Anthony Grafton, who has been working on a book about magic in Renaissance Europe,²⁹ says that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, torture was systematically used against anyone suspected of witchcraft, his or her statements taken down by sworn notaries - the equivalent, I suppose, of the CIA’s interrogation officers - and witnessed by officials who made no pretence that this was anything other than torture; no talk of ‘enhanced interrogation’ from the lads who turned the wheel to the fire. As Grafton recounts:

the pioneering medievalist Henry Charles Lea . . . wrote at length about the ways in which inquisitors had used torture to make prisoners confess heretical views and actions. An enlightened man writing in what he saw as an enlightened age, he looked back in horror at these barbarous practices and condemned them with a clarity that anyone reading public statements must now envy.

There were professionals in the Middle Ages who were trained to use pain as a method of inquiry as well as an ultimate punishment before death. Men who were to be ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’, in medieval London, for example, would be shown the ‘instruments’ before their final suffering began with the withdrawal of their intestines in front of vast crowds of onlookers. Readers who have seen Braveheart will recall that William Wallace is shown the ‘instruments’ before being racked - but is ultimately spared disembowelment before his beheading. Most of those tortured in medieval times were anyway executed after they had provided the necessary information to their interrogators. These inquisitions - with details of the torture that accompanied them - were published and disseminated widely so that the public should understand the threat which the prisoners had represented and the power of those who inflicted such pain upon them. No destroying of videotapes here. Illustrated pamphlets and songs, according to Grafton, were added to the repertory of publicity. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia and Italian scholars Diego Quaglioni and Anna Esposito have studied the fifteenth-century Trent Inquisition whose victims were usually Jews and who, in 1475, were three Jewish households in Trent accused of murdering a Christian boy called Simon to carry out the supposed Passover ‘ritual’ of using his blood to make ‘matzo’ bread. This ‘blood libel’ - it was, of course, a total falsity - is still, alas, believed in many parts of the Middle East, although it is frightening to discover that the idea was well established in fifteenth-century Europe.

As usual, the ‘podestà’ - a city official - was the interrogator, who regarded external evidence as providing mere clues of guilt. Europe was then still governed by Roman law which required confessions in order to convict. As Grafton describes horrifyingly, once the prisoner’s answers no longer satisfied the ‘podestà’, the torturer tied the man’s or woman’s arms behind their back and the prisoner would then be lifted by a pulley, agonisingly, towards the ceiling. ‘Then, at the “podestà’s” orders, the torturer would make the accused “jump” or “dance” - pulling him or her up, then releasing the rope, dislocating limbs and inflicting stunning pain.’ Other methods of torture included thrusting onions and sulphur under a prisoner’s nose or holding hot eggs under the armpits. When a member of one of the Trent Jewish families, Samuel, asked the ‘podestà’ where he had heard that Jews needed Christian blood, the interrogator replied - and all this while, it should be remembered, Samuel was dangling in the air on the pulley - that he had heard it from other Jews. Samuel said that he was being tortured unjustly. ‘The truth, the truth!’ the ‘podestà’ shouted, and Samuel was made to ‘jump’ up to eight feet, telling his interrogator: ‘God the Helper and truth help me.’ After forty minutes, he was returned to prison.

Once broken, the Jewish prisoners, of course, confessed. After another torture session, Samuel named a fellow Jew. Further sessions of torture - including eggs under the armpit - finally broke him and he invented the Jewish ritual murder plot and named others guilty of this non-existent crime. Two tortured women managed to exonerate children but eventually, in Grafton’s words, ‘they implicated loved ones, friends and members of other Jewish communities’. Thus did torture force innocent civilians - craftsmen, housewives and teenagers - to confess to fantastical crimes, along with supposed witches, women who confessed under torture that they had flown through the air to worship the Devil, destroyed crops and killed babies. Oxford historian Lyndal Roper found that the tortured eventually accepted the view that they were guilty.

Grafton’s conclusion is unanswerable. Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA’s ‘waterboarding’ did not confess that they could fly to meet the Devil? And who knows if the CIA did not end up by believing them?

The Independent, 2 January 2008

Crusaders of the ‘Green Zone’

I drove Pat and Alice Carey up the coast of Lebanon this week to look at some castles. Pat is a builder from County Wicklow, brave enough to take a holiday with his wife in Beirut when all others are thinking of running away. But I wanted to know what he thought of twelfth-century construction work. How did he rate a Crusader keep? The most beautiful of Lebanon’s castles is the smallest, a dinky-toy palisade on an outcrop of rock near the village of Batroun. You have to climb a set of well-polished steps - no handrails, for this is Lebanon - up the sheer side of Mseilha castle and then clamber over doorsills into the dark, damp interior. So we padded around the battlements for half an hour. ‘Strongly made or they wouldn’t be still here,’ Pat remarked. ‘But you wouldn’t find any company ready to put up the insurance. And in winter, it must have been very, very cold.’ And after some minutes, he looked at me with some intensity. ‘It’s like being in a prison,’ he said. And he was right. The only view of the outside world was through the archers’ loopholes in the walls. Inside was darkness. The bright world outside was cut off by the castle defences. I could just see the splashing river to the south of the castle and, on the distant horizon, a mountainside. That was all the defenders - Crusaders or Mamelukes - would have seen. It was the only contact they had with the land they were occupying.

Up at Tripoli is Lebanon’s biggest keep, the massive Castle of Saint Gilles that still towers ominously over the port city with its delicate minarets and mass of concrete hovels. Two shell holes - remnants of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war - have been smashed into the walls, but the interior of the castle is a world of its own; a world, that is, of stables and eating halls and dungeons. It was empty - the tourists have almost all fled Lebanon - and we felt the oppressive isolation of this terrible place.

Pat knew his Crusader castles. ‘When you besieged them, the only way to get inside was by pushing timber under the foundations and setting fire to the wood. When they turned to ash, the walls came tumbling down. The defenders didn’t throw boiling oil from the ramparts. They threw sand on to the attackers. The sand would get inside their armour and start to burn them until they were in too much pain to fight. But it’s the same thing here in Tripoli as in the little castle. You can hardly see the city through the arrow slits. It’s another - bigger - prison.’

