On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, commonly known as "The Gulf War"

It has been a terrible six months, and more. In addition to the publicly planned and quasi-publicly executed destruction of a country and the mass murder of many of its people, there has been the extent to which the addiction of the public in Britain to the belief that they have access every hour to a source of summary about the true condition of the world - with twice daily enlargments in print if required - has been ruthlessly exploited. It has been an essential part of the military bombing campaign: the largest bombardment of anti-language to which the British public has ever been exposed, as a necessary adjunct to its armed forces' participation in the largest military bombardment of a country in History. That bombing has stopped, but the domestic bombardment continues unchecked and apparently still unquestioned. It seems that people must not be allowed to realise the extent of the savagery that has been perpetrated in their name. By the time that the destruction of cities, towns, food-storage supplies and even essential sewage processing works does begin to dawn on the public mind, it seems it must by that time have been primed to understand that all such destruction and all such murder must be seen as the work of the demon from Hell, Saddam Hussein.

 

So many countries have had their eye on the carve-up to come, the backhander to be received, or the trade deal threatened with withdrawal. Amongst tonnages of printed matter and months of broadcast verbiage about morality, not a scrap of moral judgement has had any bearing on any one of the thirty or so countries involved. In the Security Council, the supposed "problem" was to have been Russia and China. But Russia is now in the soup-queue, and its handouts from Saudi Arabia and America would certainly have been scrapped with any genuine Russian opposition. China on the other hand could agree to turn a blind eye while the West reopened trade and let it get on with prosecuting the same students whose indictment for criminal offence the West had previously condemned. The phrase "all necessary means" was the core of anti-language at the heart. It meant to the Russians and the Chinese "You three get on with the bombing, we didn't sign anything that can hold us responsible". The juxtaposition of public statement with a kind of public winking extended throughout, echoed faithfully from Bush to Major to Kinnock, and beyond. "The sole object is to drive Iraq from Kuwait": "The worst possible outcome is if Iraq now chooses to leave Kuwait". These two sentences would be used in the same paragraph as if they did not contradict each other. They didn't in that language was not being used honestly but strategically. It was necessary for the evasion of responsibility to say that the object of the exercise was the defence of freedom - not that freedom was a concept much known in Kuwait under the Emir. But it had to be accepted that the real object of the exercise was the effective destruction of Iraq - this for listeners of a military-strategy turn of mind. In agreeing to this understanding, the listener was flattered with a pseudo-confidentiality, and bolstered with the notion of compliance in decision-making. The decision was "not to send the wrong signals to Saddam Hussein". So certain things had to be said, and certain things had to be understood. Mum's the word, corporal.

 

The BBC World Service in its broadcasts to North America often focusses on the transactions taking place in the United Nations building in New York. On March 20th - which happens to be the day this article is being written - the 3.am news announced the report of the United Nations envoy to Iraq. The envoy had travelled extensively in the country, and found a major and "dramatic" - to quote the adjective used - cause for world concern. Iraq is devastated, with roads and means of communications destroyed. There is a desperate shortage of food throughout the country. The agricultural system has broken down due to the failure of fuel supplies, which like the food storage containers, have been destroyed by the bombing. The price of corn is already beyond the reach of most Iraquis. There are thousands of refugees fleeing into Iran, into an area already devastated by the Iran-Iraq war. Many of these people, women, children, and men, are suffering from the burn effects of Allied - the report specifically said "Allied" - bombing. They are not receiving proper medical treatment. There is a chronic shortage of medicine as well as food for Iraquis, and with the coming hot weather the risk of plague is increasing. The pressure should grow, the report concluded, for the Secretary General to reconvene the Security Council in order to ask that the embargo on food and medicine into Iraq - which has now operated for seven months - should be lifted.

