“Bomb now: Die later”

On Sanctions: The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk, Pages 705-706

 

    So why did the Americans and the British and their other friends at the United Nations impose this hateful sanctions regime on Iraq?  Many of the Western humanitarian workers and UN officials in Baghdad had come to their own conclusions.  Margaret Hassan, a British woman married to an Iraqi, a brave, tough, honourable lady who ran CARE’s office in the Iraqi capital, was outraged by the tragedy with which she was striving to cope.  “They want us to rebel against Saddam,” she said. “They think that we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything – even give our own lives – to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991, so now they are using cruder methods.  But they are wrong.  These people have been reduced to penury.  They live in shit.  And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”

 

    Margaret Hassan was right.  “Big picture,” an air force planner told the Washington Post in 1991.  “We wanted to let people know. ‘Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding.  We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime.  Fix that and we’ll fix your electricity.’”  Just before the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document described probable results of the destruction of power stations and continued economic sanctions.  “With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations sanctions to import these vital commodities.  Failing to secure these supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population.”  In other words, the United States and Britain and other members of the Security Council were well aware that the principal result of the bombing campaign – and of sanctions – would be the physical degradation and sickening and deaths of Iraqi civilians. Biological warfare might prove to be a better description. The ultimate nature of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear.  Bomb now: die later.

 

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    Kuwaitis drew strength from the 2,000 Iranian POW’s whom Iran had thought dead but who emerged alive from Saddam’s prisons after the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988.  Saddam liked hostages, they reasoned. He knew how to use them.  He had held thousands of Westerners captive after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.  But Kuwaiti prisoners held no interest for him.  None of the 850 men and women – not even Samira – were ever seen alive again. Only after the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, did Kuwaitis know why.  Amid the thousands of corpses dug up from execution pits in the desert west of Hilla were dozens of men still carrying their Kuwaiti citizenship papers. So now Kuwait would have yet more names to add to their list of “martyrs” from the war, a small figure perhaps, but further proof that Arabs die at the hands of Arabs.

 

    North of the Kuwaiti border, however, there now lay a barren land of misery, fear and defeat, its power stations bombed out, its water purification systems shattered by allied explosives, its sewers overflowing into streets and houses. Western journalists taken on a UN helicopter across southern Iraq saw thousands of tank revetments and trenches, all now covered with grass and sand; the Iraqi army had spent its energies in destroying the uprising and preserving the regime – threatening its neighbours was no longer an option.  Iraq was prostrate and its people, under the burden of UN sanctions that were first intended to persuade Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without a fight and then to destroy his regime – which was accomplished – were about to embark on a slow mass death, made more terrible and more immoral because those sanctions were imposed by nations that regarded themselves as the most civilised on earth.

 

    Across southern Iraq, the Shiites lived in mortal peril of their lives, their sons and husbands and brothers already filling the execution grounds around Hilla and Nasiriyah.  The great golden-domed mosque of the Imam Ali in Najaf was in partial ruins, its centuries-old blue marble tiles lying in heaps around the souvenirs for passing journalists and for Saddam’s Republican Guards who had blasted their way into the sacred buildings of Shiite Islam to kill the Iraqi insurgents seeking sanctuary there. Twelve years later, Shiite insurgents – in some cases the very men who had fought Saddam’s killers in 1991 – were hiding in the very same shrine, this time from American army tank fire.  In the north, the Kurds – now under American and British protection – lived amid the hundreds of villages that had been gassed and then systematically destroyed on Saddam’s orders. We had betrayed the Shiite rebellion. We had betrayed the Kurdish rebellion. Later – much later – when we came to destroy Saddam himself, we should expect them to be grateful to us. But they would remember.

 

    The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost thirteen years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures.  Our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 closed the page – or so we hoped – on our treatment of the Iraqi people before that date, removed the stigma attached to the imprisonment of an entire nation and their steady debilitation and death under the UN sanctions regime.  When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq.  Sanctions were never mentioned.  They were “ghosted” out of the story.  First there had been Saddam, and then there was ‘freedom.”