And so I sat on the cold stone floor and stared through a loophole and, sure enough, I could see only a single minaret and a few square metres of roadway. I was in darkness. Just as the Crusaders who built this fortress must have been in darkness. Indeed, Raymond de Saint-Gilles spent years besieging the city, looking down in anger from his great fortress, built on the ‘Pilgrim’s Mountain’, at the stout burghers of Tripoli who were constantly resupplied by boat from Egypt. Raymond himself died in the castle, facing the city he dreamed of capturing but would not live to enter. And of course, far to the east, in the ancient land of Mesopotamia, there stand today equally stout if less aesthetic barricades around another great occupying army. The castles of the Americans are made of pre-stressed concrete and steel but they serve the same purpose and doom those who built them to live in prisons.

From the ‘Green Zone’ in the centre of Baghdad, the US authorities and their Iraqi satellites can see little of the city and country they claim to govern. Sleeping around the gloomy republican palace of Saddam Hussein, they can stare over the parapets or peek through the machine-gun embrasures on the perimeter wall - but that is as much as most will ever see of Iraq. The Tigris river is almost as invisible as that stream sloshing past the castle of Mseilha. The British embassy inside the ‘Green Zone’ flies its diplomats into Baghdad airport, air-lifts them by helicopter into the fortress - and there they sit until recalled to London. Indeed, the Crusaders in Lebanon - men with thunderous names like Tancred and Bohemond and Baldwin - used a system of control remarkably similar to the US Marines and the 82nd Airborne. They positioned their castles at a day’s ride - or a day’s sailing down the coast in the case of Lebanon - from each other, venturing forth only to travel between their keeps.

And then out of the east, from Syria and also from the Caliphate of Baghdad and from Persia came the ‘hashashin’, the ‘Assassins’ - the Crusaders brought the word back to Europe - who turned the Shia faith into an extremist doctrine, regarding assassination of their enemies as a religious duty. Anyone who doubts the relevance of these ‘foreign fighters’ to present-day Iraq should read the history of ancient Tripoli by that redoubtable Lebanese-Armenian historian Nina Jidejian, which covers the period of the Assassins and was published at the height of the Lebanese civil war. ‘It was believed that the terrorists partook of hashish to induce ecstatic visions of paradise before setting out to perform their sacred duty and to face martyrdom . . .’ she writes. ‘The arrival of the Crusaders had added to . . . latent discontent and created a favourable terrain for their activities.’

One of the Assassins’ first victims was the Count of Montferrat, leader of the Third Crusade who in 1191 had besieged Acre - ‘Saint Jean d’Acre’ to the Christians - and who met his death at the hands of men sent by the Persian ‘terrorist’ leader, Hassan-i Sabbah. The Assassins treated Saladin’s Muslim army with equal scorn - they made two attempts to murder him - and within a hundred years had set up their own castles around Tripoli. They established a ‘mother fortress’ from which - and here I quote a thirteenth-century Arab geographer - ‘the Assassins chosen are sent out thence to all countries and lands to slay kings and great men’. And so it is not so hard, in the dank hallways of the Castle of Saint Gilles, to see the folly of America’s occupation of Iraq. Cut off from the people they rule, squeezed into their fortresses, under constant attack from ‘foreign fighters’, the Crusaders’ dreams were destroyed.

Sitting behind that loophole in the castle at Tripoli, I could even see new meaning in Osama bin Laden’s constant reference to the Americans as ‘the Crusader armies’. The Crusades, too, were founded on a neo-conservative theology. The knights were going to protect the Christians of the Holy Land; they were going to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem - ‘Mission Accomplished’ - and ended up taking the spoils of the Levant, creating petty kingdoms which they claimed to control, living fearfully behind their stone defences. Their Arab opponents of the time did indeed possess a weapon of mass destruction for the Crusaders. It was called Islam.

‘You can see why the Crusaders couldn’t last here,’ Pat said as we walked out of the huge gateway of the Castle of Saint Gilles. ‘I wonder if they even knew who they were fighting.’ I just resisted asking him if he would come along on my next trip to Baghdad, so I could hear part two of the builder’s wisdom.

The Independent, 2 April 2005

Paradise in Hell

During the 1975-90 civil war, a clammy joke made the rounds on both sides of the Beirut front line. God, the old saw went, created Lebanon as the most beautiful country on earth. But it looked so like Paradise that God became jealous - so He put the Lebanese there. Yet the Lebanese, amid all their suffering and destruction, continued to care for their cedar trees and to plant vines and wheat and apple orchards and jasmine. Even on my own Beirut balcony, there was saxifrage and a single bougainvillea and a couple of miserable palm trees. I remember wanting to feel the warmth of plants, but I cared for them in a half-hearted way because shells fell regularly around my apartment and I was never really sure if they - or I - would survive.

In Baghdad a couple of burning summers ago, I did the same thing, setting off through the dangerous streets to a market garden of fountains and pink flowers - run by an ex-Iraqi soldier who had seen the gassed and putrefying Kurdish bodies at Halabja - and bought three two-foot pot plants. These I ceremoniously put on the balcony of The Independent’s room at the Hamra Hotel in bleak memory of my Beirut flowers, the imaginary Mediterranean opposite, in reality occupied by a sinister, cracked apartment block. The plants consumed litres of dirty water each day, but eventually successive colleagues let them die, just as Baghdad was dying. And who could blame them? Flowers in war are a kind of beautiful obscenity, heaven amid disaster, an attempt to create Paradise in Hell.

