Sanctions and other weapons

"As the President warned the United Nations last week, Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. It is a danger to its neighbours, to the United States, to the Middle East and to international peace and stability. It is a danger we do not have the option to ignore. The world has acquiesced in Saddam Hussein's aggression, abuses and defiance for more than a decade."

U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in testimony to the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. Senate, September 19, 2002.

IN December 1983, with Iraq's early advantage in the war against Iran largely dissipated, U.S. President Ronald Reagan despatched a special envoy to Baghdad. Reagan chose a private citizen for this mission, though a known intimate of his circle of right-wing Republican zealots. Two weeks after high-level discussions had been concluded in Baghdad, the Reagan administration sent word to friendly states in the Gulf region that Iraq's defeat in the war with Iran would be "contrary to U.S. interests". On the basis of this determination, media reports premised on inner track briefings indicated, the U.S. government had "made several moves" to prevent an outcome adverse to Iraq.

George Shultz, Reagan's Secretary of State, recorded in his memoirs published in 1993, that reports of Iraq using chemical weapons against Iranian combatants began "drifting in'' by December 1983. But this was seemingly of no account. On March 6, 1984, the U.S. State Department recorded its finding, on the basis of an evaluation of all available evidence, that Iraq had used "lethal chemical weapons'' against Iranian combatants in battlefield encounters. On March 24, the news agency UPI reported from New York, quoting a team of United Nations experts that "mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq".

The UPI report also observed that President Reagan's special envoy was back in Baghdad and had concluded talks with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, "before leaving for an unspecified destination". On March 29, The New York Times reported from Baghdad that "American diplomats" were more than satisfied at the state of relations with Iraq and would go so far as to suggest that "normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name".

By late-1984, the U.S. and Iraq had resumed full diplomatic ties, broken off during Israel's six-day war of conquest in 1967. Reagan's special envoy to Iraq had by then returned to private life, though by all accounts he remained interested in a future bid for the U.S. Presidency. Among the achievements he listed in his resume when he made the preliminary soundings about his prospective candidacy for President in 1988, was his role in restoring diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iraq. His name was Donald Rumsfeld.

As he runs a gamut of public forums today, placing on record his indignation at the Iraqi regime's crimes and misdemeanours, Rumsfeld's early role as the advance guard of the U.S. policy of engagement with Iraq obviously does not trouble his conscience. And his pointed reference to a "decade" of acquiescence in Iraq's "aggression, abuses and defiance", suggests that he is not interested in an excavation of the preceding record. This is understandable in the circumstances he finds himself in. Rumsfeld today has to find a rationale for war with Iraq from the time that the U.S. began to target that country as an adversary. It is a minor inconvenience, easily overcome through the deployment of the overwhelming powers of disinformation at his disposal, that at the time that Iraq was perpetrating its worst war crimes, the U.S. was among its principal sponsors and benefactors.

Dilip Hiro, a veteran observer of the Gulf region and chronicler of the Iran-Iraq conflict, has recorded that after 1983, when it used chemical munitions in a desperate bid to repel the "human waves" of Iranian troops, Iraq began using these lethal agents with greater promiscuity. Nerve agents were widely deployed in the spring and summer of 1988 when Iraq fought a final battle to regain territories that had been lost to Iranian counter-offensives in the mid-1980s. And in these enterprises, by all accounts, the Iraqis enjoyed the tacit blessings of the U.S. government. Patrick Tyler has pointed out in The New York Times on August 18 that President Reagan, Vice-President George H.W. Bush and all their senior aides, maintained a public posture of deprecating Iraqi military tactics, while covertly providing logistical and intelligence sustenance to Iraq. Battle plans, he has said, were shared with the U.S., though Iraq never officially admitted to the use of chemical agents. In early-1988, after Iraq had regained territorial control over the Fao peninsula and re-established its routes of access to the Gulf, senior officers from the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency undertook a tour of inspection of the area. They reported back on the extensive utilisation of chemical agents. As one of the officers engaged in the logistical operations in aid of Iraq recalls: "The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern."

This rather tepid assessment was inaccurate for, if anything, all the wrong reasons. From 1984, according to excavations of the classified record from that time, the U.S. was providing detailed battlefield information to the Iraqi forces to help them plan chemical attacks. In 1985, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to restore Iraq to the list of state sponsors of terrorism, from which it had been removed by the Reagan administration in 1982. In an evasive manoeuvre, Secretary of State Shultz wrote back to the House pleading that Iraq had "effectively distanced itself from international terrorism" thanks to the "diplomatic dialogue" that the U.S. had initiated on this and other issues.

There is little doubt that this record of double-dealing was responsible in large measure for fostering the impression in Baghdad in 1990 that Iraq could invade Kuwait with impunity. What the Saddam Hussein regime overlooked was that since the end of the war with Iran, the U.S. had again reassessed its strategic priorities in the region and decided that its next target should be Iraq. This resolve was strengthened by Saddam Hussein's fulminations at an Arab summit in March 1990 against the continued presence of American warships in the Gulf and U.S. complicity in the oppression of Palestine. The July 1990 briefing by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, which conveyed a certain disinterest in the territorial dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, was in this respect a carefully laid trap.

In demonising the Saddam Hussein regime today, the farthest point in history that the U.S. would like to touch is the 1988 incident after the ceasefire with Iran when Iraq dropped lethal chemical agents on the town of Halabja to retake it from rebel Kurd elements. It would also like to portray the decade following the Gulf war, when a war-weary and enervated country was fighting a desperate battle for survival against enormous odds, as a period of Iraqi defiance and aggression. In the bargain, the U.S. war establishment has to propagate two myths assiduously: that the war of aggression it inflicted upon Iraq and the siege that has followed, have had no serious repercussions for civilian life; and that whatever impairment of civic and material life has occurred has been entirely on account of the Iraqi regime.

By any objective account, the devastation that has been caused to Iraq by the U.S. aggression and the sanctions that it alone is responsible for sustaining, has been several times worse than anything inflicted upon Iran or Kuwait. But it is difficult, if not impossible today, to find any reference in the U.S. popular media to the civilian casualties of the Gulf war or to the many who have died under the sanctions regime. In 1992, a demographer at the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the number of fatalities from the Gulf war at that stage could be put at over 175,000 most of it not directly on account of hostilities, but post-war conditions of deprivation. The media, when they did report these findings, proved rather indifferent. By far, greater energy was devoted to bringing the researcher concerned to account for her supposed effrontery. The U.S. Census Bureau managed to fend off the demand for her dismissal, but only at the cost of publicly distancing itself from her findings.

In 1999, the United Nations Childrens' Fund recorded an alarming increase in child mortality rates and concluded on the basis of a comparison between the rapid improvements recorded in the 1980s and the precipitous decline in the 1990s, that the deaths of 500,000 children could be directly attributed to the sanctions on Iraq. Again, the response from the U.S. administration and media was dismissive, holding the Iraqi regime responsible for the mass suffering when all objective studies, including by various agencies of the U.N., only showed that the government was doing the best it could under conditions of extreme adversity.

Rumsfeld may suffer an acute form of selective recall. But the inferences to be drawn from the last 12 years are unequivocal: U.S.-mandated sanctions have proved a much more lethal weapon of mass destruction than anything that Iraq may have had in its arsenal even at the time it enjoyed superpower benediction. And for all the mistakes and failures of the Baghdad regime, it still has a far stronger claim to nationalist legitimacy, than the motley crew of adventurers, feudal chieftains and opportunists that the U.S. has assembled under the banner of the Iraqi National Congress.