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    And indeed, when sanctions were first imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, there was little outcry; if they could induce Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without the need for war, then few would criticise them.  Besides, before the liberation of Kuwait, Iraq’s power stations were still operating at full capacity and its economy, while crippled by the eight years of war with Iran, was capable of providing Iraqis with one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world.  Rationing was introduced in Iraq in September 1990, but most Westerners – and most Arabs – assumed that once Saddam had withdrawn from Kuwait, hopefully before any hostilities took place, these sanctions would be lifted. As so often in the Middle East, a decision that initially appeared benign was to be quickly transformed into a weapon far more deadly than missiles or shells.

 

    UN Security Council Resolution 661 was passed on 6 August 1990, scarcely four days after Saddam’s army had crossed the Kuwaiti border, calling upon all states to prevent the import of “all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait” and to prohibit the supply of all goods except “supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs.” In retrospect, it is clear that the United States never had any faith that these sanctions – mild by comparison with the postwar restrictions – would persuade Saddam to order his forces out of Kuwait.  Just as America and Britain would claim, twelve years later, that the UN arms inspectors could not be given the time to finish their work before the 2003 invasion, so the Americans gave up on the sanctions regime by the time their troops were in place for the liberation of Kuwait.  The Washington Institute for Near East Policy concluded before the end of 1990 that “sanctions cannot be counted on to produce a sure result.”  By 15 January 1991, British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd was announcing that Britain was resigned to fight for Kuwait because UN sanctions had had no “decisive effect” on Saddam’s capacity to wage war.

 

    Only after the war did the United States make it clear that there would be no lifting of sanctions until Saddam Hussein was gone.  Sanctions would remain, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, “until there was a change of government in Iraq.”  But the effect of sanctions was now catastrophic.  In 1991 the Allies had crippled power stations and deliberately bombed water and sewage facilities – a decision that was bound to cause a humanitarian catastrophe among the civilians of Iraq.  A Harvard team of lawyers and public health specialists, after visiting forty-six Iraqi hospitals and twenty-eight water and sewage facilities, stated in 1991 that deaths among children under five in Iraq had nearly quintupled, that almost a million were undernourished and 100,000 were starving to death.  Their research found that 46,700 children under five had died from the combined effects of war and trade sanctions in the first seven months of 1991.

 

    As more and more Iraqis started to die – not only ravaged by the foul water they were forced to drink from bomb-damaged water-cleansing plants but increasingly prevented from acquiring the medicines they might need to recover – a UN commission redrew the country’s southern


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border to deprive it of part of the Rumeila oilfield and the naval base at Um Qasr, Iraq’s only access to the waters of the Gulf. The confiscated territory was given to Kuwait.  Western leaders insisted that Saddam Hussein could use Iraq’s own resources to pay for humanitarian supplies, willfully ignoring the fact that Iraqi financial assets had been blocked and oil sales prohibited.  By the end of 1994, Iraqi inflation was running at 24.000 per cent a year and much of the population was destitute.  On the streets of Baghdad, even the middle classes were selling their libraries for money to buy food.  Volumes of Islamic theology, English editions of Shakespeare, medical treatises and academic theses on Arab architecture ended up on the pavements of Mutanabi Street in Baghdad: paper for bread.

 

    By 1996, half a million Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions.  Madeleine Albright, who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave an infamous reply on 12 May that year when asked about sanctions on the CB news programme 60 Minutes.  Anchor Leslie Stahl put it to Albright: “We have heard that half a million children have died.  I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima.  Is the price worth it?”  Albright’s reply: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”  In March 1997, Albright – now U.S. secretary of state – emphasized the impossibility of ending sanctions.  “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.  Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions … And the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein’s intentions will never be peaceful.”