Yet this month once more, we set off to the Beirut market garden called Exotica to renew the balcony flowers amid Lebanon’s latest and dangerous crisis. And yes, the old bougainvillea, no longer flowering, has been replanted. But three more - blazing with orange and scarlet and pink - have taken its place. There are now African violets and chrysanthemums and clostridia on the balcony. And why? Well, by extraordinary coincidence my latest mail package from The Independent contains the 26 April issue of The London Review of Books, and as I sat reading it on our newly flowering balcony, there was Brian Dillon’s review of a book by Kenneth Helphand, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. I shall, of course, buy it. The extracts were enticing enough, for Helphand had discovered that French and British troops in the trenches of the First World War also created miniature gardens.

In May 1915, the Illustrated London News published a full-page drawing entitled ‘Beauty Amid War’. As Dillon writes:

A sign that reads ‘Regent Street’ has been nailed to a blackened tree, and in the foreground, two soldiers tend a pair of perfectly rectangular beds of daffodils. A photograph taken the previous winter, in the Ypres salient, shows a soldier of the London Rifle Brigade posing in what is clearly intended . . . to be an approximation of a traditional English cottage garden.

Idealised gardens obviously did really exist - what Dillon calls ‘an unlikely pelago of tidy plots that stretched across the front itself ’.

And I began to wonder, reading this, if flowers did not soften war for us. Wasn’t ‘The Roses of Picardy’ a wartime song? Don’t we still immortalise the blood-red poppies of Flanders Fields? Didn’t Gracie Fields mock the Nazi Blitz with ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’? And for that matter, more gloomily, didn’t the British codename Arnhem ‘Operation Market Garden’?

Of course, Britons in wartime London cultivated kitchen gardens for food rather than flowers, and it’s probably true, as Dillon suggests, that the wartime garden is as much a symbol of desperation as a spiritually sustaining stretch of earth. Helphand’s book records how the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto - long banned from public parks - could see from their windows ‘young girls with bouquets of lilac walking on the “Aryan” part of the street’. Mary Berg recorded in the ghetto in 1941 how she could ‘even smell the tender fragrance of the opening buds. But there is no sign of spring in the ghetto.’ And for symbolism of America’s collapse in Iraq, what could be more profound than the story of US Warrant Officer Brook Turner, at an army base north of Baghdad, trimming a tiny lawn less than a metre across and a couple of metres long with a pair of scissors? Turner was acting out of nostalgia for the grass of his native Oregon, but it was an ‘artificially sustained territory’, threatened from within by a tenacious enemy of insurgent ants.

I was originally inspired to place plants on my own balcony by my landlord Mustafa, who used to raise fig trees, olives and roses on the shell-smashed vacant lot next door. (Palestinians later buried rockets a few metres away.) Now a grim parking lot covers Mustafa’s little orchard, but he dutifully rescued most of his flowers and now they hang from 24 white boxes on the front railing of his home. And after all, was it not the late Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his magnificent book on the Shah, who realised why Iranians made such beautiful carpets? They wove birds with splendidly coloured wings on to silken trees and rivers and blossom-covered branches. And they would throw their carpets to the ground, creating a garden in the desert.

An army of lovebirds now flocks past Mustafa’s garden and hides in the palm trees of the Corniche. But there was one persistent, ratty bird with no sense of music that would wake us all before dawn each morning. ‘Cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep- cheep,’ it would go, monotonously, ruthlessly off key. Even the howl of shells would have been more musical, Wilfred Owen’s ‘choir’ of artillery rounds. For months Mustafa would emerge in his pyjamas and dressing gown and storm on to the road with an ammunition pouch of stones. These he would fling into the trees in an attempt to hit the wretched bird which prevented our sleep. He always missed, and in the end he simply gave up, and now the same bird’s descendants sound the same ghastly chorus at 4.30 a.m. There is nothing we can do. Nature has won over humanity.

The Independent, 12 May 2007

‘Bush is a revelatory at bedtime’

Sy Hersh is an ornery, cussed sort of guy, not one to suffer fools gladly. As the man who broke the My Lai story and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, I reckon he has a right to be ornery from time to time - and cussed. He’s dealing with powerful folk in Washington, including one - George W. Bush - who would like to cut him down. And when Hersh wrote - as he did in the New Yorker this month - that ‘current and former American military and intelligence officials’ have said Bush has a target list to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and that Bush’s ‘ultimate goal’ in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change - again! - you can see why Bush was worried. ‘Wild’, he called the Hersh story. Which must mean it has some claim to truth.

So when I cornered Hersh at Columbia University in New York and dropped him a note during a Charles Glass presentation asking for an interview, I expected a stiff reply. ‘Anything you ask,’ he scribbled obligingly on a piece of paper. His own lecture was frightening. Bush has a messianic vision - and intends to go down in history (probably he has chosen the right direction) as the man who will have ‘saved’ Iran. ‘So we’re in a real American crisis . . . we’ve had a collapse of Congress . . . we have had a collapse of the military . . . the good news is that when we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day [of Bush]. But that is the only good news.’

Hersh might have said that we’d also had a ‘collapse’ of the media in the United States, a total disintegration of the Ed Murrow/Howard K. Smith/Daniel Ellsberg/Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward school of journalism. The greying, bespectacled, obscenity-swearing Hersh is about all we have left to frighten the most powerful man in the world (save for the jibes of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times).

So it’s good to know he’s still doing some fighting, including other journalists on his target list. ‘I know some serious generals,’ he says. ‘I can’t urge them to go public. They’d be attacked by Fox [TV], and the [New York] Times and the Washington Post would wring their hands. It’s a mechanism. You don’t get rewarded in the newsroom for being a malcontent.’ Journalists on the mainstream papers are largely middle-class college graduates - not reporters who came up the hard way like Hersh’s street reporting in Chicago in his early days. They have largely no connection to the immigrants’ society. ‘They don’t know what it’s like to be on social welfare. Their families weren’t in Vietnam and their families are not in Iraq.’ The BBC, too, has ‘fallen off the way’.

So what is the Hersh school of journalism?

‘In my business, I get information, I check it out and I find it’s not true - that’s what my business is. Now there is [also] stuff in the military from people I don’t know - I don’t touch it . . . I was seeing [President] Bashar [Assad of Syria] at the time of the assassination of [former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq] Hariri. There was obviously bad blood between Bashar and Hariri. Bashar was saying that Hariri wanted to take over the cell-phone business in Damascus. To this day I don’t know what happened. I saw Bashar from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. [on 14 February 2005]. He talked about what a thief Hariri was. I didn’t write it.’

