Immediately after the November 29 vote in the UN authorizing force, the administration unblocked a $140 million loan for the World Bank to China and agreed to meet with Chinese government officials.
The Soviet Union was promised $7 billion in aid from various countries and shipments of food from the United States.
Zaire was promised forgiveness of part of its debt as well as military assistance.
A $7 billion loan to Egypt was forgiven, a loan the President had no authority to forgive under U.S. law.
Syria was promised that there would be no interference in its Lebanon actions.
Saudi Arabia was promised $12 billion in arms sales.
The U.S., which owes the most money to the UN, paid off $187 million of its debt immediately after the vote authorizing the use of force. The administration attempted to coerce Yemen by threatening the cutoff of U.S. funds.1
But even were this not the case, can the UN apply measures of force such as the embargo, effectively a blockade and an act of war, and authorize all necessary means – which the U.S. saw as war – without negotiating first? It cannot do so according to the stipulations of its own Charter.
Nor was the UN permitted to embargo food and limit the importation of medicine. Neither the UN nor any country can take measures that intentionally or knowingly have the effect of starving and harming the civilian population. This is prohibited by every tenet of international law. It is well known that Iraq imports 60 to 70 percent of its food. As testimony presented elsewhere in books and in many reports from fact-finding missions to Iraq since the end of the war, many children died because of the lack of infant formula and adequate food and medicine.
And what of this infamous resolution that authorized all necessary means to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait? Did this authorize war? Not by its own terms. The resolution was left specifically vague, stipulating only “all necessary means.” Nowhere did it mention war and certainly many other means were readily available for achieving the goals of the UN resolutions. All other means were never exhausted. From the U.S. standpoint, massively violent war was the first and only option. All other means had to be precluded at any cost.
Finally, on the point of the U.S. commission of crimes against peace, even if we get over all of the other illegalities and assume that the UN had the authority to authorize war and did so in this case, what did it authorize? It authorized the use of force only to obtain the withdrawal from Kuwait. It certainly never authorized the incursion into, much less the occupation of, Iraq and the total subjection of that nation to the dictates of the UN acting out policies originating in the U.S. government. No one has authorized the U.S. to have even one soldier in Iraq. This is aggression in the classic sense. U.S. forces moved in from the north down to the 36th parallel and have set up camps for displaced Kurds. Nor did the resolution authorize any bombing of Iraq, certainly not the bombing of Baghdad or Basra or the near complete destruction of the economic infrastructure.
The second broad category we are concerned with is what are referred to as crimes against humanity. By this I mean both crimes against civilians and combatants. There is a long history of outlawing certain kinds of conduct once war has begun. The principle is that the means and manner of waging war are not unlimited. In other words, while it is of primary importance to prevent war, once war has begun there are limits on the types of targets that can be attacked and the weapons that can be employed. Central to these laws of war is the desire to protect civilians, noncombatants, soldiers who are no longer fighting, and the resources and infrastructure necessary to their survival. Again, at Nuremberg, the Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity which included killings of the civilian population and the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages and devastation not justified by military necessity.
These laws are embodied in various treaties, including most importantly the Hague Convention of 1907, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions. They all reflect a similar set of rules, violations of which are war crimes. They are built around two principles. First, military operations are to be directed at military objectives – the civilian population and civilian objects are not to be targets. So, massive bombing, as was engaged in by the U.S., which kills civilians and destroyed the water supply, is illegal. In fact, when the dispute was barely a month old, in September, Air Force chief of staff General Michael J. Duggan was fired for leaking to the press suggestions that the U.S. was already planning bombing targets which would include Iraqi power systems, roads railroads, and petroleum plants.1
At the height of the war, this sort of bombing campaign was defended by Pentagon spokespersons in terms reminiscent of the Vietnam War. Many parts of Iraq became “free fire zones” in which everyone who remains in such a zone is declared unilaterally by the U.S. as a legitimate target for destruction. The entire city of Basra, Iraq's second largest, became such a free fire zone, as described by Brigadier General Richard I. Neal. The Washington Post story recounts:
In Riyadh, Marine Brig. Gen. Richard I. Neal gave a detailed explanation of why repeated allied pounding of the southern Iraqi city of Basra is causing “collateral damage.” Basra, Neal said, “is a military town in the true sense, it is astride a major naval base and a port facility. The infrastructure, military infrastructure, is closely interwoven within the city of Basra itself.” The destruction of targets in and around Basra is part of what Neal described as an “intensifying” air campaign against all “echelons of forces, from the front lines and all the way back …. There is no rest for the weary, for any of them …. There is no division, no brigade, there is no battalion that really is spared the attacks from our pilots.”69
The second limit international law places on the conduct of war is the principle of proportionality – you can only use the amount of force against military targets necessary to achieve your objective. So, for example, destroying the retreating Iraqi army was disproportional for it was not necessary to achieve the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The whole conduct of the war, in fact, violates every conceivable notion of proportionality.
International law lays down rules for how the civilian population is to be protected. Obviously civilians cannot be intentionally attacked, but indiscriminate attacks are prohibited as well. Such attacks are defined as those that “employ a method of combat which cannot be directed at specific military objectives.” While the mass media, especially TV news, gave the impression during the war that the U.S. was using only “smart” bombs that directly hit their military targets, in fact 93 percent of the bombs used were “dumb” bombs of which at least 60 to 70 percent missed their targets, killing lots of people. Such bombs cannot be directed exclusively at a military objective and in my view are illegal. Nor can bombs dropped from a B-52 flying at thirty to forty thousand feet hit their targets.
