Interesting article

[wiffleball 4,654]

This is interesting. This is from Stephen C. Pelletiere, the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, head of a 1991 US Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States.

 

I was doing some research on the whole "Saddam Gassed his own people" thing and came across this. Seems like this might be the guy to know a thing or two.

 

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.

 

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.

More interesting stuff

 

Wow.

[naomi 343]

Hmmm, it's hard not to want to defer to that source. Here's an interesting slate article:

 

Excerpt from the end:

Here, for example, is a description of the chemical attack on Halabja from the 1993 Human Rights Watch report, Genocide in Iraq:

 

Those outside in the streets could see clearly that these were Iraqi, not Iranian aircraft, since they flew low enough for their markings to be legible. (continues)

 

 

 

If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves. Goldberg's New Yorker piece cites an audiotape from the 1980s of Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, discussing the Kurds in an address to members of Saddam's Baath Party:

 

I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? ###### them! The international community and those who listen to them.

 

Human Rights Watch has a cache of documents that the Kurds captured from the Iraqis during the war. Search for the word "chemical" or the word "special" (the Iraqi euphemism for gas attacks was "special attacks"), and you'll see the Baath Party was as good as its word.

[naomi 343]

From the article where the audiotape was cited (the tape was obtained by Human Rights Watch):

 

The chemical attacks on Halabja and Goktapa and perhaps two hundred other villages and towns were only a small part of the cataclysm that Saddam’s cousin, the man known as Ali Chemical, arranged for the Kurds. The Kurds say that about two hundred thousand were killed. (Human Rights Watch, which in the early nineties published “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide,” a definitive study of the attacks, gives a figure of between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand.)

 

The campaign against the Kurds was dubbed al-Anfal by Saddam, after a chapter in the Koran that allows conquering Muslim armies to seize the spoils of their foes. It reads, in part, “Against them”—your enemies—”make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly.”

 

The Anfal campaign was not an end in itself, like the Holocaust, but a means to an end—an instance of a policy that Samantha Power, who runs the Carr Center for Human Rights, at Harvard, calls “instrumental genocide.” Power has just published “ ‘A Problem from Hell,’ “ a study of American responses to genocide. “There are regimes that set out to murder every citizen of a race,” she said. “Saddam achieved what he had to do without exterminating every last Kurd.” What he had to do, Power and others say, was to break the Kurds’ morale and convince them that a desire for independence was foolish.

 

Most of the Kurds who were murdered in the Anfal were not killed by poison gas; rather, the genocide was carried out, in large part, in the traditional manner, with roundups at night, mass executions, and anonymous burials. The bodies of most of the victims of the Anfal—mainly men and boys—have never been found.

Source

The author delves into a lot of first hand experience of the Iraqi' armies efforts of rounding up the Kurds.

It seems to stand that it's debatable Iraqi gas was used in Halajba, which is Pelletiere's* point, though eyewitnesses say they saw Iraqi planes flying low. I don't understand his main point though. Was Halajba misrepresented? Debatable. Was there genocide? The argument there is pretty heavy.

 

*or those citing him. "Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities..."