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-------- Original Message --------
Betreff: I.P.O. news release on Iraq
Datum: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:23:47 +0200
Von: "I.P.O." <info@i-p-o.org>
Rückantwort: "I.P.O." <info@i-p-o.org>
An: "INTERNATIONAL PROGRESS ORGANIZATION" <info@i-p-o.org>
INTERNATIONAL PROGRESS ORGANIZATION - Information Service
Vienna, 11 October 2002/P/RE/17951c-is
Arms of mass destruction - False accusations against Iraq -
Call for independent international inquiry
In a declaration issued today, the President of the International
Progress Organization, Professor Hans Koechler, called for an
independent international investigation of the allegations of the
use of poison gas against the Kurdish population of Iraq. He referred
to a study by Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, Professor of National Security
at the U.S. Army War College (USAWC), Prof. Leif Rosenberger and Lt.
Colonel Douglas V. Johnson II published under the title Iraqi Power
and U.S. Security in the Middle East by the U.S. Army War College in
February 1990.
At that time, before the beginning of the Gulf crisis 1990/1991,
the distinguished American experts came to the conclusion that the
allegations against Iraq were unfounded. Referring to the U.S. State
Department's declaration about the alleged use of poison gas, by the
Iraqi army, in the Kurdish region of Iraq, the experts wrote: "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." In regard to the Halabja incident - where the use
of poison gas has been verified - the experts wrote in their 1990
report: "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."
In a report published last month in the Times of India, Allis
Chalmers, Professor of International Affairs at Marquette University,
Wisconsin (USA), revealed the contents of a conversation with
Professor Pelletiere, one of the authors of the study, at the U.S.
Army War College in March 1991. According to Professor Chalmers,
Pelletiere stated "that the USAWC investigation showed that in the
Iranian mass human wave battlefield strategy, Teheran used nonpersistent
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." Professor
Chalmers further noted that the Iranians thought the Kurds had fled
Halabjah and that they were attacking Iraqi forces. "But the Iraqis
had fled Halabjah and the Kurds had returned. Iran gassed the Kurds
by accident." It is explained furthermore that 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.
The President of the International Progress Organization stated that,
as a result of these reports and analyses by distinguished American
scholars, it is obvious that the accusations levelled against Iraq of
having gassed its own people are false.
As these allegations are a major element of the present U.S. campaign
for waging a so-called "preventive war" against Iraq - in violation
of the United Nations Charter -, the President of the International
Progress Organization called upon the United Nations Organization
and responsible international leaders to undertake an independent
international inquiry into these allegations. He referred to the I.P.O.
Memorandum of February 2002 addressed to the President of the General
Assembly and to the Secretary-General of the United Nations concerning
the threat of the use of force against Iraq, and called for urgent
collective action, on the basis of the United Nations Charter, to avert
war in the Middle East.
End/ Arms of mass destruction - False accusations against Iraq -
Call for independent international inquiry/2002-10-11/P/RE/17951c-is
INTERNATIONAL PROGRESS ORGANIZATION
Kohlmarkt 4, A-1010 Vienna, Austria
Phone +431-5332877, fax +431-5332962, homepage: http://i-p-o.org
November 18, 1998
Did Saddam Hussein Gas His Own People?
Memo To: Sandy Berger, National Security Advisor
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Iraqi use of Poison Gas
(URL: http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/11-18-98.html)
On the Jim Lehrer News Hour Monday night, you repeated the assertion
that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people." As the President's
National Security Advisor, I had assumed you of all people would not
make such assertions without having supporting evidence. Early this
year, on the supposition that the Iraqi situation would blow up again,
I made serious inquiries about this charge. On April 7, I sent the
following memo to Chairman Jesse Helms of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. If you have better information, Mr. Berger, I hope you can
supply it, as this is the most serious of all charges made against
Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis readily acknowledge using chemical weapons
against Iran a few times late in the war, but using such weapons in
wartime is not nearly as serious as "gassing his own people."
