WHAT OUGHT TO have been the main news event of the past week was that as many as 200,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the war in the Gulf, compared with an estimated 2,000 killed in Kuwait and 131 Allied dead. The war was a one-sided bloodfest, won at a distance with the power of money and superior technology pitted against a small Third World nation.
Moreover, it now appears that a large number of the Iraqi dead were slaughtered – and the word is precisely meant – during the brief land war launched by Washington after Iraq had agreed in Moscow to an unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. And most of these were in retreat, ordered to withdraw, trying to get home. They were, as Colin Hughes wrote in the Independent, ‘shot in the back’.46
So ‘ring your churchbells’ and ‘rejoice’ in such a ‘great victory’: a military operation of ‘almost aesthetic beauty’ . . . and so on, and on, ad nauseam.
‘The glee’, wrote Colin Hughes, ‘with which American pilots returning to their carriers spoke of the “duck shoot” presented by columns of Iraqis retreating from Kuwait City [has] troubled many humanitarians who otherwise supported the Allied objectives. Naturally, it is sickening to witness a routed army being shot in the back.’ This ‘duck shoot’, suggested Hughes, ‘risked staining the Allied clean-fighting war record’. But no; it seems the Iraqis were to blame for being shot in the back; an Oxford don, Professor Adam Roberts, told the paper that the Allies ‘were well within the rules of international conduct’.47 The Independent reported the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis on its front page, while inside a leading article referred to ‘miraculously light casualties’.48
Yet the Independent was the only British newspaper to give consistent, substantial coverage to this slaughter. ‘The retreating forces huddling on the Basra beachhead’, reported Karl Waldron, ‘were under permanent attack yesterday from the air. Iranian pilots, patrolling their border 10 miles away, described the rout as a “rat shoot”, with roaming Allied jets strafing both banks.’49 Waldron described the scene as ‘Iraq’s Dunkirk’.
The Iraqi casualty figures are critical to the ‘great victory’. Leave them out and the Murdoch comic version applies: Western technology, and Western heroism, has triumphed. Put them in and the picture bleeds and darkens; and questions are raised, or ought to be, about the ‘civilised values’ for which ‘we’ fought. The Guardian announced the death of 150,000 Iraqis in the body of a piece on page three. The Times and Telegraph performed a similar burial.50 The next day, the Telegraph referred to a ‘massacre’ on the road to Basra. American pilots were said to have likened their attack on the convoy to ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. Ducks, rats and now fish were massacred. No blame was apportioned.51
On the contrary, most newspapers carried prominently a photograph of a US Army medic attending a wounded Iraqi soldier. Here was the supreme image of tenderness and magnanimity, a ‘lifeline’ as the Mirror called it: the antithesis of what had actually happened.52 Such a consensus was, to my knowledge, interrupted only once.
During a discussion about the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, the BBC’s Radio Four delivered a remarkable live report from Stephen Sackur on the road to Basra. Clearly moved and perhaps angered by what he had seen, this one reporter did as few have done or been allowed to do. He dropped the ‘we’ and ‘them’. He separated ordinary Iraqis from the tyrant oppressing them. He converted the ducks, rats and fish into human beings. The incinerated figures had been trying to get home, he said. Among them were civilians, including contract workers from the Indian subcontinent; he saw the labels on their suitcases.53
However, on the evening television news bulletins there was no Stephen Sackur. Kate Adie described the ‘evidence of the horrible confusion’ that was both ‘devastating’ and ‘pathetic’. The camera panned across the ‘loot’ – toys, bottles of perfume, hair curlers: pathetic indeed – strewn among the blackened dead. There had first been a ‘battle’, we were told. Battle? A US Marine lieutenant looked distressed. They had no air cover, he said: nothing with which to defend themselves. ‘It was not very professional at all,’ he said, ambiguously; and he was not asked to clarify that.54
Apart from his words, I could find none, written or spoken, that expressed clearly the nature of this crime, this mass murder that was there for all eyes to see, and without the Iraqi Ministry of Information to ‘supervise’ those eyes. One recalls the interrogation by satellite that the BBC’s man in Baghdad, Jeremy Bowen, had to endure following his harrowing and personally courageous report of the bombing of the air-raid bunker in which hundreds of women and children died. ‘Are you absolutely certain it wasn’t a military bunker?’ he was asked:55 or words to that effect. No such interrogation inconvenienced his colleagues on the road to Basra. The question, ‘Are you absolutely certain that Allied planes did this deliberately to people running away?’ was never put.
