Kuwait: Exuberance in Hell

By Richard H. Curtiss

We assemble at 5:45 am Thursday, March 8, to board a Royal Saudi Air Force C-130 for a flight to Kuwait that, in a no-frills four engine propeller-driven cargo aircraft like this one, should take nearly two hours. After two hours and 45 minutes we land—and learn we're back in Riyadh.

The plane had developed engine trouble. Knowing his passengers, drowsing on folding benches with their backs to tiny porthole-like windows, wouldn't notice, the pilot didn't tell us he had turned around. It's the Arab way. Instead of worrying us about something we had no power to change, he let us sleep.

During two hours on the ground at Riyadh's military airport, I watch a large crew of men and women load a seemingly vast quantity of supplies on a US Air Force AWACS aircraft. My first thought is that they are headed for the US. Then I realize that their shift of 14 hours monitoring the skies around them is the equivalent of a nonstop flight to New York. They need provisions.

After taking a test run above Riyadh, our C-130 lands and takes us aboard again. For more than an hour we fly above a thick haze composed partly of fine dust kicked up by a cold north wind streaming down from Iraq and across Kuwait and the Saudi desert. Perceptibly, the haze begins to blacken and at 1 pm we swoop down through the dark clouds. Smoke plumes mark orderly lines of burning oil wells, but the wind is blowing the smoke south before it can congeal into a pall over Kuwait City.

The freeways seem nearly empty as they flash by below us. As we land, however, I see wrecked cars everywhere, their hoods and trunks open and most with all of their wheels removed. I later learn that the cost of tires as well as the cost of window air conditioners plunged throughout Iraq after the Aug. 2 invasion, as truckload after truckload of wheels looted from cars, and room and window air conditioning units looted from houses, reached Iraqi markets.

A roar of activity greets our party of journalists and military hitchhikers as we are shepherded out of the aircraft by Saudi Ministry of Information guides. It is one week to the day since President Bush announced a cease-fire ending the seven-week air war and 100-hour ground war. The Saudis plan to conduct such tours to Kuwait every day the improving security but unpredictable winter weather permits, until the demand from Saudi journalists and the 1,000 foreign correspondents presently in their country diminishes.

At the airport, armored personnel carriers, humvees and assorted military maintenance vehicles, bearing Kuwaiti, Saudi, Egyptian and American flags or insignias, buzz busily around. Our Saudi plane is lined up with another just like it that has brought journalists from Dhahran. Nearby are cargo planes from the air forces of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Huge US military transport aircraft form a semi-circle around us.

Parked in the center of this panoply of military aircraft is a Kuwait Airways plane which has just arrived from Cairo. The first Kuwaiti civilian aircraft to fly into the Kuwait airport in the seven months since the Iraqi invasion, its passengers are Kuwaiti diplomats returning home, and Egyptian nurses returning to their jobs in Kuwaiti hospitals.

A giant US skylifter, its fuselage and long drooping wings painted almost black, descends on the airport like an emissary from hell. It is only as I look past the frenzied military activities that I realize the incoming plane is, in fact, an emissary to the hell around us.

We are standing in front of the airport hotel. Every window is broken. Inside, the main lobby is burned out. It reeks of charcoal, and the furniture is upturned and shattered. Incongruously, an array of potted palms and other indoor plants is intact and the plants are alive, although badly in need of water. Obviously the fire was quick and superficial, probably ignited by the rocket-propelled grenades with which US Marines cleared the airport buildings, a main point of Iraqi resistance.

The floor of the lobby seems to be papered with unopened mail. On a pillar at the registration desk, above a dust-covered computer screen and next to inoperative equipment to scan passenger baggage, is a US Marine Corps inscription in black marker ink: "[Expletive] you, army. We got here first, just like we always do."

Upstairs, after a perilous climb over shattered concrete and through dead wires, thinking always about the Iraqi mines and unexploded bomblets from US cluster bombs about which we've been warned, we see that every room has been thoroughly looted, blown apart by the fighting, or both. Not even a bed or chair is intact. Papers, old magazines and even playing cards cover the floors.

Our buses have not arrived and, while we wait, I think briefly about watering the dying plants. Then I realize there is no running water in most of the city. We were warned to bring our own drinking water with us.

Although a cold wind is blowing across the airport, it is too depressing to stay inside. As I step outside, our Saudi guides have formed a line at the edge of the ruined building, facing Mecca, for one of the five daily prayers. Walking rapidly past the hotel are columns of American soldiers. Helmeted and carrying their weapons and gear in desert-camouflage packs and duffle bags, when they see our cameras some smile self-consciously and others grin broadly and make V-signs.

At 4 am Saudi time, on CNN, I'd heard President George Bush announce that this very day the first US troops will start coming home. For the airborne troopers filing by, the journey is beginning here and now as they vanish into a giant carrier.

Then, as it takes off, passing back low over the airport and then turning out over the desert, another company slogs jauntily past, silent except for the shuffle of their boots, grinning at the patroling Saudis, Egyptians and Kuwaitis, and disappearing into the next giant US transport.