To Senator Helms:
I continue to make inquiry into the situation in Iraq, as it is likely
to brew up into another crisis one of these days when the United
Nations has no choice but to conclude that Iraq is not hiding any
weapons of mass destruction -- or if they are, they are so well hidden
that nobody is going to find them. As you know, I'm sure, the warhawks
in the United States will continue to insist that the embargo remain
in place no matter what, and there will be assertions from around the
world that we have not been acting in good faith. As you also know,
I believe there are serious questions regarding our behavior toward
Iraq that go back further. You would agree, I think, that at the very
least our State Department gave a "green light" to Saddam Hussein to
go into Kuwait in August 1990. The more I read of the events of the
period, the more I believe history will record that the Gulf War was
unnecessary, perhaps even that Saddam Hussein was willing to retreat
back to his borders, but our government decided we preferred the war
to the status quo ante.
In my previous correspondence with you on this matter, I had been
in a quandary about the state of our relations with Baghdad during
that critical period. In the months immediately preceding the "green
light" given by our Ambassador, April Glaspie, a number of your
Senate colleagues including Bob Dole had traveled to Baghdad, met
with Saddam, and found him to be a head of state worthy of support.
Even Sen. Howard Metzenbaum [D-OH], a Jewish liberal and staunch
supporter of Israel, gave him a seal of approval. What disturbs me
even now, Jesse, is that these meetings occurred after the Senate
Foreign Relations committee had accused Iraq of using poison gas
against its own people, i.e., the Kurds. Like all other Americans,
in recent years I had assumed that what I read in the papers was
true about Iraq gassing its own people. Once the war drums again
began beating last November, I decided to read up on the history,
and found Iraq denied having used gas against its own people.
Furthermore, I heard that a Pentagon investigation at the time had
also turned up no hard evidence of Saddam gassing his own people.
This is serious stuff, because the United Nations tells us that 1.4
million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the sanctions, which
is three thousand times more than the number of Kurds who supposedly
died of gassing at the hands of Saddam. Many of my old Cold Warrior
friends practically DEMAND that we not lift the sanctions because if
Saddam would gas his own people, he would gas anyone. Now I have come
across the 1990 Pentagon report, published just prior to the invasion
of Kuwait. Its authors are Stephen C. Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson
II, and Leif R. Rosenberger, of the Strategic Studies Institute of
the U.S. War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The report is 93 pages,
but I append here only the passages having to do with the aforementioned
- issue
-
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.
I wonder, Senator, had you ever read this material? The entire report
is worth reading, as a matter of fact, because of its credibility on
the threshold of the Iraqi invasion. The authors are quite emphatic,
by the way, in stating that Iraq was struggling for its financial
survival at this point -- because of its debts from the Iranian war,
and the decline of the world oil price. That is, they did not believe
Iraq would have expansionist designs in the Middle East for years to
come, given how financially flattened they had been.
It does seem to me that if Congress did act more on the basis of
emotionalism than factual information, it may have contributed
substantially to the economic distress of our ally in the war with
Iran. That is, by squeezing Saddam with sanctions that included a
cutoff of IMF assistance, it thrust Saddam into the confrontation
he had with the Emir of Kuwait over oil fields and better port
access to the Gulf that the Iraqis claimed going back to World War I.
The more I pull on this piece of string, the more I believe you should
commit resources of the Foreign Relations Committee to a review of this
history. In this period, the Democrats did have control of Congress and
another senator chaired Foreign Relations. It could be that a different
viewpoint at a distance of time would enable even slight adjustments
of policy. It is now a season where everyone is asking for apologies
of events that occurred generations ago, even hundreds of years ago.
We should deal today with those issues which could grow tomorrow into
embarrassments for which our grandchildren will have to apologize.
Meanwhile, I'll continue to keep you informed as I collect this Iraqi
ball of string.
Letter
IRAQ'S CHEMICAL WARFARE
By Douglas V. Johnson, Stephen C. Pelletiere, Reply by Edward
Mortimer In response to "The Thief of Baghdad"
(September 27, 1990)
To the Editors:
In our book Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East we
questioned whether Iraq had used chemicals against its Kurdish
population, as widely believed. Your reviewer (Edward Mortimer,
"Republic of Fear," NYR, September 27) challenged us on this. Since
it is a matter of some importance, we would like to offer support
for our view. Essentially there are two instances under scrutiny.
