The Northern Front E-Book

Charles Glass

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 522

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is the Iraq war as it really started, amid lies, confusion and profound distrust between the United States and its Iraqi allies. Charles Glass, who first covered the Kurds in 1974 and was in Iraq for their failed rebellion in 1991, depicts the tense epoch that sowed the seeds of America's inevitable failure there. The Northern Front is the dramatic eyewitness account of the machinations of Iraqi leaders - Ahmad Chalabi, Abdel Aziz Hakim, Massoud Barzani and Jelal Talabani - to control the country before their opponents seized the initiative. Glass recounts what went wrong when the US, with Britain in tow, imposed its will on a people unlikely to accept foreign designs for their future. He indicts international media conglomerates that failed to tell the truth when public debate could have prevented the deaths and destruction that came with war. 'Witty and absorbing … Essential, and humbling, reading for all those pundits and commentators who think they understand what happened in Iraq.' Malise Ruthven, author of A History of the Arab Peoples 'A vivid picture of the events leading up to the war and the chaos of the war itself.' Ian Gilmour 'Should be mandatory reading for all wannabe foreign correspondents.' Jonathan Randal 'A beautifully written account of the full sweep of the war and of what it was like to report on it. A starting-point for any proper understanding of the whole contentious business of the Iraq war.' John Simpson 'In the finest tradition of radical reporting - anti-war, sympathetic, compassionate and enlightening.' Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty

Leseprobe

THE NORTHERN FRONT

Charles Glass

THE NORTHERN FRONT

A Wartime Diary

Foreword by

P. J. O’Rourke

Photographs by

Don McCullin

SAQI

London

In memory of Peter Jennings,and dedicated to his family

Foreword

by P. J. O’Rourke

Excessive certainty leads to definite actions, many of them dire, from a too-calculated ‘I do’ to the firebombing of Dresden. I promise you that Charlie Glass’s book will leave you wondering, and wonder is a splendid and under-used human capacity. Charlie takes you to war as modern war is actually fought: it entails so little fighting, yet produces such an awful toll of death and destruction.

Charlie covered the Second Gulf War from the ‘northern front’, a theatre of war that didn’t exist. The importance of its non-existence can hardly be overstated. The future of the Kurds, Turkey, NATO and Iraq itself were all affected. Charlie describes the nation of Kurdistan, the well-organized and effective anti-Saddam Iraqi government-in-exile and the successful planning for peaceful postwar occupation of Iraq – three things that never existed in the most spectacular way.

There is so much to discover if we are ever going to achieve a truly encyclopedic incomprehension of the Middle East. Charlie Glass is the right man to aid us in this endeavor. He has lived and worked in the region, read its literature and history, met many of its leaders, is even partly Middle Eastern by blood and speaks more Arabic than he lets on. We need this intellectual equipment with which to empty our minds.

Charlie performs the small good deed of removing the romance from the profession of war correspondent. The real job of a war correspondent is, as you will see, to go where no one wants you and be poorly fed and ill-sheltered and to wait for the moment when the ostracism and discomfort become indescribable pleasures because their alternative is to be dead. Charlie is a real writer, who will go anywhere for the chance to write about humanity, and humanity is never more human than when it’s lying its head off. That’s all people do in a war, except for taking occasional breaks to kill each other.

Charlie disabuses us of that notion, bred by TV, that a journalist can be everywhere at once, seeing all there is to see. He also rids us forever of the silly conceit that ‘journalism is the first draft of history’. I don’t know who said this, and Bartlett doesn’t dignify the quote with a citation. But surely it was some tired hack trying on the historian’s fancier hat. It’s an Orwellian thought (though not a thought of Orwell’s) that history gets redrafted. History is for those too squeamish to swallow the dog’s breakfast that is reality.

Charlie Glass chews the raw mess. His is a tale of human existence without historical inevitabilities, without comforting big trends, without foregone conclusions of progress or decline. You will find herein no great sweep of democracy or Marxism or markets or Arab nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism or of any of the other grand ideas used by the mighty to extend their might. Such winds may blow through the Middle East, but do they fan fires or heap ashes? Will the peoples of the Middle East be blown away? And if so, in the cyclones of brutality or on the luxury of yachts? I don’t know. You don’t know. Charlie Glass doesn’t know.

Charlie and I don’t agree about anything politically. But we do agree upon one thing: it is our fondest wish that a lot more people – especially those more important than we are – knew a lot fewer things for certain. If only the heroes and villains (and let’s not bother to try telling them apart) would wake up and say, ‘I will be a confused ignoramus all day. I’ll put off changing the world until tomorrow morning, and then I may sleep in. Meanwhile, I’ll pick up my socks from the bedroom floor and remember to leave the toilet seat down. Maybe I’ll try to make an honest buck today. And spend it sensibly. And give a little bit away, if only as a tip in a nice restaurant tonight’.

Introduction

Towards the end of 2002, Iraq attempted to pre-empt United Nations approval of a US invasion by agreeing to allow the UN to inspect its weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That agreement was insufficient to prevent the US, without UN support, from launching its war in Iraq. I doubted that Washington’s Arabists, once they seized control of the country, would do a better job in Iraq than Britain had done in the early part of the twentieth century. I met Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi opponents in London in late 2002. In January 2003, I went with them to northern Iraq to await the American onslaught. Thanks to the Turkish parliament’s refusal to allow the US to invade Iraq through Turkish territory, there was no northern front. The northern front was never necessary to defeat an army that barely existed after its defeat in Kuwait in 1991 and twelve years of economic embargo. This book is an account of the war from the front that never was and among the Iraqis whom Washington’s imperial planners would later install in Baghdad as the Iraqi face of an American occupation.

Paris, May 2006

Wednesday, 23 October 2002Paris

Today is an anniversary, as most days are, of a massacre in the Middle East. In 1983, someone drove a truck past the sentries at the US Marine Headquarters in Beirut. A bomb, said later by FBI forensic analysts to have been the largest conventional explosive ever used, killed 241American servicemen and shot a cloud into Beirut’s morning sky like a miniature Hiroshima. The fact that similar bombings had previously destroyed an Israeli military office in southern Lebanon and the US embassy in Beirut made billeting so many American personnel in one undefended concrete block seem careless, negligent and perhaps criminal. The Marines left Lebanon a few months later, although the Pentagon said they were merely ‘redeploying’ to the ships. It was not long until the ships sailed away.