And there goes a scoop about bad blood, I said to myself. But on Iran, it was something different for Hersh. He was talking to a contact. ‘I brought up Iran. “It’s really bad,” he said. “You ought to get into it. You can go to Vienna and find out how far away [from nuclear weapons production] they are.” Then he told me they were having trouble walking back the nuclear option with Bush. People don’t want to speak out - they want the shit on my head.’

As Hersh said in his New Yorker report, nuclear planners routinely go through options - ‘We’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years,’ he quotes one of them as saying - but once the planners try to argue against all this, they are shouted down. According to another intelligence officer quoted by Hersh, ‘The White House said, “Why are you challenging this? The option came from you”.’ In other words, once the planners routinely put options on the table, the options become possibilities to be considered rather than technical reports.

‘That whole Johns Hopkins speech,’ Hersh goes on, referring to the address in which Bush attacked Hersh’s own article, ‘he talked about the wonderful progress in Iraq. This is hallucinatory - and there are people on a high level in the Pentagon and they can’t get the President to give this up. Because it’s crazy. In the UK, you might have some crazy view - but you knew it was. But these guys [in Washington] are talking in revelations. Bush is a revelatory at bedtime - he has to take a nap. It’s so childish and simplistic. And don’t think he’s diminished. He’s still got two years . . . he’s not diminished. We’ve still got a Congress that can’t articulate opposition. This is a story where I profoundly hope, at every major point, that I’m wrong.’

Hersh has also been casting his wizened eye on the Brits. ‘Your country is very worried about what Bush is going to do - your people’ - Hersh means the Foreign Office - ‘are really worried. There are no clearances . . . no consultations.’ In Washington, ‘advocating humanity, peace, integrity is not a value in the power structure . . . my government are incapable of leaving [Iraq]. They don’t know how to get out of Baghdad. We can’t get out. In this war, the end is going to be very, very messy - because we don’t know how to get out. We’re going to get out body by body. I think that scares the hell out of me.’ It’s all put neatly by one of Hersh’s sources in the Pentagon: ‘The problem is that the Iranians realise that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the US. Something bad is going to happen.’

What was that line from Bogart in Casablanca, when he asked Sam, his pianist, what time it is in New York? Sam replies that his watch has stopped, and Bogart says, ‘I bet they’re asleep in New York. I’ll bet they’re asleep all over America.’ Except for Hersh.

The Independent, 20 April 2006

The worse it gets, the bigger the lies

We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That’s how we run the Iraq War - or the Second Iraq War as Prime Minister Blair would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange tracksuits to remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of women held prisoner by the Americans. Abu Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little snapshots? But don’t worry. This wasn’t the America George Bush recognised, and besides we’re punishing the bad apples, aren’t we? Women? Why, there are only a couple of dames left - and they are ‘Dr Germ’ and ‘Dr Anthrax’. But Arabs do not forget so easily. It was a Lebanese woman, Samia Melki, who first understood the true semantics of those Abu Ghraib photographs for the Arab world. The naked Iraqi, his body smeared with excrement, back to the camera, arms stretched out before the butch and blond American with a stick, possessed, she wrote in Counterpunch, ‘all the drama and contrasting colours of a Caravaggio painting’.

The best of Baroque art invites the viewer to be part of the artwork. ‘Forced to walk in a straight line with his legs crossed, his torso slightly twisted and arms spread out for balance, the Iraqi prisoner’s toned body, accentuated by the excrement and the bad lighting, stretches out in crucifix form. Exuding a dignity long denied, the Arab is suffering for the world’s sins.’

And that, I fear, is the least of the suffering that has gone on at Abu Ghraib. For what happened to all those videos that members of Congress were allowed to watch in secret and that we - the public - were not permitted to see? Why have we suddenly forgotten about Abu Ghraib? Seymour Hersh, one of the few journalists in America who is doing his job - has spoken publicly about what else happened in that terrible jail. I’m indebted to a reader for the following extract from a recent Hersh lecture:

Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib . . . The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomised, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking . . .

Already, however, we have forgotten this. Just as we must no longer talk about weapons of mass destruction. For as the details slowly emerge of the desperate efforts of Bush and Blair to find these non-existent nasties, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. US mobile site survey teams managed, at one point, to smash into a former Iraqi secret police headquarters in Baghdad, only to find a padlocked inner door. Here, they believed, they would find the horrors that Bush and Blair were praying for. And what did they find behind the second door? A vast emporium of brand-new vacuum cleaners. At Baath party headquarters, another team - led by a Major Kenneth Deal - believed they had discovered secret documents which would reveal Saddam’s weapons programme. The papers turned out to be an Arabic translation of A. J. P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Perhaps Bush and Blair should read it.

So as we continue to stagger down the crumbling stairway of our own ghastly making, we must listen to bigger and bigger whoppers. Iyad Allawi, the puppet prime minister - still deferentially called ‘interim prime minister’ by many of my reporter chums - insists that elections will be held in January even though he has less control of the Iraqi capital (let alone the rest of the country) than the mayor of Baghdad. The ex-CIA agent, who obediently refused to free the two women prisoners the moment Washington gave him instructions not to do so, dutifully trots over to London and on to Washington to shore up more of the Blair-Bush lies.

Second Iraq War indeed. How much more of this sophistry are we, the public, expected to stomach? We are fighting in ‘the crucible of global terrorism’, according to Blair. What are we to make of this nonsense? Of course, he didn’t tell us we were going to have a Second Iraq War when he helped to start the First Iraq War, did he? And he didn’t tell the Iraqis that, did he? No, we had come to ‘liberate’ them. So let’s just remember the crisis before the crisis before the crisis. Let’s go back to last November when our prime minister was addressing the Lord Mayor’s banquet. The Iraq War, he informed us then - and presumably he was still referring to the First Iraq War - was ‘the battle of seminal importance for the early twenty-first century’.