The first attack allegedly occurred at Halabjah in north-central
Iraq. All accounts of this incident agree that the victims' mouths
and extremities were blue. This is consonant with the use of a
blood agent. Iraq never used blood agents throughout the war; Iran
did. The U.S. State Department said at the time of the Hallabjah
attack that both Iran and Iraq had used gas in this instance. Hence,
we concluded it was the Iranians' gas that killed the Kurds.
The second alleged gas attack by the Iraqis against the Kurds occurred
at Amadiyyah (in the far northern region of Iraq) after the war had
ended. This one is extremely problematical since no gassing victims
were ever produced. The only evidence that gas was used is the eyewitness
testimony of the Kurds who fled to Turkey, collected by
staffers of the U.S. Senate. We showed this testimony to experts in
the military who told us it was worthless. The symptoms described
by the Kurds do not conform to any known chemical or combination of
chemicals.
Lacking any gassing victims, and given the fact that the testimony does
not seem credible we were unwilling to say that in fact the attacks
had occurred. At the same time, throughout the study we cited instances
of Iraqi-instigated chemical attacks against Iranian military units.
There is no doubt that these occurred; indeed the Iraqis have stated on
occasion that they feel justified in using chemicals tactically under
certain conditions. However, they deny using chemicals as a weapon of
mass destruction, that is against civilians. What our study concludes
is that those who claim they are doing so need to come up with some
more convincing proof.
On an another matter, your reviewer claimed that we did not predict
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He quotes us (correctly) as saying that
(after the war with Iran) "Iraq has neither the will nor the resources
to go to war with anybody." However, we qualified that statement, by
saying, if we (that is the United States) impose economic sanctions
on the Iraqis, it then is likely that they will lash out against
our interests in the Gulf. This part of the prediction your reviewer
left out, and it's important since, as you know, the U.S. Congress
did impose sanctions and almost immediately after the Iraqis invaded
Kuwait.
If any of the New York Review of Books readers want to read what we
said in our study, they can obtain a free copy by writing to us.
Dr. Stephen C. Pelletiere
Lt. Col. Douglas V. Johnson III
Strategic Studies Institute
US Army War College
Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, 17013-5050
Edward Mortimer replies:
I accept that in the specific case of Halabja the possibility that
the chemical attack came from Iran (which might not have realized
that Iraqi troops had already evacuated the town), or indeed from
both sides consecutively, cannot be ruled out. I find it extraordinary,
however, that the War College authors persist in dismissing the
evidence that Iraq's armed forces used poison gas against Kurdish
civilians and insurgents in late August 1988, i.e., after the end of
the war with Iran. This evidence takes a number of forms:
- State Department officials said on September 8, 1988, that US
intelligence agencies had confirmed Iraq's use of chemicals in
its recent drive against Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq. The
same information prompted Secretary of State George Shultz, a
man who had presided over a strong pro-Iraq tilt in US policy,
and who continued to oppose sanctions against Iraq, to accuse
Iraq of "unjustifiable and abhorrent" use of poison gas against
the Kurds in a meeting on the same day with Iraqi Minister of
State for Foreign Affairs Saadoun Hammadi. (This evidence was
shared with the British government, and was subsequently described
as "compelling" by then Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe.)
Although there was vigorous debate between Congress and the
executive branch about the policy conclusions to be drawn, in
1988 and again in 1990, there has been no difference between
them about the facts of Iraqi misconduct.
- Many eyewitness accounts were collected in Turkey between September
11 and 17, 1988, by a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff
mission led by professional staff member Peter W. Galbraith and
including a representative of the State Department as well as a
Kurdish-speaking US government employee. This team interviewed
refugees (men, women, and children) from more than thirty
villages_some selected by Kurdish refugee leaders but many others
chosen at random by the team itself. Most refugees said that they
had seen the attacks and resulting deaths. Their accounts were
striking for their detail and consistency: people from the same
village who had found refuge in different parts of Turkey gave
similar accounts of the attacks on their village; and survivors
from different villages described a similar pattern of Iraqi
attack and victim symptoms. As Galbraith says in a recent
memorandum sent to The New York Review: "To disbelieve these
eyewitnesses one would have to conclude that the Kurdish
insurgents had organized, in a matter of days, a conspiracy
to defame Iraq involving the full participation of 65,000 men,
women, and children confined in camps in locations up to 200
miles apart."
