Posted by Alli Antar (160.129.27.22) on November 26, 2001 at 13:05:29:
from "Iraq Under Siege"
There is a reasonable way to proceed to find out what the motives are for US Iraq policy. We can run through possibilities and see if some of them can be excluded. The one that immediately comes to mind, and the first one to pay attention to, is the one that is universally and vociferously expressed and never questioned. Let's just take one example, a Boston Globe editorial titled "A Just Attack." According to the Globe, Saddam Hussein is "a vengeful despot who has already used [chemical and biological] weapons on his own citizens," which is the "ultimate" horror. Obviously, such a creature has to be destroyed. He poses an enormous threat. He can't be tolerated. So, you bomb him. You impose sanctions. That's essentially the universal explanation.
That justification does have at least one merit: it's very easily tested. You simply have to ask: what was the US-British reaction when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people? And he certainly did. There's no doubt that he is a vengeful despot who has used weapons against his own people. That's undoubtedly true. In 1998, he carried out a major gassing campaign against Kurds. He also used nerve gas and other chemical weapons in the war against Iran that was just finishing up at that time. In fact, the use of it increased toward the end. So, it happened. And there was a reaction on the part of the US and Britain. The reaction was that the US and Britain increased support for their favorite monster. They had been supporting Hussein avidly right through his worst crimes; after gassing, they increased the support. It's not a secret. We can easily discover it.
How did they increase support? In some interesting ways. The US had been providing Iraq with all kinds of aid, but particularly at that point, the Reagan and Bush administrations increased subsidized food aid. Iraq had been an agricultural producer, one of the few countries in the region that was actually an efficient producer of food. So, what did they need US agricultural exports for? A lot of that's connected with the gassing of Kurds. Saddam Hussein, the vengeful despot, was destroying agricultural areas and the people who lived in them, so there was actually a food shortage. Therefore, we had come to the rescue, to help out with this project of gassing Kurds in the north. And we did, by increasing the subsidized agricultural exports to Iraq, essentially for that reason. This continued. So, during the invasion of Panama in December 1989, George Bush took a moment to announce that we were going to increase the credits to Iraq to allow it to make purchases from US agricultural and other producers.
Let's forget the small thing about increasing US exports, meaning increasing profits for agribusiness and high technology industry. At that time, the line was that we were in a better position to deal with Iraqi human rights issues if we subsidized Hussein. A year later, it turned out that we were in a better position to deal with human rights issues if we starved the Iraqi people into submission. Somehow, you're not supposed to notice that the line changed for some reason.
Madeleine Albright was asked on national television in 1996 what she thought about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of the sanctions. She agreed that this was "a very hard choice," but she said that "we think the price is worth it." So, that's the way in which we deal with Iraqi human rights violations, by killing 500,000 Iraqi children. "We're" willing to pay that price. That's nice to hear.
The subsidies for our favorite killer when he was carrying out the "ultimate" horror were not restricted to subsidized agricultural exports. They also included technical equipment, dual-use equipment that could be used for military purposes (helicopters, for example), and a lot of equipment that could be used for production of chemical and biological weapons. This was revealed afterward. At the time, there was suspicion that Saddam Hussein had biological warfare facilities. The US denied it. He was our friend, after all. He wouldn't do that sort of thing. But this was discovered by Charles Glass, a very good journalist who was at that time the Middle East reporter for ABC television. He was able to find high-level Iraqi defectors in London, and from information that he got from them using French commercial satellites, which are certainly nothing like what the Pentagon has, he was able to locate and identify biological warfare facilities. ABC news let him run a spot on the news showing biological warfare facilities, including the evidence from a defecting Iraqi general. Then they switched immediately to their Pentagon correspondent, who pooh-poohed the story and said this was nonsense. The story died. Now this reincarnation of Attila the Hun has to be destroyed by massacring his population. You're not supposed to remember that, either.
In April 1990, a group of high-ranking US senators went to Iraq. They met with Hussein in the Kurdish city of Mosul. Remember, the Kurds were the ones who were gassed. The delegation was headed by Robert Dole, who brought the president's greetings to Saddam Hussein. Alan Simpson was in the delegation. He told Hussein that his problems were not with the American government, which had no objections to him.
That brings us to April 1990, already two years after the Halabja massacre. This continues up until the day of the invasion of Kuwait. Overwhelmingly, Saddam Hussein's crimes were committed during that period, and the US supported him all the way through, with a good deal of enthusiasm. So did Britain. That tells us that just by elementary logic the crimes can't be the reason why we have to destroy the monster.
What about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein? That's real. That threat peaked in the late 1980's, thanks to our support. That's the time when he was most threatening and most powerful. There's a measure of how great the threat was. Hussein attacked Iran, with our support. He was unable to defeat Iran, a country that had just decimated its officer corps and top military at the time of the revolution in 1979 that led to Ayatollah Khomeini. Even with the Iranian military largely decimated, Iraq was unable to defeat them - with the support of the United States, Russia, Britain, Europe, and the Arab states. That gives you a measure of the threat at its peak. Today, in comparison, the Iraqi army is approximately back to where it was when the British established it as a means to suppress the population violently so that the rulers would be able to export oil to the West and ensure that the profits go to the West.