I covered Lebanon then for ABC News. Ten years later I quit ABC, disgusted as much with myself as with television. After 1993, my children approached and attained maturity. I travelled; I sought a home, whatever that might mean for an itinerant American, in Tuscany, London and Paris. Two novels failed to find publishers. My essays, book reviews and disgruntled commentaries on the American empire made their way into British and American periodicals. I am halfway through writing a travel book (not a guidebook) on the Middle East, and have run out of money. So it is back to TV news, the mistress whose bed I swore never, ever, to share again.

In 1983, television did not tell the story of the American war in Lebanon. We showed the pictures, but we could not explain why the Marines were there. They were there because Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was unpopular at home and horrified the rest of the world. Israel then persuaded Ronald Reagan’s administration to send Marines to oversee the forced departure from Lebanon of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The Marines would later be duty-bound to return to protect the ravaged West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, whose undefended residents were slaughtered on Israel’s watch. Secretary of State George Shultz made Lebanon’s Israeli-installed president Amin Gemayel sign an agreement with Israel in 1983. Gemayel harassed his rivals and tortured dissidents. Identified with Gemayel’s stupid policies and with Israel’s occupation, the Marines became an obvious target – obvious, that is, to everyone but Shultz and Reagan.

The US is now preparing to invade Iraq: another American intervention in an Arab state, another regime change. Will we tell the story any better now than we did in 1983? Will we make the connections we did not then? This time Washington has its own agenda. I am talking daily with ABC News in New York about covering the war. Peter Jennings, the incarnation of ABC, is encouraging. Then again, we’re friends. He was best man at my wedding, and each of us gave sympathy to the other when our marriages were dissolving in confusion. Today he warns me, ‘Don’t fuck up.’

I always fuck up. I am negotiating a deal with Paul Friedman, another friend and ABC executive. Friend or not, he plays tough over money. I’m broke, although I don’t tell him this, and accept less than what I was earning ten years ago. (Friedman was expected to succeed Roone Arledge, the P. T. Barnum of television news and the most enthusiastic backer of his ‘troops’ in war zones, as president of the network’s news division. He didn’t. Walt Disney bought the company, and Friedman is not a Disneyman. Nor, despite childhood trips to Disneyland and a love of Old Yeller when I was seven, am I.)

Like our rulers in Washington, I’m turning my attention from the Levant to Mesopotamia and for the same reason: money. I might not covet Iraqi oil, but I need an income. HarperCollins’s paltry advance for my book, The Tribes Triumphant, ran out months ago. I’ve been working on it for more than a year, during which I had to re-mortgage my flat in London. I moved to Paris last February to live more cheaply. The book should have been finished by now, but I write slowly, rewrite more slowly and rewrite again. There is one other reason to witness this war: I love Iraq in general and Iraqi Kurdistan in particular. The Kurds have endured more than any other people in the Middle East since the British and French, having promised them a state in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, forced them to live as helots within Arab, Turkish and Iranian national states. They are fine people and deserve better.

Thursday, 24 October 2002London

I take the morning Paris-London train to see the ABC people, interview Edward Said for a BBC documentary, meet old acquaintances and friends from Iraq, do research on Iraq and deliver a lecture on the establishment of modern Iraq by Great Britain. An article I wrote on the subject for The London Review of Books brought a letter from the comedians John Bird, John Fortune and Rory Bremner. They are doing a satirical sketch on Iraq and want a reading list.

Friday, 25 October 2002London

A documentary maker named Ed Harriman takes me to lunch at an Italian restaurant in Soho to pitch an idea. He wants to produce a film covering the period of my LRB essay: from Sir Stanley Maude’s conquest of Ottoman Baghdad in 1917 to the toppling of Maude’s statue during the 1958 Iraqi revolution. He calls it Teatime in Baghdad. It’s a good idea, and Britain’s experience should be instructive to the US. Harriman, an American expatriate about my age, is hopeful that Channel Four or the BBC will sponsor the film. He imagines a US sale after that. I’m more cynical. I hope that Ed, who has produced many award-winning documentaries, is right and I’m wrong. It’s timely – and I need the money.

At the London Library, I read books by some of the Britons who fabricated Iraq and killed thousands of Arabs and Kurds to do it: A. O. Wilson, Gertrude Bell, Sir Percy Cox and other empire-builders who published memoirs. I wonder what version of history Iraq’s new kingmakers – Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, Colin Powell – will leave as testimony. Michael Austin is at another table in the reading room. We go to the stairway to talk. Taller and a little older than I, intelligent and a transatlantic sailor, he is writing a screenplay based on Steven Kinzer’s book, Bitter Fruit. It’s about another US-driven regime change in the cause of freedom: deposing the reformist president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954 to install the mass murderers who protected the United Fruit Company and other US businesses in Central America. Bananas then, oil now. Michael says that Andy Karsch, for whom he wrote and directed Princess Caraboo, is producing. It’s the kind of project Andy loves. An anti-Zionist Jew and anti-imperialist American, he is courageous for a producer. He did, however, make Town and Country.

In the evening, my ex-wife Fiona and two of our children, George and Julia, gather for dinner at our favourite Notting Hill Italian restaurant, Osteria Basilico. Looking at all three of them, I damn myself for every trip I took to faraway lands without them. Fiona and George have already advised me not to worry Julia, who is seventeen, by telling her I am going to Iraq. Instead, we talk about … I don’t remember. It must have been awful for a wife and small children to worry about a man who went to war zones for no better reason than that he did not know how to do anything else. When I leave for Iraq, I’ll tell Julia. The last time I left for Iraq, in January 1993, she had just turned eight. It was dawn in London, and she was sleeping. I kissed her without waking her, as I did the other children, sensing on that last morning in our house that my wife would not want me to return. I was right.

That was when George Bush the Elder’s bombs crashed into the al-Rasheed Hotel, where the press corps stayed in Baghdad, and killed two civilians. A week or so later, I turned forty-two in Iraq without celebrating. A few days afterwards, Fiona told me on the telephone not to come home. I was shocked, but not surprised, and have not known a home since. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be war reporters.

Saturday, 26 October 2002London

My older stepdaughter, Beatrix, had a boy a few days ago. Julia, Fiona and I go to her new house to see Felix, active at the breast the whole time we are there. Beatrix, now twenty-nine, had just turned four when I married her mother. Her sister Hester was two. Hester has a baby, Orlando, whom I’ve seen only once in his first year-and-a-half of life. I love Beatrix and Hester, but ex-stepfathers are easily superseded by new stepfathers.

