The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
countries’ in 1982, two years after its invasion of Iran and in the very year that Iran reported eleven Iraqi poison gas attacks against its forces. The truth was that the Stark – one of seven US warships in the Gulf – was sailing under false pretences.
Iraq had placed its ‘exclusion zone’ around Kharg Island in January 1984 because it was losing the land war it had initiated two years earlier; by attacking tankers lifting oil from Iran’s Kharg Island terminal, Saddam hoped to strangle his antagonist economically. His aircraft henceforth fired at ships of any nationality that were moving to and from Iranian ports. Iran retaliated by targeting vessels trading with Iraq through the Arab Gulf states. Iraq’s massive imports of arms for the war were transiting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose funding of Iraq’s war effort was close to $404 billion; any ship trading with either nation was now threatened with Iranian air attack. Between 18 April 1984 and 18 May 1987 – the day after the Stark was hit – 227 ships had been attacked in the Gulf, 137 of them by Iraq and 90 by Iran; several had been struck by missiles and repeatedly repaired, and of the 227 total, 153 were oil tankers. Between May 1981 and 18 May 1987, 211 merchant seamen, most of them foreigners, were killed on these ships, of which 98 were oil tankers; it was a tiny figure compared with the hundreds of thousands of combatants in the land war, but it internationalised the conflict – as both Iraq and Iran probably hoped that it would.
American warships were now ostensibly keeping the sea lanes open for international shipping, to prevent the Gulf becoming, in Reagan’s odd term, a ‘chokepoint’. But US vessels were not shielding Iranian tankers from Iraqi attack. Nor were they seeking to protect foreign oil tankers lifting Iranian oil for export at Kharg. America’s mission in the Gulf was to protect only one side’s ships – Iraq’s – in the sea lanes. Already the Americans were proposing to escort Kuwaiti-flagged tankers in the Gulf, which did not carry Iranian cargo. They carried Iraqi oil for export. Iraq might not be able to gain any victories in its land war with Iran, but with American help, as the Iranians realised at once, it could win the sea war. Reagan claimed that the United States was fighting ‘war against war’ in the Gulf. In fact, Washington was fighting a war against Iran.
Eleven days after the Stark was rocketed, the Iranians complained that a US warship in the Gulf had ‘threatened’ an Iran Air passenger jet flying from Shiraz to Doha, in Qatar, and ordered the pilot to alter course. My own investigation among Dubai air traffic controllers established that the American warning came from one of four naval vessels escorting a Kuwaiti-registered ship with a cargo of arms to Bahrain. ‘The incident provided just the sort of scenario for a … tragedy in the Gulf,’ I wrote in my dispatch to The Times that night. ‘Iran Air flies scheduled routes to both Doha, the capital of Qatar, and to the Gulf emirate of Dubai further east, regularly overflying the waters in which American … frigates patrol. Although the Iranians did not say so, the pilot probably flew unwittingly over a US naval unit which identified the plane as Iranian and ordered it to change course.’ The ‘tragedy’ was to come exactly fourteen months later.
There were plenty of portents. Not long after the Stark was hit, I spent a day and a night on Gulf patrol with HMS Broadsword. Accompanying British ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Reagan’s now famous chokepoint – the word ‘escort’ was never used by the British – and discouraging the attentions of the Iranians might have seemed a simple matter in the dry memoranda that their naval lordships used at the defence ministry in London. But inside the glow-worm interior of the Type-22 class destroyer, the radar monitors watched with feverish intensity for the transponder numbers of the civilian aircraft passing over Broadsword. ‘If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful,’ one of them said.
At least the air conditioning was pumped into their little nest – for the computers, of course, not for them – but what afflicted most of the seamen in the Gulf was the heat. It burned the entire decks until they were, quite literally, too hot to walk on. British sailors stood on the edges of their shoes because of the scalding temperatures emerging from the steel. The depth-charge casings, the Bofors gun-aiming device, were too hot to touch. On the helicopter flight deck, the heat rose to 135 degrees, and only a thoughtless leading hand would have touched a spanner without putting his gloves on. It created a dull head, a desperate weariness, an awesome irritation with one’s fellow humans on the foredeck.
