A War Crime or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere
New York Times | Opinion

Friday 31 January 2003

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."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)  

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The Administration Builds Up Its Pretext for Attacking Iraq

by Roger Trilling
May 1 - 7, 2002

It is now clear that the Bush administration is determined to force a "regime change" in Baghdad no matter how severe the crisis in the Mideast. Or how much the Arabs protest: At the Arab summit in March, both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia formally reconciled with Iraq, an emphatic signal that they regarded Saddam as less of "a threat to the region" than an attack by the U.S. would be.

The ostensible reason the administration regards Saddam as a threat is his possession of weapons of mass destruction—that’s what the switch from "war on terror" to "axis of evil" signified. But dismantling Saddam’s arsenal is a job for UN arms inspectors. And there are many in Washington who worry that they may not be up to it.

"Are you still committed to trying to get UN weapons inspection teams back into Iraq?" CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Vice President Cheney. "Because, as you know, some critics . . . have said that would be a waste, that they’re just going to give a runaround."

"The issue’s not inspectors," Cheney replied. "The issue is that he has chemical weapons—and he’s used them."

Last month, the administration’s effort to garner public support for its go-it-alone posture got a boost from an unlikely source. In its March 25 issue, The New Yorker ran an 18,000-word piece by Jeffrey Goldberg about Halabja, a Kurdish town where, on March 16, 1988, Saddam is accused of massacring his own citizens with poison gas.

The scenes of devastation were severe, and historically nuanced in the retelling. "The Iraqis, knowing that gas is heavier than air, and that it would penetrate cellars effectively, drove everybody into their basements by launching a conventional artillery attack," Goldberg said on NPR’s Fresh Air. "They were stuck in their basements." He concluded: "The way it was described to me [was] really as gas chambers."

There were other dire details—a woman succumbing as she suckled a baby she hoped would survive the fumes; people rendered blind, mad, or infertile; even a plague of poisonous snakes. "Saddam Hussein’s attacks on his own citizens," Goldberg wrote, "marks the only time since the Holocaust that poison gas has been used to exterminate women and children."

on of what happened in 1988 when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds in northern Iraq, against some of his own people. It demonstrates conclusively what a lot of us have said: that this is a man who is a great danger to that region of the world—especially if he’s able to acquire nuclear weapons."

The president agreed. A few days earlier, he had invoked the story during his trip to Mexico. "It details about his [Saddam's] barbaric behavior toward his own people," Bush said. "And this is a man who refuses to allow us to determine whether or not he still has weapons of mass destruction—which leads me to believe he does."

Ever since September 11, the administration has been trying to hook Iraq into the "war on terror." Initially, a claim was advanced that suicide pilot Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi operatives in Prague. Then Iraq was floated as a source of the anthrax attacks. Finally, the "axis of evil" speech accused Saddam of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Although few doubt that Saddam has such armaments, none of these charges was ever substantiated. But by repeatedly citing the New Yorker article, Bush and Cheney were saying that they didn’t need to prove a thing. What Saddam did in Halabja is reason enough to oust him.

It’s quite a stretch to predicate a threat of war on an incident that took place 14 years ago—especially if there’s a possibility that it didn’t happen the way Goldberg described it.

Halabja was attacked in the closing weeks of the Iran-Iraq War, when two Kurdish guerrilla groups sided against Saddam. It lies just inside Iraq’s border with Iran, and the Iranians had mounted an offensive in the region. Halabja was thus contested territory. That many people died that day is beyond dispute. The question is, Who killed them?

When pictures and stories flooded the world press—reporters had been helicoptered in by the Iranians, who saw Halabja as a PR opportunity—the reaction was automatic. Most reporters, well aware of Saddam’s long history of poison gas use against the Iranian army, accepted their hosts’ explanation: Saddam had gassed his own people.

The Reagan-Bush White House, which had tilted decisively toward Saddam in the war, denounced Iraq immediately. But the State Department wasn’t so sure. "There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical artillery shells in this fighting," spokesman Charles Redman told the press a week after the attack. "We call on Iran and Iraq to desist immediately from the use of any chemical weapons."

Redman may have been relying on a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report filed the day of his announcement. It stated that "most of the casualties in Halabja were reportedly caused by cyan[o]gen chloride. This agent has never been used by Iraq, but Iran has shown interest in it. Mustard gas casualties in the town were probably caused by Iraqi weapons, because Iran has never been noted using that agent."

In time, studies were commissioned from and produced by the military and intelligence communities, which found that both armies had used gas. One report, "Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War," was prepared by Dr. Stephen Pelletiere and Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Johnson of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. Its findings came out of a two-day conference attended by U.S. defense attachés who had served in the Middle East, as well as by military and political analysts from both the CIA and the DIA who had monitored the war. Because neither Iran nor Iraq had allowed reporters or foreign military observers at the front, the report drew on field reports, open source materials, and "signal intelligence"—phone and radio messages sent by the warring armies, and picked up by the National Security Agency.

Most of the report’s chapter on chemical weapons is devoted to Iraqi military tactics, but one sentence stands out: "Blood agents [i.e., cyanogen chloride] were allegedly responsible for the most infamous use of chemicals in the war—the killing of Kurds at Halabjah. Since the Iraqis have no history of using these two agents—and the Iranians do—we conclude that the Iranians perpetrated this attack." (The report is available at www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/3203/.)

All of this was reported at the time. On May 3, 1990, referring to yet another study, The Washington Post stated: "A Defense Department reconstruction of the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war has assembled what analysts say is conclusive intelligence that one of the worst civilian massacres of the war, in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja, was caused by repeated chemical bombardments from both belligerent armies."

In response to the orthodoxy already established around the event, the Post’s Patrick Tyler went on to note that the reconstruction "calls into question the widely reported assertion of human rights organizations and Kurdish groups that Iraq bore the greatest responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi Kurds—women, infants and elderly—who died at Halabja."

Articles asserting Iranian complicity also ran in The New York Times ("Years Later, No Clear Culprit in Gassing of Kurds"), Newsday, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

But that’s all forgotten now. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the demonization of Saddam has become a linchpin of U.S. foreign policy, and his solo turn as Killer of Kurds has passed beyond question. Likewise, Halabja has become an Alamo for human rights and Kurdish rights groups, who have used it ever since for their own often admirable purposes.

In a telephone interview with the Voice, Goldberg explained why he had chosen to elide the position of the military and intelligence communities from his piece. "I didn’t give it much thought, because it was dismissed by so many people I consider to be experts," he told me. "Very quickly into this story, I decided that I support the mainstream view—of Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, the State Department, the UN, and various Kurdish groups—that the Iraqis were responsible for Halabja. In the same way, I didn’t give any merit to the Iraqi denials."

Implying that the Pentagon, the DIA, and the CIA are no more reliable than the Iraqis seems a bit extreme, but Goldberg’s point is essentially correct. Never more than since September 11, Saddam’s sole responsibility for the massacre at Halabja has become conventional wisdom.

To Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq War, this is highly alarming. "There is to this day the belief—and I’m not the only one who holds it—that things didn’t happen in Halabja the way Goldberg wrote it," he told the Voice. "And it’s an especially crucial issue right now. We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and the world shouldn’t tolerate him. But why? Because that’s the last argument the U.S. has for going to war with Iraq."