When they met me, I was on crutches from artillery shrapnel that had caught my foot in Beirut in 1976. I tried living full-time with them in London for years – as a domestic news reporter at The Observer; as a researcher at London Weekend Television; editing a business magazine; writing for Newsweek. When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, I was desperate to go. I got drunk one night and called Newsweek’s editor, Rick Smith, to demand he send me. (He sent Tony Clifton, the London bureau chief, who wrote the book God Cried, condemning Israel’s crimes in Lebanon. Clifton did a better job for Newsweek than I would have.) A few months later, I quit. If I hadn’t, Rick would probably have fired me.

I went to Lebanon in October 1982, during the early days of Israel’s occupation, to write a magazine feature that was never published. I had been ABC’s radio stringer there in the early 1970s. In April 1983, the network appointed me Chief Middle East Correspondent, an easy title to obtain when I was its only Middle East correspondent. I moved back to Lebanon and found a top-floor flat near the Commodore Hotel. By then Fiona and I had four children, her two girls and our two boys. I left them all and our huge house in Notting Hill to live alone in a small flat 2,000 miles away, writing and calling home every day and visiting every six weeks. It is the stupidest thing I have ever done.

At 6 PM I am at the Albery Theatre in St Martin’s Lane. Bremner, Bird and Fortune have finished their matinee performance and are on a two-hour break before the evening show. They have dinner at a little restaurant behind the theatre. Satire may be the only way to expose those who, from their safe havens in Washington and Westminster, propose to send young men and women to kill and die in the oil lands of the East. Bird is reading some of the histories and recommends books to me. They all have questions. What is the source of this quote, that story, some allegation, especially about the Royal Air Force and of the use of poison gas on the Kurds? Their attention to accuracy and authenticity would shame most journalists. Bird says, ‘We want to get it right.’

Their revue at the Albery apparently includes a sketch on British desert manoeuvres. Bird says the shortcomings, like tanks that run for no more than an hour in the sand, come straight from Defence Ministry reports. They invite me to see the show any night before it closes, that is, any night this week.

I go to dinner with Kate Reardon, a fashion journalist, friend and former girlfriend (however briefly). She has invited a huge crowd to Cambio de Tercio, a Spanish restaurant in Old Brompton Road. A banker friend of hers from New York knows nothing about me, my work or the war in Iraq. He is, however, a fan of P. J. O’Rourke and remembers my name from P. J.’s Holidays in Hell. He quotes passages about a trip P. J. and I made in Lebanon. (P. J.’s Lebanon piece shares, along with an article I did on suicide, the distinction of having been spiked without explanation by Tina Brown – his at Vanity Fair, mine at The New Yorker. It remains one of his best.) I suspect that when the war starts, P. J. will be in Iraq too.

Tuesday, 29 October 2002London

Rachel Johnson and I take in Bremner, Bird and Fortune’s revue at the Albery. Bremner triumphs as George Bush, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Robin Cook and the rest of Anglo-America’s bellicose phallocracy. Bird and Fortune’s skit on Britain’s war preparations pits Fortune as an interviewer against Bird’s laconic bureaucrat. Bird’s conclusion: Britain, with its equipment designed for Northern Europe, can defeat Iraq – provided Saddam agrees to fight in Northern Europe. A full house jumps to its feet to applaud them for ten minutes.

After the performance, Rachel and I have drinks with Bremner while he eats dinner. Rachel is a columnist at The Daily Telegraph, an excellent writer and mother of three. Her husband, my friend Ivo Dawnay, was Foreign Editor at The Sunday Telegraph and is now an independent political lobbyist. Her brother, Boris Johnson, edits The Spectator and represents Henley-upon-Thames as a Conservative Member of Parliament. I am surprised, given her brother’s Conservative connections, that she is as doubtful about the war as Bremner is. She is beautiful, blonde, well-endowed in body and mind: I would ask her to marry me if I did not know she loved her husband. But she seems to be falling in love with Bremner, who is as happily married as she is.

My son Edward calls my cellphone from St Andrew’s in Scotland, where he is in his last year doing philosophy and English. He and his girlfriend have just come back from an anti-war demonstration in Glasgow. (I’ve taken the children to demos from the time they were in their prams – to denounce racism, to legalise cannabis, to stop the ban on hunting, to protect prisoners and stop torture, to preserve the right to trial by jury and to contain the American empire.) I hand the telephone to Bremner who, in his Tony Blair voice, scolds Edward for opposing his and George W.’s war. I expect more scolding from the real Blair before it’s over.

Rachel and I go for dinner at San Lorenzo. There we meet Taki Theodoracopoulos – columnist, heir to a Greek shipping fortune, an extreme right-winger with whom I disagree on almost every political issue and one of my best friends. Like Rachel, he opposes war in Iraq. When I disappear to the men’s room, I later learn, he makes a pass at her.

Wednesday, 30 October 2002London

Back to San Lorenzo at lunchtime to celebrate the birthday of my friend Flora Fraser with her husband Peter Soros, her three children, her mother Antonia Fraser and stepfather Harold Pinter. Harold is enraged by the war. He’s written about it, given speeches about it and argued about it – despite the fact that he is recovering from a cancer operation. Taki and Harold Pinter, the old right and old left, are lost to George W. and Tony. And the centre? Will it hold?

My older son George and I go to a father-son, black-tie dinner and later meet Julia and one of her school friends for drinks at the Groucho Club in Soho. The two girls have just seen the Bremner-Bird-Fortune show at the Albery and met Rory afterwards. Like Rachel, they more or less fell in love with him. They say most of the Sherborne School for Girls, not exactly a cauldron of radical sentiment, are against the war. Taki, Harold, Rory and company, the Sherborne girls … where does Blair hear the trumpets, fifes and drums calling the nation to battle?

Thursday, 31 October (Halloween) 2002London

At the London Library, I read more documents and memoirs from the time of Britain’s conquest of Mesopotamia. It is all there, written at the time in arrogance, brought to light now in shame: the bombing of villages, the imposition of unwanted leaders, the rigged referendum, Britain’s kidnapping of a popular political leader, the massacres, the contempt for the natives who were forced to live in a state they did not ask for. Saddam inherited and expanded a system that Britain created in 1917: ruling without consent, shooting those who resist. What will the US create when it ‘imposes democracy’, Washington’s latest oxymoron? I read the letters and diaries of Iraq’s British guardians, because I am writing a lecture. If I deliver an impromptu speech, I remember later all the things I forgot to say. If I write it in advance to read aloud, I lose touch with the audience. This time, I am trying a compromise: I make little notes on index cards as aides-mémoires for an off-the-cuff talk. Like most other compromises, it will be a catastrophe.