The War College authors cite unnamed "experts" as saying the
symptoms described by the Kurds do not conform to any known
chemical or combination of chemicals. But US government experts
consulted by the Senate mission said that the symptoms described
were consistent with the use of mustard gas, as well as some
fast-acting lethal agent, possibly nerve agents or cyanide.
3. These findings were supported in congressional testimony by Dr.
Robert Cook-Deegan of Physicians for Human Rights, who led a
medical team to eastern Turkey. Contrary to the assertion of the
War College authors, this team of doctors was able to examine
actual victims of the attacks, and found injuries resulting from
blistering agents.
4. Further eyewitness testimony was collected from refugees in Iran
by British journalist Gwynne Roberts, and shown on British Channel
4 television on November 23, 1988. Survivors described a massacre
at Bassay Gorge, in northern Iraq, on August 29, 1988, in which
something between 1,500 and 4,000 people, mainly women and children,
were killed by what appears to have been a mixture of various nerve
gasses while trying to reach the Turkish border. Their bodies were
piled up and burnt by Iraqi troops wearing gas masks the following
morning.
Roberts, a very experienced reporter, said the survivors were clearly
traumatized by what they had witnessed, and their reports were
completely consistent. He also entered Iraq clandestinely and brought
back fragments of an exploded shell with samples of the surrounding
soil, which were confirmed by a British laboratory as containing
traces of mustard gas. (Nerve gas would not have left traces so long
after the event.) In my review I drew attention to the fact that
Roberts's evidence was completely ignored in the report of the War
College authors, and I note that it is still completely ignored in
their letter.
Even more extraordinary is their attempt to suggest that the US
Congress provoked the invasion of Kuwait by imposing sanctions on
Iraq. In fact, Congress had not enacted sanctions by the time Iraq
invaded Kuwait on August 2. It seems far more likely that Saddam
Hussein went ahead with the invasion because he believed the US
would not react with anything more than verbal condemnation. That
was an inference he could well have drawn from his meeting with US
Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, and from statements by State
Department officials in Washington at the same time publicly
disavowing any US security commitments to Kuwait, but also from
the success of both the Reagan and the Bush administrations in
heading off attempts by the US Senate to impose sanctions on Iraq
for previous breaches of international law.
Events have tragically borne out the warning in the report of the
Senate mission in September 1988, which said: "Right now the Kurds
are paying the price for past global indifference to Iraqi chemical
weapons use; the failure to act now could ultimately leave every
nation in peril." On that occasion the US, and the rest of the
international community, failed to act. Now soldiers of the US and
many other nations face a chemically armed Iraq, on the Saudi-Kuwaiti
border.
The Role of the Media in Shaping Public Perception
Stephen Pelletiere speaks at the CPAP
With a PhD in Political Science, a background in journalism, and a
current position as professor of National Security Affairs at the
U.S. Army War College, Stephen Pelletiere brought his expertise
to a discussion of the media at a 13 September 2001 Center lecture.
He focused on press coverage of Iraq, Palestine, and the current
situation following the 11 September plane hijackings and attacks
on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the U.S.
Pelletiere began by addressing the media campaign against Iraq
following the Iran-Iraq war. The U.S. did not expect Iraq to win,
and when it did, U.S. leaders were "dumbfounded." As Iraq sought
to "rebuild itself" after the war, the U.S. attempted to prevent
this restructuring through a number of avenues, focusing on damaging
Iraq's "credit worthiness." Despite the accumulation of a large debt,
Iraq "was good for the money" considering its oil resources. Still,
in the spring of 1988, Iraq did not have the cash reserves necessary
and wished to reschedule its debt payments. The media in the U.S.
began running stories on Iraq, "the tone of which was extremely
hostile."
"All of the stories were slanted against Iraq," which by itself is
suspicious. In addition, some of the stories were simply "phony,"
such as the report that 80,000 to 100,000 Kurds were gassed to death
by Iraq. "You can't kill that many people using gas, in a concentrated
period, in terrain such as exists in northern Iraq." Irrational stories
do appear in the media on occasion, but not usually so extensively
in the established press. It seemed to Pelletiere that "this was a
campaign." At the time, Congress was debating sanctions on Iraq and
may have been trying to prepare the public. When sanctions were
eventually declared, Iraq could no longer reschedule its debts.
