[Media-watch] Fw: Facing the Unthinkable - Challenging Bush on the Gassing of Kurds
Henry McCubbin
hmccubbin at tinyworld.co.uk
Sun Feb 2 12:44:06 GMT 2003
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From: <A
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href="mailto:AFSC_Europe at topica.email-publisher.com">Joseph Gerson
To: <A title=hmccubbin at tinyworld.co.uk
href="mailto:hmccubbin at tinyworld.co.uk">hmccubbin at tinyworld.co.uk
Sent: Saturday, February 01, 2003 7:36 PM
Subject: Facing the Unthinkable - Challenging Bush on the Gassing of
Kurds
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<FONT class=subhead
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<A class=issue
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face=" verdana, sans-serif" color=#b00000
size=-1>Facing the Unthinkable - Challening Bush
on Gassing of Kurds
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<A
name=ttlHead1><FONT class=head
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size=+1>Facing the Unthinkable - Challening
Bush on Gassing of Kurds <FONT
class=body face=" verdana, sans-serif"
color=#000000 size=-1>2/1First, two
corrections from yesterday’s events
posting:1) UJP Buses to New York on
February 15 cost $30, not $40.2) Robert
Fiske’s February 5 talk at MIT on will be at
Wednesday, February 5th7:00 PM, MIT, Room
10-250Overflow room
34-101Friends,The following
article by Stephen C. Pelletier, formerly the
CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the
Iran-Iraq War and professor at the Army War
College from 1988 to 2000, speaks for itself.
Written by an absolutely credible source, in the
tradition of Daniel Ellsberg’s revelations about
the U.S. war in Vietnam, and confirming a charge
made by Scott Ritter, it points to what may be a
profound lie at the heart of the Bush
Administration’s efforts to mobilize the U.S.
public and the world for its catastrophic war
against Iraq - that Saddam Hussein’s government
may not have gassed its own people. It may well
have been the Iranians. In what is likely to be
the last critical weeks to avert this war,
Pelletiere‘s report should be circulated as widely
as possibleIt may be possible that
President Bush has, to his mind, already decided
upon war. This leads me to two thoughts. First, we
must do all that we can in the coming weeks to
avert it, and this includes encouraging as many
people as possible to join the February 15
demonstration in New York or in our home
communities, and picking up those phones on Monday
and moving those e-mail along, to press your
senators and Senators Frist and Daschle to support
and to allow debate on SR 32. It is worth
recalling that in 1969, when 200,000 people
journeyed to Washington, D.C. to oppose the
Vietnam War, we didn’t know that a nuclear threat
had been communicated to the Vietnamese and that
the U.S. military was at the highest state of
nuclear alert. President Nixon’s memoirs tell us
that it was when he learned the numbers who had
come to protest that he concluded he could not
follow through on his November ultimatum.*
Even as we do all that we can to prevent
the war, we should also be preparing our responses
to it. I’ll post more about this in the coming
days, but such preparations should include more
than "The Day(s) After" community and state-wide
demonstrations and civil disobedience, although
they are ESSENTIAL. I think it also means
steadfastness on our part, holding the public
space and imagination. Among the ways that this
can be done is through the wearing of black arm
bands to communicate mourning for the Iraqi
people, our troops, for the costs to our
communities in the near and long-term, and for the
erosion of democracy and human rights here in the
U.S. It will also serve to counter whatever this
Administration’s version of the 1991 yellow ribbon
campaign will be. It also means movement offices
being organized to respond before the unthinkable
happens and having our office volunteers and
communications networks in place. It means having
our media strategies in place, and it includes
religious and other commu nities thinking in
advance about how you will respond as communities.
And the list goes on…Driving back from
Connecticut this afternoon I learned of the loss
of the Colombia and, worse its crew of nine. This,
as we know, is a terrible tragedy for these people
and a loss beyond words for their families and
friends. Even as we know that these missions are
related to the monopolization of the
militarization of space and come at enormous costs
in essential human services not provided to our
communities, we understand that this is death. As
we move into this period of national mourning, let
us not fail to remember that our government and
nation are preparing to kill tens of thousands of
people - if not more. Let us feel the preciousness
of their lives and of their families while they
are still living. Let us do all that we can to
preserve their lives and psyches and those of our
soldiers, by preventing this totally avoidable
war.For life, peace and justice,Joseph
Gerson*For more information on Nixon’s
ultimatum and the way we stayed his nuclear hand,
see chapter 5 of "With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War,
Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination" by yours
truly.A War Crime or an Act of
War?New York Times, January 31, 2003By
STEPHEN C. PELLETIEREMECHANICSBURG, Pa. —
It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking
smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs,
used his State of the Union address to
re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The
dictator who is assembling the world's most
dangerous weapons has already used them on whole
villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens
dead, blind or disfigured."The accusation
that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its
citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The
piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up
concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of
Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the
eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself
has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people,"
specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple
Saddam Hussein.But the truth is, all we
know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with
poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with
any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed
the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the
Halabja story. 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.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. In fact, those
who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has
bearing on today might want to consider a
different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking
the town? A closer look may shed light on
America's impetus to invade Iraq. We are
constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the
world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional
and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be
more important that Iraq has the most extensive
river system in the Middle East. In addition to
the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater
Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the
country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by
the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the
region.Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq
had built an impressive system of dams and river
control projects, the largest being the
Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was
this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control
of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there
was much discussion over the construction of a
so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the
waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the
parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No
progress has been made on this, largely because of
Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands,
of course, all that could change. Thus
America could alter the destiny of the Middle East
in a way that probably could not be challenged for
decades — not solely by controlling Iraq's oil,
but by controlling its water. Even if America
didn't occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein's
Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative
opportunities would open up for American
companies. All that is needed to get us
into war is one clear reason for acting, one that
would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link
the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved
inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its
neighbors have also failed to create much resolve;
in its present debilitated condition — thanks to
United Nations sanctions — Iraq's conventional
forces threaten no one. Perhaps the
strongest argument left for taking us to war
quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human
rights atrocities against his people. And the most
dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.
Before we go to war over Halabja, the
administration owes the American people the full
facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam
Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were
not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died
fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam
Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking
on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when
there are so many other repressive regimes
Washington supports? Stephen C. Pelletiere
is author of "Iraq and the International Oil
System: Why America Went to War in the Persian
Gulf."
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