As our buses, bearing huge Saudi flags, pull away past shattered aircraft hangers, I see where the US troops are coming from. Out of the haze and smoke covered desert descends a steady stream of huge transport helicopters. They are the same ones that put US women pilots deep into Iraq even before the ground war began. As the troops assemble briefly after disembarking, and then start their rapid march to a transport aircraft, to an observer it's a dust and smoke obscured scene from a windswept hell.

A Most Anticipated Trip

To the participants, however, it's the beginning of the only trip they have anticipated through months of blazing days and freezing nights in northeastern Saudi Arabia and, more recently, Kuwait and Southern Iraq.

By contrast with the ruined airport, the outskirts of the city seem virtually untouched. A kind of shabbiness has settled over the once-opulent Kuwaiti suburbs, however. Construction projects—new houses or additions to older ones—clearly stopped many months ago. Frozen in mid-project, scaffolding is rusting, and construction equipment and materials are covered with dust. At corner vacant lots are piles of garbage, still in black plastic bags exactly as in the US. Clearly the Kuwaitis have tried, after the breakdown in municipal services, to keep their neighborhoods sanitary.

Kuwaiti flags fly from virtually every house: from flagpoles, television antennas, and light poles. The Kuwaiti colors are painted on walls of private villas, and on the cement abutments that designate on and off ramps of the freeways that ring the city.

After the seemingly intact suburbs, the destruction downtown in this once glittering urban oasis on the Gulf is horrendous. The Ministry of Information and adjoining television tower complex, one of the most spectacular aggregations of buildings in town, has taken several shells, some apparently fired maliciously by the retreating Iraqis. So have the landmark Meridian Hotel, and some of the other hotel towers and once-spectacular shopping malls.

The hundreds of small downtown shops are boarded up. Some had taped their windows, just as have all the residents of Riyadh and Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. In Kuwait, obviously, it did no good. The windows are broken. Some shops yawn open and empty. Others are protected by steel shutters and grills. It is impossible to see through the shutters, but through the locked grills one sees only broken and empty interiors.

Even the old buildings along the downtown sea front have sustained heavy damage. One housed a government-sponsored museum which showed tourists how Kuwaitis had lived in their low, whitewashed buildings before petrodollars and air conditioning changed the Gulf forever. Another was occupied by the widow of a British official who stayed in Kuwait long after the departure of the British forces in 1961. He wrote two marvelous books detailing the cultural heritage of the Kuwaitis and their bedouin cousins of the deserts of Northern Saudi Arabia. The Dasman Palace, former seat of the government, which a younger brother of the Emir was killed defending, is totally ruined. I'm told, but don't see for myself, that the beautiful modern museum built for a priceless collection of Arab-world art spanning 1,400 years has been wantonly destroyed. So were the files, records and even the hybrid animals and plants produced by years of scientific cross-breeding at the prestigious Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research.

After the Cook's tour of the destruction in the business district, our bus stops at the three immense blue water towers that have become Kuwait's most widely recognized landmark. As we string out to walk from there along the seaside corniche to the American Embassy and the shell-damaged Kuwait International Hotel (formerly the Kuwait Hilton), two dramatic pageants open before us.

Two Dramatic Pageants

On the sea side, the Iraqis have built an endless cement trench, punctuated with bunkers and machine gun complexes. On the 150-foot-wide stretch of sand in front of the Iraqi positions are small detachments of soldiers removing the mines placed where the Marines were supposed to come in, but, wisely, didn't.

US and French groups probe carefully and methodically, and mark off each rectangle of cleared beach with bright orange tape. In another area, Saudi soldiers are at work. They move carefully down the beach on hands and knees, with three separate teams of three men each doing the digging, probing gingerly with bayonets. One man does nothing but carry the unearthed mines, one in each outstretched hand, back to another team which gingerly arranges them according to type.

Watching the mine removal from the broad promenade on the other side of the Iraqi trenches are hundreds of Kuwaiti civilians, and a sprinkling of US, French, British, Kuwaiti and Saudi soldiers. As I approach, a loud explosion startles the onlookers. The Saudis apparently are detonating some of the larger mines, rather than trying to remove them. The spectators jump, but then laugh, and await the next explosion.

On the inland side of the corniche, a totally different spectacle is unfolding—one familiar to everyone in the world with a television set. A steady stream of cars passes, horns honking, the occupants singing or shouting. The cars are decorated with bunting in the colors of the Kuwaiti flag. In addition to waving Kuwaiti and Saudi flags, the occupants of one car have decorated the top with a Bahraini flag and another with a Qatari flag. Very much in evidence as well are Egyptian, British and American flags.

On the corner in front of the former Hilton Hotel, which now provides spartan living quarters for US Ambassador Edward (Skip) Gnehm and his staff, and near the entrance to the heavily guarded US Embassy across the street, dozens of Kuwaitis stand or sit on railings watching their young people, and soldiers, principally American soldiers, talk, trade souvenirs, and pose for the television cameras.

