1. Alex P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, et al., Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books), 1988, pp. 5–6.
2. Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 6.
3. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House), September 2002, p. 5.
4. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense), April 2001, p. 428.
5. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, op. cit., p. 1.
1. Conor Gearty, “Terrorism and Morality,” RUSI Journal, October, 2002, pp. 36–37.
2. Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003), pp. xiii-xiv.
1. See James D. Kiras, “Terrorism and Irregular Warfare,” in James Baylis, James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen, and Colin S. Gray, Strategy in the Contemporary World, An Introduction to Strategic Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 208–232.
2. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice, 3rd ed. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), 1996, p. 21.
3. Martin Gilbert, Israel, A History (New York: William Morrow, 1998), pp. 135–146.
1. Laqueur, op. cit., p. 8.
2. Tony Judt, “America and the War,” in Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, eds., Striking Terror, America's New War (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), p. 21.
3. Quoted in Walter Pincus, “Wolfowitz: Iraq Key to War on Terrorism,” Washington Post, July 28, 2003, online.
4. Condoleezza Rice, “Transforming the Middle East,” Washington Post, August 7, 2003, online.
1. “In the President's Words: 'Free People Will Keep the Peace of the World.” Transcript of President Bush's speech to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI, Washington, D.C.), February 26, 2002; New York Times, February 27, 2002, online. Also see Philip H. Gordon, “Bush's Middle East Vision,” Survival, Spring 2003, pp. 131–153; and George Packer, “Dreaming of Democracy,” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2003, pp. 44–49, 60, 90, 104.
2. Excerpted from the text of President Bush's September 7, 2003, speech, reprinted in “Bush: 'We Will Do What Is Necessary,'” Washington Post, September 8, 2003, online.
1. National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, D.C.: The White House), December 2002, p. 1.
2. Ibid., p. 2.
1. Quoted in Michael Dobbs, “N. Korea Tests Bush's Policy of Preemption,” Washington Post, January 6, 2003, online. It is not clear that small and vulnerable nuclear arsenals deter superpower military action. See Lyle J. Goldstein, “Do Nascent WMD Arsenals Deter? The Sino-Soviet Crisis of 1969,” Political Science Quarterly, Number 1, 2003, pp. 59–79.
2. Robin Cook, “Iraq's Phantom Weapons and Iran,” New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer 2003, p. 29.
1. See Rolf Ekeus, “Iraq's Real Weapons Threat,” Washington Post, June 29, 2003, online; Bob Drogin, “The Vanishing,” New Republic, July 21, 2003, online; John Barry and Michael Isikoff, “Saddam's Secrets,” Newsweek, June 30, 2003, online; Walter Pincus and Kevin Sullivan, “Scientists Still Deny Iraqi Arms Programs,” Washington Post, July 31, 2003, online; Michael R. Gordon, “Weapons of Mass Confusion,” New York Times, August 1, 2003, online; David Kelly, “Regime's Priority Was Blueprints, Not Arsenal, Defector Told,” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2003. online; and Joseph Curl, “Bush Believes Saddam Destroyed Arms,” Washington Times, April 26, 2003, online.
1. Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2000, p. 61.
1. Quoted in Hoffman, op. cit., pp. 11–12.
2. Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God, Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 169.
3. Ibid., p. 14.
1. See Martha Crenshaw, “The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as the Product of Strategic Choice,” in Howard and Sawyer, op. cit., pp. 55–67.
2. “Bush: 'We Will Do What Is Necessary,'” loc. cit.
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: All that really needs to be said by way of introduction to Dr. Pelletière's contribution is that its credibility cannot be impugned. The piece first appeared in the New York Times on January 31, 2003 – by no means an indication that it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (witness Judith Miller's stellar “reporting”). But it is something of an event when the largely pro-war paper finds an opposing argument significant enough to print on its oped page. Pelletière was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and was a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. During the same period he served as the Middle East expert at the War College's Strategic Studies Institute. A solid argument can easily be made that not too many in this country are more familiar with the circumstances surrounding the Iran-Iraq war and developments immediately thereafter. The Halabja gassing thus occurs right in the heart of Dr. Pelletière's academic and professional career.
All this isn't a guarantee of anything, of course, but it has, we believe, massive weight in a debate that has for too long been characterized by superficiality and subterfuge. Those who are interested in finding out more should consult the lengthy interview with Jude Wanniski called “The (Bogus) Case Against Saddam” which leads off our companion volume, Neo-CONNED!. It is largely composed of other sources beyond Wanniski's opinion that confirm Pelletière's perspective. The bottom line is that the “gassing” charges that have re-surfaced since Saddam was deposed, after the al-Qaeda and WMD myths were debunked, are themselves at the very least questionable. Should some 2,000 Americans and untold Iraqis have died for that?
CHAPTER
20
A War Crime or an Act of War?
………
Stephen C. Pelletière, Ph.D.