Moving to the issue of how the media has covered Israel and Palestine,
Pelletiere explained that Israel's current military activity in the
Occupied Territories is "coming dangerously close to ethnic cleansing."
Nonetheless, the press presents the conflict as relatively balanced
and argues that both sides are equally responsible for the violence.
Pelletiere takes a different approach. He explained that at the Camp
David negotiations, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered
a deal "that was no deal at all." Barak hoped the Palestinians would
accept it and be "saddled with an entity that was not viable," a socalled
state that would fall apart. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
refused. "The pro-Israeli forces . . . had to find a way of retreating
from the exposed position they found themselves in, because in the
process of setting Arafat up, . . . they had dignified both him and
his movement by appearing to take the idea of Palestinian statehood
seriously." They choose to "criminalize" the Palestinians. Israeli
leader Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif, which
Barak allowed, started the uprising, then the Israeli army responded
to subsequent protests with "unusual ferocity." "Once a cycle of
violence had been created, one could simply nurse it along."
Pelletiere urged the public to "pay special attention" to the fact
that journalists who are focusing on these stories and opinions are
conservative, as are the newspapers publishing them, mainly The New
York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The
line between news and opinion has become blurred, mainly through the
op-ed pages of the newspapers. "Spurious" ideas start there and then
filter into the news. This is not only the case regarding Israel/
Palestine, but with other issues as well. The role of the press is
to "serve special interests." Pelletiere urged those concerned with
these issues to confront to media. The "peace movement faced the same
challenges" in the 1960s and managed to overcome them. They can be
overcome now as well, "but it does take innovative thinking."
"There is a cadre [in the government] that knows what's going on" and
who are "fairly astute," but if their opinions are heard at all, they
are labeled "alternative." During his work with the army and Central
Intelligence Agency, Pelletiere met those like him who had alternative
viewpoints but "never got a hearing until there was a crisis," such as
during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
Despite his encouragement of innovative thinking, Pelletiere was keenly
aware of the challenges involved. As he explained, conservatives are
"in the ascendancy" now. He already sees trends developing following
Tuesday's attack. These trends include the perceptions that: (1) "We're
at war." (2) America will never again be the same. However, Pelletiere
asserted, "I don't think we're any different" than before. The U.S.
is still nearing a recession, the information technology industry is
still failing, President Bush is still untested. (3) Osama bin Laden
is guilty of the attack. Pelletiere does not believe bin Laden had the
resources to organize such a campaign, but whether or not he is guilty,
the U.S. will use him as a scapegoat. (4) The United States will likely
attack Afghanistan. The administration is already preparing the public
for it through news coverage and government briefings.
This is "not a classic conspiracy," Pelletiere pointed out. Government
and media leaders do not get together and decide what these "lines" or
trends will be. Rather, there is a "distillation process" from "thinks
tanks" and policy institutes. Certain approaches seem more plausible
than others, are repeated often enough, and are easier to defend than
other arguments, and they become the "line." Pelletiere also urged
the audience to watch the stock market and observe how it affects U.S.
policies. The only times he has witnessed "real changes made" were
when business interests were affected. As for what the U.S. leadership
will do now, Pelletiere said, "All they want to do is get themselves
through this period. If it develops into a real exploitation where the
administration begins to single out certain areas for repression-then
we're in for a very bad period. I don't see any signs of that now."
Nonetheless, "there's a tradition of using incidents like this... to
point American society into a very conservative direction." This has
occurred "over and over again" in the past. "Whether that will happen
this time, I don't think anyone has a way of knowing, but it's a
possibility."
The above text is based on remarks delivered on 13 September 2001 by
Stephen Pelletiere, Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S.
Army War College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the
Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine or The Jerusalem Fund. This
"For the Record" was written by Publications Manager Wendy Lehman;
it may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the
Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine.
CPAP
For The Record
Number 82
18 September 2001
The Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine Tel: 202.338.1290
http://www.palestinecenter.org
Copyright +2001 Al-Hewar Center, Inc. All rights reserved.
