I shall never forget the minutes after the missile landed. Has victory been worth this? I'm not sure
(Filed: 13/04/2003)
telegraph.co.uk
A week after his translator died in a US friendly fire accident in northern Iraq, John Simpson, in Kirkuk, reflects on the price of toppling Saddam Hussein
This city of Kirkuk has got off relatively lightly from the chaos of Saddam Hussein's collapse. I was caught up in the looting of a hospital in the city centre, which was ugly and brutish.
No one tried to loot our camera gear, though, because my producer, Tom Giles, and I are now being guarded everywhere we go by four extremely tough and well-armed peshmerga soldiers, supplied generously (though much against our protestations) by the head of the Kurdish PUK movement.
Mosul is a different matter: an amalgam of almost every ethnic group in Iraq. Under Saddam's rule there was a system called "ethnic correction", by which you were encouraged to register yourself as an Arab in exchange for various privileges.
The problem was, the authorities could then shift you wherever they chose. Many real Arabs, as well as "corrected" ones, ended up in Mosul.
So there is a sizeable proportion of southern Shi'ites, for instance, some of whom demonstrated loudly and angrily on Friday against Saddam and in favour of an Islamic republic. Then they attacked an Italian friend of mine because he was an infidel. Nothing in post-Saddam Iraq is simple or homogeneous; one wonders whether Donald Rumsfeld has entirely grasped this.
In the end Saddam's Iraq imploded suddenly, as many of us had predicted. And if the American generals, instead of Mr Rumsfeld, had had their way, it would probably have happened even faster. If so, the appalling scenes of looting and brutality we have witnessed in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baghdad might not have occurred, and plenty of decent people might not have lost their lives.
The generals wanted twice the forces, and a stunning air bombardment at the start of the campaign. Mr Rumsfeld wanted a quick war, and a light one. As a result, it took more than three weeks, and now the United States simply doesn't have the manpower in Iraq to sort out the problems which regime change has brought.
The use of much more well-targeted high explosive, as the American generals wanted, would have shortened the course of the war. Yet bombing Third World countries from First World planes is a nasty business, and not nearly as accurate as the official spokesmen in places such as Doha would have you believe.
Driving from Kirkuk to Mosul I saw a dozen places which the Americans had bombed. Some had been taken out with great precision; in others, the bombs had landed harmlessly close by, or had hit buildings which did not seem remotely like military targets. The trouble is, a human being has at some point to make the critical decision, and release the bomb.
Last Sunday a pilot in the US Marine Corps, flying his F14 from the USS Roosevelt, fired a Maverick missile at a tank in response to a request from an American special forces officer on the ground. The SF officer, who was escorting a leading Kurdish commander, had spotted the tank about a mile away.
The pilot and his navigator, coming in low, seem to have confused the tank's position with the position of the SF officer. The mistake was compounded by the fact that there actually was a disabled Iraqi tank lying near the SF officer. The bright orange panels we had all put on the roofs of our vehicles to show we were with the coalition forces should have been clearly visible from 500ft, but the F14 ignored them.
I shall never forget the minutes after the missile landed. I watched a Kurdish soldier wandering around with his entrails in his hands, with an expression of mild worry on his face. He died quickly. So did another soldier, who burned to death beside me, lying with his arms in the air. My translator, Kamran, whose foot was blown off, took a little longer to die.
Later that afternoon I went to see Kamran's mother. I had thought of all sorts of things to say to comfort her, but her tears and those of her daughters wiped them from my mind. I could only touch her shoulder and tell her again and again how sorry I was. The guilt of taking her son to a place where an American pilot could mix up one six-figure number with another was mine, and mine alone.
I shall not be allowed to forget it, since I am likely to be deaf in one ear for the rest of my life, and may walk with a distinct limp. And I was one of the lucky ones; 20 people died around me.
Was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein worth all the violence and chaos in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baghdad? Was it worth the death of my 25-year-old translator, the only support of his widowed mother? She doesn't think so. At the moment, I'm finding it hard not to agree with her.
John Simpson is World Affairs Editor of the BBC |
