The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
an offer of protection from the Soviet Union – which immediately provoked an almost identical proposal from President Reagan. Kuwait was now feeling the breath of war more closely. Iran’s Silkworm missiles, fired from Fao, were soon to be landing on Kuwaiti territory. One night, I lay in my bed in the Kuwait Meridien hotel, unable to grasp why the windows and doors were perpetually rattling until I realised that the detonation of the Iranian guns outside Basra was blasting across the head waters of the Gulf and vibrating throughout Kuwait city. Almost daily, Kuwaitis would find the corpses of Iranians drifting in on the tide from Fao on the other side of the seaway.
As the Americans pushed in the United Nations for a worldwide arms embargo against Iran, Iranian government officials authorised a massive new weapons procurement programme. Hundreds of pages of documentation from the Iranian National Defence Industry Organisation (INDIO) shown to me by dealers in Germany and Austria listed urgent demands for thousands of TOW antitank missiles and air-to-air missiles for Iran’s F-14 aircraft. The Iranians were offering $20 million for one order of 155-mm gun barrels, demanding more than 200,000 shells at $350 a shell.
King Hussein of Jordan, frightened that what he called ‘my nightmare’ – the collapse of Iraq and an Iranian victory – might be close, hosted a secret meeting of Saddam Hussein and President Hafez el-Assad of Syria at a Jordanian airbase known only as ‘H4’ in the hope that Assad might be persuaded to abandon his alliance with Iran. Nine hours of talks between the Iraqi and Syrian dictators, whose mutual loathing was obvious to the king, produced nothing more than an arrangement that their foreign ministers should meet, but such was the king’s political stature that his failures always reflected well upon him. The worthiness of his endeavours always appeared more important than their results; was he not, after all, trying to bring about an end to the Gulf war by calling upon Arab leaders to unite?
Kuwait now accepted an offer by Reagan to re-flag its tankers with the Stars and Stripes. Washington decided to parade its new and provocative policy by escorting the huge 401,382-ton supertanker Bridgeton up the Gulf to Kuwait, a phenomenal story to cover, since television crews from all over the world were hiring helicopters in the United Arab Emirates to follow this mega-tanker to her destination. I flew into Dubai on 23 July 1987 on an MEA aircraft from Beirut and – true to form – the flight-deck crew invited me to sit in the cockpit. And from there, at 10,000 feet over the Gulf, I saw Bridgeton, putting half a knot onto her previously acknowledged top speed of 16½ knots while three diminutive American warships described 3-kilometre circles round her hulk. ‘Mother-hen surrounded by her chicks,’ I wrote scornfully in my notebook. The Americans closed to battle stations as they passed within range of Iran’s Silkworm missiles and the island of Abu Moussa, where Revolutionary Guards maintained a base.
It was a fiasco. South-east of Kuwait and still 200 kilometres from its destination, the Bridgeton struck a mine on her port side and the US naval escorts, anxious to avoid a similar fate to that of the Stark two months earlier, immediately slunk away in line behind the Bridgeton’s, stern for protection. On board the escorting missile destroyer USS Kidd, the captain ordered armed seamen to the bow of his vessel to destroy any suspicious objects in the water by rifle-fire. Iranian fishing boats had been in the area before the Bridgeton was hit, but there was no way of identifying the mine. This permitted the Iranian prime minister, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, to praise the ‘invisible hands’ which had proved the vulnerability of America’s ‘military expedition’. With her speed cut to a quarter and her port side number one compartment still taking water, the Bridgeton continued what was now a political rather than a commercial voyage towards Kuwait.