For more information, please contact Al-Hewar via
e-mail at alhewar@alhewar.com
The Administration Builds Up Its Pretext for Attacking Iraq
Fighting Words
by Roger Trilling
May 1 - 7, 2002
URL: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0218/trilling.php
It is now clear that the Bush administration is determined to force
a "regime change" in Baghdad no matter how severe the crisis in the
Mideast. Or how much the Arabs protest: At the Arab summit in March,
both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia formally reconciled with Iraq, an
emphatic signal that they regarded Saddam as less of "a threat to
the region" than an attack by the U.S. would be. The ostensible reason
the administration regards Saddam as a threat is his possession of
weapons of mass destruction_that's what the switch from "war on terror"
to "axis of evil" signified. But dismantling Saddam's arsenal is a
job for UN arms inspectors. And there are many in Washington who worry
that they may not be up to it.
"Are you still committed to trying to get UN weapons inspection
teams back into Iraq?" CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Vice President
Cheney. "Because, as you know, some critics . . . have said that
would be a waste, that they're just going to give a runaround."
"The issue's not inspectors," Cheney replied. "The issue is that he
has chemical weapons_and he's used them."
Last month, the administration's effort to garner public support for
its go-it-alone posture got a boost from an unlikely source. In its
March 25 issue, The New Yorker ran an 18,000-word piece by Jeffrey
Goldberg about Halabja, a Kurdish town where, on March 16, 1988,
Saddam is accused of massacring his own citizens with poison gas.
The scenes of devastation were severe, and historically nuanced in
the retelling. "The Iraqis, knowing that gas is heavier than air, and
that it would penetrate cellars effectively, drove everybody into their
basements by launching a conventional artillery attack," Goldberg said
on NPR's Fresh Air. "They were stuck in their basements." He concluded:
"The way it was described to me [was] really as gas chambers."
There were other dire details_a woman succumbing as she suckled a
baby she hoped would survive the fumes; people rendered blind, mad,
or infertile; even a plague of poisonous snakes. "Saddam Hussein's
attacks on his own citizens," Goldberg wrote, "marks the only time
since the Holocaust that poison gas has been used to exterminate
women and children."
Though he says it wasn't meant that way, Goldberg's piece_entitled
"The Great Terror"provided an eloquent set of images for the Bush
administration's Iraq policy. "It's a devastating article," Cheney
said on Meet the Press. "Specifically, its description of what
happened in 1988 when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against
the Kurds in northern Iraq, against some of his own people. It
demonstrates conclusively what a lot of us have said: that this is
a man who is a great danger to that region of the worldespecially
if he's able to acquire nuclear weapons."
The president agreed. A few days earlier, he had invoked the story
during his trip to Mexico. "It details about his [Saddam's] barbaric
behavior toward his own people," Bush said. "And this is a man who
refuses to allow us to determine whether or not he still has weapons
of mass destruction_which leads me to believe he does."
Ever since September 11, the administration has been trying to hook
Iraq into the "war on terror." Initially, a claim was advanced that
suicide pilot Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi operatives in Prague.
Then Iraq was floated as a source of the anthrax attacks. Finally,
the "axis of evil" speech accused Saddam of stockpiling weapons of
mass destruction. Although few doubt that Saddam has such armaments,
none of these charges was ever substantiated. But by repeatedly citing
the New Yorker article, Bush and Cheney were saying that they didn't
need to prove a thing. What Saddam did in Halabja is reason enough to
oust him.
It's quite a stretch to predicate a threat of war on an incident that
took place 14 years ago_especially if there's a possibility that it
didn't happen the way Goldberg described it.
Halabja was attacked in the closing weeks of the Iran-Iraq War, when
two Kurdish guerrilla groups sided against Saddam. It lies just inside
Iraq's border with Iran, and the Iranians had mounted an offensive
in the region. Halabja was thus contested territory. That many people
died that day is beyond dispute. The question is, Who killed them?
When pictures and stories flooded the world press_reporters had been
helicoptered in by the Iranians, who saw Halabja as a PR opportunity
the reaction was automatic. Most reporters, well aware of Saddam's
long history of poison gas use against the Iranian army, accepted
their hosts' explanation: Saddam had gassed his own people.
The Reagan-Bush White House, which had tilted decisively toward Saddam
in the war, denounced Iraq immediately. But the State Department wasn't
so sure. "There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical
artillery shells in this fighting," spokesman Charles Redman told
the press a week after the attack. "We call on Iran and Iraq to desist
immediately from the use of any chemical weapons."