If asked by reporters, the Kuwaitis will tell their personal horror stories, but the dominant mood today is decidedly one of jubilation at their liberation. As the afternoon wears on, the pace increases. Now busloads of singing school children are passing, some hanging out of the windows. The traffic, festooned in Kuwait's green, white, red and black national colors, becomes gridlocked, with children standing and waving full-sized flags from every car with a sunroof.

Many children are in sequined and embroidered traditional attire or party dresses. Some teenagers are wearing costume party' masks or clown suits. Occasionally, automatic weapons are fired into the air. The noise of shooting increases dramatically as a heavy military vehicle approaches, manned by Kuwaiti regular or irregular soldiers firing heavy machine guns into the air, muzzles pointed out to sea. Clearly the thousands of 30-caliber brass bullet casings all over the sidewalks and street have little to do with the fighting, and much to do with the celebrating.

Even the mine explosions seem to be coming closer together. Vehicles from the various military forces are joining in this daily late-afternoon victory parade. A huge American military vehicle passes. Several crew members are sitting on top, their desert hats at jaunty angles. One, with studied nonchalance, twirls a yo-yo. It's a media age and clearly both victorious liberators and jubilant liberatees have a finely tuned sense of what will make the television news. As the TV crews in our group record the passing parade, Kuwaiti participants call out: "What network, what network?"

Our bus was supposed to return to the airport at 5 pm, but the pilots were delayed among the gridlocked celebrators. It's pitch dark when we finally get underway. In a city without lights, the driver has a hard time finding his way back to the airport. The cheering people will be returning to cold houses without electricity and running water. In fact, for now, virtually nothing in Kuwait works but its automobiles.

At intersections, where military repair crews of all nations, and particularly Americans, were working on cables by daylight, there now are little groups of soldiers, mostly Saudis, each guarding a piece of the lightless city. Some warm their hands around fires kindled from shattered boards and beams in empty oil drums. Most perch glumly on armored personnel carriers or machine-gunbearing pickup trucks in the cold blackness.

The transistor radio carried by one of the passengers in the bus tells us that at this moment the first 2,000 of the as-yet-unknown number of Kuwaitis imprisoned by the Iraqis are eagerly picking their way in trucks toward the blackened city. The first transports of returning Iraqi prisoners of war are leaving this very evening from Saudi Arabia for equally shattered, cold, dark and waterless Baghdad. Refugees in US-occupied Southern Iraq, without either food or water, are pleading for permission to cross into this ruined Kuwait that I, after a foodless and waterless day here, am so eager to leave.

As we approach the airport, the going gets easier for the bus driver. The hundreds of burning oil wells illuminate not only the clouds above but the streets below. The random destruction inflicted by retreating Iraqis in the showplace buildings downtown is dwarfed by the sheer madness of methodically wiring for destruction and then detonating some 600 of the 1,000 Kuwaiti oil wells that had produced the wealth Saddam Hussain coveted, and then destroyed. This pointless waste and destruction, and the deliberate flooding of the ecologically vulnerable Gulf with poisonous petroleum, though on a smaller scale, will surely rank along with two world wars in Europe and Asia and genocides in both the Old World and the New, among the darkest chapters of 20th-century history.

At the airport, we find the Saudi press plane from Dhahran is suffering mechanical trouble. We all are piled into the surviving aircraft and an hour later swoop down over brightly lit Dhahran airport, where more US army troops are embarking for the long flight home. Just before midnight, we land at Riyadh, its lights stretching as far as the eye can see, its streets filled with fast-moving traffic, and its restaurants full of Thursday night crowds. In just a few hours the Saudi capital will be welcoming Secretary of State James Baker III for the first of two visits marking the second week after the war's end.

Welcome News

At the beginning of this day of contrasts, in the same triumphal speech to Congress in which he announced American troops were already starting home, President Bush promised that his secretary of state would begin working immediately on a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The news was as welcome in the Saudi capital as the victorious end of the war.

Just as the serious work to win the war began here and in Washington, so must the serious work to win the peace. The US controls the financial spigot that has enabled Israel's governments to become increasingly intransigent ever since 1967. It's a spigot that can be turned off, if necessary, to bring the current extremist Israeli government to the realization that it must trade the land seized then for lasting peace, as called for by UN Security Council Resolution 242, supported by six successive US presidents. Similarly, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries that follow its lead control the flow of funding to Israel's Arab neighbors, all of whom eventually will have to recognize Israel's right to live in peace within pre-1967 boundaries that include two-thirds of the former mandate of Palestine.

Here, with the fear of Scud missiles lifted, Saudis are pouring into the brightly lit streets again. Just to the north are Kuwait and Iraq, filled with the wounded, the bereaved, and men, women and children suffering in cold and darkened homelands that have been set back a generation by this war.

Which picture represents the future for all of the Middle East depends largely upon what Saudi Arabia's King Fahd and Secretary Baker discuss here, and what happens afterward in the United States. Will President Bush risk his 90 percent approval rating, earned in the military minefields of the Middle East, by venturing into the political minefields of Washington, DC to resolve the Middle East's most serious political problem? It's a matter of light versus darkness for the Middle East, and perhaps of life and death for those American soldiers now joyously returning home.