 

    In October 1996. Philippe Heffinck, the representative in Iraq for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that “around 4,500 children under the age of five are dying here every month from hunger and disease.”  A year later, a joint study between the UN and the World Food Programme concluded that sanctions “significantly constrained Iraq’s ability to earn foreign currency needed to import sufficient quantities of food to meet needs.”  On 26 November 1997, UNICEF was reporting that “32 per cent of children under the age of five, some

960,000 children, [are] chronically malnourished – a rise of 72 per cent since 1991.  Almost one quarter … are underweight – twice as high as the levels found in neighbouring Jordan or Turkey.”

 

    And all this while, the reasons for sanctions – or the conditions upon which they might be lifted – changed and extended.  Saddam must allow the United Nations Special Commission on Monitoring (UNSCOM) arms inspectors to do their work freely, must end human rights abuses, free Kuwaiti POWs, end the torture of his own people, recognise Kuwaiti sovereignty, pay wartime reparations and withdraw missile batteries from the (non-UN) “no-fly” zones. Individually, there was nothing immoral about any of these demands. Collectively, they were intended to ensure that the sanctions regime continued indefinitely.  By January 1998, the Pope was talking of the “pitiless embargo” visited upon Iraqi’s, adding that “the weak and innocent cannot pay for mistakes for which they are not responsible.”  U.S. officials began to warn that sanctions would stay “for ever” unless Saddam complied with American demands.


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    American spokesmen and spokeswomen repeatedly pointed out that Saddam Hussein was escaping the effect of sanctions.  Albright appeared before the United Nations with satellite photographs of vast building complexes in Iraq, pictures, she said, of further palace-building by Saddam Hussein.  She was correct in what she said, but wrong in her conclusions. For if Saddam had managed to avoid the effects of the UN sanctions on his regime, then those sanctions had clearly failed in their objective.  In 1998, British foreign secretary Robin Cook became obsessed with the Iraqi regime’s purchase of liposuction equipment which, if true, was merely further proof of the failure of sanctions.  He repeatedly stated that Iraq could sell $10 billion of oil a year to pay for food, medicine and other humanitarian goods – but since more than 30 per cent of these oil revenues were diverted to the UN compensation fund and UN expenses in Iraq, his statement was wrong.

 

    And Saddam Hussein yet again found a common cause with the Americans.  Just as the latter needed to prove that Saddam had permitted the further suffering of his people while building temples to his greatness, so Saddam needed to show the world – especially the Arabs – how cruel were the Americans and their allies in decimating the innocent people of Iraq. It was a calculation that found a constant response in one of his own Arab enemies. Osama bin Laden, who regularly expressed his sympathy – he did so in an interview with me – for the Iraqis suffering under the U.S.-inspired sanctions.

 

    Those of us who visited the grey and dying world of Iraq during these ghastly years were sometimes almost as angered by the Iraqi government’s manipulation as we were by the suffering we witnessed.  Each morning, Ministry of Information “minders would encourage foreign journalists to witness the “spontaneous” demonstrations by Iraqi civilians against the sanctions.  Men and women would parade through the streets carrying coffins, allegedly containing the bodies of children who had just died of disease and malnutrition. Only when we asked to see the wooden boxes were we told that the protest was symbolic, that the coffins only represented the dead.  Yet the dead were real enough.  The rivers of sewage that now moved inexorably through even the most residential of Baghdad suburbs were evidence of the breakdown of the most basic social services.  From the countryside came credible reports that Iraqis were eating weeds to stay alive.

 

    So why did the Americans and the British and their other friends at the United Nations impose this hateful sanctions regime on Iraq?  Many of the Western humanitarian workers and UN officials in Baghdad had come to their own conclusions.  Margaret Hassan, a British woman married to an Iraqi, a brave, tough, honourable lady who ran CARE’s office in the Iraqi capital, was outraged by the tragedy with which she was striving to cope.  “They want us to rebel against Saddam,” she said. “They think that we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything – even give our own lives – to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991, so now they are using cruder methods.  But they are wrong.  These people have been reduced to penury.  They live in shit.  And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”


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    Margaret Hassan was right.  “Big picture,” an air force planner told the Washington Post in 1991.  “We wanted to let people know. ‘Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding.  We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime.  Fix that and we’ll fix your electricity.  Just before the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document described probable results of the destruction of power stations and continued economic sanctions.  “With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations sanctions to import these vital commodities.  Failing to secure these supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population.”  In other words, the United States and Britain and other members of the Security Council were well aware that the principal result of the bombing campaign – and of sanctions – would be the physical degradation and sickening and deaths of Iraqi civilians. Biological warfare might prove to be a better description. The ultimate nature of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear.  Bomb now: die later.

