By Stephen C. Pelletiere
New York Times OP-ED
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, and the hard evidence repeatedly brought up is the gassing of the Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988 near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
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. Many facts surrounding the event have been overlooked or grossly distorted.
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 a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified materials that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtly know: it came about in the course of battle between the 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 of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified repot, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study concluded it was the Iran gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did not find that each size 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- that 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 as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned.
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 the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were the 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 close 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 the Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and less Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the 6th century AD, and was a granary for the region.
Before the Persian Gulf War, Iraq had built an impressive system of damns and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan damn in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of.
In the 1990s there was much discussion of the construction of the 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 American 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.
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 Iraqi threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition - thanks to UN sanctions - Iraq's conventional forces threaten no one.
The Strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case - the one involving using non-conventional weapons on his own citizens- are the accusation 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 gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranians Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
New York Times OP-ED
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, and the hard evidence repeatedly brought up is the gassing of the Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988 near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
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. Many facts surrounding the event have been overlooked or grossly distorted.
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 a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified materials that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtly know: it came about in the course of battle between the 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 of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified repot, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study concluded it was the Iran gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did not find that each size 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- that 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 as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned.
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 the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were the 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 close 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 the Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and less Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the 6th century AD, and was a granary for the region.
Before the Persian Gulf War, Iraq had built an impressive system of damns and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan damn in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of.
In the 1990s there was much discussion of the construction of the 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 American 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.
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 Iraqi threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition - thanks to UN sanctions - Iraq's conventional forces threaten no one.
The Strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case - the one involving using non-conventional weapons on his own citizens- are the accusation 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 gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranians Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
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