Diary – 17 September 2004

Before I relocated to Baghdad to participate in the reconstruction effort, several friends said they didn’t want to see me paraded on television in one of those natty orange boiler suits pleading for American and British troops to withdraw from Iraq with a rusty Swiss Army knife at my throat. Not a very original joke and I was grateful for their concern, but this beheading thing has sown a disproportionate fear among otherwise rational people. Yes, it’s extraordinarily dramatic and gruesome, hence the headlines all over the world that the terrorists so crave, but statistically it hardly figures. By my calculation, of the approximately 200,000 Coalition forces and foreign contractors working in Iraq, perhaps half a dozen have been beheaded, giving a ratio of something like three per 100,000. Unpleasant, certainly, and it concentrates the mind, but let’s keep things in perspective. Baghdad has seen all this before, and on a much greater scale. When Tamerlane swept through in 1401, he put Baghdad, once known as Dar as Salam, the House of Peace, to the sword. Never mind a handful of carefully televised beheadings to terrify the world. After he’d finished flattening the city that for 500 years had been the centre of the Islamic world, the self-styled Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction, Marlowe’s ‘Scourge of God’, had 120 of his trademark towers piled up around the devastated city. They contained 90,000 skulls. That’s a proper massacre.

Of course, if you’re a modern jihadi, there’s an obvious — and uncomfortable — parallel with Tamerlane. For all his talk of killing infidels, he butchered infinitely more Muslims than Christians, Jews or Hindus. As Gibbon observed in a characteristically dry aside: ‘If some partial disorders, some local oppressions, were healed by the sword of Timour, the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease …perhaps his conscience would have been startled if a priest or philosopher had dared to number the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the establishment of peace and order.’