According to Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and also a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, the alleged gassing of the Kurdish people took place during a battle between the Iraqis and the Iranians over the Iraqi town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. The dead bodies were examined by the Americans who determined that the symptoms were consistent with gassing by arsenic based poison gas used by the Iranians. The Iraqis used mustard gas and were not known to have arsenic gas. Therefore, the evidence available point to the Iranians who killed the Kurdish victims and not the Iraqis.
Bush had been found out to have lied when it came to the demonization of the Iraqis and Saddam. He kept harping on the “aluminum tubes” sought by the Iraqis as evidence that they are planning to make weapons of mass destruction. But all the experts have repeatedly told him that the aluminum tubes have nothing to do with WMD. This lie, and another one he announced as Tony Blair was visiting (that the IAEA issued a new report claiming Iraq was 6 months to developing the nuclear bomb), was circulating as congress was deliberating over the war resolution. The media did not clear up these two falsehoods until three weeks after they came out of Bush’s mouth. By that time, the resolution had already passed congress giving Bush war powers.
I want more people to read what I have so we can debate. I post on several forums at once. If you plug this post into a search engine, you’ll see I also posted it at ACLU.
What’s wrong with the other board? YOU don’t go there.
So, what do you think about the many former Iraqis who hate Saddam and think he’s a horrible dictator? Do you think these people have any reason for hating Saddam, or are they lying too? Has he or has he not been abysmally horrible to his own people? I’m just asking.
This has been dealt with several times. Supposedly there is proof.
Saddam may have gassed the Kurds multiple(24?) times. Halabja is the controversial event. I’ve seen lots of anti-war sites that make the same arguments as the OP.
Well, that was a completely forked sentence. There are supposedly 24 victims in one family. Saddam may have gassed the Kurds multiple times. I’m not saying Saddam gassed the Kurds 24 times.
Let’s agree poision gas is pretty bad (the West used it up through WWI, then thought better of it) – though I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the idea of “cruel” means of killing vs. “humane,” which is one of the many paradoxes of war crimes doctrine (and I assume that among the vast U.S. arsenal today there are a number of weapons that would not produce a very clean or comfortable death). C’est la guerre, perhaps, and I guess you have to look as much to the motive for killing as the means in order to determine if the killing was especially “inhuman.”
At the least, there seems to be (quite mainstream) support for the view that the apparent gas attack killed Kurds in an Iraqi border region who had been supporting or collaborating with the Iranians during the Iraq-Iran war.
The Kurds consider themselves a distinct (and would be autonomous) people (and enjoy quasi-autonomy from Baghdad now). Kurdish separatism and insurgency have been a problem for the Arab leadership of Iraq as they have for the secular Turkish leadership, and both governments have taken action against what they deemed Kurdish fifth columns within their states. This can certainly be viewed as heavy handed, ethnically based politics of a deplorable brand. But, if the Kurds were actively collaborating with the Iranians (and assuming the Iranians were no saints just like the Iraqis), the matter does take on a different complexion – Iraq would argue that it took military action against the joint Iranian and collaborationist forces on its border, and that the Kurds affected by this did not, themselves, think that the Iraqis and Kurds were the same people.
You don’t have to believe the Iraqis were “right” and the Kurds were “wrong,” or accept the use of poison gas under any circumstances, to believe that the distinction between attacking “his own people” and attacking what his military viewed as a dangerous fifth column is important. In the former case, no one but a genocidal madman would attack “his own people” (inferentially, for no other reason than pure evil), which proves Saddam does terroristic or irrational things for the sheer joy of doing them – hence we must head him off before he attacks, say, New Yorkers (why not? If he’s willing to attack his “own people”?). In the second case, Iraq’s handling of the Kurds reflects a Machtpolitik approach to dealing with enemy sympathizers during war – you can question the basic justness of Iraq’s war aims, its overall treatment of the non-assimilationist Kurds, or the degree of force used – but you can’t really call it mad or irrational.
The “Saddam is a madman” theory has never made much sense to me, and Mr. Bush pere was as fond of it as is fils, which is too bad, because it comes across as very disingenuous. At most, and as illustrated if nothing else by his all-too-knowing gaming of the inspection and propaganda process, he’s the classic Arab Strongman – brutal and intolerant of dissent, no doubt, but rational enough to have stayed in power for decades and to have generally known when to back off to save his own skin. To the extent that “gassing his own people” is being used, with no context, to support so-far thinly supported links to irrational terrorist acts, it seems the U.S. cheapens its principled arguments against Saddam by relying on cartoonish characterizations that it knows don’t stand up to scrutiny. Getting caught in a fib like this embarrasses the U.S. in the sight of the lefties and not-so-friendly foreign powers, and even causes honest hawks to wonder why a “just” war requires such fudging of the facts.