Redman may have been relying on a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
report filed the day of his announcement. It stated that "most of the
casualties in Halabja were reportedly caused by cyan[o]gen chloride.
This agent has never been used by Iraq, but Iran has shown interest in
it. Mustard gas casualties in the town were probably caused by Iraqi
weapons, because Iran has never been noted using that agent."
In time, studies were commissioned from and produced by the military
and intelligence communities, which found that both armies had used
gas. One report, "Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War," was prepared
by Dr. Stephen Pelletiere and Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Johnson of
the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. Its findings
came out of a two-day conference attended by U.S. defense attachés
who had served in the Middle East, as well as by military and
political analysts from both the CIA and the DIA who had monitored
the war. Because neither Iran nor Iraq had allowed reporters or
foreign military observers at the front, the report drew on field
reports, open source materials, and "signal intelligence" phone
and radio messages sent by the warring armies, and picked up by the
National Security Agency.
Most of the report's chapter on chemical weapons is devoted to Iraqi
military tactics, but one sentence stands out: "Blood agents [i.e.,
cyanogen chloride] were allegedly responsible for the most infamous
use of chemicals in the war - the killing of Kurds at Halabjah. Since
the Iraqis have no history of using these two agents_and the Iranians
do-we conclude that the Iranians perpetrated this attack." (The report
is available at www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/3203/.)
All of this was reported at the time. On May 3, 1990, referring to
yet another study, The Washington Post stated: "A Defense Department
reconstruction of the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war has assembled
what analysts say is conclusive intelligence that one of the worst
civilian massacres of the war, in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja,
was caused by repeated chemical bombardments from both belligerent
armies."
In response to the orthodoxy already established around the event,
the Post's Patrick Tyler went on to note that the reconstruction
"calls into question the widely reported assertion of human rights
organizations and Kurdish groups that Iraq bore the greatest
responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi Kurds-women,
infants and elderly_who died at Halabja."
Articles asserting Iranian complicity also ran in The New York Times
("Years Later, No Clear Culprit in Gassing of Kurds"), Newsday, The
New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.
But that's all forgotten now. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the
demonization of Saddam has become a linchpin of U.S. foreign
policy, and his solo turn as Killer of Kurds has passed beyond
question. Likewise, Halabja has become an Alamo for human
rights and Kurdish rights groups, who have used it ever since
for their own often admirable purposes.
In a telephone interview with the Voice, Goldberg explained why he
had chosen to elide the position of the military and intelligence
communities from his piece. "I didn't give it much thought, because
it was dismissed by so many people I consider to be experts," he
told me. "Very quickly into this story, I decided that I support the
mainstream view_of Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights,
the State Department, the UN, and various Kurdish groups_that the
Iraqis were responsible for Halabja. In the same way, I didn't give
any merit to the Iraqi denials."
Implying that the Pentagon, the DIA, and the CIA are no more
reliable than the Iraqis seems a bit extreme, but Goldberg's
point is essentially correct. Never more than since September
11, Saddam's sole responsibility for the massacre at Halabja
has become conventional wisdom.
To Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on
Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq War, this is highly alarming. "There
is to this day the belief - and I'm not the only one who holds it -
that things didn't happen in Halabja the way Goldberg wrote it,"
he told the Voice. "And it's an especially crucial issue right now.
We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and
the world shouldn't tolerate him. But why? Because that's the last
argument the U.S. has for going to war with Iraq."
http://www.babylon-festival.net/
http://www.uruklink.net/iraqdaily/
http://www.giv-archiv.de/2002/Januar/020131GI.007
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>> Further Informations about Iraq and Palestine:
>> GIV-Archiv: http://www.giv-archiv.de http://www.giv-seiten.de
>> http://home.arcor.de/ge.lange/index.html
>> http://home.arcor.de/ge.lange/Menue/www.giv.de.cx/index.html
>> http://home.arcor.de/ge.lange/Menue/www.irak.de.cx/index.html
>> http://home.arcor.de/ge.lange/Menue/www.giv-archiv.de/index.html
>> http://soziales.freepage.de/irak/index.htm
>>>-----------------------------------------------------------------<<<
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