NP? A War Crime or an Act of War?

[pynchonoid]

A War Crime or an Act of War?
By STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE

ECHANICSBURG, 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. [...]

continues:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html

-Doug


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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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