Comrades,
it seems that the story about the Iranians having gassed the Kurds in Halabja is
shakey at least. It is cerTAINLY TRUE THAT THIS WAS DONE IN A SITUATION OF WAR
AGAINST Iran whwen the Kurdish PUK had brought Irani farces to the region. I
remember having spoken to PUK peshmergan in a hospital here in Germany who were
injured during the Anfal-campaign and who were really angry at their own party
leaders having brought those other enemies of the Kurds into Iraq and thus
having provoked the Halabja-incident. However it seems that it was indeed the
Iraqi regime who did it. It seems that they didn't do it out of ethnical hatred
but for politico-military reasons, but still ...
Best A.Holberg
PS. By the way, if Saddam ain't no nice guy the Ayatollahs and other
clerico-fascists (not a scientific term here!)are at least as bad, and that not
because they want to destroy the Zionist settler stateIsrael (which s a must),
but because they oppress everyone not believing what they believe and because
they are not anti-zionists but outright anti-jewish/christian/communist/buddhist
and what else you want.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> History Lessen
> by Spencer Ackerman
>
>
> <URL: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=foreign&s=ackerman020403
>
> Only at TNR Online| Post date 02.04.03
>
> It is by now a well-established fact that chemical weapons claimed the
> lives of over 5,000 Kurds in the northern Iraqi town of Halabja on March
> 16, 1988. It is equally well-established that responsibility for this
> atrocity lies with Saddam Hussein. Indeed, there is virtual unanimity
> among
> the dozens of journalists, government delegations, and international
> human
> rights groups who have investigated the matter that Halabja was the
> first
> frightful act of Saddam's Anfalcampaign, a genocide that consumed almost
> 100,000 Kurds in all. Yet according to a chilling and incoherent op-
> edpublished in Friday's New York Times,Saddam had nothing to do with the
> massacre after all. The author of this revisionist account is Stephen C.
> Pelletiere, a retired Army War College professor who served as a senior
> Iraq analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Iran-Iraq
> war.
> Pelletiere is the co-author of the 1990 book Iraqi Power and U.S.
> Security
> in the Middle East,which concluded that Iranian gas, not Iraqi gas,
> murdered the Kurds at Halabja. In his Timesop-ed Pelletiere recycles
> this
> argument, only this time against the backdrop of a second war with
> Saddam.
> He's no more convincing today than he was 13 years ago. Pelletiere
> begins
> by reprising the usual facts--namely, that Halabja was the site of an
> intense battle between Saddam and the Iranians. He first concedes that
> Iraq
> did use chemical weapons, but argues that the Iranians did as well. The
> Kurdish victims of the chemicals "had the misfortune to be caught up in
> the
> exchange." Pelletiere then cites a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
> report, issued shortly after Halabja, to support his conclusion that
> Iranian gas killed the Kurds. His evidence? The Kurdish corpses
> "indicated
> that they had been killed with a blood agent," which the Iraqis, "who
> are
> thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have
> possessed."
>
> But this claim is wildly implausible. First, interviews by international
> human rights groups with scores of Halabja survivors reveal no such
> confusion about who deployed the chemicals. Kurds who were outside their
> houses during the mid-morning attack "could see clearly that these were
> Iraqi, not Iranian aircraft, since they flew low enough for their
> markings
> to be legible," concluded Human Rights Watch in its 1993 report Genocide
> In
> Iraq.In any case, the argument for Iranian culpability neglects the
> logistics of the Halabja battle itself. The Iranians, who controlled the
> town on March 15, would have no reason to use chemical agents against
> the
> Iraqi counteroffensive on March 16, since the Iraqis retaliated with air
> strikes and placed no soldiers on the ground against whom such weapons
> could be used. Second, even if the victims died of exposure to blood
> agents, this would be perfectly consistent with the claim of Iraqi
> responsibility. A 1991 DIA report, since declassified, concluded
> definitively, "Iraq is known to have employed ... a blood agent,
> hydrogen
> cyanide gas (HCN) ... against Iranian soldiers, civilians, and Iraqi
> Kurdish civilians." Nonetheless, it is far more likely, according to the
> standard accounts of the attack on Halabja, that mustard gas and the
> nerve
> agents sarin and tabun--and perhaps even VX and the biological agent
> aflatoxin, which the Iraqis were also known to possess--were the
> instruments of Kurdish murder. For example, Human Rights Watch noted
> that
> survivors excreted blood-streaked urine, "consistent with exposure to
> both
> mustard gas and a nerve agent such as Sarin." Third, the 1988 DIA report
> Pelletiere cites to pin Halabja on the Iranians was not the end of the
> DIA's inquiry. The DIA's April 19, 1988 cable--a month after
> Halabja--took
> note of the fact that the Iraqis were already forcibly resettling "an
> estimated 1.5 million Kurdish nationals," including "an unknown but
> reportedly large number of Kurds [who] have been placed in
> 'concentration
> camps' located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders." This in
> mind,
> the far more plausible story is that Halabja was part of a concerted
> effort
> to settle the Kurdish problem "once and for all," in the words of an
> October 24, 1988 DIA report--by wiping out the Iraqi Kurdish population.