 

None of these details are themselves new or surprising. Anyone who has not wilfully shut out the thought of what must be the effect of blocking food and medicine to 170 million people for months, then dropping 2,500 planeloads of bombs on their country every day for seven weeks, would not require an envoy from the United Nations to warn them of a human disaster. All the horrors of so-called "conventional" weapons that had been stored up in Germany for use against the Communists have been dropped on a conscript and civilian population. The people who had suffered for more than twenty years under a dictator whom the West had propped up over them, now have had to suffer many times worse the murder and terror for which he had been responsible; but the new murder and terror was from the "Allies" - which is to say principally America, Britain and France. Nothing short of nuclear weapons was spared, and these were spared both because the effects could be otherwise achieved, and because their use would have been counter-productive in propaganda terms. The "fuel-air-explosive" bombs used are sometimes artfully described, in their capacity to incinerate everything within a radius of several miles, as each being "equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon". Napalm was used, though when this story broke, and instantly disappeared, it was not before assurances that it was "only being used on ditches filled with petrol". The burns of the refugees arriving in Iran are burns from napalm.

 

And the devastation was inflicted not only on Iraq but on Kuwait itself, which was supposed to be being "liberated". Several days before the final conflagration, a journalist briefing boasted of "more than 3,000" bomber attacks on Kuwait over two days alone. Again this was hardly surprising. The Emir himself had said that if it was necessary to flatten Kuwait in order to "liberate" it, this is what should be done. A reporter phoning in to Irish radio - which was one station where one could occasionally hear reports that hadn't been cleared by the "Allied" censors - described his feelings when from a helicopter near the Kuwait border he first saw the dense black clouds on the horizon of the oil wells on fire: "We thought at first it was just another massive Allied air-raid." Another reporter described how from thirty miles within the Saudi Arabian border the ground was shaking under his feet from the force of the bombs landing across the Kuwaiti border, where the whole sky was lit up with flashes. This long before the so-called "turkey shoot" of the retreating Iraqi forces, which apparently caused some public figures such surprise and anguish. One report in the Guardian midway through the "war" mentioned US pilots' reluctance to knock off for sleep because they wanted to be over Kuwait and Iraq bombing, the targets were so easy. There was practically an air-traffic jam, apparently, and as there was no resistance from the Iraqui air force, which had simply fled, bombing runs could add insult to injury by not even bothering to switch off their undercarriage lights. This report was unusual in that the Guardian, like all the newspapers quality or tabloid, remained wholly jingoistic throughout the campaign. The Observer like many of the "qualities" found time to praise Mr Major's "tone". Now one knows what tone should be adopted by a British prime minister when his troops are firing Cruise missiles into civilian cities.

 

It is logical to Western governments that no Arab country should be allowed to control oil supplies unless it is sympathetic to Western perceived needs. The countries involved, including Iraq and Kuwait, were the invention of Western diplomats earlier this century. The discovery of oil has meant the Monarchy card has had to be played with a vengeance, giving spurious historical validity to these new entities whilst being cheaper to maintain than a permanent foreign standing army. So cordial diplomatic relations have been necessary with "families" who seem to spend one half of their lives breeding children of the same surname and the other half breeding horses or sitting at gaming tables. British domestic policies - such as the Labour goverment turn-around of 1976 - have had to be adjusted to suit such as the Emir of Kuwait's investment plans. Shuttlings between the palaces of either country have been a crucial part of protocol. The nub and only relevance is the contractual linking to British and American oil company interests. One newspaper report before the bombing started noted how the Kuwaiti minister of defence - one of the ruling Al Sabah family of course - had lost more at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo the previous week than his regime spent in health care in a whole year. The same report noted that amongst the first industries to be affected by Kuwaiti destabilisation would be the British horseracing industry. These were the people whose regime the young working-class soldiers from the housing schemes of Britain had to be sent to "defend".

