A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  In keeping with the natural workings of the U.S. political process, the question of whether to denounce, punish, or attempt to deter chemical weapons attacks against a largely defenseless minority was never explained to the American people. It was settled, as it usually is, behind closed doors, where special interests ruled the day and where narrow versions of national interest helped rationalize inhumanity.

  The trouble was not just that special interests spoke loudly against action; it was that, apart from these lobbies that were especially interested, there were no competing voices making phone calls on behalf of the Kurds. When the genocide convention had come up for ratification, a small group of vocal, isolationist, southern senators had managed to block its passage. During the Khmer Rouge’s bloody rule in Cambodia, likewise, the loudest voices were those that cast doubt on the refugee claims. With Iraq, too, the major human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, were still operating out of dingy offices on small budgets and focusing principally on jailed political dissidents, in the case of Amnesty, and abuses committed in Latin America and Asia, in the case of Human Rights Watch. One Boston-based group, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), had sent a medical team to the Turkish border October 7–16. After systematically debriefing refugees, PHR doctors had issued the first independent report documenting widespread chemical weapons use and describing the Iraqi offensive as a “genocidal assault.” The report, which attracted a large but short burst of media attention, had not been picked up by influential actors in Washington.130

  The loudest political support Galbraith received was from a group of steelworkers from Baytown, Texas, whose plant was scheduled to be shut down and shipped to Iraq, costing them hundreds of jobs. When they learned that the sanctions bill would block the factory move, they were ecstatic. They phoned up the frazzled Galbraith and offered him enthusiastic moral support, which counted for little when measured against the potent U.S.-Iraqi Business Council. Representative Howard Berman (D.–Calif.) had been pushing legislation to limit trade with Iraq since the mid-1980s, but the deck was stacked in the wrong direction. “There was no grassroots campaign,” he said. “The American people weren’t aware of, or that interested in, our policy toward Iraq at that time.” When the bill came up for passage, and hearing nothing from their constituents, most thought in terms of economic and strategic interests alone.

  Some of the most potent lobbies in U.S. political life today are of course those that speak for various ethnic interests. The Armenian American community has lobbied for decades to secure a day of remembrance to commemorate the Armenian genocide and in November 2000, over Turkish objections, very nearly gained official U.S. recognition of the genocide. Jewish American groups have been extremely influential, helping secure the allocation of billions of dollars worth of aid to Israel and the establishment of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. While the atrocities were actually being perpetrated in Turkey and Nazi-occupied Europe, however, these lobbies did not exist. During the Cambodian genocide, similarly, few Cambodian expatriates or descendants lived in the United States. Those who did were not organized politically to attract much attention to the cause of their compatriots. In the case of the Kurds, when Galbraith’s sanctions measure stood poised for passage in the Congress, neither Kurds nor Kurdish Americans had joined forces to set up a Washington lobby. When Talabani visited Washington in June 1988 for the first time, his party did not reinforce the trip by establishing a D.C. office or liaison. Latif Rashid, who ran the party’s London office, remembers, “Because we had no representatives based in Washington, it was easy for American leaders to pretend the Kurds didn’t exist.”

  The U.S. media can sometimes play a role in helping draw public attention to an injustice abroad or to the stakes of a legislative sequence. When it came to Iraq’s repression of the Kurds, however, the March 1988 Halabja attack and the September 1988 exodus received some attention, but neither the larger Iraqi campaign to destroy Kurds in rural Iraq nor the legislative toing and froing around the Prevention of Genocide Act on Capitol Hill generated much press interest. This spotty reporting helped ensure that lawmakers and administration officials could oppose the sanctions bill without attracting negative publicity.

  Senator Pell delivered a postmortem on the Prevention of Genocide Act:

  Occasionally our legislative process works in a way the American people can understand and appreciate. September 9, 1988, was such an occasion. On that day the Senate unanimously passed sweeping sanctions against Iraq in response to its poison gas attacks on its Kurdish minority. . . . Now we are in a situation where a . . . couple of senior members in the House of Representatives were able to thwart the overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate that favored taking a stand against Iraq’s use of poison gas. This is . . . the sort of thing that makes so many Americans skeptical about our legislative process.131

  The United States did not summon a special meeting of the UN Security Council, as advocates urged, but instead joined nine other nations in calling on the UN to send a team of experts to Iraq to investigate, urging that the fact-finding mission be modeled on past UN chemical weapons inquiries (which had confirmed Iraqi use against Iran). U.S. officials made this recommendation without noting that these prior investigations offered staunch testimony to the ineffectiveness of a policy of inquiry alone. Such UN teams had “concluded” in 1986, 1987, and 1988 that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iran.132

  In November 1988 Iraq expelled Haywood Rankin, the same U.S. foreign service officer who had accompanied Galbraith into Kurdish territory in 1987, because he had taken another trip to northern Iraq to inquire about Iraq’s poison gas use. Baghdad said it was expelling him for “talking to Kurds.”133 The State Department responded by expelling an Iraqi diplomat from the Iraqi embassy in Washington, but it did not publicly announce the expulsion or link it to chemical weapons use or the destruction of rural Kurds.134