Inside the ship – and their lordships would have appreciated the cleanliness of Broadsword’s galleys and mess decks and bunks and short, fearful advertisements warning of the dangers of AIDS in Mombasa port – the heat shuffled through the vessel faster than the seamen. The officer’s mess was a cool 80 degrees. One glass of water and I was dripping. Open the first watertight door and I was ambushed by the heat, just as I was seven years earlier in the streets of Najaf. After the second door, I walked into a tropical smelter, the familiar grey monochrome sea sloshing below the deck. How can men work in this and remain rational? Or – more to the point – how could the Iraqis and Iranians fight in this sweltering air and remain sane?
‘There’s Sharjah airport,’ the radar officer said, and fixed the beam. ‘I’m listening to a plane landing now – commercial flight – but if I want to know about a specific plane, I ask for an IFF [identification, friend or foe?] and talk to Sharjah control.’ There were boards and charts and crayon marks on war-zone lines. The USS Reid – part of Reagan’s Gulf flotilla – had just cut across the Iraqi ‘exclusion zone’. So much for Stark’s insistence that it stayed outside. Two Soviet Natya-class minesweepers and a submarine depot ship were listed as outside the Hormuz Strait. Two British Hong Kong-registered ships were waiting for us on the return journey.
Night was no relief. At 4.15 a.m., Broadsword was in the Gulf of Oman, her engineers dragging a hawser from the support ship Orangeleaf riding alongside her, refuelling in the heat. The humidity cloaked us all. The deck was awash with condensation, the seamen’s faces crawling with perspiration. The sweat crept through my hair and trickled down my back. Our shirts were dark with moisture. It came to all men, even to Russians. Off Fujairah, Moscow’s contribution to the freedom of Gulf navigation – a depot ship and two minesweepers – nestled against each other on the warm tide, the Soviet sailors, glistening and half-naked on deck, waiting for the next inbound Kuwaiti tanker. Here was the principal reason why Reagan wanted to patrol the sea lanes, here was the real ‘hostile power’ that he feared might ‘dominate’ the Gulf. The two British freighters came alongside to be ‘accompanied’ by Broadsword.
On the bridge, an Indian radio operator could be heard pleading over VHF with an Iranian patrol ship. ‘We are only carrying dates,’ he said. ‘Only dates.’ The Iranian was 30 kilometres away. An Iranian P-3 reconnaissance aircraft answered. ‘Be aware,’ boomed the tannoy throughout Broadsword, ‘that yesterday the Iraqis launched an Exocet attack on a Maltese tanker carrying oil from Iran. We can therefore expect the Iranians to retaliate …’ A dog-day mist now swirled around the ship, leaving salt cakes across the flight deck. The two freighters were steaming beside us, an overheated version of every Second World War Atlantic convoy, because Broadsword, however unheroic in her humidity, was – like the American ships – a naval escort.
Back in 1984, when Iraq began this maritime conflict, the Gulf looked a lot simpler. The Arabs, protesting mightily at every attack by the Iranians and silent when the Iraqis struck at Iranian shipping, were almost as fearful of American involvement as they were of the Iranians. Saudi Arabia maintained a quiet relationship with Iran – just in case Iraq collapsed – while at the same time underwriting Saddam’s war. Ostensibly, the Arabs remained neutral -‘at war but skulking’, as Churchill unfairly remarked about the Irish in the Second World War – and offered refuge to any ship’s master who found himself under fire. Bahrain and Dubai would receive the crippled hulks of both sides’ aggression, profiting from the millions of dollars in repairs that their shipyards would make in reconstituting the ships. By 1987, eighteen had been hit twice,