not say so, the pilot probably flew unwittingly over a US naval unit which identified the plane as Iranian and ordered it to change course.’ The ‘tragedy’ was to come exactly fourteen months later.

There were plenty of portents. Not long after the Stark was hit, I spent a day and a night on Gulf patrol with HMS Broadsword. Accompanying British ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Reagan’s now famous chokepoint – the word ‘escort’ was never used by the British – and discouraging the attentions of the Iranians might have seemed a simple matter in the dry memoranda that their naval lordships used at the defence ministry in London. But inside the glow-worm interior of the Type-22 class destroyer, the radar monitors watched with feverish intensity for the transponder numbers of the civilian aircraft passing over Broadsword. ‘If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful,’ one of them said.

At least the air conditioning was pumped into their little nest – for the computers, of course, not for them – but what afflicted most of the seamen in the Gulf was the heat. It burned the entire decks until they were, quite literally, too hot to walk on. British sailors stood on the edges of their shoes because of the scalding temperatures emerging from the steel. The depth-charge casings, the Bofors gun-aiming device, were too hot to touch. On the helicopter flight deck, the heat rose to 135 degrees, and only a thoughtless leading hand would have touched a spanner without putting his gloves on. It created a dull head, a desperate weariness, an awesome irritation with one’s fellow humans on the foredeck.

Inside the ship – and their lordships would have appreciated the cleanliness of Broadsword’s galleys and mess decks and bunks and short, fearful advertisements warning of the dangers of AIDS in Mombasa port – the heat shuffled through the vessel faster than the seamen. The officer’s mess was a cool 80 degrees. One glass of water and I was dripping. Open the first watertight door and I was ambushed by the heat, just as I was seven years earlier in the streets of Najaf. After the second door, I walked into a tropical smelter, the familiar grey monochrome sea sloshing below the deck. How can men work in this and remain rational? Or – more to the point – how could the Iraqis and Iranians fight in this sweltering air and remain sane?

‘There’s Sharjah airport,’ the radar officer said, and fixed the beam. ‘I’m listening to a plane landing now – commercial flight – but if I want to know about a specific plane, I ask for an IFF [identification, friend or foe?] and talk to Sharjah control.’ There were boards and charts and crayon marks on war-zone lines. The USS Reid – part of Reagan’s Gulf flotilla – had just cut across the Iraqi ‘exclusion zone’. So much for Stark’s insistence that it stayed outside. Two Soviet Natya-class minesweepers and a submarine depot ship were listed as outside the Hormuz Strait. Two British Hong Kong-registered ships were waiting for us on the return journey.

Night was no relief. At 4.15 a.m., Broadsword was in the Gulf of Oman, her engineers dragging a hawser from the support ship Orangeleaf riding alongside her, refuelling in the heat. The humidity cloaked us all. The deck was awash with condensation, the seamen’s faces crawling with perspiration. The sweat crept through my hair and trickled down my back. Our shirts were dark with moisture. It came to all men, even to Russians. Off Fujairah, Moscow’s contribution to the freedom of Gulf navigation – a depot ship and two minesweepers – nestled against each other on the warm tide, the Soviet sailors, glistening and half-naked on deck, waiting for the next inbound Kuwaiti tanker. Here was the principal reason why Reagan wanted to patrol the sea lanes, here was the real ‘hostile power’ that he feared might ‘dominate’ the Gulf. The two British freighters came alongside to be ‘accompanied’ by Broadsword.

On the bridge, an Indian radio operator could be heard pleading over VHF with an Iranian patrol ship. ‘We are only carrying dates,’ he said. ‘Only dates.’ The Iranian was 30 kilometres away. An Iranian P-3 reconnaissance aircraft answered. ‘Be aware,’ boomed the tannoy throughout Broadsword, ‘that yesterday the Iraqis launched an Exocet attack on a Maltese tanker carrying oil from Iran. We can therefore expect the Iranians to retaliate …’ A dog-day mist now swirled around the ship, leaving salt cakes across the flight deck. The two freighters were steaming beside us, an overheated version of every Second World War Atlantic convoy, because Broadsword, however unheroic in her humidity, was – like the American ships – a naval escort.

Back in 1984, when Iraq began this maritime conflict, the Gulf looked a lot simpler. The Arabs, protesting mightily at every attack by the Iranians and silent when the Iraqis struck at Iranian shipping, were almost as fearful of American involvement as they were of the Iranians. Saudi Arabia maintained a quiet relationship with Iran – just in case Iraq collapsed – while at the same time underwriting Saddam’s war. Ostensibly, the Arabs remained neutral -‘at war but skulking’, as Churchill unfairly remarked about the Irish in the Second World War – and offered refuge to any ship’s master who found himself under fire. Bahrain and Dubai would receive the crippled hulks of both sides’ aggression, profiting from the millions of dollars in repairs that their shipyards would make in reconstituting the ships. By 1987, eighteen had been hit twice, six had been attacked three times and two – Superior and Dena – had the distinction of being rocketed and repaired four times in four years. As early as May 1984 there was a floating junkyard of mortally wounded vessels off Bahrain.

