Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

This was not brainwashing in the normally accepted use of the word. It was scarcely indoctrination. But there could be no doubt what the Iranians were trying to do at Parandak: to make Saddam’s own soldiers more dangerous to his Baathist regime than the Iranian army that was fighting its way towards the Iraqi frontier. When Khomeini’s name was mentioned, it echoed over the massive parade ground, repeated by thousands of Iraqi soldiers who then knelt in prayer and homage to the Islamic faith that overthrew the Shah.

True, there were some dissidents among the Iraqi troops, men who still retained their political as well as their Islamic identity. At the far back of one line of older prisoners – captives now for more than a year – an Iraqi soldier shouted ‘Saddam is a very good man’, and a few of his comrades nodded in agreement. ‘The man did not say “Saddam” – he was greeting you with the word “Salaam”,’ explained an Iranian official with the confidence of mendacity. Several hundred prisoners refused to pray. ‘They had probably not washed before prayers,’ said the same official. ‘They had not been purified.’

From his residence in north Tehran, Khomeini had given specific instructions that Iraqi prisoners-of-war were to be well treated and given all the rights of captive soldiers. The POWs were visited by the International Red Cross, but they were also being lectured in Arabic each day by Iranian officers who explained to them that the United States, France, Britain and other Western nations had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1980 attack on Iran. There were, naturally, no contradictions from their vast audience. When the Iraqi prisoners knelt to pray, they took Khomeini’s portrait from around their necks, placed it upon the ground in front of them and rested their heads upon it. In the barracks, these men – including Iraqi paratroopers who arrived from the war front on the very day of our visit, still wearing their blue berets – were to be given weekly lessons by mullahs on the meaning of Islam. They were already receiving the daily Tehran newspaper Kayhan , specially printed in Arabic for their convenience.

When these prisoners eventually returned to Iraq, some of them, perhaps a goodly proportion, must have carried these lessons with them, an incubus for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – or an inspiration to oppose any other army that dared to take control of their country in the years to come. We were not told how many of these young Iraqi soldiers were Shiites and what percentage were Sunni.

The Iranians would not permit us to speak to the prisoners, although they produced more than a hundred captives – or ‘guests’ as they cloyingly called them – from Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria and Somalia, who had been taken among the Iraqi prisoners. A bearded Lebanese librarian from Zahle – a Christian town – claimed to have been forced to enlist while working in Baghdad. A Somali, Fawzi Hijazi, frightened but smiling, pleaded with me to tell his embassy of his presence. He had been a scholarship student at Baghdad University, he said, when he had been press-ganged into the Iraqi army. He had not been visited by the Red Cross. But at this point, an Iranian guard ordered him to stop speaking.

Now on our chaperoned visits to the Iranian front, we could see the country’s newly established self-confidence made manifest. The Revolutionary Guard Corps had become the spine of Iran’s military power, drawing on a huge pool of rural volunteers, the Basiji , the schoolboys and the elderly, the unemployed, even the sick. An official history of the Guard Corpswas published in booklet form in Tehran during the war, claiming that it was ‘similar in many respects to the combatants of early Islam, in the days of the Holy Prophet … Among the important and prevalent common points of the two is … life according to an Islamic brotherhood; the story of the travellers and the followers. The travellers … migrated to the war fronts, and the followers … support their families in the cities during the war.’ An ‘important and popular activity’ of the Guards, the pamphlet said, was ‘the military, political, and ideological training of the Baseej [sic] , in which the limitless ocean of our people are organised.’ *

Both the ‘Guards’ and the ‘travellers’ were now in convoy towards the borders of Iraq, singing and chanting their desire to ‘liberate’ the Iraqi Shia holy cities. One trail of trucks, jeeps and tanks 5 kilometres long, which I overtook near the Iranian city of Susangerd, was loaded down with thousands of Basiji , almost all of them waving black and green banners with ‘Najaf’ and ‘Kufa’ written across them. Jang ta pirouzi , they shouted at me when I took their pictures. ‘War until victory.’ Another convoy was led by a tank with a placard tied above its gun muzzle, announcing that it was the ‘Kerbala Caravan’. These men, most of them, were going to their deaths in Iraq but they were doing so with an insouciance, a light-heartedness – a kind of brazen stubbornness – that was breathtaking.

I suppose the soldiers of the 1914 war had something of the same gaiety about them, the British who thought the war would be over by Christmas, the French who painted ‘Berlin’ on the side of their troop trains, the Germans who painted ‘Paris’ on theirs. In Frederic Manning’s semi-autobiographical Her Privates We , a unit of British soldiers marching through a French village at night during the First World War awakes the inhabitants:

… doors suddenly openedand light fell through the doorways, and voices asked them where they were going.

‘Somme! Somme!’ they shouted, as though it were a challenge.

‘Ah, no bon!’ came the kindly, pitying voices in reply … And that was an enemy to them, that little touch of gentleness and kindliness; it struck them with a hand harsher that death’s, and they sang louder, seeing only the white road before them …

No wonder that boy soldier on the Dusallok Heights had lectured me about spirituality and materialism. There comes a point, I suspect, in a soldier’s life when the inevitability of death becomes more pressing than the possibility of life.

Now the Arab leaders who had expressed such confidence in Saddam were fearful that he might lose the war they had so cheerfully supported. King Hussein of Jordan arrived hurriedly in Baghdad for talks with Saddam, speaking boldly of standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Iraqis but privately expressing his fears that their army would soon fall back even further, allowing the Iranians to enter Iraq. The Kuwaitis and Saudis bankrolled Saddam’s new armoury. Egyptian-made heavy artillery shellswere sent by air to Iraq from Cairo, overflying Saudi airspace. *

But the Arabs were not alone in their fears that Iraq might collapse. The United States had been furnishing Iraq with satellite imagery of the Iranian battle lines since the first days of the war, and a steady stream of unofficial US ‘advisers’ had been visiting Baghdad ever since. When Mohamed Salam, a Lebanese staff correspondent for the American Associated Press news agency in Beirut, was posted to Iraq in 1983, ‘Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to meet Saddam and I was treated like a king, like all the people connected to the Americans. The Iraqis couldn’t be more cooperative.’ At Muthanna, the old military airport in the centre of Baghdad, the Iraqis held an arms fairand ‘everyone was there, from the British to the South Koreans,’ he recalled. Around May 1985, a US military delegationtravelled to Baghdad with twelve ranking officers, according to Salam. ‘The embassy wouldn’t talk about it. They stayed for three days and they came on a special Pan Am plane.’

At the time, Salam – we had both covered the Lebanese civil war together – could not travel unaccompanied in Iraq, but he told me in Baghdad at the time how the Americans were concentrating on Iraq. ‘The US is beginning to regard Iraq as its main card in the area … So far, Saddam has been successful in suppressing the communists, the Shiites and all the opposition. That suits the Americans quite well. King Hussein is useful in promoting Iraq to the West. But the US would not want Iraq to be a post-war regional power. Nothing is clear at the embassy here. There’s a USIS guy called Jim Bulloch, the deputy chief of mission is Ted Katouf and Dean Strong is their military affairs man. But they’re cut out of the loop of what the Pentagon is doing.’ Salam recalls now that he ‘saw satellite photos of the Iranian forces – I saw these pictures at the US interests section in Baghdad in 1984.’