Thus, self-censorship remains the most virulent form. At the time of writing, the message of a war with ‘miraculously light casualties’ drones on and on. There is a radio report of the trauma suffered by British troops who had to bury the victims of the atrocity on the Basra road. In the commentary, there is no recognition of the victims’ human rights even in death; and no acknowledgement of the trauma awaiting tens of thousands of Iraqi families for whom there will be no proper process of grief, not even a dog-tag.
Like the bulldozers that cleared the evidence on the Basra road, the propagandists here now attempt to clear away the debris of our memories. They hope that glimpses we had of the human consequences of the greatest aerial bombardment in history (a record announced with obvious pride) will not form the basis for a retrospective of the criminal nature of the relentless assault on populated areas as part of the application of criminal solutions to political problems. These must be struck from the record, in the manner of modern Stalinism, or blurred in our consciences, or immersed in celebration and justification.
Celebration, of course, is a relatively simple affair. For those of us lacking churchbells, David Dimbleby will have to do. However, justification is quite another matter, especially for those who seem incessantly to describe themselves as ‘liberals’, as if they are well aware that their uncertainty, selectivity and hypocrisy on humanitarian matters is showing. Bereft of reasoned argument, they fall back on labels, such as ‘far left’, to describe those with humanitarian concern.
According to Simon Hoggart of the Observer, one of the myths spread by this ‘far left’ is that ‘the Allies were unnecessarily brutal to the Iraqi forces . . . Of course the death of thousands of innocent conscripts is unspeakable. But you cannot fight half a war.’ The basis for Hoggart’s approval of the ‘unspeakable’ is apparently that his sisters are married to soldiers who went to the Gulf, where they would have been killed had not retreating Iraqi soldiers been shot in the back and Iraqi women and children obliterated by carpet-bombing.56
Robert Harris, the Sunday Times man, is even more defensive. He writes that Rupert Murdoch did not tell him to support the war: a familiar refrain. Murdoch, of course, didn’t have to. But Harris adds another dimension. Disgracefully, he insults Bobby Muller, the former decorated US Marine who lost the use of his legs in Vietnam, as a ‘cripple’ and a ‘cardboard figure’ whom I ‘manipulate’.57
Even Muller, who is a strong personality, was shocked by this; and at a large meeting in central London last Monday night invoked Harris’s name in the appropriate manner. Unlike Harris, he has fought and suffered both in war and for his convictions. Harris’s main complaint, it seems, is that those against the war have neglected to mention Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Kuwait – which apparently justify slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts and civilians.
The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of this is clear. First, as children we are told that two wrongs do not make a right. Second, those actively opposed to the war are the same people who have tried to alert the world to Saddam Hussein’s crimes. In 1988, 30 MPs signed Ann Clwyd’s motion condemning Saddam Hussein’s gassing of 5,000 Iraqi Kurds. All but one of these MPs have been steadfastly against the war.
In contrast, those who have prosecuted and promoted the war include those who supported Saddam Hussein, who armed and sustained him and sought to cover up the gravity of his crimes. I recommend the current newspaper advertisement for Amnesty International, which describes the moving plea of an Iraqi Kurdish leader to Thatcher following Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds.58
‘One of our few remaining hopes’, he wrote, ‘is that democrats and those who cherish values of justice, peace and freedom will voice their concern for the plight of the Kurds. That is why I am making this direct appeal to you . . .’ The letter was dated September 16, 1988. There was no reply. On October 5, the Thatcher Government gave Iraq more than £340 million in export credits.
March 8, 1991