It transpired that the Americans had no minesweepers in the area, had not even bothered to look for mines in the 30-kilometre-wide channel where the tanker was struck, and now feared that their own warships were more vulnerable to mines than the vessels they were supposed to protect. Kuwaiti and American officials now sought to load the Bridgeton with crude oil, an overtly political act because, as one shipping agent asked contemptuously, ‘Who in their right mind would load his cargo onto a damaged ship?’ The sorry tale of military unpreparedness was only made worse when Captain Yonkers, the US naval officer in command of the three warships – the destroyer Kidd and two frigates – blandly admitted that he did not wish to sail back through the same sea lane because ‘one of the things I do not now have is the capability to defend my ships against mines’. This statement was compounded by Rear Admiral Harold J. Bernsen, who told reporters accompanying the convoy that ‘it may sound incongruous, but the fact is [that] a large ship, a non-warship such as the Bridgeton, is far less vulnerable to a mine than a warship … if you’ve got a big tanker that is very difficult to hurt with a single mine, you get in behind it. That’s the best defence and that’s exactly what we did.’ Such statements provoked an obvious question: if the US navy could not protect itself without hiding behind a civilian vessel, how could it claim to be maintaining freedom of navigation in the Gulf?
For newspaper reporters, this was again a frustrating story. From the shore, it was impossible to see the tanker fleets or their escorts. Only by being in the air could we have any idea of the immensity of the conflict. The Iran – Iraq war now stretched from the mountains of Kurdistan on the Turkish border all the way down to the coastline of Arabia, the land that once in part belonged to the Sherif Hussein of Mecca whom Lawrence had persuaded to join the Allied cause in the First World War. The question was overwhelming: how could we write about this panorama of fire and destruction if we could not see it? The television networks with their million-dollar budgets flew their own planes. They needed pictures. We did not. But during the Lebanese civil war, which was now in its thirteenth year, I had befriended many of the American network producers and crews, often carrying their film to Damascus or Cyprus for satelliting to the United States. And the American NBC network now happily allowed me to fly in their helicopter out of Dubai – provided I acted as an extra ‘spotter’ of ships in the heat-hazed sea lanes.
At least forty warships from the United States, France, the Soviet Union and Britain were now moving into station in the Gulf and the waters of the Gulf of Oman outside Hormuz; America would have the largest fleet – twenty-four vessels, with 15,000 men aboard – including the battleship Missouri. The superlatives came with them; it was one of the biggest naval armadas since the Korean war and very definitely the largest US fleet to assemble since Vietnam. They would all be guaranteeing the ‘freedom’ of Gulf waters for ‘our Arab friends’ – and thus, by extension, Iraq – but they would do nothing to protect Iran’s shipping. It was scarcely surprising that the Iranians should announce their own ‘Operation Martyrdom’ naval manoeuvres off the Iranian coast with the warning that ‘the Islamic Republic will not be responsible for possible incidents against foreign planes and warships passing through the region.’
From my seat in NBC’s chopper, I now had an aerial platform from which to observe the epic scale of the conflict. Off Dubai, we flew at almost mast height between a hundred tankers and gas carriers, moored across miles of sea, big creamy beasts, some of them, alongside dowdy freighters and rust-streaked tubs packed with cranes and haulage equipment. True, they were under orders to wait for a rise in the spot price of oil rather than to delay their voyages because of Iran’s naval threats. But such was the blistering heat across the Gulf that we often blundered into warships in the haze without seeing them. ‘This is US warship. Request you remain two nautical miles from US warships. Over.’ The voice on the radio had a clipped, matter-of-fact east coast accent but retained its unnecessary anonymity. ‘US warship. Roger. Out.’
When we saw them spread across 6 kilometres of gentle swell – three tankers in V-shaped formation, the four warships at equidistant points around them – they looked set for a naval regatta rather than a hazardous voyage up the Gulf. The foreign tankers lying across the ocean around them, some with steam up, others riding the tides for their masters’ orders, were somehow familiar, faint echoes of those great convoys that set off through the Western Approaches forty-six years earlier. Three new American-registered ships – Gas King, Sea Isle City and Ocean City – were unremarkable symbols of Washington’s political determination in the Gulf; ill-painted, a touch of rust on their hulls, the American flag not yet tied to their stern. The US warships Kidd, Fox and Valley Forge lay line astern and abeam of them, a further American vessel