Saddam thirsty for UK weapons

THE MIDDLE EAST

BACKGROUND

We would come across them from time to time on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war. Amid the ever-so-sweet smell of bodies rotting in the 120 degree heat, behind berms of sand, alongside ditches in which the arms and legs and heads of dead men had been thrown in confusion by the incoming shellfire, we would catch sight of an artillery piece transhipped to Iran by Noricum, the state-owned Austrian armaments manufacturer.

Not far from Basra, we were attacked by a French-made Mirage jet in the colours of the Iraqi air force, a snatched contour of wings and cockpit canopy beneath the sun as it tried to bomb the Iranian convoy in which I was travelling through the desert.

Once, with the Iranians, at the Battle of the Fish Lake across the Shatt al-Arab river from Basra - in a Somme-like landscape of mud and air-bursting shells and burning tanks and 30-foot deep mass graves - I even caught sight of a battery of American Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, a gift from Colonel Oliver North, the Israelis and the US government, the rockets painted a blinding white, perched in the cover of a sand-dune.

When the Iraqis staged their initial great advance into Iraq, they proudly displayed their first captured British-made Challenger tanks. The one I climbed into contained an incinerated soldier in the gunner's seat but an unburned copy of the driver's manual beside him with the word ''Classified" on the cover and the name of its publisher at the foot of the first page: the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall.

The Middle East, so the old cliche goes, is an arms bazaar. But during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, from 1980 until 1988, it was more like a department store, the traders landing by air at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad or Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, their wares queueing up on the docksides in Kuwait and in the Saudi port of Dammam or at Bandar Abbas for overland transhipment to the battlefronts.

The arms merchants never breathed the smell of death, of course. The ones I came across - and they were more difficult to reach than the fearful places of blood and fire they had helped to create - were always soberly dressed with well-polished shoes and dark ties, an obscene combination of undertaker and suitor.

And in a way, suitors is what they were, their wealth as obvious as their mercantile promiscuity, always excusing their mission on the grounds that if they did not climb into bed with the most beautiful woman in town - the arms procurors of Iraq or Iran, it hardly mattered - then someone else would enjoy her favours. It was the vile exoneration uttered by every government official. I once received an embittered letter from a now-dead member of the House of Lords, urging me to investigate Iraq's arms suppliers and enclosing a British minister's reply to his questions in the House about Anglo-Iraqi trade. Britain was in competition, the minister said; Britain was ''a trading nation".

And when I followed the good lord's advice and went to ferret out the men who made the guns that had me cowering in the sand 2,000 miles away, they turned out - inevitably - to be genial fellows, as sharp of tongue and intellect as George Bernard Shaw's Undershaft. A German arms trader - I found him in a Teutonic castle not far from Cologne - happily boasted to me of how he helped to kick off the Iran-Iraq war: by flying to Washington, picking up satellite pictures of the Iranian front lines at the Pentagon and then flying back across half the world to present them to a general in Baghdad.

When I asked him for the state of Iran's wartime armoury, he summoned a young man, who entered his office with a complete inventory of Iran's current arms requests. I expected a few sheets of paper but they came in volumes, each page stamped by the Iranian Arms Procurement Office in London, just a few hundred yards from Scotland Yard. Each list contained thousands of demands: for 155mm guns, for artillery linings and proximity shells and mortar casings and fuses and tank tracks and parts for Bell Cobra helicopter gunships. When the Iraqi volumes were brought into the room, they were even larger.

''People have been fighting wars since the ancient Greeks," my plump German host said over lunch in the factory canteen. ''Of course, I don't sell weapons directly to the belligerents; I obey the law. But naturally, these nations are put in touch with dealers who can help them. Do you think it's immoral to employ all these people here, all these workers who have families to support, who are well paid and happy?" And it was true; the workers, all in their smart blue uniforms, were happy. They had health insurance from their German employer, free meals and financial assistance with lodging. They even ate with their boss. Germany, too, was a trading nation.