The venue is an upstairs room at Orsino’s restaurant in Portland Road, Holland Park. My hosts from the Lebanese Centre at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, are waiting downstairs, where we have drinks. They are well-dressed Lebanese bourgeois, polite, interested, apparently hoping to hear me deliver the goods. Well … The plan is for me to give a talk upstairs before dinner and answer questions between courses. Forty-five people attend. I give a short preamble, and amble I do. I rummage through my index cards looking for an appropriate quote, statistic, fact. I cannot find the ones I need when I need them. I fear embarrassing my son George, who is twenty-five and has a degree in Middle East history from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

A few friends who have no Middle East connections – Rupert Fairfax, Lucy Clive, Willie Stirling and Tracey Worcester – must assume that this stammering, inarticulate buffoon dropping index cards knows nothing. Standing before forty-five puzzled faces impatient for dinner, I abandon the cards. I swallow some vino rosso and apologise, ‘I’ll start again.’ I ramble, but the rambling follows the course of Britain’s 1917–18 march from Basra to Baghdad; the turf dispute between the India Office and the Arab Bureau; the further conquests; the discovery of oil; the creation of the monarchy, the rebellions and revolts; the lies and deceits and abominations of imperial order in Mesopotamia; Britain’s air bridge from Egypt via Iraq to India; Iraq’s pseudo-independence; the 1941 anti-British coup; the second British invasion; the Baghdad Pact; and the revolution of 1958.

My conclusion: The US’s invasion of Iraq is unlikely to have more felicitous consequences than Britain’s did. Then we eat decent Italian food and drink more wine. George looks like he watched me fall from the edge, catch my coat on a branch and slowly climb up before the branch broke.

While we eat, the questions go on and on. Dahlia Salam, whose family I know from Beirut, is with a pro-war Iraqi friend, who says he wants an American invasion. I cannot blame him. Most Iraqis would let the devil himself liberate them from Saddam Hussein. I repeat what Lawrence wrote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘I often told Feisal, “Freedom is taken – not given.”’ The Arabs’ original sin was allowing the British and French empires to expel and replace the Ottomans. Their leaders have pursued foreign sponsors ever since, and sponsors – whether American or Soviet – have their own interests. If the Arabs do not free themselves, they will not govern themselves.

Afterwards, some of us walk back to the house where I’m staying. There my hostess, Amabel Lindsay, is holding a dinner party with, among others, Don McCullin. McCullin and I covered the Kurdish uprising together in 1991. At the time, the Iraqis were taking their freedom. Town after town, garrison after garrison, prison after prison, the north and the south fell to the rebels, who were massing towards Baghdad. The Kurds and Shiites seized fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. Within weeks, the capital itself would have been in their hands. Saddam would have died like Hitler or been hanged in public like Mussolini. But it was not to be. The US, whose president had encouraged the uprising, denied anti-Saddam army rebels access to their arms caches in southern Iraq. At the same time, it withdrew its air protection and allowed Iraq’s air force to fly again. Within hours, Don was taking photographs of the victims of Saddam’s aerial bombardment.

The Kurds, who had suffered the chemical attack at Halabja in 1988, feared another blast of poison gases. They showed fear. No, what they showed was terror, and they fled to the nearest border. In the south, Saddam returned and massacred the freedom fighters and anyone else in his way. Then, the US did not let the Iraqis take their freedom. Now, it deigns to give it to them. Unspoken then was the apprehension of the US’s main Arab clients, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the Saudi royal family, that a popular revolution in another important Arab country would set an unfortunate precedent for them. The encouragement to US policy this time comes from Israel.

McCullin, who is sixty-seven and is about to become a father (again) with his new bride, retired from war photography twice. He returned from a seven-year hiatus to come with me to Iraq in 1991, when we did a long piece for The Independent’s Saturday magazine. Afterwards, Don gave up war all over again. He and Philip Jones Griffiths are probably Britain’s best war photographers, and Don is the least gung-ho journalist I know. His photographs in India and of England’s brooding landscapes have been exhibited throughout the world and turned into expensive books. Don does not photograph models, movie stars, minor royalty or game show hosts, but he agrees to cover one more war. His wife, Catherine Fairweather, is due to give birth to a boy in December. That is when the Pentagon says it may invade Iraq. She seems stoic about her new man’s departure for the land of strife, ‘It’s what he does.’

They ask me to be godfather.

 

Monday, 11 November 2002London

For the first time in ten years, I visit an ABC News office. The London bureau has moved from Carburton Street in the West End to the Disney building next to the Hammersmith flyover – one of the many architectural eyesores that London’s visitors endure on their way in from Heathrow Airport. Inside the cold stone-and-glass reception, surrounded by life-size effigies of Disney cartoon characters, I apply for a security badge. At the old bureau, there were no badges and the only security was an English night watchman who never managed anything more daring than catching an ABC News executive in flagrante with his secretary. Now, a team of South African uniformed guards from a private security firm patrol the building. They are polite and young. One of them leads me to the elevator, where music from Beauty and the Beast fills the smokeless air.

On the third floor, he swipes a plastic card to open the double doors and leaves me in the newsroom. It is, to my surprise, beautiful. The old newsroom was cramped and never quite worked as a set for a visiting anchor. The space was too narrow, the ceilings too low. It looked like it was built for crooked accountants. The new place is vast: glass-fronted offices on either side of the news desk; windows and daylight in each office; anchor space with a studio camera at one end; and the console and monitors of Master Control behind sealed glass at the other. It is a smaller version of the New York newsroom and looks like a pleasant place to work. It should be, but everyone who works there is a survivor of the latest round of Disney firings. The bureau chief, Rex Granum, is gone. A nice man who had twenty years’ experience, Rex received notice a few weeks ago. The last time I saw him was at a memorial service for the intrepid Carlos Mavroleon, who died while on assignment for CBS in Pakistan. His office is occupied by his replacement, Marcus Wilford. Marcus, an English local hire whom I knew when he started at ABC in the 1980s, must share with everyone else in the office the fear that he may be next. ABC has also fired Roupen Vosguimourikian, an award-winning cameraman who began his network career with Peter Jennings in Beirut in 1972, and Bruno Sylvestre, an excellent and long-time producer, in Paris. There are rumours of an ABC-CNN merger, which would see all of ABC’s overseas bureaus closed. When I started stringing for ABC in 1973, it had bureaus everywhere – Cairo, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Paris, Rome, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Tokyo, Hong Kong … It is now down to Jerusalem, Moscow and London, with a few mini-bureaus and stringers dotted around. The more American business expands across the earth, the more the American media retreat.