 

But once the "war" got under way such criticism by newspapers was abandoned, and one and all lined up behind Queen and Country. This included the Glasgow Evening Times for instance, which the day before the bombing began had carried an opinion poll showing 70% of Scottish people against military action. The best that can be said about papers like the Evening Times is that at least they weren't openly racist like the morning tabloids. One knew what to expect from Mr Maxwell's organs: he publicly stated, at a Solidarity with Israel conference in 1989, that newspapers should not attack the Israeli government nor publish "rubbish" such as the intelligence report which claimed genuine Israeli- Palestinian negotiations must mean talking to the PLO. The headline in one of his newspapers before Christmas - "Crazed Arab Stabs Scots Squaddie" - is more or less par for the Middle-Eastern course from his Daily Record and Sunday Mail. One might go on here about the anti-Arab racism that has been such a prominent feature of American culture this past decade and more - e.g. in numerous simple things like the mindless "terrorists" in the otherwise excellent Back to the Future film by Spielberg - but this would require another article. It is just another twist in the story of anti-Semitism: people tend to forget that both the
A.abic and the Jewish peoples are Semitic.

 

Besides the Press the main source of "information" has been the daily "briefings" by various Army representatives, and the reports on television and radio subject to Ministry of Defence control in conjunction with the public relations firm hired by John Wakeham to sell the conduct of the "war" on the government's behalf. Walking along a main road past shops selling banked rows of televisions in Britain during January and February 1991, was like being in South America, El Salvador or Chile. At any hour of the day these shop windows would be filled with images of a person in flak jacket dispensing solemn "information" to wholly subservient and unprobing journalists. The image that occurs about what actually took place at these "briefings" is one that I think comes from Karl Kraus, about a music hall sketch in which on stage a streetlamp casts a small circle of light. Around is total darkness. A man has dropped a sixpence, and he spends his time walking round and round the lamp-post, looking for his sixpence in the circle of light. That to me was what the "briefings" were about. Many words were taboo, chief of which was the word "Iraq" itself. The possibility had to be avoided that people might actually imagine a real country with real people having an ancient culture. Instead there was the language- bombardment of demonology: "Saddam" this, "Saddam" that - as if it was a personal demon that was stretched like Gulliver from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. As for the catalogue of horrors that was being dropped on this demon's territory, there was a tension between the wish to brag about the efficacy of its mayhem and the need not to let people's mental pictures of this mayhem become graphic and actual. Thus what was bragged of as the biggest aerial bombardment in the history of warfare somehow became bound up with its also being one of the greatest acts of humanitarian charity the world had ever seen. As Mr Bush in one of his many incredible black=white statements put it, the whole operation was "a victory for the human race". It seemed at one point as if the designer of the Cruise missile would be in line for this year's Nobel Prize for Peace. Here were thousand-pound bombs that seemingly paused at the kerb to let old ladies cross the road. And the gentlemen of the Press marvelled, wrote it down, and showed it on television. After all, it fell well within the light cast by the streetlamp on the stage.

 

But the most crucial part in the conduct of the "war" at home has been played neither by the Press nor by the broadcasting companies, but by Parliament, in particular the parties of Opposition. The polls such as were allowed to be published before January 17th showed deep division of opinion in the country. If Parliament had reflected that division, if the Opposition parties had reflected the huge opposition there was to military intervention, then the effect would have been very significant. Broadcasts would have had to have reflected the Parliamentary divisions, as would have the Press. But the tabloids would probably have screamed Treason, and that is probably the main reason why, just as at the time of the Falklands Adventure, Labour decided that the only possible course was to enter wholeheartedly into a de facto Government of National Unity. "Politics" were suspended. If one called up the "Politics" or "Parliament" sections on Ceefax, there was for weeks virtually nothing there, other than a few references as to on which Ceefax pages Gulf War "information" could be sought. In the Commons itself, the exchanges between Major and Kinnock became ever more affable, ever more "statesmanlike". Labour's foreign minister Kaufmann seemed almost to speak slower and a little deeper than usual, as if he had had tuition from the same How-to-Sound-Grave-and-Important tutor as has trained Douglas Hurd. The main activity for the Shadow Front Bench was to minimise "revolt" in the Parliamentary Party. This meant that Healey could express his opposition to the War so long as he didn't actually vote with Benn against it. Other MPs could be seen having their own cake and eating it in this fashion, with or without articles by such as Brian Wilson in the Glasgow Herald. It was left to a small bunch loosely though not entirely associated with Benn who consistently expressed their opposition, and voted accordingly; people like George Galloway and Maria Fyfe. Each expression of humanitarian principle, each crumb of sanity, had to be seized on with gratitude. The Pope and the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland, the Protestant World Council of Churches, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland - all shamed those politicians who couldn't even find within themselves the humanitarianism of the official orthodox clergy. The grotesqueries of a "thanksgiving service" is a political move to cover some of these tracks.