And the law could be circumnavigated as easily as the world. To sell weapons in defiance of UN resolutions and government legislation during the Iran-Iraq war, all you needed was a set of false end-user certificates, the documents provided to customs officials allegedly proving that weapons were en route to recognised and permitted clients - invariably Third-World governments who were not at war. The favourite nations of transhipment for the arms dealers I met were Oman and Singapore. So many questions did I ask one arms supplier that he became convinced that I wished to purchase weapons for Iraq and handed me an entire end-user certificate for the State of Oman, made out in the name of a general in Muscat but with the type of armament left open for me to fill in later.

Years later, the American journalist Kenneth Timmerman investigated the arms procurements of the 1980-88 Gulf war. Between 1970 and 1990 - the first 10 years of which allowed the world's arms suppliers to sell weapons legally to the future belligerents - Britain sold to the Iraqi military Cymberline mortar locating radar, Hovercraft engines, tank spares, encription equipment, multiplexer communications, laser rangefinders, Jaguar and Cougar radios and VIP armoured vehicles. The US Commerce Department vied with the British Department of Trade and Industry to bestow credit upon Iraq for the purchase of supposedly non-military equipment.

I was in Baghdad when the Americans flew in plane-loads of generals to offer US technology to the Iraqis at a pre-war arms fair; Galaxy aircraft were landing at Saddam airport with missile technology on board, the US officers in their green dress uniform with crossed swords greeted with bear hugs by their Iraqi hosts.

When Alan Clark turned up at Saddam International Airport in 1986 to persuade the Iraqis to support the British machine-tool industry, he was extended an endless handshake from Hassan Ali, the Iraqi trade minister, and champagne in the airport's VIP suite. Britain was then offering a deal that would have brought Iraq pounds 750m of credit since 1983. Nothing lethal would be sold, of course, but - as Timmerman would note much later - no one defined what ''lethal" meant.

I found out for myself not long after the start of the war. Despite the arms embargo, the United States had agreed to sell ''civilian helicopters" to Iraq, providing credit guarantees and spares on the understanding that the machines would be used only for crop protection. On the long road south of Kut al-Amara, I saw a dozen of these supposedly harmless helicopters standing in a field. I could not help noticing, however, that each had been painted in green and grey camouflage, and that rocket pods had been fitted to the skids. Obviously the Iraqis intended to protect their date plantations from insects by firing missiles at them.

And so it went on. It would still be interesting to hear the non-lethal definition that allowed Marconi to sell ''troposcatter" microwave transmitters to the Iraqi army in 1985 or which permitted Racal to sell an entire factory for the production of Jaguar frequency-hopping advanced military radios. Matrix Churchill representatives must have asked themselves similar questions.

Could anyone have been blind to the nature of their own deals? What did David Hastie, Alan Clark's most senior official, think he was doing when he negotiated with Majed Hussein Kamel, Saddam's ruthless war criminal son-in-law who was put in charge of Iraqi arms procurement? As Iraq's war against Iran - an aggression infinitely more savage than its later invasion of Kuwait - drew to an end, the British decided that Saddam was their chosen potentate, just as the Americans had already concluded.

Having humbled Iran's revolutionary regime at a cost of a million and a half dead, the Arab leader who would later become the ''butcher of Baghdad'' was regarded as our man, the Arab dictator to hold fundamentalism at bay. In victory, his army was further strengthened in the hope that Britain would benefit from the profits of Iraq's renewed oil exports. Which is why, when he invaded Kuwait two years later, his military strength had been augmented by UK armourers; indeed, elements of Saddam's invasion force arrived in the emirate wearing uniforms that had been manufactured in Britain

Hussein Kamel now languishes in exile in Amman, but be sure he will peruse the Scott report with more than passing interest. So will the man who benefited for so long from the world's hypocrisy and greed. Although he will greet Mr Justice Scott's report with hollow laughter, there will be no reader more enthralled by its contents than the man who understands the eternal nature of the arms bazaar: Saddam Hussein.

Robert Fisk