The place seems sad, but everyone is welcoming. Robin Wiener, a senior producer with whom I worked in the 1980s, gives me a tour. I bump into Gordon Ring, who has run ABC’s overseas logistics since he was a kid. He loans me an empty office. There are far more good people than bad here. I’m enjoying the comradeship, drinking coffee with the editors, camera crews and engineers, catching up, hearing the gripes and the gossip. It’s a change from the seclusion of writing.

I work the phones, calling every Iraqi I can think of for briefings on the impending war and for help to get to the north of the country. One of my oldest friends in the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), Hoshyar Zebari, proposes we meet at a hotel in Kensington in an hour. I am there on time; he is late. This is what I remember about covering the Middle East: garish hotels, coffee in empty bars and a source who is late.

Hoshyar enters the hotel lobby like a salesman making a call, briefcase at his side, tie loose at the neck, grey suit jacket unbuttoned. He is not fat, but is an easy twenty pounds heavier than he was in Kurdistan twelve years ago. Then, when his people were losing again to the monster in Baghdad, he was a trim tribal warrior in the more comfortable baggy trousers of a Kurdish mountaineer. Beside him in 1991 was his contemporary, the then-young Massoud Barzani, who led and still leads his late father’s KDP and its armed forces. The Zebaris and Barzanis have a long history in Kurdistan, and it was a Zebari who took the British shilling to turn on the Barzanis in the 1920s. Hoshyar, however, worked for old Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the leading Kurdish nationalist leader of the twentieth century. It was easier for Hoshyar than for others of his tribe to work with their ancient feudal rival. Hoshyar’s older sister had married Mullah Mustafa – Mullah Mustafa’s son and successor, Massoud, is therefore Hoshyar’s nephew.

Hoshyar embraces me with the kind of hug the Russians must have given old Mullah Mustafa, when Stalin took in his band of Kurdish rebels in 1946. (The US had just helped the Shah of Iran to crush the world’s first nominally independent Kurdish state, the Mehabad Republic.) Hoshyar had taken me across the Tigris in 1991 at the start of the rebellion, and we survived the war together. The people of Zakho, the first village we entered, welcomed us the way the French did the US Army in June of ’44. They hoisted us, a dozen American and British journalists, onto their shoulders. Shots were fired in the air. Speeches were made in our honour. ‘Haji Boosh’ was thanked through us for leaving the skies clear for them to rescue the country from Saddam’s assassins. We were not entitled to credit for Bush’s conquest of Kuwait and his call to arms. Nor were we to blame a few weeks later for Bush’s betrayal, when he allowed Saddam’s forces to rampage and exact revenge.

In the Kensington hotel’s empty bar, Hoshyar says Turkey is creating problems for the Kurds. The Turkish government, which has displaced and killed almost as many Kurds in Turkey as Saddam has in Iraq, is setting terms for Iraqi Kurdish participation in the US invasion. Hoshyar has been to Turkey, where officials told him they would resist any Kurdish advance on either Kirkuk or Mosul. The new Islamist Turkish government, not unlike its predecessors, does not recognise a Kurdish stake in either city – both of which are perched above large pools of oil. What would happen, I ask him, if the Kurds go into Kirkuk as they did in 1991? ‘The Turkish army would invade,’ he said. And then? ‘Then, Charlie,’ he smiled, ‘then Iran has said it will invade to keep the Turks away.’ This could be an interesting war.

My goal is to get into Iraqi Kurdistan. It is the only place where journalists will be free of Saddam’s and the Pentagon’s control. Since 1991, when Hoshyar took us in from Syria, hundreds of journalists have used the route over the Tigris. It was almost romantic to ferry across the rapids on a raft and meet the Kurds on the other side. ‘Not anymore,’ Hoshyar says. ‘Not since CNN.’ The Syrian government’s only condition for providing the border facility was that no one publicise it and thus upset Saddam. CNN, he says, violated the understanding. When a CNN correspondent broadcast his river crossing, Syria closed the border to the rest of the press. Hoshyar says the Turks do not permit journalists to enter Iraq from their territory. Iran, he says, is being difficult. There is no fourth border for Iraq’s Kurds, apart from the smuggling route from the Arab south of Iraq.

I have to find a way in, and that means calling and meeting scores of Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians and Turks. I am applying for Syrian and Iranian visas.

Thursday, 11 November 2002Cambridge

Don Guttenplan, an American writer living in Hampstead, somehow persuaded the BBC to let him produce a profile of Edward Said. Although the BBC is too cowardly to spend more than a pittance and will broadcast it on something called BBC 4 (for which viewers require special digital equipment and therefore has a potential audience of eleven), it is worthwhile. There are few scholars as accomplished, original and polymath as Edward. Don wants to record a long interview for an archive and possibly a book more than he does for the thirty minutes the BBC will broadcast.

Edward Said is in Cambridge with Mariam, his wife, to deliver a series of lectures and to see old friends. He’s always been an Anglophile who buys his shirts and ties in Jermyn Street, despite what the British Empire did to Palestine.

Don, his wife Maria and I meet at King’s Cross early in the morning for the Cambridge train. We are all affected by the knowledge that this man we admire and love is dying. His leukaemia has been killing him for eleven years already, and his doctors did not anticipate his survival to now. Mariam has told us that he is not well at the moment and has asked us not to tire him. When we reach King’s College, we walk up many, many stairs to a sitting room where the director, Mike Dibb, has set up his cameras and microphones. Dibb has read most of Edward’s books and is doing the project for love rather than money. There is a blue screen behind the sofa where Edward is to sit, allowing Mike the possibility of superimposing old photographs or other illustrations related to whatever Edward might speak about. Jo Dutton, a charming and multilingual young assistant producer, offers to bring us coffee. A BBC employee, she’s overqualified for her job.

Edward comes up the stairs in pain and with difficulty, holding Mariam’s arm. Why didn’t we use a ground-floor room? He settles in on the sofa. I take a chair. Don, Maria, Mariam and Jo sit on another sofa behind Mike. We begin. Slowly, the tiredness leaves Edward’s face. Conversation is a drug, as are writing and playing the piano, which revives him, restores him and despatches the leukaemia.

I have known this man since 1972. We met at a lecture he gave on Michel Foucault in Beirut at the American University. Mariam was with him. We saw one another at dinners and lectures; I was a graduate student in philosophy, he a professor of comparative literature (and so much else) at Columbia, then formulating ideas that would coalesce in his masterpiece, or one of his masterpieces, Orientalism.

