In No Man’s Land

John Simpson, flamboyant world affairs editor of the BBC, delves into Iraq’s history, America’s strategic engagements in West Asia and his own notes taken in the course of more than 20 years of covering Saddam’s three wars to hazard a few answers. Simpson’s famous despatches from war zones around the world are uniquely animated. In Simpson’s world, historic moments are encapsulated in his encounters. Though him the viewer bears witness. Through his exaggerated sense of self and his self-deprecating British humour, we are positioned at new perspectives. Through him the drama gathers momentum. In the war in Afghanistan, for instance, you could have been forgiven for crediting him with the liberation of Kabul from the Taliban as he led a motley group of passersby past the city limits.

In The Wars Against Saddam, however, it’s a sober John Simpson who narrates a slice of contemporary history. The Second Gulf War demonstrated that so much military success can be negated by “collateral damage”, by the attendant loss of civilian life. In this war, Simpson keeps account of casualties and the burdens of scarcity and disruption that accrue to Iraqis on the cusp of “liberation”. Liberation from the Saddam years, he finds, is not that seductive a prospect when it involves dodging the bombs and making acquaintance with a nervy, trigger-prone occupation force. In addition, Simpson gauges a surreal conviction amongst many Iraqis in the early days of the “shock and awe” strikes: that the Americans are simply conspiring to perpetuate Saddam’s rule. George W. Bush, wrote Britain’s poet laureate Andrew Motion undertook his West Asian adventure for “elections, money, empire, oil and Dad”, and the Iraqis cannot quite forget Dad’s legacy — Bush Senior’s refusal to aid the Basra uprising, for instance, and his fellow Republicans’ assistance to Saddam in his war against Iran.

In a tragic twist, Simpson’s own crew is hit by an American missile as they trail fleeing Iraqis near Kirkuk. His translator, a chirpy local lad seeking Simpson’s friendship and some adventure who lies to his family that he’s going nowhere near the frontline, is killed — and Simpson himself is left with a permanent hearing impairment and a limp.

But if this was a war that routinely went wrong in the desert, the writer keeps reminding us, the reasons lay in Washington and London. Targeting Saddam, as much to remove a potential threat to American security as to announce American power, had always been on the neocon agenda. September 11, argues Simpson like many other analysts, only gave them reason to hasten their offensive. Even as he was spirited away from his Pentagon office after an airliner struck the building that autumn day, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was taking quick notes: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only U(sama) B(in) L(aden). Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” Later his deputy, neocon guru Paul Wolfowitz, and American Vice-President Dick Cheney were asked why they were so intent on attacking Iraq. Both replied: because it was “do-able”. In London, moans Simpson, Tony Blair with his inexplicable desire to be liked played along with his transatlantic allies at every turn.

And this “do-able” war was waged. Leaving so many in no man’s land. Between the peace rallies in assorted capitals and the incredibly jingoistic reportage from embeds were stranded millions of confused folks around the world — among them, it would seem, Simpson himself. He writes: “I was what Americans would call ‘conflicted’. I could understand the attitude of the radical British journalist Christopher Hitchens, who felt Saddam’s crimes were so disgusting that he was even prepared to support George W. Bush in overthrowing him, but I could also understand the opinions of the writer and film-maker Michael Moore… who shouted… at the 2003 Oscars ceremony, ‘We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.’” Simpson could be speaking for most of us oceans away in India.