  Saddam Hussein had been destroying rural Kurdish areas for more than eighteen months. The deadly Anfal campaign had lasted more than six months. In that period, although the State Department received a steady stream of intelligence on the destruction of the Kurdish villages and the gas attacks against Kurdish civilians, officials in the Reagan administration spoke out only when forced to do so by the media and the feisty sanctions effort on Capital Hill. Even then, they worded their criticism so narrowly that they made it clear Hussein was free to attack the Kurds with means besides chemical weapons. Senator Pell initiated the sanctions effort because he considered stopping genocide more important than the geopolitical, agricultural, manufacturing, or oil interests at stake. Yet the opponents of sanctions did not pose the question as one of principle versus interest. “People don’t like to admit they are weighing a hard principle against a hard constituent interest,” Christianson observes. “They are much happier weighing a soft principle against a hard constituent interest. So it is better to keep the principle hazy, or on the horizon, and not let it crystallize.”

  Thus, those who did not want to punish Hussein told themselves that the crime was not necessarily genocide, that the Kurds had invited repression upon themselves, and that the evidence of gassing was not foolproof. The United States had intelligence that distinguished Iraqi military engagement with armed Kurds from Iraqi destruction of whole communities. And although senior policymakers were right that the information flow was imperfect, U.S. policy is rarely predicated on foolproof evidence. U.S. officials certainly knew enough to know that Saddam Hussein was prepared to use any means available to him to solve his “Kurdish problem.”

  Aftermath

  Life (and Death) After Anfal

  Saddam Hussein wound down his Anfal campaign just after Galbraith’s abortive sanctions effort in the fall of 1988. Those Kurds from prohibited areas who had been relocated but not executed were forced to sign or place a thumbprint on a statement that read: “I, the undersigned, ______, testify that I live in the governorate
of______, in the section of ______, residence number______, and I recognize that I will face the death penalty should the information indicated be false, or should I alter my address without notifying appropriate administration and authorities.”135 The Kurds from the forbidden areas were crammed into more than a dozen complexes, each containing some 50,000 people, each composed mainly of Anfal survivors, or Anfalakan.136 Kurds still in Iraqi jails were said to have amnesty, but some were executed anyway. Others were freed under the condition that they “shall not be treated on an equal footing with other Iraqis in terms of rights and duties, unless they can effectively match good intentions with proper conduct and demonstrate that they have ended all collaboration with the saboteurs. . . .” They would be monitored, the authorities said, “through the placement of thorough and diligent informers in their midst.”137

  Having performed his brutal mission with alacrity, al-Majid was determined that the gains not be lost. “There shall be a prompt and decisive response to any incidents that may occur,” he said, “with the scale of the response being out of proportion to the scale of the incident, no matter how trivial the latter may be.”138

  By 1989 only a few hundred villages remained standing in Hussein’s “Kurdish autonomous region.” Some 4,049 villages had been destroyed since Iraq demarcated the prohibited zones.139 In April 1989 al-Majid handed over the Northern Bureau to his successor. At a kind of pass-the-torch (so to speak) ceremony, he reflected on his handiwork while professing to have retained his humanity:

  I would like to admit that I am not and will not be the right person for the current stable situation in the North. . . . I cry when I see a tragic show or movie. One day I cried when I saw a woman who was lost and without a family in a movie. But I would like to tell you that I did what I did and what I was supposed to do. I don’t think you could do more than what I could do.140

  When George Bush Sr. took over the White House in January 1989, his foreign policy team undertook a preliminary strategic review of U.S. policy toward Iraq. The study, completed at the same time al-Majid departed northern Iraq, deemed Iraq a potentially helpful ally in containing Iran and nudging the Middle East peace process ahead. The “Guidelines for U.S.-Iraq Policy” swiped at proponents of sanctions on Capitol Hill and a few human rights advocates who had begun lobbying within the State Department. The guidelines noted that despite support from the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and State Departments for a profitable, stable U.S.-Iraq relationship, “parts of Congress and the Department would scuttle even the most benign and beneficial areas of the relationship, such as agricultural exports.”141 The Bush administration would not shift to a policy of dual containment of both Iraq and Iran. Vocal American businesses were adamant that Iraq was a source of opportunity, not enmity. The White House did all it could to create an opening for these companies. “Had we attempted to isolate Iraq,” Secretary of State James Baker wrote later, “we would have also isolated American businesses, particularly agricultural interests, from significant commercial opportunities.”142 Hussein locked up another $1 billion in agricultural credits. Iraq became the ninth largest purchaser of U.S. farm products; he was a favorite with midwestern farm-state politicians. As Baker put it gently in his memoirs, “Our administration’s review of the previous Iraq policy was not immune from domestic economic considerations.”143

