A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Galbraith had something unseemly working in his favor. Since April 1987 Hussein had been purging and killing Kurds with a variety of weapons. But this most recent offensive involved chemical weapons, which killed in a more grisly way than machine guns and captured the imagination of U.S. lawmakers. Ensconced in a country attacked only once in the twentieth century, most Americans did not feel vulnerable when foreign slaughter was discussed. Before September 11, 2001, most Americans believed that the large-scale murder of civilians could only occur miles from home. But chemical weapons were different. They had crept into American consciousness because they did not respect national rankings and were unimpressed by geographic isolation. No matter how thick U.S. defenses, the gasses could penetrate. The horrors of gassing entered the Western imagination back in April 1915, when British soldiers were subjected to what Churchill called the “hellish poison” of German mustard gas. At the Battle of Ypres in Belgium, these gases wounded 10,000, killed some 5,000, and ushered in a tit-for-tat series of chemical attacks that left more than 100,000 dead. The gasses blistered the skin and singed the lungs. The deaths were slow; the last days of life ghastly. British poet Wilfred Owen, who was himself exposed to the chemicals, lived the horror of the trenches and brought it vividly home to postwar Britain with his wrenching “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The poem describes the “helpless sight” of stricken soldiers, “guttering, choking, drowning,” and “gargling from froth-corrupted lungs.” Decades later, Owen’s words remained artifacts of a substance to be abhorred and a weapon to be avoided. Gassing could happen to us because it had happened and because victims of gassing attacks, scientists, and artists have detailed the vomiting, blistering, choking, singeing, and peeling associated with chemical weapons.

  U.S. senators knew that chemical weapons had become all too easy to acquire in the 1980s. Nuclear weapons required either plutonium or highly enriched uranium, which had few suppliers, and sophisticated chemical and engineering processes and equipment were needed to convert the fissionable material. Chemical weapons, by contrast, were cheap and said to take a garage and a little high school chemistry to make. They were the poor man’s nuke. The news media were filled with accounts of rogue states and terrorist groups that had stockpiled deadly chemicals.

  Galbraith recognized that generic fears about chemical weapons use and proliferation could be a kind of Trojan horse by which he could muster congressional support for punishing Iraq for its broader campaign of destruction aimed at the Kurds. Like Lemkin and Proxmire, he made a prudential, interest-based case for the Pell-Helms bill, emphasizing the gassing more than Hussein’s other means of killing. “Right now the Kurds are paying the price for past global indifference to Iraqi chemical weapons use,” he wrote. “The failure to act now could ultimately leave every nation in peril.”70 In private Galbraith worried that if a pro-sanctions Senate coalition were held together only because of Hussein’s use of poisons, the Iraqi dictator might simply revise his tactics and massacre civilians in other ways. “Most of those senators were concerned not with the Kurds but with the instrument of death, the chemical weapons,” Galbraith remembers. “I wasn’t concerned with the use of chemical weapons as such but with their use as a way of destroying the Kurdish people. These weapons were not any more evil than guns.” Nevertheless, he needed all the help he could get on the sanctions legislation, and he took it.

  One week after the Kurdish refugees had begun pouring into Turkey, the sanctions bill, which kept the name “Prevention of Genocide Act,” was introduced on the Senate floor. It passed the Senate the next day on a unanimous voice vote. Because senators did not hold a roll-call vote, they were not on the written record as having supported the bill, which would subsequently enable them to squirm more easily out of their commitments. On September 9, 1988, though, Galbraith noticed only the remarkable tally. It looked to him and most observers as if, to paraphrase Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, it was the good fortune of Iraqi Kurds to be attacked with chemical weapons. The bill needed only to clear the House before it became law.

