BOOKS

The I of the beholder

Robert Fox

FROM THE HOUSE OF WAR by John Simpson Hutchinson, £13.99, .£6.99, pp. 390 he Gulf conflict brought us the first 'real time' war on television. Via satellite we could see action as it happened, bombs bursting, Baghdad burning, Kurds fleeing. The satellite dish was Cyclops' eye, all- seeing and all-knowing. Supreme practitioner of the new dark arts of tele- vision was the Cable News Network company of Atlanta, who brought it home before you could blink.

On occasion the CNN news message seemed to outrun the messenger. It made its own air-raid alarms against the Scuds in Saudi Arabia, co-opted the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister as part-time correspon- dent and commentator, and became Saddam Hussein's link to the outside world. Within a few days of the first raids on Baghdad starting, only CNN was per- mitted to stay in the Iraqi capital, 'because of the high regard here for CNN's objectiv- ity', the viewers were told. In fact, accord- ing to John Simpson in his sparkling memoir of the Gulf events, CNN had made a deal with the regime for a 24-hour open four-wire telephone link. The notion was that CNN's presence guaranteed that the line would not be cut from outside, and the Iraqis could use it to contact their overseas embassies and the hoods and hobgoblins who hung around in them.

So a terrible narcissism was born. The Gulf conflict became a non-stop war movie piped from the sky into every home in the West, and by golly CNN was not merely going to report the action but be a star attraction in it. As Mr Peter Arnett, the lucky man who stayed behind in Baghdad, declared, he had a 'contribution' to make.

CNN is one of the few out-and-out villains in Simpson's new book. He treats most of his colleagues with fairness and generosity, indulging even the crackpot historicism and hair-brained prophecies of Mr Robert Fisk, who saw the whole opera- tion against Saddam as a crusade doomed to failure. On the basis of a few notes about British tank deployment and the friendship of more than 23 years he has been unwarrantedly fullsome about this correspondent, too. (We started journalis- tic life together as fellow galley slaves in the BBC Radio News operation). Over the years John Simpson has come to offer and represent some of the best things in British broadcast journalism: graphic description, quirky observation, trenchant analysis, sobering reflection. Never wearing his conscience on his sleeve, he keeps it in a back pocket for use at just the right moment. The BBC is now pecu- liarly blessed with reporters and writers of outstanding sagacity and literary ability, the

likes of Sells, Wheeler, Bridget Kendall, Stephen Jesse!, Lewellyn, Kirby and Silver- man — no other broadcasting company has a squad of such strength and depth. In this company John Simpson is outstanding, a master of the news essay in print (as his frequent articles in this paper show), as well as of the reflective broadcast. Green monsters feed on the occasions that friends and colleagues have remarked these past months, 'Have you read John Simpson in The Spectator on this?' From the House of War is the diary jottings and musings of the man behind those despatches, and we see the perils and pitfalls of how they were made. Simpson emerges as an engaging, sensitive and 'Let's play play Mummies and Baddies.' romantic fellow. He also lives up to his rep- utation as one of the bravest men in this trade. He is intensely proud of his cultural heritage, the best of his very British upbringing. A century ago he would have been pursuing the Great Game on the North West Frontier with vigour. If G. A. Henty, the maestro of prep-school tales of daring do, were alive today, he would soon have a volume entitled 'With Simpson to Suleimaniya,' in the airport bookshop.

The best of the book is the series of brilliant sketches of incidents and individuals caught up in the dreadful imbroglio of Saddam's wars. Simpson was on the scene at Halabje in Kurdestan not long after it had been bombed and gassed by Saddam's men in 1988. Families were caught in flight and at the very moment of eating, mortified by cyanide in frozen tableaux like the citizens of Roman Pompei transfixed by the fumes of Vesuvius. Months after he was haunted by the poster near his London home declaiming, 'Don't forget Halabje'. 'I only Wished I could,' Simpson remarks with disarming candour. -In Baghdad itself we meet the stage army of minders, torturers, and the omnipresent Mukhabarat, the secret police, commanded by Ba'athist functionaries with 'spray-one, patent leather hair'. These are 'the revolu- tionaries who travel business class'. Away from the rent-a-thug gang, the people of Baghdad are warm, generous, civilised, and brave even in their silent opposition to the regime. At an orchestrated hate- demonstration outside the British embassy, a young teacher approaches the BBC team. 'You must realise that no one here sup- ports Saddam. No one wants this war to happen,' she states simply. 'We are only here because we have to be. No one wants to demonstrate. You must understand that.'

The worst of the book comes from the vices of the publishing industry today. The publishers set the impossible deadline of 2 August — the anniversary of Saddam's seizure of Kuwait — and offered negligible production editing, and neglected to pro- vide an index. The conclusion on the rising of the Kurds and the Shi'ites becomes somewhat ragged. (Incidentally, Simpson's own war ended with collision into a large desk while rushing to catch sight of the latest air raid. Later he was thrown out of Iraq and prevented by his broken ribs from returning).

