When US turned a blind eye to poison gas by Dilip Hiro

[Michael Pugliese]

When US turned a blind eye to poison gas

America knew Baghdad was using chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988. 
So why, asks Dilip Hiro , has it taken 14 years to muster its outrage?

Sunday September 1, 2002
The Observer

When it comes to demonising Saddam Hussein, nothing captures the popular 
imagination in America better than the statement that 'he gassed his own 
people'. This is an allusion to the deployment of chemical weapons by 
Iraq's military in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during 
the Iran-Iraq war, and then in the territory administered by the 
Tehran-backed Kurdish rebels after the ceasefire five months later.

As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the 
question arises: what did the United States administration do about it 
then? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the 
pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald 
Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise 
Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which 
it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally 
- a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of 
Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully 
played themselves out.

Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 
munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the 
skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, 
but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these 
lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis 
proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and 
summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic 
Fao peninsula.

That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents 
during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago. 
'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao 
peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now 
retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote 
Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical 
contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, 
indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves 
from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'

In 1986, it was with the aim of recapturing the Fao peninsula, taken by the 
Iranians in February, that Saddam's military used chemical agents so 
extensively that the UN Security Council stopped accepting its routine 
denials. Following an examination of 700 Iranian casualties, UN experts 
concluded that Baghdad had deployed mustard and nerve gases many times. 
Instead of condemning Baghdad for this, the Security Council, dominated by 
Washington and Moscow, both pro-Iraq, coupled its condemnation of Baghdad 
with its disapproval of 'the prolongation of the war' by Tehran for 
refusing a truce until the council had named Iraq the aggressor.

Despite its repeated reiteration of neutrality, the US had all along been 
pro-Baghdad. It lost no time in supplying Iraq with intelligence collected 
by the Saudi-owned but Pentagon-operated Airborne Warning and Control 
Systems (Awacs) plying in the region. Once Iraq and the US had resumed 
diplomatic links after the re-election of Reagan as President in November 
1984, the military cooperation blossomed.

Starting in July 1986, aided by the Pentagon, which clandestinely seconded 
its air force officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts, Saddam's air 
force greatly improved its targeting accuracy, striking relentlessly the 
enemy's power plants, factories and bridges, and extending the range of its 
strikes to Iran's oil terminals in the lower Gulf. Under the rubric of 
escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers, the US built up an armada in the Gulf, which 
clashed with the small, under-equipped Iranian navy and sank two Iranian 
offshore oil platforms in the lower Gulf in retaliation for Iran's missile 
attack on an American-flagged supertanker docked in Kuwaiti waters.

Against this background, Iraq started hitting Tehran with its upgraded Scud 
ground-to-ground missiles in late February 1988. To retake Halabja from 
Iran and its Kurdish allies, who had captured it in March, Iraq's air force 
attacked it with poison gas bombs. The objective was to take out the 
occupying Iranian troops (who had by then left the town); instead, the 
assault killed 3,200 to 5,000 civilians. The images of men, woman and 
children, frozen in instant death, relayed by the Iranian media, shocked 
the world. Yet no condemnation came from Washington. It was only when, 
following the ceasefire with Iran in August, Saddam made widespread use of 
chemical agents to recapture 4,000 square miles controlled by the Kurdish 
insurgents that the Security Council decided to dispatch a team to find out 
if Baghdad had resorted to chemical arms. Saddam refused to cooperate.

But instead of pressuring him to reverse his stand, or face a ban on the 
sale of American military equipment and advanced technology to Iraq by the 
revival of the Senate's bill, US Secretary of State George Shultz chose to 
say only that interviews with the Kurdish refugees in Turkey and 'other 
sources' (which remained obscure) pointed towards Iraqi use of chemical 
agents. These two elements did not constitute 'conclusive' evidence. This 
was the verdict of Shultz's British counterpart, Sir Geoffrey Howe: 'If 
conclusive evidence is obtained, then punitive measures against Iraq have 
not been ruled out.' As neither he nor Shultz is known to have made a 
further move to get at the truth, Iraq went unpunished.

That was the end of the story - until the hawks in the Bush administration 
recently began bandying about the revolting phrase of 'gassing his own 
people' for their partisan ends.

· Dilip Hiro is the author of 'Neighbours, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After 
the Gulf Wars' (Routledge). His latest book is 'War Without End: Rise of 
Islamist Terrorism and Global Response' (Routledge, £12.99).


http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,784314,00.html


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