They called it the ships’ graveyard and the term was cruelly appropriate. The great tankers that Iran and Iraq had destroyed were towed here in terminal condition, bleeding fuel oil into the warm, muddy brown waves in the very centre of the Gulf, a series of jagged holes in their scalded superstructure to show how they met their end. The Bahraini government even ran a patrol boat out to this maritime cemetery for journalists to understand what this war now represented. An Iranian Phantom hit the 29,000-ton Chemical Venture so accurately on 24 May that its missile plunged into the very centre of the bridge: there was a 12-metre sign there saying ‘No Smoking’ in the middle of the superstructure; the rocket took out the letters ‘S’ and ‘M’. The tanker crews along the Gulf were growing restive over the dangers; by the end of May, up to twenty-five ships were riding at anchor off the Emirates alone, waiting for instructions from their owners, and you only had to take a look at the ruin of the Al-Hoot to understand why. The 117,000-ton supertanker was listing with a hole the size of a London bus along her waterline where an Iraqi missile had exploded three weeks earlier. The superstructure had been twisted back and outwards over the stern and the crew’s quarters had simply melted down as if they were made of plastic rather than iron. The gash on the starboard side was so deep I could see daylight through it.

Just to the north lay the 178,000-ton Safina al-Arab, moving restlessly in the swell as a Swedish-registered tanker tried to take off the last of her crude oil. The stuff was everywhere, down the sides of the ship, across the water, turning even the foam on the waves dark. I could smell it from a mile away. The salvage crews – mostly Dutchmen – knew the risks but strolled the decks as if they were in harbour rather than sitting on bombs 115 kilometres out in the Gulf.

It was an isolated place.* On the map of the Middle East, the Gulf seemed just a crack in the land mass between the deserts of Arabia and southern Iran, but the seas could be rough and the horizon featureless save for the lonely and vulnerable tankers butting through the sirocco winds up to Ras Tanura and Kuwait. They had no convoys to sail in then, no protection from the air, and they crept in those days as close as they could to the southern shoreline. They passed us as we photographed the graveyard of their more unfortunate brethren, ill painted for the most part, plunging through the heat haze, targets of opportunity for either side in the upper reaches of the Gulf, depending on their masters and their ports of call.

The sea should have been polluted but it was alive with flying fish that landed on their tails, long yellow sea snakes that came up out of the green depths to look at us, and porpoises and even turtles. Big-beaked black cormorants effortlessly outflew our fast Bahraini patrol boat. The oil slicks came in thick, viscous patches and in long thin streaks that shredded their way up the pale blue water towards the wrecks. The only sign of President Reagan’s concern in those days was the discreet grey majesty of the USS Luce, a Seventh Fleet missile cruiser that lay all day off the Mina Salman channel outside Bahrain harbour, a picket boat filled with armed sailors slowly circling it to ward off unconventional attackers – an idea before its time, since the USS Cole would not be struck by suicide bombers in Aden for another decade. Besides, the radio traffic from the Luce, clearly audible on our own ship-to-shore radio, seemed mostly bound up with the complexities of bringing new video films aboard for the crew. A few hours later, a smaller US patrol craft moved into port and the Luce gently steamed off into the sweltering dusk, its in-house entertainment presumably updated.

But other American warships were – even then – playing the role of convoy escorts. This unofficial and unacknowledged protection was given no publicity in Washington, nor among the Arab states, coinciding with their own desire to keep the US navy over the horizon. Sometimes the escort was provided by the USS John Rodgers, a sleek, twin-funnelled missile cruiser that last defended American interests by bombarding the Chouf mountains of central Lebanon a year earlier. At other times, the USS Boone, a squat and rather cumbersome flat-topped missile carrier, came up by night from the Emirates and rested off Bahrain. Anyone who approached the warships by day – which we did, of course – would be confronted by a steel-helmeted US sailor manning a fixed heavy machine gun.

US air force cargo jets were already flying regularly into the airports of the Gulf states, carrying equipment so bulky that they were forced to deploy their giant C-48 droop-wing transports. These flights were being made to the countries that Reagan always called ‘our Arab friends’, a definition that no longer included Lebanon – from which US forces had been famously ‘redeployed to sea’ three months earlier, following the bombing of the Beirut marine barracks and the killing of 241 US servicemen – but which very definitely embraced the conservative oil states of the Gulf peninsula. If the Americans were to become strategically involved – as they would do three years later – then the Arab states would have to be portrayed, as I wrote in The Times in May 1984, ‘as the innocent party in the dispute: the Iranians, inevitably, will be the enemy’. And so it came to pass. Was it not Iranian aircraft, the Iranian regime and ultimately Iranian ideology that threatened the security of the area? Again, we would be expected to forget that Iraq began the war and that Iraq was the first to order its air force to attack oil tankers in the Gulf.