How did the US and Britain react to the threat at its peak? The main reaction was to increase the threat.
Bear in mind that in May 1987, Iraqi missiles struck the US destroyer Stark, killing 37 personnel. They got a slap on the wrist, but that's it. That shows you're really committed to somebody. What was the Stark doing there? The US Navy at that time was being introduced into the Gulf to back up Iraq and support them in the war against Iran - and of course, in its war against its own population. That alliance strengthened a year later, in July 1988. The US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner just taking off from an Iranian airport, killing 290 people. The plane was clearly in a commercial air corridor. In fact, the Vincennes was in Iranian territorial waters. By that point, Iran recognized the reality. They might be able to fight a war with Iraq, but they could not fight a US-Iraqi alliance, with the US Navy now acting aggressively. The US claims - it's not credible or taken very seriously - that the airliner was mistaken for an Iranian military plane; but it was commonly pointed out that the US was not shooting down low-flying Iraqi planes, which were very visible and indeed were warplanes. Iran recognized that the game was over and essentially capitulated shortly after that. That's the peak of the Iraqi threat, thanks in part to our contribution.
Saddam Hussein, in fact, used his increased power very quickly. Five days after the cease-fire, he turned to another major gas attack against Kurds in the north. I've already described the US reaction. Just put this together, and we've now at least eliminated one candidate for what the motives were, namely the candidate that is universally presented, without question and with great vigor.
There is an event that did change Saddam Hussein from favored friend to "the beast of Baghdad," namely when he invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. What about that? Is that why we have to impose sanctions that are killing people? That's pretty hard to argue. Was that a major crime? Sure. Invading another country is a war crime. It's the thing for which we hanged people at Nuremburg. Is it a serious crime? That's hard to argue. In comparison with the rest of Hussein's criminal record, which we had supported, it's like adding a toothpick to a mountain. Furthermore, it was recognized by the United States not to be a very serious crime. In fact, the great fear of US leaders at the time of the invasion was that Iraq would quickly withdraw, leaving a puppet regime in place, and then all the Arab states would be happy. That was the expectation. It was called the "nightmare scenario."
Then comes February 1991, the Gulf massacre. It ended at the end of the month. Within days, Saddam Hussein turned to the next most serious crimes of his career after the use of chemical warfare against his own citizens. Immediately after the war, there was an uprising in southern Iraq in the Shiite areas, led by rebelling Iraqi generals. This was right under the nose of the US Army, which dominated the whole region. "Stormin'" Norman Schwarzkopf was sitting there watching it, following orders from Washington. The rebelling generals did not ask for assistance. They asked for access to captured Iraqi equipment. That was supported by Saudi Arabia, which also requested the United States to allow them to at least have access to captured Iraqi equipment. The US refused. In fact, it refused to do anything to deter the vicious Iraqi government response, which was brutal and murderous. The US clearly wanted and had to say that it wanted the revolt to fail. And it failed. It was crushed with extreme violence. Right after that, a revolt took place in the Kurdish areas in the north, and the same story was re-enacted. Until public protest mounted, the Bush administration refused to give any protection to the rebels, in fear that they might succeed - that is, that they might overthrow "the beast of Baghdad." So, immediately after the war was over, the US essentially returned to support for its favorite murderer, as he again carried out really attrocious and vicious acts.
That was too visible to suppress at the time, so there was an official justification for it, which remains today. True, this offended our sensibilities, but it was necessary to maintain something called "stability." To maintain stability we have to keep the "beast of Baghdad" in power, even though he was carrying out huge massacres in the north and the south, with our tacit support. The State Department line, as it was presented by New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, was that "the best of all worlds" for the US would be an "iron-fisted Iraqi junta" that would rule Iraq just the way Saddam Hussein had done, but it would be nice if it didn't have Saddam Hussein's name on it, because that is kind of embarrassing. Friedman wrote that this would be "much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," which is probably true. He left out the most striking case, because it's indelicate to mention it; but, as he and every other reporter following the Middle East knew, it would be much to the pleasure of Israel, which is the only country I know of where there was open public support across the spectrum for the crushing of the Kurdish rebellion. The Jerusalem Post reported on this. They had their reasons, which were that an independent Kurdish state would create a land corridor between Syria and Iran, which are their enemies. They didn't want this, so they wanted the US to allow Saddam Hussein to crush the Kurds.
Furthermore, during this very same period, the early 1990's, our favorite ally Turkey, which has one of the worst human rights records in the world, was increasing its own murderous attack against the Kurds in southeastern Turkey. As just one measure of that, about 1 million Kurds fled to Diyarbakir, the unofficial Kurdish capital in southeastern Turkey, during those years. 1994 was a peak year in two respects. It was the year in which Turkish terror against the Kurds peaked, and it was the year in which US military aid to Turkey peaked. Those are two things that typically go together. There's a close correlation between terror and violence and US military aid, not only in that region. Somehow that didn't mean that we had to impose sanctions on the people of Turkey, to kill hundreds of thousands of their children. This is good terror, terror carried out by our ally. Therefore, we have to expedite it....
(to be continued after my class is over)