Well, he can say that again. But just listen to what else Lord Blair of Kut informed us about the war. ‘It will define relations between the Muslim world and the West. It will influence profoundly the development of Arab states and the Middle East. It will have far-reaching implications for the future of American and Western diplomacy.’ And he can say that again, can’t he? For it is difficult to think of anything more profoundly dangerous for us, for the West, for the Middle East, for Christians and Muslims since the Second World War - the real second world war, that is - than Blair’s war in Iraq. And Iraq, remember, was going to be the model for the whole Middle East. Every Arab state would want to be like Iraq. Iraq would be the catalyst - perhaps even the ‘crucible’ - of the new Middle East. Spare me the hollow laughter.

I have been struck these past few weeks how very many of the letters I’ve received from readers come from men and women who fought in the Second World War, who argue ferociously that Blair and Bush should never be allowed to compare this quagmire to the real struggle against evil which they waged more than half a century ago.

‘I, now 90, remember the men maimed in body and mind who haunted the lanes in rural Wales where I grew up in the years after 1918,’ Robert Parry wrote to me.

For this reason, Owen’s ‘Dulce et decorum est’³⁰ remains for me the ultimate expression of the reality of death in war, made now more horrific by American ‘targeted’ bombing and the suicide bombers. We need a new Wilfred Owen to open our eyes and consciences, but until one appears this great poem must be given space to speak again.

It would be difficult to find a more eloquent rejoinder to the infantile stories now being peddled by our prime minister. Not for many years has there been such a gap - in America as well as Britain - between the people and the government they elected. Blair’s most recent remarks are speeches made - to quote that Owen poem - ‘to children ardent for some desperate glory’. Ken Bigley’s blindfolded face is our latest greatest crisis.³¹ But let’s not forget what went before.

The Independent, 25 September 2004

Let’s have more martyrs!

I wonder sometimes if we have not entered a new age of what the French call infantilisme. I admit I am writing these words on the lecture circuit in Paris where pretty much every political statement - including those of Messrs Chirac, Sarkozy, de Villepin et al. - might fall under this same title. But the folk I am referring to, of course, are George W. Bush, Prime Minister Blair and - a newcomer to the Fisk Hall of Childishness - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

For as someone who has to look at the eviscerated corpses of Palestine and Israel, the murdered bodies in the garbage heaps of Iraq, the young women shot through the head in the Baghdad morgue, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the sheer, unadulterated, lazy bullshit - let’s call a spade a spade - which is currently emerging from our great leaders. There was a time when the Great and the Good spoke with a voice of authority, albeit mendacious, rather than mediocrity; when too many lies spelled a ministerial resignation or two. But today we seem to live on two levels: reality and myth.

Let’s start with the reality of Iraq. It is, to quote Winston Churchill on Palestine in the late 1940s, a ‘hell-disaster’, a nation of anarchy from Mosul and Irbil down to Basra, where armed insurgents control streets scarcely half a mile from the Baghdad ‘Green Zone’ wherein American and British diplomats and their democratically elected Iraqi ‘government’ dream up optimism for a country whose people are burning with ferocious resentment against Western occupation. No wonder I’m more sure each day that I want to be away from conflict.

But for Bush, America is not anxious to withdraw from Iraq. Far from it. The United States is fighting enemies who want to establish a ‘totalitarian empire’, he says, a ‘mortal danger to all humanity’ which America will confront. Washington is fighting ‘as brutal an enemy as we have ever faced’. But what about Hitler’s Nazi Germany? Mussolini’s fascist Italy? The expansionist Japanese empire which bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941? It’s one thing, surely, for Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara to play Roosevelt and Churchill or to claim that Saddam is Hitler, but to exalt our grubby, torture-encrusted, illegal conflicts as being more important than the Second World War - or our turbaned enemies as more malicious than the Auschwitz SS killers - is surely a step on the road to the madhouse.

‘By any standard of history,’ my favourite American president declared this week, ‘Iraq has made incredible progress.’ Excuse me? By any standard of history, the Iraqi insurgents have made incredible inroads into the US military occupation of Iraq. ‘We’ve lost some of our nation’s finest men and women in the war on terror,’ Bush tells us. ‘... The best way to honour the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission.’ In other words, we are going to prove the worth of the sacrifice by making more sacrifices. Truly, this is bin Laden-like in its naivety. We’ve suffered martyrs? Then let’s have more martyrs!

Then we have President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Israel, he tells one of those infinitely dull and boring Tehran conferences on ‘Zionism’ this week, must be ‘wiped off the map’. I’m old enough to remember this claptrap from Yasser Arafat’s weary old cronies in Beirut in the late 1970s. Ahmadinejad’s speech - before the obligatory 4,000 ‘students’ who used to be a regular feature of Iran’s revolution - was replete with all the antique claims. ‘The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world. The skirmishes [sic] in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny.’ Was this silly man, I ask myself, the scriptwriter for Ridley Scott’s movie Kingdom of Heaven? Surely not, for the Hollywood epic is Homeric in its scope and literacy compared to Ahmadinejad’s sterile prose. This, after all, is the sort of stuff I had to suffer during the original Iranian revolution when Ayatollah Khomeini set up his theocracy in Iran. Government for and by the dead is becoming a vision for both Bush and Ahmadinejad.

But hold on. We have not counted on the Churchillian vision of Lord Blair. ‘I have never come across a situation of [sic] the president of a country stating they want to wipe out another country,’ he told us on Thursday. Oh deary me. What can we do with this man? For Rome was rather keen, was it not, to wipe out Carthage. And then there is the little matter of Herr Hitler - a regular bogeyman for Blair when he stares across the desert wastes towards the Tigris - who insisted that Poland should be wiped out, who turned Czechoslovakia into the Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, who allowed the Croatian Ustashe to try to destroy Serbia, who ended his days by declaring that his own German state should be wiped out because its people didn’t deserve him.

