Just a few days before suicide bomber Salman Abedi killed 22 and injured dozens more in Manchester, the BBC began a 25-part radio documentary series in which British journalist Jeremy Bowen reflects on his quarter of a century of reporting from the Middle East.
In Our Man in the Middle East, Bowen recalled an incident which few in the UK will now recall but which will haunt families for generations in Iraq. Somewhere in the region of 400 people – the elderly, women and children – died on February 14, 1991, after Operation Desert Shield had morphed into Desert Storm and the US air force destroyed a civilian air raid shelter in the Amiriyah district of Baghdad.
At the scene after the attack, Bowen watched rescue workers recovering human “fragments … twisted pieces of charcoal” and charred bodies, “many of them tiny … obviously of children”.
He found himself in the midst of a crowd of men who “had taken their families to the shelter and left them where they thought they’d be safe” and now, “silent, aghast, devastated by grief”, could do nothing but witness the hopeless rescue efforts.
To Bowen’s surprise these men whose hopes and dreams had been reduced to ashes by the latest savage spasm of geopolitics beyond their control “spoke politely to me, a journalist from one of the countries that was killing Iraqis”. He wondered “how a reporter from Iraqi TV would have fared if somehow Saddam’s men had managed to kill 400 civilians in London or New York”.
Perhaps it is that the stoicism of those encountered by Bowen in Baghdad – and again and again elsewhere throughout the Middle East during his tenure – has become the habit of the helpless, of peoples so frequently suppressed by the bullying, bombs and bullets of assorted dictators, invaders and terrorists that the expectation and acceptance of catastrophe is woven into the fabric of everyday life.
But it is a terrible error to believe, as many of the politicians currently battling for votes in Britain’s upcoming general election appear to, that such horrors do not beget horrors of their own.
Last week Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK’s opposition Labour Party, provoked outrage when, four days after Manchester, he suggested there might be “connections between wars that we have been involved in … in other countries and terrorism here at home”.
It was a careful, measured speech, in which he stressed that the assessment “in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children”. But if elected on June 8, a Labour government would conduct foreign policy in a way that “reduces rather than increases the threat … if we are to protect our people we must be honest about what threatens our security”.
He was vilified, by opposition politicians and sections of the media alike, for “putting politics before people at a time of tragedy”. It was “monstrous” and “inexplicable in this week of all weeks that there should be any attempt to … legitimate the actions of terrorists”.
Of course, Corbyn had done no such thing. He was giving voice to a fact widely recognised within MI5, Britain’s hard-pressed domestic security service, and expressed publicly by a former director-general. In 2010 Eliza Manningham-Buller told the Chilcott inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had “radicalised … a whole generation of young people … who saw our involvement … as an attack upon Islam” and had “undoubtedly increased” the terror threat to the UK.
In February 2003, one month before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the UK government’s Joint Intelligence Committee submitted a report that was equally unequivocal. The “threat from Islamist terrorists will … increase in the event of war”, it concluded, “reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West”. Attacks were “likely, especially in the US and UK”.
And, of course, in the region, which continues to bear the brunt of Islamist terrorism, as the attacks in Kabul and Baghdad this week demonstrated all too clearly.
Lest we forget, Chilcott concluded in July last year that Saddam Hussein’s regime had posed no imminent threat to British interests, intelligence suggesting Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was presented with “unjustified certainty”, peaceful alternatives had not been explored and the war and its ongoing aftermath, that claimed the lives of 179 British military personnel and, in the three years after 2003, those of more than 160,000 Iraqi civilians, was wholly unnecessary.
It is irrelevant whether attacks in the West, such as that in Manchester, are being carried out by crazed individuals “inspired” by the evil philosophy of groups such as ISIL or Al Qaeda, or by cells recruited and trained in the badlands of Syria and Libya. The key question, raised by Corbyn, is this: would any of them, from the 7/7 London bombings to Manchester (to say nothing of the hundreds of lives lost in New York, Brussels, Paris, Nice, Copenhagen, Berlin, Stockholm and elsewhere), have taken place without the provocation of western intervention?
The lessons of Iraq have not been learnt and other interventions, such as in Libya and Syria, have followed. Indeed, it is now thought that Manchester-born bomber Salman Abedi’s father, a Libyan refugee living in the UK, was helped by British intelligence to travel to join the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group battling against Qaddafi in Libya. Following the dictator’s overthrow some, including his son, transferred their allegiance to ISIL. Abedi’s sister Jomana told The Wall Street Journal her brother “saw the explosives America drops on children in Syria, and he wanted revenge”.
If anyone was playing politics at the expense of those who lost loved ones in Manchester, it was those politicians and sections of the media who turned a blind eye to the obvious truths and painted Corbyn as some kind of traitor. They have form.
In February 1991 Jeremy Bowen reported what he saw in Amiriyah, Baghdad, and was “amazed when the Pentagon in Washington and the Ministry of Defence in London put out statements saying that the shelter was a military command centre”. The British tabloid press compared Bowen to the traitor William Joyce, who broadcast propaganda from Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
By grim chance, the date of the Amiriyah bombing, February 14, is also the anniversary of the 1945 destruction of the German city of Dresden by British and American aircraft during the Second World War, which claimed the lives of over 20,000 civilians. In 1942, following eight months of German air raids over the UK that killed 40,000 people, British air chief marshal Arthur Harris prefaced the RAF’s devastating response with a statement chillingly relevant today.
The Nazis, he said, had entered the war “under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now, they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
To suggest that Britain and other western states are now reaping the whirlwind of ill-advised intervention in the Byzantine complexities of Middle East politics is neither to absolve terrorists of responsibility for their evil work, nor to insult the memory of the innocents who have died. On the contrary. Only by confronting the serial foreign-policy catastrophes of the past and taking steps to avoid their repetition, can countries such as Britain even hope to prevent the further useless, brutal waste of innocent young lives, whether in Baghdad or Manchester.
Jonathan Gornall is a frequent contributor to The National
