The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
flying over them. Iraqi aircraft, he was to tell journalists later, were ‘deemed friendly’. The green speck on the radar did not represent a threat. Because the Stark held a course almost directly towards the Iraqi Mirage, the frigate’s superstructure blocked the anti-missile sensors and the Phalanx anti-missile battery which had the ability to pick up an incoming missile and fire automatically. But the system had anyway been switched to manual to avoid shooting down the wrong aircraft in the crowded Gulf. The captain would later claim that the detection systems were also malfunctioning. At 10.09 p.m., Brindel ordered a radio message to be sent to the pilot: ‘Unknown aircraft, this is US navy warship on your 078 for twelve miles. Request you identify yourself.’ There was no reply. A minute later, the aircraft banked towards the north and rose to 5,000 feet. The crew in the Stark’s ‘combat information centre’ failed to identify the two Exocet missiles with their 352-lb warheads which had detached themselves from the Mirage and were now racing towards them.
It was a lookout who first saw the rocket skimming the surface of the water towards the ship and telephoned Brindel. Two seconds later, the Exocet punched into the Stark at 600 mph and exploded in the forward crew’s quarters, cremating several of the American seamen as they lay in their bunks. The second missile exploded thirty seconds later. More than a sixth of the frigate’s crew were to die in less than a minute after the first Exocet spewed 120 pounds of burning solid missile fuel into crew sleeping quarters. The warhead failed to explode but smashed through seven bulkheads before coming to rest against the starboard hull plating. The second missile sent a fireball through the crew’s quarters, its 3,500-degree burning fuel killing most of the thirty-seven victims, turning many of them to ash. The Stark filled with thick, toxic smoke, the temperature even in neighbouring compartments soaring to 1,500 degrees. Bunks, computers and bulkheads melted in the heat. One petty officer spent thirteen hours in a darkened magazine room spraying water on 36 missiles as a 2,000-degree fire raged only a bulkhead away. The ship burned for two days. Even after she was taken in tow, the fires kept reigniting.
Listing and flying the American flag at half-staff, the Stark was pulled towards Bahrain. Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger called the attack ‘indiscriminate’. The Iraqi pilot, he said, ‘apparently didn’t care enough to find out what ship he was shooting at’. But there America’s criticism of Iraq ended. Even before Saddam Hussein made his own unprecedented and contrite expression of remorse – and long before the US navy had begun its own three investigations into the attack – President Ronald Reagan decided to blame Iran. ‘We’ve never considered them hostile at all,’ he said of the Iraqis. ‘They’ve never been in any way hostile.’ The Gulf was an international waterway. ‘No country there has a right to try and close it off and take it for itself. And the villain in the piece is Iran. And so they’re delighted with what has just happened.’*
Listening to Reagan’s words, one might have thought that Iran had started the war by invading Iraq in 1980, that Iran had been using chemical weapons against Iraq, that Iran had initiated the maritime exclusion zone in 1984 which started the tanker war in the Gulf – of which the Stark was indirectly a victim. Iraq was responsible for each of these acts, but Iraq was deemed ‘friendly’. Only a few weeks before the near-sinking of the Stark, US undersecretary Richard Murphy had himself visited Baghdad and praised Iraq’s ‘bravery’ in withstanding Iran, spraying its enemies with poison gas now a definition of Iraqi courage for Mr Murphy. Reagan had rewarded the aggressor by accepting his excuses and referred to the nation that did not kill his countrymen as the ‘villain’. It was an interesting precedent. When Iraq almost sank an American frigate, Iran was to blame. When al-Qaeda attacked the United States fourteen years later, Iraq was to blame.
All that was left was for Saddam himself to offer his condolences to the families of the dead Americans. They were not long in coming. ‘Rest assured that the grief which you feel as a result of the loss of your sons is our grief, too,’ the Iraqi leader wrote in a letter to the families of the dead, dated 22 May and printed on the stationery of Iraq’s Washington embassy:
On the occasion of the funeral ceremony of the victims lost in the grievous and unintentional incident that has happened to the American frigate Stark, I would like to express to you … my condolences and feelings of grief. All the Iraqis and I feel most profoundly the sorrow of moments such as these. Since we have ourselves lost a great many of our dear ones in the war which has been raging now for seven years, while the Iranian government still persists in … rejecting our appeals and those of the international community for the establishment of a just and lasting peace.
Even now, Saddam had to add his own propaganda line, although it neatly dovetailed with Reagan’s own distorted view of the conflict. Iran’s ‘rejection’ of appeals from the ‘international community’ alluded to Iran’s refusal to accept UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions which failed to demand punishment for the ‘aggressor’ nation. White House spokesman Dan Howard also said Reagan’s vilification of Iran was because of its refusal ‘to go to the bargaining table’.* Shipping officials in the Gulf always suspected that the Iraqis made their night-time attack on the Stark in the hope that the United States would believe an Iranian aircraft tried to destroy the frigate and would therefore retaliate against Tehran. In the event, they didn’t need to waste their time with such conspiracy theories: America blamed Iran anyway. A few days later, Reagan called Iran ‘this barbarous country’.
Saddam compared the American relatives of the Stark to the families of Iraqis killed during his aggression against Iran, thus turning the US navy personnel into the surrogate dead of his own atrocious war. Saddam’s plaintive call for a ‘just and lasting peace’ was almost Arafat-like in its banality. The final American abasement came when Washington dispatched a full-scale US navy inquiry team under Rear Admiral David Rodgers to Baghdad, where they were told they would not be permitted to question the Iraqi pilot who fired the two Exocet missiles; nor did the Iraqis agree with the Americans that the Stark was outside Iraq’s self-imposed ‘exclusion zone’ when it was hit. The Americans said the vessel was at least 10 nautical miles outside, Iraq claimed it was at least 20 nautical miles inside. Weinberger’s call to produce the Iraqi pilot was ignored. Captain Brindel of the Stark was relieved of his command, his weapons officer was reprimanded and left the navy, and his executive officer disciplined for ‘dereliction of duty’.
The Americans always assumed that the Iraqi pilot had been executed – hence Iraq’s refusal to produce him – but the ex-deputy commander of the Iraqi air force insisted to me in Baghdad that this was untrue. ‘I saw him a few months ago,’ he said. ‘Like me, he’s out of work. But he obeyed all our rules. We were fighting a cruel enemy. It was a mistake. We weren’t going to get rid of one of our senior pilots for the Americans. The Americans were inside our “forbidden zone”. We told them not to enter it again – and they obeyed.’
A visit by a group of US senators to the melted-down crew quarters on the Stark was sufficient to set them off in a spasm of rage at the one country that had nothing to do with the American deaths. Republican Senator John Warner, a former secretary of the US navy, described Iran as ‘a belligerent that knows no rules, no morals’. Senator John Glenn was reduced to abusing Iran as ‘the sponsor of terrorism and the hijacker of airliners’. Thus Saddam’s attack on the Stark was now bringing him untold benefits. Americans were talking as if they were themselves contemplating military action against Iran.
Reagan pretended that the Americans were in the Gulf as peacemakers. ‘Were a hostile power ever to dominate this strategic region and its resources,’ he explained, ‘it would become a chokepoint for freedom – that of our allies and our own … That is why we maintain a naval presence there. Our aim is to prevent, not to provoke, wider conflict, to save the many lives that further conflict would cost us …’ Most Americans knew, Reagan said, that ‘to retreat or withdraw would only repeat the improvident mistakes of the past and hand final victory to those who seek war, who make war’. The Iranians, needless to say –