 

    Not long before Christmas 1997, Dennis Halliday, the bearded and balding Irishman who was heading the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq, received personal and deeply distressing evidence of what this meant.  He had a paid a visit to four small Iraqi children suffering from leukaemia in the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre.  “The doctors told me they couldn’t get the drugs to treat them and I got involved with them.”  Halliday told me in his cramped Baghdad office, the walls hung with cheap Arab rugs, “With a World Health Organisation colleague, I managed to get the drugs they required – some from Jordan, one from northern Iraq, which means it was probably smuggled in from Turkey.  Then I dropped in on Christmas Eve to see the children in their ward. Two were already dead.”

 

    Halliday was already palpably torn by his task of distributing food and medicine to 23 million Iraqis, all of whom were being punished and some of whom were dying in appalling hospital conditions because of Saddam’s crimes.  At the same time as he was seeking drugs for the children, Halliday – who was clearly close to resigning – wrote an impassioned letter to UN secretary general Kofi Annan, complaining that what the UN was doing in Iraq was causing untold suffering to innocent people.  “I wrote that what we were doing was undermining the moral credibility of the UN,” he said.  “I found myself in a moral dilemma.  It seemed to me that what we were doing was in contradiction to the human rights provision in the UN’s own charter.”  Halliday, a Quaker who worked in Kenya and Iran before joining the UN’s bureaucracy in New York, was looking for some alternative to sanctions – vainly, because the United States and Britain had no intention of ending Iraq’s misery.

 

    His desk was piled with statistics the UN didn't want to know; that Iraq's electrical power stations were producing less than 40 per cent of capacity, that water and sanitation were on the point of breakdown.  Doctors were forced to reuse rubber gloves during operations, their wards were without air-conditioning or clean water. Without electrical pumps, water pressure was falling in the pipes and sewage was being sucked into the vacuum.  “The government here used to encourage the use of infant formula – and infant formula with contaminated water is a real


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killer.”  But Halliday was worried by other long-term effects of this suffering.  “There are men and women now in their twenties and thirties and forties who have known little more than the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War and the sanctions.  They see themselves as surrounded by unfriendly people, and a very unsympathetic America and Britain. They are out of touch with technology and communications.   They have no access to Western television.  And these are the people who are going to have to run this country in the future. They are feeling alienated and very Iraqi-introverted.  Their next-door neighbours are going to have a tough time dealing with these people.”

 

    Halliday’s colleague in the Baghdad UNICEF office was no more optimistic.  Outside, feral children prowled through street-corner garbage.  Inside. Philippe Heffinck's files showed that chronic malnutrition for children under five stood at 31 per cent.  “That accounts, in the whole of Iraq, for 1.1 million children, including in the Kurdish areas.  This is a serious problem – particularly serious when you have chronic malnutrition up to two years old, because that is the period when the brain is formed.  You become stunted.  There is a lack of physical and mental growth that will afflict the child – his schooling, his job opportunities, his chances of founding a family and quite possibly his or her offspring as well.”

