[Newspoetry] NYTimes.com Article: A War Crime or an Act of War?

[CJC]

A War Crime or an Act of War?

January 31, 2003
By STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE 

MECHANICSBURG, 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."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html?ex=1045034729&ei=1&en=1cc363744e8b3027





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