Sorry, messed up that one link. Last article.
Somehow I think the fact of collaboration with the enemy plays an important part in how this was played out. “He gased his own people” is a bit misleading if these people were collaborating with the enemy. John Walker?
Whatever Saddam did, he did without any objection from the US government.
Whoa, these dead Kurds sure are valuable assets to the American propaganda machine. When the government wants to give money to Iraq, we claim it was Iran, when we decided we don’t like Iraq, we blame Iraq. When an editorial decides that we might not hate Iraq that much, it moves back to Iran.
Gee it seems if weren’t for dead Kurds we wouldn’t have a mid-East policy. Who gives a shit who did it. It’s not like Saddam was having a love affair with the Kurds, or that he ran in to help them. However, it seems a bit counterproductive for the Iranians to kill the strongest opposition group.
Here’s what pisses me off: The Kurds now have (with the help of the no fly zones) the most Democratic form of government in the middle-east, and yet we have promised Turkey that we will not give them autonomy if we can use Turkish bases. Does anyone else see the irony in this?
A meaningless jab that is inaccurate. I’m probably more left wing than most posters here.
I generally trust Slate and Hitchens; I’m not aware of any outright distortions they’ve permitted. Against that, we have Elucidator’s link to an op-ed (which I presume is of a similar epistemological status to mine). However, that’s why I claimed half a cite: an indirect reference from a reliable source. Take it for what it’s worth.
Irony wouldn’t be my choice of phrase.
Whether or not it was intentional, although most belive it was, myself included, Saddam’s military had no qualms about gassing civilians. Here are some highlights from a recorded transcript said by “Chemical Ali” in 1987 in reference to Kurdish revolt.
“Because I cannot tell you the same day that I am going to attack with chemical weapons. I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! the international community, and those who listen to them!.. In our attacks we will take back one-third or one-half of what is under their control. If we can try to take two-thirds, then we will surround them in a small pocket and attack them with chemical weapons. I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days.”
The entire transcript can be found here.
Here is the location of Appendix C of the Human Rights Watch report on Operation al-Anfal. This article details some of the more than three dozen chemical attacks against Kurdish locations, along with estimated death tolls on some of them. As HRW notes, one of the four main purposes of the gassing campaign of Anfal was to “To inflict exemplary collective punishment on civilians for their support for the peshmerga [Kurdish militia],” and also “To spread terror amongst the civilian population as a whole, flushing villagers out of their homes to facilitate their capture, relocation and killing.”
Draw your own conclusions based on this.
First of all let me repeat that Pelletiere was a senior CIA analyst and a professor at the Army War College and as such an eminently credible authority.
Secondly he doesn’t say that the Iraqis didn’t use gas but that they didn’t target Kurdish civilians with it. Has Tariq Aziz really said otherwise? Cite please. And since when has Aziz become a credible authority on this issue?
There are indeed other sources like HRW which dispute what Pelletiere says. None of us has the technical expertise to decided who is correct. Let me just say that the CIA probably has better intelligence sources on the matter than any human rights group.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the deliberate use of chemical weapons by Iraq against Kurdish civilians is a matter of dispute.
Pelletiere was a senior CIA analyst and military professor, not a bad background. But Robert Baer, a CIA operative with more years under his belt than Pelletiere, and also a former resident of Iraq, disputes Pelletiere’s take.
As to your second point, Pelletiere does assert that, “We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds.” Ergo, he is uncertain on whether or not even Iraqi chemical weapons were used on Halabja. Why the Iranians would gas their own positions and friendlies en masse is beyond comprehension.
Yes, the CIA does have decent intelligence, but it’s not foolproof. We’re talking about the same CIA that denied an attempted coup against Saddam in 1994 because they couldn’t get enough details via spy satellite, despite having multiple operatives witness the event and talk with its leaders. This is the same CIA that spent more time in the 1990’s snooping on crooked executives than investigating terrorism. The same CIA that let more than a dozen Russian military agents go when there were no CIA operatives in the area that spoke Russian. The same CIA that at one point in the '80s didn’t have a single senior CIA analyst of the Mideast that spoke either Arabic or Farsi. The same CIA that never solved the bombing of the Beirut embassy in 1983. Etc. etc. The CIA is not an infallible source, rather it is a shaky organization that is highly inept in many regards.
I concur that the sole logical conclusion seems to be that the matter is a disputed one. By whom the disputing is done, though, is another matter entirely.
I don’t understand this attitude. Yes, we provided support for Iraq in the 80’s. yes, we were probably wrong to do so. At the time he seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Why does that mean we cannot oppose him now? At the risk of invoking Godwin, most of Europe did jack shit when hitler invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia. Does that mean they gave up any right to fight him? Hell, the fact that we gave arms to Afganistan in the war against the USSR didn’t stop Al-queda from attacking us with the Talibans blessing. It’s fine to be outraged that we helped Iraq 15 years ago, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the situation today.