  A “Reorganization of the Urban Situation”

  If Galbraith was relieved by the vote, the Reagan administration was alarmed. U.S. officials knew of Saddam Hussein’s general designs. The State Department’s cable traffic from the first week of September continued to report on Iraq’s campaign of destruction against the Kurds. On September 2, 1988, a full week ahead of the passage of the Prevention of Genocide Act in the Senate, Morton Abramowitz, the former U.S. ambassador to Thailand who was then assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, sent a top-secret memo to the secretary of state entitled, “Swan Song for Iraq’s Kurds?” Abramowitz cited evidence that Iraq had used chemical weapons against the Kurds on August 25, writing, “Now, with cease-fire [with Iran], government forces appear ready to settle Kurdish dissidents once and for all. . . .Baghdad is likely to feel little restraint in using chemical weapons against the rebels and against villages that continue to support them.” Abramowitz acknowledged that “the bulk” of Kurdish villages were vulnerable to attack.71 Hussein’s forces would consider Kurdish civilians and soldiers alike fair game.

  But this made little difference in a State Department and White House determined to avoid criticizing Iraq. A September 3 cable from the State Department to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad urged U.S. officials to stress to Hussein’s regime that the United States understood the Kurds had aligned with Iran and that the problem was a “historical one.” U.S. diplomats were told to explain that they had “reserve[d] comment” until they had been able to take Baghdad’s view “fully into account.”72 Still, the conduct of Iraq’s campaign was causing international outcry that was becoming embarrassing for the United States. In consultation with Iraqi foreign ministry undersecretary Nizar Hamdoon the following day, Ambassador April Glaspie warned that Iraq had “a major public relation problem.” She noted that the lead story on the BBC that morning had been the gas attacks and said, “If chemical warfare is not being used and if Kurds are not herded into WWII concentration camps,” then Iraq should permit independent observers access to Kurdish territory. Hamdoon denied chemical weapons use but said the access she requested was “impossible” just then. Besides, the fighting would be over “in a few days.” The embassy “comment” on the meeting was that “it has been clear for many days that Saddam has taken the decision to do whatever the army believes necessary to fully pacify the north.”73

  In public, State Department officials betrayed little of this behind-the-scenes grasp of Iraq’s agenda. Picking up on wire reports of gas attacks that started running August 10, journalists had begun pressing State Department spokespersons for comment on the attacks on August 25. Day after day spokesperson Phyllis Oakley said she had “nothing” to substantiate the reports. Her colleague Charles Redman said on September 6 that he could not confirm the news stories. Sensing the reporters’ exasperation, Redman did add a hypothetical condemnation. “If they were true, of course we would strongly condemn the use of chemical weapons, as we have in the past,” he said. “The use of chemical weapons is deplorable. It’s barbaric.”74

  U.S. officials reluctant to criticize Iraq again took refuge in the absence of perfect information. They noted that the reports from the Turkish border were not unanimous. Bernard Benedetti, a doctor with Médecins du Monde, had found no chemical weapons cases. “That’s a false problem,” he told the Washington Post, referring to chemical weapons. “The refugees here are suffering from diarrhea and skin rash which are spreading because of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.”75 Turkey likewise insisted that forty doctors and 205 other health personnel had found no proof of the atrocities. One Turkish doctor told the New York Times that the blisters on the face of a three-year-old Kurdish boy came from “malnutrition” and “poor cleanliness.”76 But neither source was reliable. Physicians with the international aid agencies had no expertise on diagnosing the side effects of exposure to chemical weapons, and Turkey got most of its oil from Ira
q and conducted $2.4 billion in annual trade with its neighbor.77 It also frequently partnered with Iraq to suppress Kurdish rebels.

  Shaken refugees in Turkey found their claims rudely challenged. Clyde Haberman of the New York Times described a “reluctant subject,” thirteen-year-old Bashir Semsettin, who after suffering a gas attack and landing in Turkey found “his thin body pulled and prodded like an exhibit . . . for the benefit of curious visitors.” Bashir’s chest and upper back were scarred in a “marbled pattern” of burns, with streaks of dark brown juxtaposed beside large patches of pink. While he was pent up in a Turkish medical tent, a Turkish MP arrived with an entourage of assistants and began poking at Bashir’s wounds.

  “What are these?” the lawmaker asked.

  “Burns,” replied the Turkish government physician.

  “What sort of burns?” the MP pressed.

