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by
Maggie O'Kane, December 5, 2002
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 I
have a picture from the last Gulf war. It was taken in the basement
of the Al Rashid hotel, the night the war started. The look
on my face is one you might expect of a 28-year-old reporter
at the centre of one of the biggest stories of my lifetime:
earnest, excited and thrilled to be in Baghdad.
Eleven years later, I'm on maternity leave and the news of an
impending second Gulf war follows me around the kitchen. This
time, I feel only a sense of intense danger as the Middle East
lurches towards a possible chemical and biological war.
The chances
of Saddam Hussein using chemical and biological weapons if attacked
are, according to the testimony of the CIA to the US Senate
intelligence committee on October 7, "pretty high"
- a scenario that even one of greatest hawks in US history,
Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to George
Bush senior, says would lead to meltdown in the Middle East.
As of December 7, when Iraq is expected to produce its definitive
dossier, there should be no illusions: no matter what Baghdad
discloses, America and almost certainly Britain are going to
war. The "material breach", if it does not happen
by itself, will be manufactured, so wringing consent for the
second Gulf war just as consent was manufactured with breathtaking
cynicism in 1991.
There
were two glaring examples of how the propaganda machine worked
before the first Gulf war. First, in the final days before the
war started on January 9, the Pentagon insisted that not only
was Saddam Hussein not withdrawing from Kuwait - he was - but
that he had 265,000 troops poised in the desert to pounce on
Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon claimed to have satellite photographs
to prove it. Thus, the waverers and anti-war protesters were
silenced.
We now
know from declassified documents and satellite photographs taken
by a Russian commercial satellite that there were no Iraqi troops
poised to attack Saudi. At the time, no one bothered to ask
for proof.
No one
except Jean Heller, a five-times nominated Pulitzer prize-winning
journalist from the St Petersburg Times in Florida, who persuaded
her bosses to buy two photos at $1,600 each from the Russian
commercial satellite, the Soyuz Karta. Guess what? No massing
troops. "You could see the planes sitting wing tip to wing
tip in Riyadh airport," Ms Heller says, "but there
wasn't was any sign of a quarter of a million Iraqi troops sitting
in the middle of the desert." So what will the fake satellite
pictures show this time: a massive chemical installation with
Iraqi goblins cooking up anthrax?
The US
propaganda machine is already gearing up. In its sights already
is Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector. He's too much of
a softie for Saddam, the former CIA director James Wolsey told
the Today programme last week. His work is of "limited
value". He was Kofi Annan's "second choice".
What
next? Blix's granny is Iraqi? He has a drugs problem?
Meanwhile,
in Britain, Jack Straw's new human rights dossier on Iraq is
timed to coincide with the build-up. Convenient, eh? The second
tactic used to get consensus for war in 1991 was another propaganda
classic: dead babies. Then, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
in Washington, Nijirah al-Sabah, tearfully described how, as
a volunteer in the Al Adnan hospital in Kuwait City, she had
watched Iraqi soldiers looting incubators to take back to Baghdad,
pitching the Kuwaiti babies on to "the cold floor to die".
Except
it never happened. The Filipina nurses, Frieda Construe-Nag
and Myra Ancog Cooke, who worked in the maternity ward of the
Al Adnan hospital, had never seen Ms al-Sabah in their lives.
Amnesty admitted they had been duped. Middle East Watch confirmed
the fabrication, but it was too late: a marginal US congress
had been swung to vote for war. George Bush senior mentioned
the "incubator babies" seven times in pre-war rallying
speeches. It was months before the truth came out. By then,
the war was over.
This
time, we have yet to see what propaganda will be used to rally
consensus for the second Gulf war by proving a "material
breach". It is highly likely that Saddam Hussein maintains
at least some chemical and biological capacity. In a war in
which his own survival is unlikely (and already rumoured to
be ill with cancer) Saddam Hussein has nothing to lose. If he
knows his fall is imminent, what terrible legacy might he choose
to leave behind? What better present to his extremist Arab brothers
than an attack on Israel? And how will the US, Britain or Israel
respond if their troops or cities come under chemical or biological
attack?
I n 1995,
the Washington-based Defense News reported on the outcome of
the then highly classified Global 95 Wargame, a high-level military
exercise enacted at the US Naval War college. Global 95 played
out a simultaneous threat from North Korea and Iraq. The North
Korean situation was diffused, but Iraq attacked US troops in
the region with biological weapons. Washington replied with
a nuclear bomb on Baghdad. The main observation during the Global
95 experiment was just how quickly the situation escalated.
But the
greatest irony, and most important issue, is that although the
war on Iraq may indeed get George Bush re-elected, it will not
win the war on terrorism. It will instead fuel it.
In 1998,
I spent an afternoon with Abu Ziad, an elderly accountant in
Baghdad. He recounted how, at 2am on February 13, 1991, two
bombs had hit the Amiryia bomb shelter near his home. The first
pierced the roof, slicing into the central heating tank and
sending gallons of boiling water pouring over the women and
children below. The second bomb, 15 minutes later, exploded
with such force that he never had the chance to identify the
bodies of his wife and four of their five children: Zena,14,
Fuad, 12, Lena, seven and Sadaad, six. He remembers standing
outside the shelter in the early morning and noticing the ankles
of dead women and children marked by the red hot mattress springs
they had fought to climb over to get out of the shelter before
the second bomb dropped.
The Abu
Ziads of the second Gulf war will be seen on al-Jazeera TV giving
their heartbreaking testimony to a new generation of disaffected
and dispossessed young Muslim men from Palestine, Indonesia,
the Middle East and Africa. And we can all hear the death chant
of a hundred suicide bombers: Allahu Akbar. It's a high price
to pay for another four years in the White House.
I am
not some naive pacifist. I supported intervention in Bosnia,
the war in Kosovo and military intervention in East Timor. Baghdad
is a city where terror hangs in the air in every home. Iraqis
literally dare not speak Saddam Hussein's name. But now he is
cornered, dangerous and possibly dying. Provoking him is criminally
irresponsible and provoking him in order to secure a second
presidential term is unforgivable.
Remember
the words of JFK to his brother Bobby, spoken in the ante-room
of the Oval Office the night before the Cuban missile crisis,
now declassified. "I have to do it, Bobby," said John
Kennedy, explaining why he was facing up to the Soviets. "I'll
lose the presidency if I don't." Krushchev had a way out.
He ordered the Soviet ships to turn around. What would have
happened if he had nowhere to turn?
· Maggie O'Kane is editorial director of GuardianFilms.
She was named European Journalist of the Year this week for
its first documentary, Looking for Karadzic. maggie.okane@guardian.co.uk
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