There is a difference between opposing and invading. I just think it’s hypocritical for the US to try to use the gassing of the Kurds as propaganda now, when Bush Sr. didn’t give a crap about it at the time. I’m not saying tht gassing the Kurds was good or acceptable, I’m saying that the government’s outrage now, 20 years later, is transparently insincere and manipulative.
I agree that the whole gassing business is a rather weak argument. Luckily, it is one of the least commonly used. I imagine most people see over it. I imagine few Americans have the desire to send American troops to fight Saddam because more than a decade ago he gassed some people. OTOH, when coupled with the assertion that he has chemical weapons, it automatically becomes more sinister, whether truthful or deceiving.
“Ergo, he is uncertain on whether or not even Iraqi chemical weapons were used on Halabja.”
Not at all. He is sure that the Iraqis used chemical weapons but not that they were suffiicently lethal to kill the Kurds. No inconsistency here.
“Why the Iranians would gas their own positions and friendlies en masse is beyond comprehension.”
I think the claim is that the Iranians fired gas on the Iraqi positions in Halabja. They weren’t trying to kill the Kurds either.
It’s entirely possible that the CIA could be wrong on this one. So could its critics. LIke I said none of us has the expertise to decide one way or another. Note that there was also a report by the Defense Intelligence Agency which backs Pelletiere.
Of course if American intelligence organizations are so incompetent that does complicate the case for war which relies heavily on their analysis, doesn’t it?
Perhaps behind the CIA to some degree. Allegedly the agency has been undergoing reform in the post 9/11 world, and despite that, the NSA is renown for being very reliable. You may expect to see lots of evidence against Saddam being procured by the NSA in the near future.
“…the NSA is renown for being very reliable. You may expect to see lots of evidence against Saddam being procured by the NSA in the near future”
Source?
I don’t doubt it! We are indeed assured that absolutely incontrovertible, utterly reliable proof positive is on the way!
Just for nostalgia’s sake, they ought to call it “Operation Candor”
I think the point is that satellite intelligence is often more trustworthy than the wetter kind, though it doesn’t always tell you what you want to know.
It’s a situation we didn’t care about then, and don’t care about now. It’s just that Iraq became the Official Enemy for other reasons, and now we’re pretending to be concerned over the incident.
It’s disingenuous. But that’s politics.
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I’ve always smiled at the Orwellien doublethink surrounding the (now) ubiquitous media cliché / phrase “his own people” – are these the same people who’ve been fighting for independence for decades, that Bush 41 encouraged to rise against the oppressive Saddam regime and then deserted…… read for yourselves how much they consider themselves “his people”:
“*I was born in Kirkuk in 1955. I became a Peshmerga at the age of 20 when I joined the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. I have the honour of being a member of the first revolutionary unit that fought the Baghdad regime in 1976, one year after the collapse of our previous revolution in 1975.
I spent most of my time between 1976 and 1991 in the mountains fighting the Iraqi Government. We have been calling for – and fighting for - “regime change” for the past 30 years. *”
- Surely, “his own people” is no more than a speechwriters cutesy turn of phrase that appeals to the media for it’s emotionally evocative implications:
*’This is how bad he is; look, look, can you believe he’d do this ? the evil dictator would even gas his very own kind, the people who support him, rely on him….see what kind of monster we’re dealing with *….yawn, yawn, yawn - It’s just more ‘creative’ misrepresentation from people with their own agendas seeking to influence the public they’re supposed to serve: Its political bollocks.
In fact, one would think there’s enough material around to discredit this monster without having to pretend Saddam and the Kurds consider themselves on even the same planet, let alone “his people” who he stabbed in the back with a nasty old mustard gas canister.
Besides, when did this god forsaken dessert area have the status of ‘country’ forced on it by an external empire carving up the region as it suited….1920’s ? – if anything, what this reminds me of is the 58,000 Confederate prisoners who died in Yankee prisons after the US Civil War ended…… but that’s my own thought processes; another tale for another day…
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As LC says, I’ve always been sceptical of the idea that he considers the kurds to be his “own people”. There’s a couple of other lines that get trotted out regularly by the war-mongers that are less than clear-cut as well:
That he invaded Kuwait without provocation - from what I’ve read Kuwait were slant drilling into Iraqi oil reserves and Saddam invaded because he thought he had the ok from the US (who had after all, been supporting him and selling him weapons for the previous decade). I’m not saying this “provocation” justified the invasion, just that it’s not true to say that he invaded “without provocation”.
That he had half a million troops lined up on the Saudi border ready to invade - this was used as the pretext for the Gulf War but Russian satellite photos showed there was no such mobilisation.
That he tried to assassinate Bush senior - well so what, Bush senior would have had no problem assassinating Saddam if he could’ve. The two countries are enemies, of course they would assassinate each other if they got the chance. Big deal.