  “Who can say?” the physician answered. “I know these are first-degree burns from a heat source other than flames,” he said. “If they were flames, his hair and eyebrows would also be burned. But I can’t say if they’re from chemicals. They can be from anything.”78

  Peter Galbraith

  Bashir Semsettin, Kurdish survivor of an Iraqi chemical attack.

  The Reagan administration had been conciliatory toward Iraq for years, always preferring double condemnations of Iraq and Iran and requests for additional fact finding. Yet at the time of the massive Kurdish flight in September, the State Department consensus at last began to crack. The State Department’s Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), run by Richard Murphy, and the Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR), run by Abramowitz, took different positions. Within several days of the launching of the final Anfal, INR intercepted Iraqi military communications in which the Iraqis themselves confirmed that they were using chemical weapons against the Kurds. A pair of U.S. embassy officials also spent two days conducting interviews with refugees from twenty-eight villages at the Turkish border. The refugees and the intercepts together left little doubt. But Murphy’s bureau, which managed the U.S. political relationship with Iraq, remained unconvinced. Murphy may have mistakenly trusted Iraqi denials of responsibility and thus discounted the overwhelming evidence of Iraqi poison attacks. Or he may have willfully cast doubt on the information because he believed the U.S.-Iraq relationship would be harmed if the United States condemned the gassing. “I certainly don’t recall deliberate slanting,” Murphy says today. “I think that we did what we are supposed to do with intelligence: We challenged it. We said, ‘Where did you get it?’; ‘Who were your sources?’; ‘How do you know you can trust those sources?’” Whatever the bureau’s motives, NEA officials contested INR’s findings long after the intelligence officers found the evidence of Iraqi responsibility overwhelming.

  After nearly two weeks of heated internal debate, the INR view finally prevailed. It had been nearly eighteen months since al-Majid had begun his vicious counter-insurgency campaign. The United States had long known about the destruction of Kurdish villages and disappearances of Kurdish men. But only after the high-profile refugee flight and the deluge of press inquiries did Secretary of State Shultz decide to speak out. “As a result of our evaluation of the situation,” spokesman Redman declared authoritatively on September 8, 1988, “the United States government is convinced that Iraq has used chemical weapons in its military campaign against Kurdish guerrillas.”79 When he was challenged to account for why the United States had been so reticent about responding to chemical weapons attacks in the past, Redman noted, “All of these things have a way of evolving. And it’s simply a matter of the course of events.”80

  On the same day Secretary Shultz confirmed Iraqi chemical use, he raised the matter with Saddoun Hammadi, Iraqi minister of state for foreign affairs, delivering what Murphy and others present described as a fifty-minute harangue. Hammadi denied the U.S. charge three times during the meeting, calling the allegations “absolutely baseless.”81 But he said Iraq had a responsibility to “preserve itself, not be cut to pieces.” The Iraqi perspective, like that of most perpetrators, was grounded in a belief that the collective could be punished for individual acts of rebellion. Baghdad had to “deal with traitors.” Shultz suggested they be arrested and tried, not gassed.82 Britain, which up to this point had been mute, quickly followed the U.S. lead with a similar statement.

  Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, too, vehemently denied allegations of wrongdoing. Aziz did not dispute that the Iraqi government was relocating a number of Kurds who lived near the Iranian border. But sounding an awful lot like Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister of the interior in 1915, he stressed, “This is not a deportation of people, this is a reorganization of the urban situation.”83

  Iraq’s defense minister, General Adnan Khairallah, was more revealing in his statements. Iraq was entitled to defend itself with “whatever means is available.” When confronting “one who wants to kill you at the heart of your land,” he asked, “will you throw roses on him and flowers?” Combatants and civilians looked alike: “They all wear the Kurdish costume, and so you can’t distinguish between one who carries a weapon and one who does not.”84

