US Army
War College (USAWC) undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by
Iran and Iraq in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare.
They concluded that it was Iran and not Iraq that killed the Kurds.
by Raju
Thomas
-
Times of India, 16 September 2002.
- The repeated American propaganda weapon to rationalise the deaths of
more than one million innocent Iraqis since 1991 through economic
sanctions is that Saddam Hussein used poison gas against Iranians during
the Iran-Iraq war and against Iraq's own Kurdish citizens. The
accusation is now being invoked to launch a full-scale American assault
on Iraq. This claim of Iraq gassing its own citizens at Halabjah is
suspect. First, both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons against each
other during their war. Second, at the termination of the Iran-Iraq war,
professors Stephen Pelletiere and Leif Rosenberger, and Lt Colonel
Douglas Johnson of the US Army War College (USAWC) undertook a study of
the use of chemical weapons by Iran and Iraq in order to better
understand battlefield chemical warfare. They concluded that it was Iran
and not Iraq that killed the Kurds.
In the first report they wrote: "In September 1988 - a month after
the war had ended...the state department abruptly, and in what many
viewed as sensational manner, condemned Iraq for allegedly using
chemical weapons against its Kurdish population...with the result that
numerous Kurdish civilians were killed. The Iraqi government denied that
any such gassing had occurred...Having looked at all the evidence that
was available to us, we find it impossible to confirm the state
department's claim that gas was used in this instance. To begin with
there were never any victims produced. International relief
organisations who examined the Kurds - in Turkey where they had gone for
asylum - failed to discover any. Nor were there any found inside Iraq.
The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the
border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee."
Regarding the Halabjah incident where Iraqi soldiers were reported to
have gassed their own Kurdish citizens, the USAWC investigators
observed: "It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, Congress was
influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in
another Iraq-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at
Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing many deaths.
Photographs of the Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the
international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack even though
it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemical weapons
in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian
bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds." [The Iranians thought
the Kurds had fled Halabjah and that they were attacking occupying Iraqi
forces. But the Iraqis had already vacated Halabjah and the Kurds had
returned. Iran gassed the Kurds by accident]
In March 1991 as the massive US-led attack on Iraq ended, I was
visiting the USAWC to give a lecture on South Asian security and
discussed this problem with professor Pelletiere at lunch. I recall
Pelletiere telling me that the USAWC investigation showed that in the
Iranian mass human wave battlefield strategy, Teheran used
non-persistent poison gas against Iraqi soldiers so as to be able to
attack and advance into the areas vacated by Iraqis. On the other hand,
Baghdad used persistent gas to halt the Iranian human wave attacks.
There was a certain consistency to this pattern. However, in the
Halabjah incident, the USAWC investigators discovered that the gas used
that killed hundreds of Kurds was the non-persistent gas, the chemical
weapon of choice of the Iranians. Note it was the Iranians who arrived
at the scene first, who reported the incident to UN observers, and who
took pictures of the gassed Kurdish civilians. However, Saddam Hussein's
Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in August and the truth of the Halabjah
incident became inconvenient.
I asked professor Pelletiere in March 1991, when he thought their
findings would come out. I recall him telling me that it would probably
take about five years after emotions over the Gulf war crisis died down.
However, the USAWC report of 1990 has been dispatched into oblivion. The
propaganda that Iraq gassed its own Kurdish civilians is cons-tantly
invoked by the media. It was reactivated by president Clinton in
December 1998 to justify the further bombing and destruction of Iraq.
Meanwhile, estimates of the number of innocents who have died in Iraq
from relentless American-dictated UN sanctions range between 1-1.7
million, including more than half-a-million children. An article in The
New England Journal of Medicine, assessed through a study of monthly and
annual infant mortality rates in Iraq that "more than 46,900 children
died between January and August 1991. UNICEF official Thomas Ekfal
estimates that about 500,000 children have died in Iraq since the United
Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Baghdad.
If the US bombs Iraq, it is not the direct loss of Iraqi lives from
"collateral damage" alone that will be the only tragedy, but the unseen
and accelerated loss of lives of tens of thousands of more infants, the
sick and the elderly from lack of medicine and other healthcare. Before
the US bullies all countries into supporting its bombing of Iraq, major
countries such as France, Germany, Russia, China, India and Indonesia
should stand up in unison and say "no more [bombs]" to the sole
superpower.
The
author is the Allis Chalmers distinguished professor of International
Affairs at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Copyright Raju
Thomas, Times of India 2002, For fair use only
See
also Memo
To: Sandy Berger, National Security Advisor
A
War Crime or an Act of War?
By
Stephen C. Pelletiere
The New York Times
Jan. 31, 2003
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. - It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking
smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the
Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The
dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already
used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead,
blind or disfigured."
The
accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a
familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently
brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in
March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush
himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja,
as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But
the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with
poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that
Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion
in the Halabja story.
I am
in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior
political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at
the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the
classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the
Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the
Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version
of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This
much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in
the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical
weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in
northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who
died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were
not Iraq's main target.
And
the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States
Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report,
which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know
basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds,
not Iraqi gas.
The
agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle
around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however,
indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a
cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are
thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have
possessed blood agents at the time.
These
facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often
as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A
much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference
to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas
might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought
up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of
American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am
not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to
answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing
his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as
far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used
involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications
for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In
fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on
today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on
taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to
invade Iraq.
We are
constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of
oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more
important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle
East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab
and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with
irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the
region.
Before
the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and
river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the
Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control
of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over
the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters
of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by
extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of
Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that
could change.
Thus
America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably
could not be challenged for decades - not solely by controlling Iraq's
oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the
country, once Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many
lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.
All
that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one that
would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to
Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens
its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present
debilitated condition - thanks to United Nations sanctions - Iraq's
conventional forces threaten no one.
Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that
Saddam Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people.
And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.
Before
we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the
full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds,
it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died
fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us
proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq
on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other
repressive regimes Washington supports?
Stephen C. Pelletiere is author of
Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the
Persian Gulf.
See also
Litmus test for liars:
Did Saddam gas Kurds at Halabja?
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