 

And what of the Scottish National Party? After all, it was Scotland which expressed 70% opposition on the eve of the bombing's commencement. Unfortunately if the Parliamentary Labour Party can be fairly understood as having stifled mass opposition throughout the UK to the "War" once it got under way, in Scotland this can be even more pointedly said of the SNP. They it is who have spoken about Labour's abandonment of the socialist and working-class vote in Scotland, an abandonment they have recently claimed to seek to make good. But the various wings of the SNP hadn't a clue what to say about the "war" other than make pathetic mutterings about percentages of Jocks versus Sassenachs at the front. When it came to the most important decision of foreign policy since the Second World War, yet again the SNP was tied to its "your-liege-Ma'am, bonny-fechters-the-warld-ower" camp followers; people whose idea of a liberated Scotland is the Royal Toast given in Lallans. But the SNP like some on the so- called "soft left" of the Parliamentary Labour Party did make some protest about "staying within United Nations guidelines". This meant not actually invading Iraq. At present Iraq has not only been invaded, it has an army of occupation, and many thousands of bodies have had to be cleared. However, that is a taboo subject, and no-one is asking any questions about it - neither the SNP nor the Labour Party. For the truth is that though the mass bombing has stopped, reporting is still firmly under the control of the Ministry of Defence.

 

A.y bodies, any destruction, any disease, is to be blamed on Hussein and the present civil war over which the Allies have booked rather more than a grandstand seat. The British parliamentary parties have been very glad of the opportunity provided by the Budget to re-enter at last the theatre of oppositional dialogue. It is as if the Speaker had blown a ceremonial whistle for the ritual once more to begin. What better than with the annual pantomine of the Budget - that yearly ceremonial-encumbered ritual tinkering with tax, fags and booze which shuns the really dirty work such as the raising of prescription charges that is pushed through on other days without studio discussion, eleborate presentation or response? But at any rate with the Budget, Parliament can now be declared officially "back to normal".

 

