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[04.09.03] YES, I'VE BEEN READING FALLACI AGAIN This MoDo column, while perhaps not rising to Immutable Laws levels of idiocy, does elicit a certain je ne sais quoi...

Mr. Cheney's war guru, Victor Davis Hanson, writes in his book "An Autumn of War" that war can be good, and that sometimes nations are better off using devastation than suasion. Mr. Hanson cites Sherman's march through Georgia, the 19th century's great instance of shock and awe, as a positive role model.

Polls and interviews show that in their goal of making Americans less rattled by battle, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney have succeeded: most Americans are showing a stoic attitude about the dead and the wounded so far.

(Perhaps the American tolerance for pain is owed to the fact that much of the pain is not shown on television, embeddedness notwithstanding.)

Stop. What was not shown on television was precisely the thing that justified this war. The hundreds of thousands Saddam has killed were not shown on television. The Halabja massacre was not shown on television. Bemoaning a few dozen war casualties the TV cameras might have passed over seems is legitimate, but strikingly misplaced if you yourself refuse to grasp the magnitude of Saddam's atrocities precisely because you didn't witness them on television.

It would take a hundred Al Jazeeras, broadcasting at all hours of the day and night, to give us a sense of what these tragedies mean in proportion to its extensive coverage of the bloodshed in civilian areas. For every day you spend protesting the 1,200 civilian casualties the Iraqi government claimed, you'd have to spend a minimum of 200 days protesting Saddam's reign of terror, and since Ms. Dowd seems to be worried about Syria, 30 days protesting Hafez Assad's Hama massacre, alone. This doesn't include the countless days they'd have to spend celebrating, at a rate of 1,200 a day, the tens of thousands of Iraqis who will now live because Saddam no longer soils the ground in Baghdad.

During the runup to this war, many people asked a lot of questions, and doubtless, some in the anti-war movement convinced themselves enough to ask, "What if we're wrong? What if Saddam is telling the truth and there are no torture chambers? What if Saddam is telling the truth and he doesn't condone terrorism? What if the Iraqis are willing to live with Saddam and don't want us there?" The war itself has exposed these worries as the ridiculous falsehoods that they are, and stripped away all the illusions we may have had about Saddam's innocence. Why Ms. Dowd continues to don a veil of ignorance, even at this hour, about the atrocities we're fighting against is mystifying.

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The hundreds of thousands Saddam has killed were not shown on television. The Halabja massacre was not shown on television...

Saddam is a tyrant, and a monster, and has committed many atrocities. The Halabja massacre was indeed a terrible act.

However, there is evidence that it was actually Iran, not Iraq that gassed the Kurds at Halabja in March 1988. If this is true, then it would be wrong to absolve Iran, and Ayatollah Khomeini, of responsibility for this. If it was Iran, then they deserve the blame.

(This comment post is in no way, however, meant to show support or justification for Saddam, or to deny that he is monster, which he undoubtedly is. It is only meant to provide information and ascertain the truth.)

Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's top analyst during the Iran-Iraq war (when this incident took place), and was a professor at the U.S. Army War College, was privy to much of the classified information regarding Halabja. He had in the New York Times on January 31st on this.

(For those who aren't registered at the NY Times website, the article has been published here and here, as well.)

In 1990, Dr. Pelletiere co-authored a Pentagon report on this topic, along with Dr. Douglas V. Johnson II and Dr. Leif R. Rosenberger. That report is totally 93 pages in length, but below is an excerpt from it. As it turns out, the type of gas used in the attack against the Kurds may more likely have been controlled by Iran, not Iraq.

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U.S. Army War College
1990 Pentagon Report
(This is an excerpt, with web links and boldface emphasis added.)
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Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East

Excerpt: Chapter 5
U.S. SECURITY AND IRAQI POWER

Introduction. Throughout the war the United States practiced a fairly benign policy toward Iraq. Although initially disapproving of the invasion, Washington came slowly over to the side of Baghdad. Both wanted to restore the status quo ante to the Gulf and to reestablish the relative harmony that prevailed there before Khomeini began threatening the regional balance of power. Khomenini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him.

United by a common interest, Iraq and the United States restored diplomatic relations in 1984, and the United States began to actively assist Iraq in ending the fighting. It mounted Operation Staunch, an attempt to stem the flow of arms to Iran. It also increased its purchases of Iraqi oil while cutting back on Iranian oil purchases, and it urged its allies to do likewise. All this had the effect of repairing relations between the two countries, which had been at a very low ebb.

In September 1988, however -- a month after the war had ended -- the State Department abruptly, and in what many viewed as a sensational manner, condemned Iraq for allegedly using chemicals against its Kurdish population. The incident cannot be understood without some background of Iraq's relations with the Kurds. It is beyond the scope of this study to go deeply into this matter; suffice it to say that throughout the war Iraq effectively faced two enemies -- Iran and the elements of its own Kurdish minority. Significant numbers of the Kurds had launched a revolt against Baghdad and in the process teamed up with Tehran. As soon as the war with Iran ended, Iraq announced its determination to crush the Kurdish insurrection. It sent Republican Guards to the Kurdish area, and in the course of this operation -- according to the U.S. State Department -- gas was used, with the result that numerous Kurdish civilians were killed. The Iraqi government denied that any such gassing had occurred. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Schultz stood by U.S. accusations, and the U.S. Congress, acting on its own, sought to impose economic sanctions on Baghdad as a violator of the Kurds' human rights.

Having looked at all of 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 organizations who examined the Kurds -- in Turkey where they had gone for asylum -- failed to discover any. Nor were there ever 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.

We would have expected, in a matter as serious as this, that the Congress would have exercised some care. However, passage of the sanctions measure through the Congress was unusually swift -- at least in the Senate where a unanimous vote was secured within 24 hours. Further, the proposed sanctions were quite draconian (and will be discussed in detail below). Fortunately for the future of Iraqi-U.S. ties, the sanctions measure failed to pass on a bureaucratic technicality (it was attached as a rider to a bill that died before adjournment).

It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, the Congress was influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraqi-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing a great 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 chemicals in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.

Thus, in our view, the Congress acted more on the basis of emotionalism than factual information, and without sufficient thought for the adverse diplomatic effects of its action. As a result of the outcome of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq is now the most powerful state in the Persian Gulf, an area in which we have vital interests. To maintain an uninterrupted flow of oil from the Gulf to the West, we need to develop good working relations with all of the Gulf states, and particularly with Iraq, the strongest.

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Posted by: Patriot at April 14, 2003 03:02:32 PM

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