IT WAS NO surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his 2003 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.<
br />
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 March1 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 1990s 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 Ba'ath 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 is 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?
1. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror,” The New Yorker, March 25, 2002, online.
We are working these days on very, very serious issues of war and peace, life or death. We are not working on potatoes.
—Nathalie Loiseau, French embassy
spokeswoman, March 2003, on the
substitution of “freedom fries” for “French
fries” on all House of Representatives menus
at U.S. congressional cafeterias
I wish it had never happened.
—Congressman Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.),
in retrospect, May 2005, on the “freedom
fries” initiative, which he sponsored
THE PROFESSIONALS SPEAK IV:
A SCIENTIST AND A DIPLOMAT
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Several unique points are raised by Dr. Prather that aren't routinely considered in the debate surrounding the war in Iraq. Much is made – and we'd be the last to deny this – of the neoconservative push for war with Saddam that seems to have come to fruition under Bush 43. But Prather offers a healthy reminder, adding some detail to the picture painted by Cockburn and St. Clair in Chapter 1 (and by Dr. Joy Gordon in Neo-CONNED!), that the U.S. position throughout the Clinton administration tended towards “regime change” in Iraq, and was no less a violation of the UN Charter and principles of equity and justice then than it was and is under the current regime.
Then there's Congress. Congress too is guilty of capitulation in the face of Bush-administration machinations. It had a chance to pull the plug on the march to war against Iraq, because its resolution authorizing the President to use force in Iraq was contingent upon him notifying them that further diplomatic action wasn't an option. He did so, but, Prather argues, they should have known better. Sadly the whole exchange of documents between the White House and Congress seems like a dramatic paper trail covering a fait accompli.
The end result of this fiasco – from Prather's perspective – is a world that is less safe than it was when the International Atomic Energy Agency had access to Iraq and its nuclear-program-related materials under effective surveillance. A tribute to Bush's “triumph” is the October 1, 2004, report from the IAEA indicating that it “continues to be concerned about the widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq's nuclear program.” In other words, materials that were accounted for by the IAEA in Iraq now are not accounted for. “The disappearance of such equipment and materials may be of proliferation significance,” the report said. Call it yet another Iraq war “success” story.
CHAPTER
21
Neocons & Loose Nukes
………
Gordon Prather, Ph.D.
IT WAS JOHN Kerry's best shot, but evidently most Americans – especially those living safely in the heartland – did not want a President whose Number One Priority is keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists.
Keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists certainly hasn't been President Bush's Number One Priority. On the contrary, Bush's application of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes has actually increased – substantially – the chances that a few hundred thousand Americans will be nuked by terrorists.
In particular, when Bush II became President, North Korea was a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and all its nuclear facilities and nuclear materials were “frozen” under the terms of a bilateral U.S.-Democratic People's Republic of Korea agreement and subject to continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
When Bush II became President, Iraq was an NPT signatory, and all its nuclear facilities and nuclear materials had been destroyed, removed from Iraq, or rendered harmless by the IAEA under the terms of UN ceasefire-implementing resolutions.
Hence, when Bush II became President, if there were any countries in the world that could be certified to be nuke-free, North Korea and Iraq headed the list.
Furthermore, both wanted desperately – and “desperately” is not too strong a term – to have their diplomatic and trade relations with the United States “normalized.” You see, officially, a state of war still exists between North Korea and us after more than 50 years; one existed with Iraq f
or more than twelve. And a state of something close to war has existed with Iran for more than twenty.
Isn't that ridiculous? Or is it tragic?
As Kerry suggested, voters should have looked at the mess Bush II had got us in to by sand-bagging the IAEA – alleging that the Iraqi and North Korean governments were producing nukes even though subject to the IAEA Safeguards regime – and by accusing the Iraqi and North Korean regimes of being so evil as to give those alleged nukes to terrorists willingly.
When confronted with those allegations, guiltless – so far as the IAEA could determine – but defiant North Korea decided that it was better to have nukes than not to have them. So North Korea threw the IAEA inspectors out and began recovering the weapons-grade plutonium that had been under IAEA padlock and seal.
Guiltless – so far as the IAEA could determine – but defenseless Iraq reacted by throwing itself on the mercy of the international court of world opinion and of the UN Security Council. A lot of good it did them.
Establishing American Hegemony
Bush II had brought with him to power the folks who call themselves “neoconservatives.” Also known as neocons, they are more appropriately called neocrazies.
Denied a military “victory” in the cold war by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, the neocons were, nevertheless, determined to establish an American hegemony. In particular, the existing governments in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere were to be removed – by force, if necessary – and replaced by American puppet regimes.
But how to get the support of the American people for the removal – by force, if necessary – of all those regimes? Convince them that Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and other anti-American regimes had – or would soon have - nukes and that these evil regimes would give those nukes to terrorists who would, in turn, use them against them?
Neo-Conned! Again Page 47