 

    Patrick Cockburn, reporting from Baghdad for The Independent in April 1998, described the way in which the Tigris River had changed colour to “a rich café au lait brown” because raw sewage from 3.5 million people in Baghdad and other towns upstream was pouring into the river. Contamination of drinking water, he wrote, was the main reason why the proportion of Iraqi children who died before they reached twelve months had risen from 3.5 per cent in the year before sanctions to 12 per cent nine years later.  Lack of spare parts for electrical equipment, absence of staff and the subsequent reduced power supply had cut off clean water in many areas.*

 

    Western humanitarian workers sometimes felt their own contribution was near-useless.  Judy Morgan, who worked for CARE in Baghdad, described how she felt like a poor relative of King Canute.  “The water is lapping round our feet before we've even had the chance to order the tide

 

 

    *The evidence of massive human suffering was now overwhelming.  A UN humanitarian panel on sanctions reported in 1999 that “the gravity of the humanitarian situation of the Iraqi people is indisputable and cannot he overstated.  Irrespective of alleged attempts by the Iraq authorities to exaggerate the significance of certain facts for political propaganda purposes, the data from different sources as well as qualitative assessments of bona fide observers and sheer common sense analysis of economic variables converge and corroborate this evaluation.”  UNICEF reported in August 1999 that “if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998” (emphasis in original).


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to turn back,” she told me one afternoon in 1998.  Her colleague Margaret Hassan had a thick file of examples to prove that she was telling the truth. If this was a Third-World country we could bring in some water pumps at a cost of a few hundred pounds and they could save thousands of lives she said.  “But Iraq was not a Third-World country before the 1991 war and you can't run a developed society on aid.  What is wrong with the water system here is a result of breakdown and damage to complex and very expensive water purification plants.  And this eats up hundreds of thousands of pounds in repairs for just one region of the country.  The doctors here are excellent – many were trained in Europe as well as Iraq – but because of sanctions, they haven't had access to a medical journal for eight years.  And in the sciences, what does that mean?”

 

    A mere glance at the list of the items prohibited by the UN sanctions committee revealed the infantile but vindictive nature of the campaign now being waged against Iraq.  Included in the list were pencils, pencil-sharpeners, shoe laces, material for shrouds, sanitary towels, shampoo, water purification chemicals, medical swabs, gauze, medical syringes, medical journals, cobalt sources for X-ray machines, disposable surgical gloves, medication for epilepsy, surgical instruments, dialysis equipment, drugs for angina, granite shipments, textile plant equipment, toothpaste, toothbrushes and toilet paper, tennis balls, children's clothes, nail polish and lipstick.*

 

    The campaigning journalist John Pilger, one of the few reporters who had courage to condemn the sanctions at the time as wicked and immoral, recorded how, just before Christmas 1999, the British Department of Trade and Industry – a government department which tried to defend the sale of two mustard gas components to Iraq prior to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait on the grounds that one of them could be used to make ink for ballpoint pens – blocked a shipment of vaccine meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever.  “Dr. Kim Howells told parliament why.  His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply.  The children’s vaccines were banned, he said. ‘because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.’  That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction – sanctions – seemed not to occur to him.”

 

    By 2000, up to 70 per cent of Iraqi civilian industrial enterprises were closed or operating at a much reduced level.  Unemployment had reached at least 6o per cent.  Halliday and his successor Hans von Sponeck, the top UN humanitarian officers in Iraq, had both resigned their posts in Baghdad – Halliday in September 1998, and von Sponeck on 14 February 2000 – and were now speaking out in the press, on television and at public meetings, von Sponeck pointing out that 167 Iraqi children were dying every day.  “In all my years at the UN,” he said, “I had never been

 

 

    *For example, the Iraqi National Spinal Cord Injuries Centre – set up with the help of a Danish team during the Iran-Iraq War to look after seriously wounded soldiers – lacked medicine and supplies throughout the period of sanctions.  Staff were forced to re-sterilize gauze and catheters and were not permitted to receive new medical textbooks and journa1s.


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exposed to the kind of political manoeuvring and pressure that I saw at work in this programme.   We're treating Iraq as if it were made up of 23 million Saddam Husseins, which is rubbish.”

