[Peace] NY times piece on Halabja

[John Morrissette]

January 31, 2003

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.


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."


A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion.
  Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom
  they consider god-fearing and pious.
 
-Aristotle 
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