In the autumn of 1980, when it seemed certain to them that Khomeini’s regime would collapse in anarchy under the onslaught of the Iraqi army around Abadan, the Arab Gulf states – those very states which by 1984 were seeking UN censure of Iran for its air attacks on the shipping lanes – poured billions into Iraq’s war funds. But now that Iran’s Islamic Revolution had proved more tenacious than they thought, the Arabs were stapling their hopes to a worthless peace mission to Tehran and Riyadh by Syria, the one Arab country which very shrewdly decided at the beginning of the war that its Baathist enemies in Baghdad – rather than Khomeini’s mullahs – might prove to be the losers. The failure of the Arab Gulf states to draw the same conclusion had now led to a disjointed policy that was as impossible to follow as it would be to justify historically.

Sheikh Khalifa Sulman al-Khalifa, the Bahraini prime minister and brother of the emir, insisted to me in June of 1984 that Iraq did not start the war. ‘I believe that – Iraq likes to protect itself like any other nation …’ he said. ‘Of course, a war starts with something. You never know how far it will go on either side. First there is fire and fire depends on wind and the direction in which the wind blows. Sometimes people get carried away – they think they are strong.’ This was the nearest he came to criticism of Saddam. Now Bahrain – like the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council – was demanding a UN Security Council resolution that would condemn only Iran for air attacks in the Gulf. He was not in favour of US intervention. ‘There are ways of helping us and one of them is to stop the supply of arms to the fighting parties from Europe and from the Far East countries.’ And this, it has to be remembered, came from the prime minister of a country that was enthusiastically bankrolling Saddam’s aggression.

The Kuwaitis, who once denounced any foreign intervention on Gulf soil, had by November of 1983 reached the conclusion that the defence of the Strait of Hormuz was the responsibility of the countries that benefited from it – in other words, the West. Sheikh Ahmed al-Sabah, the foreign minister, was quoted in the Beirut newspaper An-Nahar as saying that the Gulf was an ‘international’ region in which he could not object to foreign intervention. Then on 27 May 1984 Kuwait’s ambassador to Washington was warning against American involvement because it might ‘prompt the Soviet Union to enter the area’. This was a strange observation to come from the only wealthy Gulf state to permit a Soviet embassy in its capital and the one country which had hoped Soviet goodwill could be used on behalf of the Gulf states at the UN Security Council.

The Saudis, on the other hand, were still fearful of any American presence in the Gulf. US bases on Gulf territory would run counter to the anti-Israeli campaign carried on by the sheikhdoms, while a prolonged American presence could quickly ignite the sort of fires that brought ruin upon the Americans and their client government in Lebanon. Reagan’s strategic cooperation agreement with Israel had not been forgotten in the Gulf – and Israel had added fuel to the Gulf War by supplying arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iranian enemy. This was long before Iran – contra, when the Americans used Israel to channel weapons to Tehran.

The Soviets, after watching the destruction of the communist Tudeh party in Iran, were sending massive new tank shipments to Iraq. The Israelis had provided large quantities of small arms and ammunition to the Iranians. So had the Syrians. The French were still supplying Exocet missiles to the Iraqis while the North Koreans sold Soviet rifles to Iran. The Americans had been quietly re-establishing their relations with Baghdad – at this point, they were still increasing their ‘interests section’ in the Belgian embassy in Baghdad – at the very moment when Saddam most needed the moral as well as the military support of a Western power. While George Bush was denouncing Iran’s ‘Oppressive regime’ in Pakistan, Saddam was reported to be hanging deserters by the roadside outside Baghdad.

On 29 May 1984 the first load of 400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and launchers arrived by air in Saudi Arabia from the United States. President Khamenei of Iran sarcastically warned Washington that Iran would ‘resist and fight’ any US forces sent to the battle zone. ‘If the Americans are prepared to sink in the depths of the Persian Gulf waters for nothing, then let them come with their faith, motivation and divine power,’ he said. As for the Gulf Arabs, he warned: ‘You will be neutral in the war only if you do not provide Saddam with any assistance. But a neighbour who wants to deliver a blow at us is more dangerous than a stranger, and we should face that danger.’ Well aware that the Arabs were still giving huge financial support to Iraq, the oil-tanker crews took Khamenei’s threats seriously. Several vessels on the Kuwait run through the sea lanes north-west of Bahrain were now travelling by night for fear of Iranian air attack.

Covering this protracted war for a newspaper was an exhausting, often unrewarding business. The repetition of events, the Iraqi attacks on Kharg Island, the massing of hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops outside Basra, the constant appeals by both sides to the UN Security Council, the sinking of more oil tankers, had a numbing quality about it. Sometimes this titanic bloodbath was called the ‘forgotten war’ – even though at times it approached the carnage of the 1914–18 disaster. I dislike parallels with the two greatest conflicts of the twentieth century. Can we really say, for example, that Saddam’s decision to invade Iran in 1980 was a blunder on the scale of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which led to the deaths of 20 million Russians – when perhaps only a million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s aggression? Certainly, by the time it ended, the Iran – Iraq bloodletting had lasted as long as the Vietnam war. And Saddam’s war was the longest conventional conflict of the last century, a struggle of such severity that the barrels of the Iranian army’s guns had to be replaced twelve times before it ended in 1988.