I was a teenage arms salesman. There! I have wanted to say that for years. It is far more satisfyingly outrageous than being a mere teenage sex maniac. Everybody is that. And it’s even true. It happened in Baghdad, which is why it comes back to me so vividly now.
The arms were tanks. Centurions, the very latest and best of British. The regime that acquired them was that of King Feisal, cousin of King Hussein of Jordan and more or less the same age. Or he would be if the tanks he bought from us had not helped to slaughter him. Our paths crossed most days as he drove out of the city to his palace for lunch and I drove back in from the tank school for mine. He would wave at me and smile from his Rolls while I quivered in salute.
A wildly improbable combination of chances had brought me to Baghdad. As a national serviceman I had joined the Royal Armoured Corps in the romantic hope of becoming a cavalry officer and getting to wear a dress uniform with boots and spurs and chain mail on my shoulders. This, I thought, would make me look like Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade. The British cavalry had exchanged its horses for armour years before, but it had kept its fancy clothes. Alas, it was not to be. I was dumped in the Royal Pioneer Corps, the least exotic of army units, and sent to a battalion of Seychellois and Mauritians in the Canal Zone in Egypt, the drabbest of all postings.
On paper, though, I was a fully qualified tank man and when a vacancy turned up in Britain’s semi-secret military training mission in Baghdad I was sent to fill it. In fact, I had only been in a tank a couple of times. And all I’d had a chance to do was poop off a single round from a Centurion’s main gun. The army could not afford to let me fire a second.
How was I to train the Iraqis and persuade them to buy more tanks than the four we had loaned them when I knew so little myself? I panicked, but I needn’t have worried. The entire Iraqi army went on holiday for three months as soon as I arrived. It was deemed too hot to soldier between July and September. So I settled down to a life of indolence and adventure in the stews and nightclubs of the city.
The Iraqi army was modelled on the British, at least in outline. There were as many colonels and majors at the Baghdad tank school as there were at its British counterpart. But there was little substance to support such profusion of rank. The school had no armour to speak of, besides mine. And nobody knew much more about how anything worked than I did, though this turned out to be useful in hiding my own ignorance.
Presumably, all that has changed. Everything else about Baghdad has, from what I see on television. Only one thing remains the same. There were no fat Iraqi soldiers in my time, only fat officers. This still seems to be so. But everyone was extremely amiable. I enjoyed myself enormously.
My idyll was shattered one day when the brigadier in charge of the British mission appeared at the tank school and asked me a single devastating question: “Jacobs, what exactly do you do here?” I couldn’t think of an answer. So he said: “It is my duty to turn you into an efficient young tank officer before you finish your service.” And he sent me to the Royal Tank Regiment in Libya, where I idled away my last two months before demob. The one thing I learnt there was how to tie a black tie before dinner without looking in the mirror. A rare accomplishment, perhaps, but not exactly what the brigadier had in mind.
You might say that my mission in Baghdad was accomplished, all the same. The Iraqis “bought” 60 tanks, for which the Americans paid. It was good business all round. Jobs for the lads at the tank factories, profits for the bosses and a longer production-run over which to spread the cost of development. The perfect arms deal, in fact, because there were no losers.
Or that was how it looked. But a flaw quickly appeared in this pleasing design. Britain, France and Israel invaded Suez a few months after I’d gone home. In the subsequent turmoil, King Feisal was overthrown. His army took charge. A few years later it made a play for Kuwait. British soldiers were all that stood in its way and they had much less effective tanks than the ones we had sold to Iraq. Luckily, the Iraqi regime backed off. But the way was paved for Saddam Hussein.
Did nobody ever think about this when we helped to build up his military machine? I am not pious about war. If it has to be fought then it has to be, and if I thought differently I would have been a conscientious objector. But surely we can learn something from experience. It is not as if mine was so long ago. To me, it is like yesterday, and the lesson seems still fresh and obvious. The biggest risk in selling arms is that they will be turned against you, the seller. Why aren’t we more careful of our own interests?
Content from our partners
Related