  The Bush administration’s guidelines revealed a worry that Iraqi transgressions would be harder to justify publicly now that its war with Iran had ended. “Clouding the issue, the immediate threat of Iranian expansion has faded, and with it the shield that protected Iraq from western criticism,” the guidelines noted. “This has allowed human rights to become the battleground for those wanting to justify severing or greatly limiting relations with Iraq.” The State Department maintained the view that the Kurds had earned repression with their rebellions. As the author of the guidelines advised, “In no way should we associate ourselves with the 60-year-old Kurdish rebellion in Iraq or oppose Iraq’s legitimate attempts to suppress it.”144 The U.S. official did not explain how legitimate suppression could be distinguished from illegitimate suppression, but the United States was under no illusion about the nature of the regime. “Saddam Hussein will continue to eliminate those he regards as a threat,” the guidelines stated, “torture those he believes have secrets to reveal, and rule without any real concessions to democracy. . . . Few expect a humane regime [will] come to Iraq any time soon.” But when twelve Western states joined together in 1989 at the UN Human Rights Commission and sponsored a strongly worded resolution that called for the appointment of a special rapporteur to “make a thorough study of the human rights situation in Iraq,” the United States refused to join.145

  On October 2, 1989, a year after some 60,000 Kurds had tumbled into Turkey fleeing gas attacks, President Bush signed National Security Directive 26 (NSD-26), which concluded that “normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East.” Thus, the administration would “pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy.” The devastation caused by the Iran-Iraq war would create vast opportunities. In other settings, such as South Africa and later China, the United States justified its support for economic engagement on the grounds that greater prosperity and Western contacts would eventually improve respect for the human rights of the South Africans and Chinese. But with Iraq the case for foreign investment was made with almost no reference to the “long-term human rights benefits” to Iraqi Arabs and Kurds. With Saddam Hussein in office, it was clear, there would be none.

  In a brochure welcoming visitors to the U.S. pavilion at the 1989 Baghdad international trade fair, U.S. Ambassador Glaspie wrote that the embassy “places the highest priority on promoting commerce and friendship between our two nations.” A number of major U.S. companies, including AT&T International, General Motors, Xerox, Westinghouse, and Wang Laboratories, participated in the fair and others worked to form the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, which lobbied in Washington to promote trade ties.146

  Certain members of Congress refused to let the issue of Hussein’s brutality against his people rest. In 1989, thanks to the pestering of Representative Berman, Senator Pell’s ally on the House side, Congress finally agreed to ban Export-Import Bank financing for exports to Iraq. It attached a waiver, however, allowing the Bush administration to ignore the ban if national security requirements dictated. The president took advantage of this loophole two months later. On January 17, 1990, Bush overrode congressional opposition and signed a directive authorizing an Export-Import Bank line of credit worth nearly $200 million. If the Congress and the Bush White House were driven by special interests, the administration justified its stand on the grounds of advancing the U.S. national interest. Neither the Bush nor the Reagan administration ever spoke out against the forced relocation of the Kurds.

  Burn Israel, Burn Bridges

  Saddam Hussein’s behavior grew so bold in early 1990 that President Bush had to work to justify warm ties. In March Iraq executed a British journalist it claimed spied for Israel. Reports began pouring in that Iraq was strengthening its nuclear and chemical weapons capability. On April 2, 1990, Hussein crossed the Rubicon in a speech to the general command of his armed forces. He confirmed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and warned that if Israel attacked Iraq, “By God, we will make fire eat up half of Israel.”147 This became known as the “Burn Israel” speech, and it earned him the special ire of American supporters of Israel, specifically, New York Republican senator Alphonse D’Amato. D’Amato hurriedly enlisted Galbraith to draft another sanctions package, this one known as the Iraq International Law Compliance Act of 1990.

  The Bush administration continued to hope that Hussein would come around. He got backing from some powerful senators. A congressional delegation that included Bob Dole and Alan Simpson (R.–Wyo.) returned from Iraq in mid-April 1
990 having met with Hussein for two and a half hours. They cheerily proclaimed him a leader with whom the United States could work.148 In the meeting Hussein complained that “a large-scale campaign is being launched against us from the United States and Europe.” Senator Dole assured him, “Not from President Bush,” insisting that Bush would veto sanctions legislation if it ever passed both houses of Congress. Still, the challenges from Capitol Hill grew louder. At a House hearing Representative Lantos challenged Murphy’s successor as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, John Kelly. “At what point will the administration recognize that this is not a nice guy?” Lantos boomed. Kelly clung to the U.S. position: “We believe there is still a potentiality for positive alterations in Iraqi behavior.”149

  The Senate opposition continued to cite futility, perversity, and jeopardy as grounds for remaining silent. But others had awoken to the humanitarian and national security implications of allowing Hussein to dictate the terms of the relationship. In 1990 they said what they had not said in 1988. Senator William Cohen (R.–Maine) decried U.S. timidity. “It is the smell of oil and the color of money that corrodes our principles,” Cohen remarked.150 To those senators who argued that unilateral sanctions would do no good, Cohen said that if the United States avoided penalizing Hussein because it feared its allies would not follow, “we are left with the argument that we must follow the herd, follow it right down the path of feeding Saddam Hussein while he continues to terrorize, attack, or simply threaten to do so.” Cohen invoked Hitler: “At one point in our history we heard the tap, tap, tap of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella on the cobblestones of Munich,” Cohen said, just before a July 27 Senate vote on the new sanctions bill. “Now we are about to hear the rumble of the farm tractor on the bricks of Baghdad.”151