 

    Halliday was far more outspoken.  “The World Health Organisation confirmed only ten days ago,” he said in October 1998, “that the monthly rate of sanctions-related child mortality for children under five years of age is from five to six thousand per month.  They believe this is an underestimate, since in rural parts of Iraq children are not registered at birth, and if they die within six weeks of birth, they are never registered ... I recently met with trade union leaders [in Iraq] who asked me why the United Nations does not simply bomb the Iraqi people, and do it efficiently, rather than extending sanctions which kill Iraqis incrementally over a long period ... Sanctions are undermining the cultural and educational recovery of Iraq and will not change its system of governance.  Sanctions encourage isolation, alienation and fanaticism ... Sanctions constitute a serious breach of the United Nations charter on human rights and children's rights.”  In 2000, Halliday wrote that “here we are in the middle of the millennium year and we are responsible for genocide in Iraq.  Today the prime minister,Tony Blair, is on the defensive on a range of largely domestic issues.  His unending endorsement of the Clinton/Albright programme for killing the children of Iraq is seldom mentioned.  What does that say about us all?”

 

    The British Foreign Office – and especially Peter Ham, who was now minister of state with responsibility for the Middle East -- tried to trash the UN officials who had resigned.  “We know that some have raised concerns about the resignations of Hans von Sponeck and, before him, Dennis Halliday, as UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq,” a sleekly worded letter from the Foreign Office's Middle East Department told a medical doctor who was an independent reader.

 

            Managing a unique and complex programme worth billions of pounds is a job for an       experienced and dedicated administrator committed to making most of the “oil for   food” program for the Iraqi people. Unfortunately neither Halliday nor von Sponeck           was the right man for it. It was clear from very early on that they disagreed with the        decisions of the Security Council and the purposes of the UN resolutions, It was not        therefore in their interests to make “oil for food” work.

 

    This was ridiculous.  Halliday, a compassionate and decent man, and the earnest von Sponeck were both experienced humanitarian workers.  To claim that two UN coordinators, one after another, were both wrong men for the job was beyond credibility.

 

    The same letter claimed that a new Security Council Resolution, 1284, would make the “oil for food” programme more effective because it removed the ceiling on Iraqi oil exports, failing to add that Iraq's broken oil facilities and a sudden lowering of the price of oil – which was not the UN's fault – largely neutered the effects of the initiative.  What Iraq needed was not the sudden relaxation of restrictions on personal items but serious reinvestment in industry, infrastructure and commercial life – something that UN sanctions did not permit.  Toothpaste and toilet rolls were no use if Iraqis could no longer afford them.


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    And every few months, as the UN inspectors sent to disarm the Baathist regime of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons – often faced with the obtuseness and threats of Iraq's security police – sought to discover the extent of Saddam's armoury, the American's would announce another “threat” by the Iraqi dictator to invade Kuwait, to ignore the U.S-imposed no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq – supposedly set up to “protect” the Shiites and Kurds – or to retrieve ground-to-ground missiles that had been left behind in the UN-administered zone along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.  Repeatedly, in the early nineties, I would race to Beirut airport for yet another flight to Kuwait, just in case Saddam was about to repeat his messianic blunder of 1990 – even though network news shows were filming Iraqi soldiers milling around rusting troop trains, some of them barefoot, many of them clearly emaciated, their uniforms torn and discoloured.

 

    Almost two years after they celebrated victory in the 1991 Gulf War, the conflict's three principal Western allies – the United States, Britain and France – launched a series of air strikes against Iraq's supposed violation of the southern no-fly zone and its seizure of Silkworm anti-ship missiles from the United Nations.  On 12 January 1993, six British Tornado bombers and a squadron of French Mirage jets based in Saudi Arabia joined a much larger force of American planes from the carrier Kitty Hawk in attacking targets inside Iraq, most of them missile sites and radar bases.  For more than a week, the United States had protested at Iraq's positioning of SAM anti-aircraft missile batteries inside the “no-fly” zones.

 

    Yet if the Americans needed a regular crisis in the Gulf, Saddam also wanted to provoke tension.  Saddam's spokesman had claimed once more that very day that Kuwait was an integral part of Iraq that will be restored.  The United Nations had escorted a troop of journalists up to the new Iraq-Kuwaiti frontier – the one the UN revised in favour of Kuwait but that Iraq did not accept – and happily displayed the wooden boxes (stamped “Ministry of Defence, Jordan”) from which Iraqis had indeed seized their old Silkworm missiles the previous weekend, weapons that were taken before the eyes of the UN guards.