This past summer, everyone who knew Edward thought he was going to die. He stayed in intensive care, and some friends said goodbye. Then he rallied, somehow. I like to think that this is his time to fight. He is needed to expose Washington’s hypocrisy in promising freedom to Iraq while paying to deny it to Palestinians.

Our interview is scheduled to run over two days – four to six hours of tape a day, depending on how tired Edward becomes. I cannot absorb the enormity of his illness, that it is indeed killing this vital, indomitable character, until he answers my first question. I ask about his personal and intellectual preoccupations as a way to create a platform for him to expound on literature, art, music, politics and culture. The answer is one he would not have given a year ago.

‘The past several months have been dominated by my illness,’ he says, stretching his left arm across the back of the sofa. ‘I thought I’d mastered it intellectually. After a summer of infections, I thought I’d get better, but it has taken its toll emotionally. I don’t feel that I have a centre that isn’t tied up with the disease. I spend a lot of time on it. My doctor is out on Long Island, so I have to go there for tests, and it eats up days. And, of course, there are the effects of the treatment. It’s very hard to do anything else. I’ve even lost the ability to listen to music, and I’ve stopped playing the piano completely. My energy is drained. Most days, by 4 PM, I don’t have any energy left. Sometimes, I can get myself revved up if I give a lecture, but that’s it. It’s very depressing.’

It does not take him long to revive, to forget his frailty and to enjoy the stimulus of indignation. I ask about his two worlds, the West and the Middle East. ‘These two worlds I’ve lived in all my life seem to be confused,’ he says. ‘I’ve had friends who have turned out, surprisingly, to be US imperialists, mouthpieces for the status quo. And that’s been a blow to me … even when I’m at my worst, there is this flash across my mind – an image of Sharon – and I get up straight away.’

By lunchtime Edward has his energy. When we return for the afternoon session before the cameras, he bounds up the stairs. By evening, I am the one who needs rest. On Iraq, he says, ‘What Bush and Sharon want is a redrawn map with naked domination of oil.’ He laments the fact that the mass media perpetuate the demonisation of Islam, of the Arabs, of the Other, in line with the orthodoxy of power. Here, he feels himself powerless. He has tried, more than most, to penetrate the ramparts that protect a well-fed public from seditious thought.

Tuesday, 12 November 2002London

Tonight, the proposition for debate at the Royal Geographic Society is ‘Bush’s cure for Iraq is worse than the disease’. The lecture hall is full, with about 800 people. Women at the door ask those coming in whether they are for or against the motion. To be for it is to oppose the war and vice versa. Public debate is ordinarily a healthy phenomenon, but two aspects of this one are worrying. The leaders who have determined upon war, as Messrs Bush and Blair have done, stand aloof from public debates and ignore public opinion. The other is that we, in the comfort of our Western empires, are deliberating the fate, the lives and deaths, of those who are less powerful than ourselves. Is the decision to wage war a fit subject for debate, when the debaters themselves are neither under attack nor threatened with war?

For the resolution, and thus against war, are Mai Yamani, fellow of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), lecturer at SOAS, daughter of Saudi Arabia’s former oil minister and a harsh critic of the Saudi royal family; Bruce Kent, a former priest who used to head the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; and Michael Quinlan, a think tank researcher formerly at the Ministry of Defence. The war party comprises William Shawcross, author of the book Sideshow, about Henry Kissinger’s destruction of Cambodia, and now a conservative journalist; Charles Powell, once Margaret Thatcher’s foreign affairs advisor, now serving on corporate boards; and Richard Perle, the US’s own Prince of Darkness, a rightist ideologue, military advisor to the Bush administration, former Likud Party advisor and now on the Pentagon’s Defense Review Board. The chair, Rosemary Hollis of the RIIA, explains the form: ten minutes per speaker, alternating between sides; questions from the floor; two minutes for each speaker to sum up; and a vote on the resolution. Lucky us, who get to vote on war against a country most of us have never been to.

The speakers present their cases in turn. The anti-war faction does not defend Saddam, but does question the US’s legal and moral right to invade Iraq, and warns of the regional consequences. The pro-war advocates, apart from Perle, do not call outright for war. They say the consequence of war, if it comes, could be the liberation of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East from tyranny. Shawcross makes the softest case for Bush’s cure, ‘I don’t think anyone on this side wants a war.’ (He cannot have checked with Perle.) He then lists each casus belli: the cooperation that he believes may have taken place between al-Qa‘ida and Saddam Hussein; the threat of Saddam’s WMD; and the danger of appeasing Saddam. ‘Let’s hope that he realises this is a last chance to disarm,’ Shawcross says. ‘Or he could be replaced in a coup d’état!’

He seems to believe that Bush’s war threat may itself be the ‘cure’ to force Saddam to disarm or compel senior Iraqi officers to replace him. Charles Powell is more robust. Saddam is ‘unmatched for murder, torture’, and so on. Powell must have been privy to the reports during his tenure at Downing Street in the 1980s that Saddam deployed illegal chemical weapons on Iranians and then Kurds. Mrs Thatcher, like her alter ego Ronald Reagan, supported Saddam, his war machine and his internal security apparatus. Saddam was ‘unmatched’ at the time, and Powell should have known it then. That was when Mrs Thatcher berated the Financial Times journalist Edward Mortimer for exposing and criticising Saddam’s crimes because, she said, his reports hurt British business. She denied that in 1988 Saddam had massacred Kurdish villagers in Halabja with nerve gas, until Gwynne Roberts, a courageous and committed documentary film-maker, brought back soil samples to prove what Saddam had done.

‘Saddam has a long track record of arming terrorists,’ Powell says, in what must refer to his sponsorship of the Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal. ‘He has a track record of using weapons of mass destruction. Also, he has a long track record of defying the will of the United Nations.’ This is true, and it happened on Powell’s watch and the watches of Thatcher, Reagan, John Major and Bush the Elder. If they had wanted to stop Saddam’s crimes, they did not need to invade Iraq. They could have cut his weapons supply. Powell says regime change is not a goal in itself. Like Shawcross – and Bush the Elder in 1991 – he sees deliverance in the deus ex machina of a military takeover. He concludes by praising young Bush and Blair for being ‘patient rather than rash’.