All this fits neatly the spirit in which the crisis of Saddam, the Macbeth of Mesopotamia, has been relayed by the world's print and broadcast media. Satellite news desk delivery has shortened the con- centration span of producer and audience. Information can only be absorbed by the audio-visual morsel — facts, ideas and arguments are measured by the sound bite, and Saddam's was the first full-blown sound bite crisis. The pox has infected pundits and players, broadcasters, politicians and lay audiences alike. Like jesting Pilate in Bacon's essay, the news editors and opinion-formers appear to ask 'what is truth', and will not stay for an answer if it is longer than an electronic minute. The burden of John Simpson's reports and reflections is that a great many truths and answers still need to be uncov- ered and addressed — and soon. The fact that they are ignored might suggest that the next violent round of the Saddam saga may indeed be only a sound bite away.

The biggest unanswered question now, as it was in August a year ago, is the conduct and power of Saddam himself — one of the pathological cases of 'malignant narcissim' of history, argues Simpson. His perfor- mance in 20 years of power makes one wonder why the west could ever regard him as anything more than the most temporary of opportunist allies. One of the most telling images in the book is the sight last April (a month after Desert-Storm), of several divisions of Republican Guard tanks ringed round Saddam's home town of Takrit, the base of the clan upon which his regime is founded. Like any mobster he is prepared to sacrifice anything, his people, capital and country, to his last Takriti blood brother.

Such a conclusion should have been reached in the chanceries of the West as the war with Iran came to a close three years ago. There was always something dis- torted about Saddam's regime and policies. His country has doubled its population in 20 years to 19 million, and for ten years the fertile lands of Mesopotamia have been incapable of feeding those who dwell there. Yet Saddam persisted in spending more than a third of GDP on his army which grew tenfold with a tank force bigger than that of most European NATO partners combined. It was a racing certainty that he was building up a chemical arsenal (which he had used against Iran and the Kurds) and a nuclear capability.

In the year before the attack on Kuwait, the signs were unmistakable that something was up, yet the West and the Gulf coun- tries hardly moved a muscle. The journalist Farzad Bazoft was hanged, nuclear and rocket switches were found at Heathrow, and the parts of a fantastic project for the Supergun were found by customs in Britain and Turkey. Saddam was desperate to rebuild his country's economy after war with Iran, and quarrels with the neighbours over natural resources — Euphrates water with Turkey and oil with Kuwait — became ominously bitter as last summer wore on.

Yet we are made to believe that the attack on Kuwait came as a surprise. Here I disagree with John Simpson, who thinks that it all happened on a spur-of-the- moment decision by Saddam on or after 17 July 1990. The manoeuvres of the Iraqi tanks to invest Kuwait City were well rehearsed — and a senior officer of the British Defence Staff declared the deploy- ment 'a class act' after looking at the intelligence photographs of the operation.

The big mystery about the war itself, when it came, and the way we reported it, was why did it stop when and where it did? The vanity of journalists let them and their public down badly. Most wanted to claim the rosettes of being the first home by piling into the.`liberated' Kuwait City as if that were the object of the entire game. This has obscured serious investigation of the military mission and the political aim of the anti-Saddam coalition. The two were only temporarily compatible, and in essence contradictory. The UN mandate was to free Kuwait, but the military objec- tive was 'the destruction of the Republican Guard reserve and the protection of liber- ated Kuwait'. So the real aim of Schwarzkopfs ground forces at their 'Main Point of Effort' was the destruction of a large part of Saddam's best forces — it was assumed this would eventually topple his regime It would require a ground opera- tion over several phases, and weeks not days to accomplish, however.

Suddenly the CNN sound bite factor intervened. The display on television of the easy advance into Kuwait City, the panicky retreat of the Iraqis, and the sanguinary skirmish with the fleeing garrison on the Mutla Ridge made the White House decide enough was enough. Meanwhile General Schwarzkopf had enjoyed serious disagreement with his corps commanders in the field as he urged them to accomplish a week's work in a few hours. His tanks and aircraft needed to regroup, refuel and take on ammunition, and fresh orders. The American tanks had run out of fuel, and the British had outpaced all artillery cover, though they had the ability to chase as far as Basra. The allied command, principally the Saudis, would not contemplate fighting Saddam's troops inside Iraq for any length of time. Moreover, it might lead to the rise of a Sigite theocracy allied to Tehran. The Saudis had spent the winter urging the Americans into the attack, but overnight they became the most ardent doves.

So the Republican Guard divisions were let off the hook, allowed to run back to Basra with much of their equipment — to fight another day against the Shi'ites in the south and the Kurds in the north. Saddam was left to reign supreme on the rubble of his country, back to the wall and ready to fight to the last of his people.

The snake has been scotched, not killed, perceptions of what to do are as cloudy now as ever and the nusak of the media has done little to clarify the options. The biggest failure we now face is in intelli- gence. From the toings and froings of the UN missions to Baghdad this summer it is evident that the US intelligence agencies using human or electronic surveillance have no precise notion of how much chemi- cal and biological weaponry Saddam has left, nor of his nuclear capability. If, as the Israelis fear, he has enough nuclear materi- al to make a bomb or projectile, and a primitive system to deliver it, he will have to be dealt with as surely as Cato knew that Carthage had to be destroyed. Wait for the next sound bite.

The slipshod approach by most of the West's media to such issues is now a matter of real concern, or if it isn't it should be. We can see the pox of sensation out- running sober thought in the way the historic complexity of Yugoslavia's troubles are now being portrayed on our screens and in print. In the way he faces such trying and awkward questions, John Simpson at least has shown that a journalist's conscience should not — and need not — make cowards of us all.