 

    That same morning, the Iraqis had made their third foray across the new frontier – the one they didn't recognize – saying they had an agreement with the UN to remove their equipment from warehouses up to 15 January.  But they had not asked permission from the UN or the Kuwaiti government to do so.  Why not?  And why, for that matter, had we not hitherto been told that the Iraqi forays into the Qasr naval base began eight months previously?  In May 1991, it emerged, Iraq took eleven Silkworm missiles from the base and then another four less than a month later. It subsequently gave the four back – at the request of the Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission – but kept the other eleven. The weekend's foray allowed them to recapture those four missiles yet again.


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    Saddam was acting, it seemed, according to an American script.  It wasn't the first time that this odd continuity operated between Washington and Baghdad.  Just as both sides found it expedient to ignore the mass Iraqi casualties of the 1991 war, so now Saddam was playing his appointed role as aggressor.  “Saddam is mad, but you know why he's done this?” an old Kuwaiti friend – one of the lucky ones to escape captivity inside Iraq in the last days of the war asked me.  He was laughing a trifle contemptuously, I thought.  Saddam doesn't care about Bush.  He wants the Arabs to care.  The UN fails in Bosnia ... More important, the UN failed to get Israel to take back the Palestinian detainees in Lebanon [deported illegally by the Israelis as 'terrorists'].  But the UN lets America use the big stick on Iraq.  Saddam wants the Arabs to think about that difference.  He thinks that way the Arabs will turn to him.

 

    Saddam was doing this in an increasingly self-delusional way.  His hall-hour television broadcast to Iraqis on 17 January 1993 was a masterpiece of Arab nationalist bombast.  He cursed the Arab “traitors” who had opposed him and the Iraqis who had rebelled against his rule two years earlier. The UN he branded as a mere satrapy of the United States – this, at least, was an allegation of some merit – and insisted that the “Mother of all Battles” had not ended, nor had the struggle for “victorious Iraq.”  Nor for a “liberated Palestine.”  And Kuwait and Iraq were part of “one nation.”  It was a Gulf War anniversary speech aimed at “the children of Arabism everywhere.”

 

    In some ways, the unsmiling Saddam was the same dictator whom the West had learned to loathe during the occupation of Kuwait.  His olive-green uniform with the inevitable brigadier-general's crossed-swords insignia on its shoulders – was crudely offset by a bowl of red-and-white flowers.  Iraq was glorious, its people steadfast, acting only on behalf of the “Arab nation.”  America and its partners were “criminals,” bent only on the division of a powerful Arab nation prepared to stand alone and on the acquisition of Kuwait as a “rented oil well.”  But he then embarked on a striking personal attack on the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait, talking to the Kuwaiti population in an eerie combination of threat, entreaty and apology.

 

    He urged Kuwaitis to “learn the lessons,” to “absorb the circumstances” and “understand” the period of Iraqi occupation.  Iraqis who had committed any acts against Kuwaitis had been punished, he announced.  “Those Kuwaitis who remained in their country will remember that one of the [Iraqi] officers remained hanging for everyone to see because of the bad things he did to Kuwaitis. This is the real face of Baghdad.  These are the principles of Baghdad ... if there were any bad acts they took place through traitors directed by the enemies of Iraq.”

 

    There was no mention of the torture chambers, the rape of foreign women, the execution of resistance men and women (in front of their families, of course); merely a reference to the unfortunate necessity that faced Iraqi armoured forces to “return fire” when they were attacked. Kuwaitis should therefore feel “brotherhood and love in God and in the nation which holds them in its heart in Baghdad.”  Kuwaitis did not remember history quite so romantically, though few would forget the hanging Iraqi colonel – truly “the real face of Baghdad” – who was indeed suspended from a crane in a central square, allegedly, so it was said at the time, for helping the Kuwaiti resistance.