It is Perle, however, who emerges from the dark to shine his torch on Washington’s goals. More portly than courtly, he ascends the podium and chants the real song of power. Like Powell, he recalls Saddam’s crimes against humanity and, like Powell, neglects to add where he was when Saddam committed them. The cause is just. The necessity for action is obvious. And the invasion cannot fail. ‘How risky is military action? As Saddam is weaker, we are stronger. We will minimise civilian casualties. They will be fewer than if Saddam is left in power.’ His great fear is a resurrected Saddam with an atomic bomb. A Scud rocket, he says, could deliver a nuclear payload to the Kurdish north, the Shiite south or, God forbid, Israel. One of Saddam’s suicide commandos – Perle does not cite any instance of Saddam’s use of suicide bombers – could smuggle an A-bomb in his luggage into New York, Washington, or Harlingen, Texas, and blow it to Hiroshima-dust. These may be the arguments Perle uses at the Pentagon and at the White House, where their mesmeric force sways policy in his direction. At the Royal Geographic Society, the applause is polite rather than enthusiastic when he concludes, ‘The alternative to not acting is to leave him to commit the crimes of which we know he is capable.’

Mai Yamani looks like one tough chick, one of the reasons Saudi men keep their women down. Unleashed and behind the wheels of their own cars, they would be more ferocious than any New York feminists. A voluptuous woman whose long black hair has a defiant streak of white, she stands at the lectern with more self-assurance than imperial delegate Perle. ‘The air is filled with misinformation,’ she says. She points out the lack of evidence of coordination between al-Qa‘ida and Iraq. The question for her is, ‘Will the US invasion solve the problem or make it worse?’ Perle, Shawcross and Powell see a US-sponsored change of regime opening possibilities for democracy in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and other lesser principalities of the Muslim East. Yamani believes the opposite. ‘Popular reaction [to an American invasion] will force these regimes to become more repressive.’ She discourteously mentions that ‘the US has never been friendly to democracy in the region’, and asks, ‘If Bush has a cure, what is the disease? Islamism? Baathism? Secularism? Arab nationalism?’ After an invasion, she says, ‘the sense of collective humiliation will be intensified’. Far from defeating Osama bin Laden, ‘his spirit will invigorate the oppressed’.

Bruce Kent’s is a familiar face in Britain. When he was still Monsignor Kent, he led hundreds of demonstrations for nuclear disarmament, gave thousands of speeches and published millions of words. On the Left, he is an old and venerated reminder of a purer, pre-Blairite past. To the Right, he is a sandal-wearing crank. Of the six speakers tonight, he is the most composed, the most elegant, the most practised – as if only slightly varying some Shakespearean soliloquy he has declaimed a thousand times.

‘We speak of cures for a patient,’ he says. ‘What is the illness? That he defied Security Council resolutions? Ninety-one such resolutions have been violated since 1968. The principal violators are … Israel and Turkey.’ Kent is the first to mention Israel, the only state on Earth that is more dedicated to an Iraqi invasion than are Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. As for Turkey, its treatment of Kurds compares to Saddam’s in quality, if not quantity. ‘Is it nuclear weapons? If so, he would be only the ninth state to have them, after India and Pakistan. Is it weapons of mass destruction? He used them on the Iranians, but he was our friend.’ Kent takes the sermon through the plains of Afghanistan and the requirements of Western oil companies, pausing at the recent UN Security Council Resolution 1441.

‘Resolution 1441,’ he says, ‘gives the United States no right to administer unilaterally the cure of invasion. Articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter require other options first. There is a legal option: indict Saddam Hussein for war crimes.’ The US has resisted indicting Saddam, citing legal obstacles. Organisations that have amassed evidence against Saddam blame politics – that is, Washington’s reluctance to expose the role of American politicians and corporations in sustaining Saddam’s criminality. ‘The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military action is not a cure,’ Kent says, ‘but a recipe for anarchy.’

Audience questions – mostly statements from people committed on both sides – consume about an hour before the vote. Young women collect the ballots. Rosemary Hollis announces the result of the poll taken before the debate:

178 for the motion that Bush’s cure was worse than the disease

126 against

204 with no opinion.

Now comes the real vote. I hand in my ballot. I hope I will not regret my choice, like those who supported the Oxford Union resolution in 1933 not to fight for King and Country. Under international law, individual states, including the US, are prohibited from invading countries that have not attacked them. The UN could have called for an invasion of Iraq under the Genocide Convention in the 1980s when Saddam was conducting the genocide of the Kurds (he called the campaign ‘al-Anfal’, after a Qur’anic sura referring to the ‘spoils of war’). It did not. The Reagan and Bush administrations – along with most of Europe and the Arab world – abetted his crimes and supplied him with the tools to commit them.

What is the casus belli now? Bush, Jr claims it is Saddam’s mere possession of chemical and biological weapons, his record of having deployed chemical agents and his attempt to acquire or manufacture an atom bomb, with a sleight of hand to depict Saddam Hussein as Osama bin Laden. Yet Saddam today has never possessed fewer chemicals and germs, never had fewer missiles with which to deploy them and never had less reason to do so. When he did use them on the Iranian army and on Kurdish civilians, the US – despite Saddam’s clear violations of international laws – did not demand disarmament and regime change. When the Iraqi people themselves fought to change the regime in 1991, the American reaction was to lift the ban on Saddam’s helicopter gunships, which he then deployed to save himself. The first Bush administration’s message, like Bush the Younger’s now, was that Iraqis must not liberate Iraq. The US, however, may. This is imperialism. As a citizen of what is meant to be a republic, I vote yes. Yes, I am against war.

After the debate, the vote is:

255 for

198 against

30 don’t knows.

Victory for peace. We are not, however, the British Parliament, the US Congress or the UN Security Council. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is predicting a December war. No serious military analyst believes it, because the US has yet to deploy sufficient force near Iraq. John Keegan writes in The Daily Telegraph that the US needs months to prepare. I may need that much time to get a visa.

Wednesday, 13 November 2002London

The mood at the ABC News bureau seems glum. The sackings hurt morale, as do rumours of more sackings and of a CNN merger. Still, the staff soldiers on, waiting for the generals’ next blunder: lions, as the Germans said of the British in 1917, led by donkeys. If and when war starts, they will all work overtime. When it is over and ABC counts the money spent, many may be unemployed.

Thursday, 15 November 2002London

To Cambridge, again to see Edward Said. He is lecturing at Lady Mitchell Hall on ‘Humanism and Knowledge: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis’. There are no empty seats, and undergraduates are queuing outside. Someone is saving places for Ruth Rogers, Don and Maria Guttenplan and me near the front. Mike Dibb is filming it for his profile and for the archives. Edward is at his best at gatherings like these, where an intellect, to demonstrate its dexterity, manifests itself to other intellects. This talk does not concern Palestine, Iraq or the American empire. Edward does not mention them. Yet, the conclusions can be drawn: think, connect, enquire, challenge.

