<URL: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=foreign&s=ackerman020403 > Printer friendly Only at TNR Online| Post date 02.04.03
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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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