But now let’s listen to Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara again. ‘If they [the Iranians] carry on like this, the question that people are going to be asking is: when are you going to do something about this? Can you imagine a state like that with an attitude like that having a nuclear weapon?’ Well yes, of course we can. North Korea. Whoops! But they’ve already got nuclear weapons, haven’t they? So we’ll ask a different question. Exactly who are those ‘people’, Lord Blair, who might expect you to ‘do something’? Could they have anything in common with the million people who told you not to invade Iraq? And if not, could we have some addresses, identities, some idea of their number? A million perhaps? I doubt it.

Is there to be any end of this? Not yet, I fear. In Australia a couple of weeks ago I found Muslims in Melbourne and Adelaide regaling me with stories of abuse and obscenities in the street. New laws are about to be introduced by Prime Minister John Howard to counter ‘terror’ which will not only allow detention without trial, but also the extension of ‘sedition’ laws which could be used against those (mainly Muslims, of course) who oppose Australia’s pointless military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Well, count me in, John. I think you live in a great country with great people, but I’m planning to turn up in Adelaide again in the spring to argue against any Western involvement in those two countries, including yours. I look forward to a sedition charge. And to Lord Blair ‘doing something’ against North Korea. I hope Mr Bush never does discover enemies worse than the Wehrmacht and the SS. And I sincerely trust that the little satraps of the religious necrocracy that is Iran will grow up in the years to come. Alas. Like Peter Pan, our leaders wish to be for ever young, for ever childish, and for ever ready to play in their bloodless sandpits - at our expense.

The Independent, 29 October 2005

The flying carpet

I tried out the new Beirut-Baghdad air service this week. It’s a sleek little 20-seater with two propellers, a Lebanese-Canadian pilot and a name to take you aback. It’s called ‘Flying Carpet Airlines’. As Commander Queeg said in The Caine Mutiny, I kid thee not. It says ‘Flying Carpet’ on the little blue boarding cards, below the captain’s cabin and on the passenger headrest covers where the aircraft can be seen gliding through the sky on a high-pile carpet.

And it’s an odd little flight, too. You arrive at Beirut’s swish new glass and steel airport where you are told to meet your check-in desk handler in front of the post office in the arrivals lounge. There is a group of disconsolate Americans - ‘contractors’ who’ve been passing the weekend in the fleshpots - and fearful Lebanese businessmen and, well, you’ve guessed it, The Independent’s equally fearful correspondent.

It was a while before I realised that the whole thing was a kind of Iraqi metaphor. From the Beirut arrivals lounge, you pass through the metal detectors in Departures, breeze past the spanking new duty-free, pick up a cappuccino and then - here we go - head for the special Mecca pilgrimage departure gate. In a box-like room painted all white, you wait for a small blue bus which eventually chugs guiltily off round the side of the airport, past the shell-blasted freight cargo hangars from Beirut’s very own, pleased-to-be-forgotten war, to the steps of the only aircraft in Flying Carpet’s fleet.

Only when I had clambered, half doubled up, down the tube to my seat did I realise that we were only a few hundred metres from the site of the old US Marine base, suicide-bombed back in 1983 at a cost of 241 American lives. I remember how the air pressure changed in my Beirut apartment when the bomb exploded and how, a couple of days later, I saw Vice President George Bush Snr standing amid the rubble, telling us: ‘We will not let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards change the foreign policy of the United States.’ Then within months, President Reagan decided to ‘redeploy’ his US Marines to their ships offshore.

These, of course, were heretical thoughts as we climbed above the snow-frothed Lebanese mountains, crossed the Syrian border and then flew east across the ever-darkening, deep-brown deserts of Syria and Iraq. I opened my morning paper. And there was old George Bush’s cantankerous son, wearing that silly smile of his, telling the world that while there may be a few problems in old ‘Ayrak’, the 30 January elections would go ahead; violence would be defeated; the bad guys would not be able to stop the forward march of democracy. In other words, he wasn’t going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards change the foreign policy of the United States.

Of course, the moment you arrive at the scene of Bush’s great new experiment in democracy - and we are all looking forward to the elections in Baghdad with the same kind of enthusiasm that the people of Dresden showed when the first Lancasters flew down the Elbe - it all looks very different. Baghdad airport is crowded with heavily armed mercenaries and friendly, but equally armed, Gurkhas. And there’s a big poster not far from the terminal with a massive colour photograph of the aftermath of a Baghdad car bombing, complete with the body of a half-naked woman in the lower right-hand corner.

The text beneath this obscenity is in Arabic:

They want to destroy our country - they attack schools. These dogs want to keep our children in ignorance so they can teach them hatred. We need the help of the multinational forces to show them that we will do anything to get our country back and to root out the killers and looters on our roads who bear the full responsibility for these terrible crimes committed against our peaceful Iraqi people. The Iraqi people refuse to be victims because they are a strong community which will never die.

But while the Iraqis want security, an increasing number of them are coming to support the ‘dogs’ and ever fewer want the assistance of the ‘multinational forces’ which, in Baghdad and much of the Sunni provinces controlled by the insurgents, means Mr Bush’s very own army. Now of course, opinion polls - an invention of the West, not the East - do show that a majority of Iraqis would like some of Mr Bush’s democracy. Back in the days of the beastly Saddam, they surely wanted even more of it - though, at the time, we were busy supporting Saddam’s regime so that he could root out all the killers in Iran, not to mention the Iraqi communists and Iraqi Shias and Kurds who were trying to destroy him.

Opinion polls would also show that a majority of Iraqis - an even larger majority, I suspect - would like some security from all the killers and looters whom the present-day multinational force doesn’t seem able to catch. And the greatest majority of all Iraqis would, no doubt, like US passports. Indeed, I’ve often thought that the one sure way of closing down Iraq’s war would be to give American citizenship to every Iraqi, in just the same way that the Romans made their conquered peoples citizens of Rome. But since this is not an idea that would commend itself to Mr Bush and his empire-builders, the Iraqis are just going to have to endure democracy in their violent, electricity-free, petrol-less towns and cities.