> This
> brings us to the biggest problem with Pelletiere's argument: If the
> Kurds
> were legitimate battlefield casualties, why is it Saddam subsequently
> felt
> the need to slaughter nearly 100,000 more of them? Pelletiere writes
> that
> any otherexamples of Saddam's chemical deployment on Kurdish victims
> "must
> show that [the dead Kurds] were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerillas who
> died
> fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary guards." But even if Saddam's
> goal
> wasto root out traitors, it's inconceivable that all or even most of the
> residents of the dozens of Kurdish villages Saddam subsequently razed
> were
> treacherous peshmerga,or that Saddam believed this to be the case.
> Certainly the testimony of hundreds of Kurdish refugees, who have
> provided
> remarkably consistent accounts of the genocide despite being dispersed
> from
> Iran to Turkey, refute this. So does the fact that Saddam kept gassing
> the
> Kurds after signing the August 20, 1988 ceasefire with Iran, as Samantha
> Power points out in her 2002 book, A Problem From Hell.And in unguarded
> moments, members of Saddam's regime have given lie to this rationale as
> well. Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, entrusted to carry out the
> Kurdish slaughter, was caught on tape at a Ba'athist meeting in May 1988
> boasting about the Kurds, "I will kill them all with chemical weapons!
> Who
> is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!"
> (Human
> Rights Watch believes the tape is mislabeled, recording a conversation
> that
> really took place in 1987--i.e., before Halabja.) What's perhaps most
> infuriating, though, is that Pelletiere is now reviving his decade-old
> hobbyhorse as a cynical argument against war with Iraq. "President Bush
> himself has cited Iraq's 'gassing its own people,' specifically at
> Halabja,
> as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein," Pelletiere writes. Considering
> the
> Bush administration's "lack of a smoking gun" in the U.N. weapons
> inspections, he continues, "perhaps the strongest argument left for
> taking
> us to war quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human rights
> atrocities against his own people." Even if Pelletiere had his facts
> straight on Halabja, his would be a noxious and dishonest argument
> against
> war. To begin with, it is an insult to the principled antiwar critics
> who
> recognize and condemn Saddam's record of genocide but who still oppose
> an
> invasion of Iraq. One such critic is Maryland Democratic Representative
> Chris Van Hollen, who as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations
> Committee in September 1988 visited Kurdish refugees in Turkey to
> determine
> what had happened in Kurdistan. Van Hollen's team documented Iraqi
> chemical
> attacks on 49 Kurdish villages, leading him to conclude that "at the end
> of
> the Iran-Iraq war, all evidence pointed to the fact that [Saddam] used
> chemical weapons against the Kurds." More important, though, Van Hollen
> grasps the distinction that eludes Pelletiere, which is that while Bush
> invokes the Kurdish genocide in his brief against Saddam, the president
> does so to establish Saddam's willingness to use weapons of mass
> destruction, not to argue that, as Pelletiere ludicrously puts it, "we
> go
> to war over Halabja." The only one fighting a war over Halabja, it
> seems,
> is Stephen Pelletiere. And it's one he'd lost before it had even begun.
> Spencer
> Ackermanis an assistant editor at TNR.
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