Normality in reporting from the Gulf though remains total censorship. Having listened to the BBC World Service 3.a.m. news, I was still awake at 5.30, so watched the ITV "World News" broadcast that goes out then. There was again a special report from Iraq, quite a few minutes' long. It made no mention of the United Nations envoy's report. It did mention fighting between Iraqui government forces and Kurds, and it mentioned refugees fleeing into Iran - refugees burned with napalm. However by omission the clear message was that these were people who had been napalmed by Hussein's forces. As for Kuwait, there was still no report on the massive damage done by "allied" bombing, and there was still no report on how many oilwells were on fire. This information the Army Command has been refusing to supply, perhaps because it might seem too much like a "propaganda coup" for "the enemy", or too obviously a fulfillment of the "ecological disaster" forewarned by many who opposed military action. However the problem of discussing it best has to be faced, and the report of 5.30 am made some start. It showed children and elderly people in hospitals with respiratory problems, whose conditions have been exacerbated by the blanket of oil-thick smog over Kuwait City. How refreshing it was to hear British anxiety over the provision of medicine to the young and the elderly in the region. What a difference a border makes. And the British soldiers were conspicuously solicitous too. There are unexploded mines lying around Kuwait, and a group of British soldiers were filmed making a television advert warning children how to recognise them, and not to touch them. So the combined sequence of quite typical icons from this "report from the Gulf", three weeks after the bombing has stopped, gave this message: "Saddam Hussein is waging war on children and old people by air and ground. The British serviceman is doing his best to protect the people from this." As for the United Nations report - not a word. These news bulletins on this particular day, March 20th 1991, are unusual only insofar as it was possible at 3.a.m. to hear a report highly critical of the "Allies" in respect of the total devastation and the continuing suffering caused by them in Iraq. The 9am BBC Radio Four bulletin six hours later was, like the ITV news, wholly uncritical. Its only Middle East report was that the Kuwaiti cabinet had resigned. People were fed up that there was still no electricity and other supplies - apparently there had been much sabotage done by the Iraquis before they left. Of damage done by British and American bombing - again not a word. There has been no mention of that since the bombing stopped, other than an occasional reference to the "battle for building contracts" that the government minister Peter Lilley will be flying out to wage with some business friends. The deliberate destruction of a country, of its means of communications and of its population's means of maintaining life and health; the deliberate refusal to consider peace terms until as many as possible of a conscript army has been exterminated using weapons against which they have no means of defending themselves: this to me is an act of genocide. But this word causes disquiet about exaggerration or dramatisation, not least because people feel you can't use the same word for the murder of six million people as you use for much lesser amounts. I have looked up the United Nations convention on genocide; some might argue for the term "political mass murder" in this case. If so, let them call it that. How many were murdered might never be known: the American commander in charge has said he is "not in the business of body counts". Neither is President Hussein. One would have thought that it might have at least occurred to people that there will be Iraqi survivors, or their descendants, who will feel that if there is any justice in the world, the cities of Britain and America will one day get at least a little of what their citizens were apparently so indifferent to inflicting on the towns and cities of Iraq. To let one's mind continue in turmoil over present enormities is to reduce oneself effectively to the status of a Francis Bacon scream. The enormities have at no time in History been absent from a fully defined contemporary context of any single happy human life. There's a maturity of maturity, the crossing point where you decide not to go "insane" but to insist on your own indestructible - except through death - status as a human being and a citizen of the world.
Accepting this is to accept the always present validity of humour and dalliance, of turning up the road to the left or wherever because that's what briefly occurs, to sit somewhere out of anyone's planned cognizance looking at the lines in your hand, or a leaf, or the sky for no other reason than because there is no reason to do so. That is nothing to do with "sentimentality" in my opinion. It is to do with being a human being.

 

The following "Questions and Answers on the Gulf" were completed at the time of the end of the bombing on February 28th. I called them Leonard's Shorter Catechism, or "And Now would you please welcome St Augustine of Hippo, who's come along this evening to talk about 'The Concept of the Just Fuel-Air- Explosive Bomb'."

 

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Q. What is meant by the phrase "by peaceful means"?
A. "By peaceful means" is a special United Nations phrase meaning "No food or medicine to be allowed in" to a country. If for instance Iraq, Palestine, and Cuba had a disagreement with Great Britain and were able to blockade the country from receiving any food or medicine, this would be called "pursuing their disagreement with Great Britain by peaceful means."

Q. Why did Pope Urban the Second launch the First Crusade?
A. "To restore peace and stability in the Middle East".

Q. Who said "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth"?
A. This was said by Jesus Christ on the Mount of Olives. He was quoting in anticipation George Bush, who used the words in his address to the American people after ordering the mass bombing of Iraq.

Q. What flies from Gloucestershire?
A. This might be any one of a number of migratory birds of Gloucestershire which winter in the Mediterranean or Africa. For example, the Garden Warbler, the Night Jar, the Swift, the Stonechat, or the Whinchat with its snappy tic-tac and soft peu, and its 5-7 pale blue eggs laid in a cupped surface on the ground under shrubbery.

Q. What do you call something that flies from Gloucestershire to a place where it "minces everything on the ground within an area one mile wide by three miles long"?
A. A human being.

Q. What do you call the things that mince everything on the ground within an area one mile wide by three miles long?
A. "Conventional weapons".

Q. What flies across France?
A. Only birds, planes, human beings and conventional weapons are allowed to fly across France.

Q. Sphinx: What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?
A. American pilot: - "A cockroach".

Q. What is the percentage of people in command of the British Army who have working-class accents?
A. I'm sorry, he would have been pleased to speak to you, but he is in bed with laryngitis.