The Shias, of course, have been waiting impatiently for elections for almost two years. The American proconsul of the time, Paul Bremer, was too frightened to hold them soon after the invasion - when they might have taken place without much violence - in case Iraq turned into a Shia theocracy. The Kurds are also waiting to put their stamp on their emerging statelet in the north.

The problem is that without the participation of the Sunni Muslims, the results of these elections - while they will be free in the sense that Saddam’s were not - will be as unrepresentative of the Iraqi nation as the polls which used to give The Beast 98.96 per cent of the vote. The Americans are now threatening to ‘top up’ the parliament with a few chosen Sunnis of their own. And we all know how representative they’re going to be of the Sunni community which is the heart of the insurgency against American occupation.

All in all, then, a mighty mess to contemplate after the 30 January elections.³² The brush fires are already being lit, but fear not, Bush and Blair will tell us that they always knew things would get violent on polling day - which will make it all right, I suppose - and that, if the violence gets worse, it all goes to show how successful those elections were because they made the killers and looters and ‘dogs’ angry. A bunch of insidious terrorist cowards are not going to change the foreign policy of the United States. Well, we shall see. Meanwhile, I’m checking the flight schedules to see if my magic carpet can take me back to Beirut after 30 January.

The Independent, 15 January 2005

The show must go on

It makes you want to scream. I have been driving the dingy, dangerous, ovenlike streets of Baghdad all week, ever more infested with insurgents and their informers, the American troops driving terrified over the traffic islands, turning their guns on all of us if we approach within 50 metres. In the spaceship isolation of Saddam’s old republican palace, the Kurds and the Shia have been tearing Iraq apart, refusing to sign up for a constitution lest it fail to give them the federations - and the oil wealth - they want. They miss their deadline - though I found no one in ‘real’ Baghdad, no one outside the Green Zone bunker, who seemed to care. And that evening, I turn on my television to hear President Bush praise the ‘courage’ of the constitution negotiators whose deadline Bush himself had promised would be met.

Courage? So it’s courageous, is it, to sit in a time capsule, sealed off from your people by miles of concrete walls, and argue about the future of a nation which is in anarchy? Then Condoleezza Rice steps forward to tell us this is all part of the ‘road to democracy’ in the Middle East.

I am back on the streets again, this time at the an-Nahda bus station - nahda means ‘renaissance’ for those who want the full irony of such situations - and around me is the wreckage of another bombing. Smashed police cars, burnt-out, pulverised buses (passengers all on board, of course), women screaming with fury, children taken to the al-Kindi hospital in bandages to be met by another bomb. And that night, I flip on the television again and find the local US military commander in the Sadr City district of Baghdad - close to the bus station - remarking blithely that while local people had been very angry, they supported the local ‘security’ forces (i.e. the Americans) and were giving them more help than ever and that we were - wait for it - ‘on the path to democracy’.

Sometimes I wonder if there will be a moment when reality and myth, truth and lies, will actually collide. When will the detonation come? When the insurgents wipe out an entire US base? When they pour over the walls of the Green Zone and turn it into the same trashed blocks as the rest of Baghdad? Or will we then be told - as we have been in the past - that this just shows the ‘desperation’ of the insurgents, that these terrible acts (the bus station bombing this week, for example) only prove that the ‘terrorists’ know they are losing?

In a traffic jam, a boy walks past my car, trying to sell a magazine. Saddam’s face - yet again - is on the cover. The ex-dictator’s seedy, bewhiskered features are on the front pages, again and again, to remind the people of Baghdad how fortunate they are to be rid of the dictator. Saddam to go on trial next month, in two months’ time, before the end of the year. Six deadlines for the ghastly old man’s trial have come and gone - like so many other deadlines in Iraq - but the people are still supposed to be fascinated and appalled at Saddam’s picture. You may sweat at home in powerless houses; you may have no fresh food because your freezer is hot; you may have to queue for hours to buy petrol; you may have to suffer constant death threats and armed robbery and your city may suffer 1,100 violent deaths in July alone (all true), but, just to take your mind off things, remember that Saddam is going on trial.

I have not met anyone in Iraq - save for those who lost their loved ones to his thugs - who cares any more about Saddam. He is yesterday’s man, a thing of the past. To conjure up this monster again is an insult to the people of Baghdad - who have more fears, more anxieties and greater mourning to endure than any offer of bread and circuses by the Americans can assuage. Yet in the outside world - the further from Iraq, the more credible they sound - George Bush and Tony Blair will repeat that we really have got democracy on its feet in Iraq, that we overthrew the tyrant Saddam and that a great future awaits the country and that new investments are being planned at international conferences (held far away from Iraq, of course) and that the next bombings in Europe, like the last ones, will have nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with Iraq. The show must go on and I know, when I return to Beirut or fly to Europe, Iraq will not look so bad. The Mad Hatter will look quite sane and the Cheshire Cat will smile at me from the tree.

Democracy, democracy, democracy. Take Egypt. President Mubarak allows opponents to stand in the forthcoming elections. Bush holds this up as another sign of democracy in the Middle East. But Mubarak’s opponents have to be approved by his own party members in parliament, and the Muslim Brotherhood - which ought to be the largest party in the country - is still officially illegal. Sitting in Baghdad, I watched Mubarak’s first party rally, a mawkish affair in which he actually asked for support. So who will win this ‘democratic’ election? I’ll take a risk: our old pal Mubarak. And I’ll bet he gets more than 80 per cent of the votes. Watch this space.³³

And of course, from my little Baghdad eyrie I’ve been watching the eviction of Israelis from their illegal settlements in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The word ‘illegal’ doesn’t pop up on the BBC, of course; nor the notion that the settlers - for which read colonisers - were not being evicted from their land but from land they originally took from others. Nor is much attention paid to the continued building in the equally illegal colonies within the Palestinian West Bank which will - inevitably - make a ‘viable’ (Blair’s favourite word) Palestine impossible. In Gaza, everyone waited for Israeli settler and Israeli soldier to open fire on each other. But when a settler did open fire, he did so to murder four Palestinian workers on the West Bank. The story passed through the television coverage like a brief, dark, embarrassing cloud and was forgotten. Settlements dismantled. Evacuation from Gaza. Peace in our time.