  The Iraqi regime was watching Washington carefully. Indeed, the September 9 Senate passage of the sanctions bill and the Shultz condemnation gave rise to the largest anti-American demonstration in Baghdad in twenty years. Some 18,000 Iraqis turned out in a rigged “popular” protest. The Iraqi media inflated the figure to 250,000, and said a “large group” of Kurds also attended. Each evening Iraq’s state-run television broadcast clips of Vietnamese civilians who had been burned by U.S. napalm bombs, as well as images of Japanese victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.85 Baghdad media derided the sanctions as the handiwork of “Zionists” and other “potentates of imperialism and racism.”86 The Reagan administration saw Iraq’s propaganda as a testament to the peril to U.S.-Iraqi relations; Galbraith considered it proof of the potential for American influence.87

  Iraq had recently spent vast energy and resources fending off criticisms in Geneva, New York, and Washington. In 1985 the Iraqi embassy in Washington had hired a public relations firm, Edward J. Van Kloberg and Associates, to help it renovate its reputation. Ambassador Nizar Hamdoon agreed to pay the firm $1,000 for “every interview with [a] distinguished American newspaper” that could be arranged. The company had organized television interviews and succeeded in placing articles favorable to Iraq in the Washington Post, New York Times, Washington Times, and Wall Street Journal.88 Desperate for foreign investment and reconstructive aid, Iraq was promoting the image of a “new Iraq.” It cared about the outside world’s opinion.

  Iraq’s ambassador to the United States, Abdul-Amir Ali al-Anbari invited any journalist to northern Iraq “to see for himself the truth.” This was a typical delay tactic: Visitors are promised access but then denied it once the act of granting permission has deflated outrage. In some instances, after endless delays, independent observers are allowed to visit the prohibited territory, but then, like Becker in Cambodia, they are trailed at all times by a “security escort” handpicked by the regime. Iraqi officials who offered access to an impartial international inquiry quickly added that such a mission would have to be delayed until “active military operations” in northern Iraq had been concluded.89 In late September twenty-four Western journalists were let in, but only on a carefully supervised government helicopter tour. The trip proved embarrassing for Baghdad: Iraq airlifted journalists to an outpost on the Iraq-Turkey border to witness the return of 1,000 refugees. But the Kurds failed to show, and the journalists spotted an Iraqi truck whose driver and passengers were hidden behind gas masks.90

  Unhappy with Shultz’s September 8 condemnation, U.S. Middle East specialists tried to “walk the Secretary back” to a more conciliatory position.91 When Ambassador Glaspie met again September 10 with Hamdoon, she acknowledged that in 1977 in Cairo she herself had seen people with burns and nausea from mere tear gas. In a secret cable back to Washington, the embassy
credited Iraq for the “remarkably moderate and mollifying mode of its presentation” and an “atypical willingness to gulp down their pride and give us assurances even after we publicly announced our certainty of their culpability.” 92

  In Search of “Proof”

  Although Pell’s Prevention of Genocide Act had sailed through the Senate, Pell came under immediate pressure to retreat. Those who criticized the bill initially said they were simply uncertain that Iraq was responsible. Galbraith was determined to put this excuse to rest and to expose the real reasons for U.S. opposition. On September 10, 1988, the day after the Senate unanimously cleared the stiff sanctions bill, he boarded a plane for Turkey and traveled to the crowded border with Iraq, where thousands of tents housing refugees had sprouted. He was accompanied by Chris Van Hollen, a younger colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The two staffers scurried from camp to camp, interviewing witnesses.

  The Americans began tentatively, almost shyly. At each site a flood of arrivals quickly descended upon them, desperate to tell their stories. It is never clear just what refugees expect from their encounters with Western intruders. Some probably believe the foreigners will bring some form of salvation—that they will deliver the chilling accounts to the higher-ups and that justice will thus be dispensed, property retrieved, or, in this case, gassings forcibly suspended. Many traumatized civilians simply want to be heard. The Cambodian refugees who crossed into Thailand and spoke to Charles Twining, the Muslims who would survive the Serb concentration camps of 1992 or the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, all revealed that same intense desire to let people know what had happened to them. Only later, when the great white hopes returned again and again empty-handed, did the patience of these eager refugees wear thin.