Q. What is the percentage of British troops in the front line who have public school accents?
A. I'm sorry, he would have been pleased to speak to you, but he is in bed with laryngitis.

Q. What do you get after three weeks if you lock a million and a half people up for 24 hours a day?
A. Thirteen billion dollars.

Q. What did the Scottish National Party say when Iraq annexed Kuwait?
A. "It's Scotland's oil!"

Q. Pete asks: "If Marconi invented the radio, and Winston Churchill invented Kuwait, who invented the steam engine?"
A. James Watt. And he was Scottish.

Q. What is the etymology of the words "Saudi Arabia"?
A. "Saudi Arabia" is an abbreviation from an ancient Arabic phrase which translates literally as "The Aramco Oil Company International".

Q. In which book does Biggles have a dogfight with the Airforce of the World Enemy, thus helping to save the world at great personal risk?
A. Biggles Goes to War, Biggles Flies South, Biggles Flies North etc.

Q. In which book does the Airforce of the World Enemy run away, so Biggles bombs cities, towns, roads, bridges, telephone exchanges, water supplies and electricity supplies, so that the survivors have difficulty getting food and the injured have difficulty getting treatment?
A. The Minutes of the British War Cabinet January-February 1991.

Q. What did the Labour Shadow Cabinet say when it realised it was an essential part of a Government of National Unity waging planned genocide?
A. Shhh.

Q. What did you used to call someone who should feel guilty about their country's past policy of genocide?
A. A German.

Q. What do you call a quarter of a million Germans marching in 1991 against genocide?
A. "Anti-semitic".

Q. What do you do when a president gasses 5,000 people in his own country?
A. Show the bodies on television - but keep selling him arms.

Q. What do you do when a president's troops invade Panama killing another 5,000 people?
A. Don't show the bodies on television.

Q. What does "control of the airwaves" mean?
A. It means suspending oil adverts until people can watch them and keep their food down at the same time.

A. The telephones sell-off, the gas sell-off, the water sell-off, the electricity sell-off, the Tory leadership contest, the total destruction of Iraq... Q. What is the question?

Q. What did Britain take part in on Tuesday, February 19th 1991?
A. It took part in what was at that point "one of the most ferocious attacks on the centre of Baghdad", using bombers and Cruise Missiles fired from ships.

Q. What did John Major say about the bombing the next day?
A. He said: "One is bound to ask about attacks such as these: What sort of people is it that can carry them out? They certainly are consumed with hate. They are certainly sick of mind, and they can be certain of one thing - they will be hunted and hunted until they are found." (He was talking about 5lb of explosive left in a litter-basket at Victoria Station in London. This killed one person and critically injured three.)

Q. "Many of these modern weapons show a considerable amount of imagination in their construction. I was told the other day that some rockets can each saturate an area the size of 60 football pitches. Is this true?"
A. "Yes. They're fired from multiple rocket launch systems, and twelve can be fired at a time. Every rocket breaks up into 600 smaller bombs or "bomblets" before they land. They're sometimes jocularly called "the honourable members" after the honourable members of the British House of Commons that voted for the war. You could maybe have a think about that next time you're watching Prime Minister's Question Time on tv!"

Q. What does "I will only continue to support the war if it stays within United Nations guidelines" mean?
A. It means "I support the mass bombing and total destruction of Iraq but I do not support the sending in of armed human beings."

Q. What does United Nations Resolution 242 state?
A. Shhh.

Q. What do you do with wee babies, four year olds, five year olds, grannies, people whom you would get on with fine if you knew them, people who would get on your nerves, football supporters, teachers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, writers, unemployed people, people that work with their hands, people that work with pens or computers, janitors, directors of firms, managers, people that work at home, bus drivers, taxi drivers, actors, electricians, policemen, clergy, workaholics, feckless wasters, boys out of school into uniform, older soldiers, musicians, alcoholics, geniuses, idiots, people who don't like the light being turned off at night, people who "prefer the old ways", people who whistle in the street?
A. Ehm... What country are they from?

(et cetera, ad infinitum)