But in Baghdad, the Iraqis I talk to are not convinced. It is to their eternal credit that those who live in the hell of Iraq still care about the Palestinians, still understand what is really happening in the Middle East, are not fooled by the nonsense peddled by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. ‘What is this “evil ideology” that Blair keeps talking about?’ an Iraqi friend asked me this week. ‘What will be your next invention? When will you wake up?’

I couldn’t put it better myself.

The Independent, 20 August 2005

‘He was killed by the enemy’ - but all is well in Iraq

Taking things for granted. Or, as a very dear friend of mine used to say to me, ‘There you go.’ I am sitting in Baghdad airport, waiting for my little Flying Carpet aircraft to take me home to Beirut, but the local Iraqi station manager, Mr Ghazwan, has not turned up like he used to. Without him, I can’t enter Departures or check in.

Back in January, he was here, telling me he wouldn’t forget to take me through security, talking to an Iraqi officer who looked remarkably like him, telling the officer to look after me. Ghazwan spoke careful, grammatical English and would laugh at himself when he made mistakes. So I call Ghazwan’s mobile and an old man answers. I want to speak to Ghazwan, I say. ‘Why?’ Because I need to know when he’ll be at the airport. There is a kind of groan from the other end of the line. ‘He was killed.’ I sit there on my plastic airport seat, unable to speak. What? What do you mean? ‘He was killed by the enemy,’ the old man says, and I hear the receiver taken from him.

A young woman now, with good English. ‘Who are you?’ A passenger. English. I start apologising. No one told me Ghazwan was dead. Even the Beirut travel agents still list his name as a Baghdad contact. The young woman - it is his wife, or rather his young widow - mutters something about him being killed on the way to the airport and I ask when this happened. ‘On the 14th of March,’ she says. I had last seen him exactly five weeks before his death. And the story comes out. His brother was a security guard at the airport - presumably the officer who looked like him whom I had met in February - and the two men were leaving home together to go to work in the same car when gunmen shot the brother dead and killed Ghazwan in the same burst of fire. I apologise again. I say how sorry I am. There is an acknowledgement from the young woman and the mobile is switched off.

Taking things for granted. I am back in Beirut, watching the new Pope visit his native Germany. He meets Cologne’s Jewish community. He talks of the wickedness of the Jewish Holocaust. He should. He speaks warmly of Israel. Why not? Then he meets the Muslim community and I see them on the screen, heads slightly bowed, eyes glancing furtively towards the cameras. To them he lectures on the evils of terrorism. It all seems logical.

But then I sit up. In his first address, there is no word about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, its expanding settlements on other people’s land, against all international law. And the Muslims, well, they do have to be reminded of their sins, of their duty to extirpate ‘terrorism’, to preach moderation at all times, to stop the scourge of suicide bombers. And suddenly I am shocked at this profound lack of judgement on the Pope’s part. Yet meekly aware that I had myself gone along with it. It was the Pope’s job, wasn’t it, to apologise to the Jews of Europe. And it was his job, wasn’t it, to warn the Muslims of Europe.

Thus do we fall in line. Yes, he should apologise for the Holocaust - to the end of time. But might not His Holiness, the former anti-aircraft gunner, have also apologised to the Muslims for the bloody and catastrophic invasion of Iraq - no, no, of course there’s no parallel in evil, scale, etc. - but he might have at least shown the courage of his predecessor who stood up against George Bush and his ferocious war. Taking things for granted. In Baghdad and then in Beirut, I read of the latest ‘anti-terror’ laws of Prime Minister Blair. Of course, of course. After suicide bombers on the London Underground, what else do we expect? Our precious capital and its people must be protected. Having been three or four trains in front of the King’s Cross Tube that exploded on 7 July, I take these things seriously myself. And were I back on the London Tube today, I’d probably be trying to avoid young men with backpacks - as well as armed members of the Metropolitan Police.³⁴

And after all the panegyrics in the press about our wonderful security forces, I’d also be taking a close look at these fine and patriotic folk. These are the men (and women?) who lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These are the chaps who couldn’t get a single advance trace of even one of the four suicide bombings on 7 July (nor the non-lethal ones a few days later). These are the lads who gunned down a helpless civilian as he sat on a Tube train.

But hold on a moment, I say to myself again. The 7 July bombings would be a comparatively quiet day in Baghdad. Was I not at the site of the an-Nahda bus station bombings after forty-three civilians - as innocent, their lives just as precious as those of Londoners - were torn to pieces last week? At the al-Kindi hospital, relatives had a problem identifying the dead. Heads were placed next to the wrong torsos, feet next to the wrong legs. A problem there. But there came not a groan from England. We were still locked into our 7 July trauma. No detectives are snooping around the an-Nahda bomb site looking for clues. They’re already four suicide bombs later. An-Nahda is history.

And it dawns on me, sitting on my balcony over the Mediterranean at the end of this week, that we take far too much for granted. We like to have little disconnects in our lives. Maybe this is the fault of daily journalism - where we encapsulate the world every twenty-four hours, then sleep on it and start a new history the next day in which we fail totally to realise that the narrative did not begin before last night’s deadline but weeks, months, years ago. For it is a fact, is it not, that if ‘we’ had not invaded Iraq in 2003, those forty-three Iraqis would not have been pulverised by those three bombs last week. And it is surely a fact that, had we not invaded Iraq, the 7 July bombs would not have gone off. In which case the Pope would not last week have been lecturing German Muslims on the evils of ‘terrorism’.

And of course, had we not invaded Iraq, Mr Ghazwan would be alive and his brother would be alive and his grieving widow would have been his young and happy wife and his broken father would have been a proud dad. But, as that friend of mine used to say, ‘there you go’.

The Independent, 27 August 2005