Edward is drawn to thinkers like Auerbach, a philologist who, like him, dwelled in two worlds or more, thought and read in many languages. He speaks of Auerbach’s theory of ‘historical coherence’, namely that ‘each historical period produced similar products’. In 1935, when the Nazis forced him out of Marburg, Auerbach accepted a post in neutral Istanbul. Of Mimesis, Auerbach’s magnum opus, Edward says, ‘It is an exile’s work.’ Auerbach wrote in 1921, ‘I am a Prussian and an adherent of the Jewish faith.’ I cannot help but see in Edward, a Palestinian out of place in America and an American estranged when in Palestine, a version of what he calls Auerbach, ‘a Prussian Jew in exile in Muslim Turkey’. Through Auerbach, Edward guides us on a Dante-esque, purposeful voyage through Heaven, literature, faith and history: the Old and New Testaments, classical and demotic forms of language, St Peter, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, Goethe, Stendhal, Flaubert, French realism and theories of time. He ends his talk, ninety minutes on, by saying that Auerbach was never at ease in Istanbul. Rather than interpret the world in which he found himself, ‘he interpreted himself and his culture to his students’.

At a big dinner in a Chinese restaurant afterwards, we talk about the war we know is coming. Edward opposes this war with the moral strength that remains to him – a formidable intellectual arsenal untouched by illness of blood and body. On the way back to London, Ruth Rogers worries aloud that we are losing him. I cannot accept it. It’s like the war: it may be inevitable, but it is not acceptable.

Friday, 16 November 2002London

Salem Chalabi meets me for lunch in Notting Hill. He is the nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). He is almost a clone of his uncle, with the same bulbous nose and barrel chest. We call him ‘Sam’, although for some reason an old girlfriend of mine calls him ‘Shmoo’. He’s a good guy, who studied law at the University of Chicago and works for a firm of international lawyers in London. In the past few months, he has become more involved in Iraqi politics, working with his uncle and travelling to Washington.

Listening to him, I understand how far behind I’ve fallen in Iraqi affairs. There are new people in Washington, feuding among themselves on Olympus, each fashioning an outcome for the mortals of Iraq. Sam has become a messenger and a petitioner to these deities. His dreams, like those of millions more in the Iraqi diaspora, is of freedom, of righting wrongs in the homeland. They seek, like the Achaeans, the fall of Troy in order to restore beautiful Helen to Menelaus and set the world right. Washington’s Olympians see a drama larger than Iraq’s in which all mortals must play their roles. I remember that Robert Graves wrote, and the quote might be inexact, that whatever else it was, the Trojan war was a trade war.

‘The Department of Defense,’ Sam says, ‘wants to train between 5–10,000 Iraqis, but not the existing party militias.’ His uncle’s INC has no militia. The Kurds have two, one in each half of Iraqi Kurdistan, under Massoud Barzani’s KDP and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The Arabs’ only opposition militia of any size is the Badr Brigade, armed wing of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The US doesn’t much care for its Iranian backers or for Shiites, but it lets SCIRI representatives attend Iraqi opposition meetings with the CIA.

Sam says the US is calling for a pan-Iraqi local force. ‘We’re swamped with applications. We started recruiting in Iraq, but the US didn’t want them [the recruits] for security reasons.’ Sam believes the security reasons, but I’m more cynical. The US doesn’t trust Iraqis. This will be an American show, I tell Sam. Anyone from the British to the Eritreans is welcome to tag along. Anyone apart from Iraqis.

‘The US wants a demilitarised Iraq,’ he says. ‘That means no private armies or Peshmerga.’ (The Kurds call their fighters Peshmerga, meaning ‘those who face death’. When they ran away from Saddam’s army in 1991, Jonathan Randal – my friend in Paris, who wrote the best book in English on modern Kurdistan, with the worst title [After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?] – called them the ‘Pêche Melba’.)

A demilitarised Iraq? Not a bad idea, but only the military – which the British created in advance of the state – has ever held Iraq together. Uncoerced, the three parts of Iraq – the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra – would have gone their separate ways. Or the Arab parts might have united with Syria, and the Kurds with their fellows in Turkey or Iran.

Sam fears that Barzani wants two states to emerge from the war: an Arab south and a Kurdish north with its capital in Kirkuk. The INC, he says, proposes ‘a more refined federalism’. That means, in his words, ‘no private armies’, i.e., the Kurds give up their two militias and join the Iraqi national army as individual soldiers. That is not what the Kurds, who will not abandon their self-defence to an Arab-controlled army, foresee.

Anything can happen in this war. In that, we are living again the demise of the Ottoman Empire through the implantation of the American. Two states, one state, three states, federalism, unity, armies, borders, chaos … Iraq is up for grabs.

‘The CIA is trying to carve Northern Iraq out for itself,’ Sam says. ‘It has two sub-stations, in Salahuddin and Suleimaniya. In April 2002, the CIA brought Talabani and Barzani to the Farm.’ The Farm? Apparently, it’s someplace in Virginia where the CIA holds secret meetings. In August, the Bush administration invited various Iraqi opposition leaders – there must be at least twenty – to Washington for meetings with Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney, true to his Wizard of Oz image, took part by video link. Sam won’t say what, if anything, came out of the sessions. Probably nothing.

His uncle, he says, has good relations with Iran – despite his better relationship with Washington’s neo-conservative cabal. Because the mullahs in Tehran want an end to Saddam at least as much as Rumsfeld and company do – Ayatollah Khomeini called for regime change in Baghdad twenty years ago, about the time Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam’s hand – the Iranians ‘will not stand in America’s way. They will allow the Iraqi opposition to operate across their borders, so long as Iraq is not used as a base for subversion [against Iran]. Why would the US want bases in Iraq, apart from subverting Iran and Syria and dominating Middle East oil?

Tuesday, 19 November 2002London

Hoshyar Zebari calls, and I go to see him. He says the Iraqi opposition conference details are now set. It is scheduled to take place in London from 10–15 December. The US asked the KDP, PUK and INC to increase the number of delegates from 260 to 300. David Pierce of the State Department and a woman from the National Security Council said the extra forty participants would be independent and liberal representatives. When this was agreed, the Americans returned to Washington. As much as Hoshyar protests that the Iraqi oppositionists are setting their own course, it looks to an outsider that the puppetmasters’ strings stretch to Washington.

Thursday, 21 November 2002London