I remember the moment I knew the Gulf War had broken out. I had just emerged from the tiny room I shared with a few amiable (i.e. non-biting) cockroaches on a rundown compound near Jeddah airport (or "King Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud International Airport" to give it its official title). It was mercifully and uncharacteristically cool on that overcast morning exactly ten years ago.
In the total absence of organised public transport which obtains on the ground in Saudi Arabia, my employers - the publishers of The Saudi Gazette, an English-language broadsheet aimed at the hundreds of thousands of English-speaking expatriates in the kingdom - used to send a car around for me each day.
Nothing luxurious this, you understand: it was an ancient Toyota with no air-conditioning, driven by a Stalinist Yemeni with a chip on his shoulder about Westerners, who used to berate me in Arabic for keeping him waiting (which I invariably did). This morning was no different in this respect. The security man had phoned my room to tell me my car had come, and I went strolling out through the dusty, palm-fringed roads of the little estate to meet my chauffeur.
Military aircraft
I heard them before I saw them: a flight of Saudi jet trainers flying low and slow over the compound, accompanied incongruously by a turbo-prop Hercules, like a big shepherd guiding a flock of sheep. Apart from the ever-present Hercules, a daily sighting in Saudi aviation, these were the first military aircraft I had seen in the six months I had spent in the country.
Seen, but not heard. Over the days, or rather nights, coming up to January 17th, late in the dead of night, the shrieking roar of B-52s rattled our sleep as they flew into at the airport in readiness for the war that was to come. Officially, of course, they weren't there. But during the war that was to come, they would make no secret of their presence as they swung in low over Jeddah to land after returning from their deadly missions to Kuwait. It was only 600 miles to the battle zone so, flying at about 500 m.p.h., a round trip, including positioning for bombing their targets, would have taken them not more than three hours. Those who have never seen a B-52, much less a great flock of them, can have no idea how frightening they appear: enormous, black-painted aircraft which appear nondescript and ill-kempt - is this deliberate, or a sign of their age - some are a full 40 years flying? - like huge, menacing vultures scavenging in the back-alleys of the sky for the dying bodies of America's enemies. The Saudi jet trainers were innocuous by contrast, but not on that particular morning, in that particular place. For the UN deadline to Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait - which his forces had invaded the previous August - had expired two days earlier, on January 15th.
American presence
My favourite Stalinist Yemeni said nothing on the way to work. I surmise that, like many people , including several of my Indian colleagues on the Gazette, he was shocked that the war had actually started, that the Allied forces - effectively the Americans, in terms of who made the decisions - had carried out their threats, and had not backed down in the blinking game with Saddam Hussein.
The American presence in Saudi Arabia was resented by many countries in the Third World for a variety of different reasons - some religious, some related to the then still-present reality of the Soviet Union, a key factor in the Gulf War which, these days, is overlooked and forgotten. But, in my view, there was also an element of anti-Western envy, a desire to experience the schadenfreude of Allied defeat or humiliation by a Third World state, no matter how notorious. It's an attitude one often finds here in Ireland in relation to Britain, a form of childishness masquerading as concern for the oppressed. At work, I discovered, not really to my surprise, that the night staff at the Saudi Gazette had organised the greatest event in the newspaper's history quite well without me. They included the only other Westerner working on the paper, my redoubtable fellow Irishman Dominic O'Dwyer, of Tralee, Co Kerry, who occupied the position of managing editor (or "managing idiot" as he was prone to describe it.) It doesn't take a hero, wrote General Norman Schwarzkopf some time later, and it didn't take me that fateful night. Later in the day, there were urgent phone calls from RTE, the BBC, Independent Television News, all seeking instant analysis, as if I were some wizened Arabist, cut from the cloth of Thesiger or Glubb Pasha.
Double censorship
The remarkable thing about work that day was how little there was of it. We in the Saudi media of the time were under a double censorship: the censorship of an autocratic Islamic regime, and the censorship of a country at war. We, and anyone else in Saudi Arabia lucky enough to have a satellite television, watched in awe as CNN reported from bomb-shattered Baghdad, and Israeli suburbs were hit by Saddam's Scud missiles.
The most important thing I had to do that day was to ensure that no mention, however oblique, of the Iraqi attack on Israel, which had quickly followed the Americans' raid on Baghdad, got into the newspaper. The Saudis were acutely aware of their own and other Arab peoples' sensitivities on this issue; any attempt by Saddam to appear as the champion of Palestine had to be suppressed. Like much censorship in wartime, however, it was futile: anyone with even an ordinary television could watch Egyptian TV and find out what was going on, and if any Saudis tuned into the BBC Arabic service they got not only news, but pro-Iraqi comment from the many Palestinians employed there in London as broadcasters. None of that changed what I had to do, for failure to do it would literally have landed me in jail.