Saddam
Did Not Commit Genocide!
Memo To: Karl Rove, President Bush�s chief political advisor
From:
Jude Wanniski
Re: Good News for the President
You know I have
been arguing for the last two years that I did not agree with those who
have been advising the President that Saddam Hussein is a mass murderer,
an Iraqi Hitler who committed genocide by having his army kill Iraqi Kurds
during the war with Iran and in its immediate aftermath. I have based much
of my case on the reports of the U.S. Army War College that were published
in 1990 and on contemporaneous newspaper accounts. I�ve always known my
efforts would not be able to stand up to those in the administration who
make the genocide argument as long as I could not interest the major media
in taking up the counter argument. I�ve also told you that I could not be
defending Saddam Hussein if I believed he was a mass murderer. The good
news is that the New York Times last week ran a major op-ed by the
team leader of the War College reports, Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, after
spending considerable time vetting his arguments and finding them to be
authoritative.
The Times of course does not necessarily
embrace his core position that there was no genocide, but agrees that it
should be part of the discussion on whether the President takes the
country to war with Iraq. It is my sense that the President truly believes
Saddam is a mass murderer, and may change his mind if he reads the
Pelletiere piece and realizes he may have been misinformed.
The President also believes Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate his father
after former President Bush left office in 1993 and traveled to Kuwait.
Once he realizes he may have been wrong about genocide, he may re-read the
Seymour Hersh New Yorker article of Nov. 1, 1993, �A
Case Not Closed,� which seriously challenges the evidence in the
assassination story. If these two weights are lifted from the President�s
scales of war, it could make it more likely that he would accept a
continuation of the diplomatic effort to contain whatever threats might
exists from Baghdad, rather than go to war.
* * * * *
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."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html
Today's Related
Links:
DR.
STEPHEN PELLETIERE, V.I.P.
Iraq
& The Christian Science Monitor.
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