There is a special law protecting objects indispensable to the civilian population – the infrastructure of a country. This includes prohibitions on destroying food supplies, water and sewer systems, agriculture, power, medical services, transportation and similar essentials. These cannot be attacked even if there is some military goal, if the effect would be to leave civilians without the essentials for life. In fact, the U.S. government openly stated its goal of destroying the infrastructure of Iraq including water, food supplies, the sewer system, electricity and transportation. The story was not reported in U.S. newspapers until late June of 1991, but the facts were obvious to even a casual observer. According to the Washington Post story, U.S. officials admitted that
Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself …. [T]he intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance.2
A report of the United Nations Mission to Iraq led by Under Secretary-General Martti Ahtisaari said that Iraq had been bombed into the pre-industrial age.1Thousands of additio
nal people – all civilians and mostly children – are dying as a result.
Attacks are also to be limited to strictly military objectives. These are defined as those that make an effective contribution to military action and whose destruction offers a definite military advantage. Civilian objects are not to be attacked. In case of doubt, such as a school, it should be presumed that it is not used as a military object. What does this rule say about the bombing of the al-Ameriyah shelter? At least 300 children and parents were incinerated in a structure that the U.S. knew was built as a shelter for civilians. Its possible use as a military communications center was only a matter of speculation and weak supposition. Or, what are we to make of the destruction of the baby milk factory at the beginning of the bombing campaign? Again, an American general has admitted that this was a mistake – a mistake that has cost many, many babies their lives.
There are also a series of very specific laws:
The use of asphyxiating gases is prohibited. The U.S. violated this by its use of fuel-air explosive bombs on Iraqi frontline troops; these bombs are terror bombs which can burn the oxygen over a surface of one or two square kilometers, destroying human life by asphyxiation.
These fuel-air bombs and the U.S. use of napalm are also outlawed by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use of weapons causing unnecessary harm to combatants. The level of U.S. evil is demonstrated by the sending to the Gulf of a stingray blinding laser system which is supposed to knock out optics on enemy weapons, but has the side effect of blinding soldiers as well who operate the weapons.
The bombing of peaceful nuclear power facilities is forbidden and particularly so because of the dangers of the spread of radioactivity. The UN International Atomic Energy Agency classified the reactors as peaceful, yet the U.S. bombed them, not caring about the spread of radioactivity. The bombing was intentional and planned in advance, clearly in violation of international law.
Both the Hague Convention of 1954 and Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks against historic monuments, works of art, places of worship and sites which constitute the cultural and spiritual heritage of a people. Catholic churches, a 4th century monastery and a Sunni Moslem mosque represent just some of the massive violations that occurred. (See Fadwa El Guindi's essay on archaeological destruction, Waging War on Civilization)
Protocol I of the Geneva Convention also requires protection of the natural environment against widespread and severe damage – the U.S. massive bombing, the blowing up of reactors, the hitting of oil storage facilities all violate this prohibition.
What I have tried to outline here, therefore, is the broad framework in which we can evaluate the criminal conduct of the United States.
1. See “The Thirteen Years' War” on pp. 3-11 of the present collection for a brief discussion of the sanctions, occupation, and bombing that began with the first Gulf War and continues through the second.
1. See Ramsey Clark, et. al., War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq (Washington, D.C.: The Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, 1992), pp. 146-157, for the text of the resolution.
1. New York Times, August 22, 1990.
2. Michael Emty, “How the U.S. Avoided the Peace,” The Village Voice, March 5, 1991.
1. Congressional Record, January 16, 1991: H520.
1. Rick Atkinson, “U.S. to Rely on Air Strikes if War Erupts,” New York Times, September 16, 1990: Al.
1. “Ground War Not Imminent, Bush Says: Allies to Rely on Air Power 'for a While,'” Washington Post, February 12, 1991, p. A14.
2. Washington Post, June 23, 1991, p. Al.
1. Martti Ahtisaari, “Report to the Secretary-General on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait and Iraq in the Immediate Post-Crisis Environment,” United Nations Report No. S122366, March 20, 1991.
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: This retrospect from the authors' book, Toxic Sludge is Good For You, should be mulled over in light of this anthology's section on the “Imperial Press.” We often hear that things are getting worse in Iraq, but the message of this contribution, along with the one preceding it, is that things weren't great even 15 years ago.
The fact is that the first Gulf War, like the second, was sold to the American public with “creative lies.” The notorious “incubator story” is no more honorable and no less outrageous than the British and American propaganda deployed in World War I, which claimed that German soldiers were gouging out the eyes of civilians, cutting off the hands of teenage boys, raping and mutilating women, giving children hand grenades to play with, bayoneting babies, and crucifying captured soldiers. Couple this with the pro-war propaganda, active censorship and the bullying of anti-war voices that seems sadly characteristic of wartime America throughout the last century of war – all sanctioned if not sponsored by the government and aided and abetted by the press – and you get a pretty grim picture of how a “democracy” manages its affairs in the mad rush to war.
The comment of a British general from World War I is axiomatic: “To make armies go on killing one another it is necessary to invent lies about the enemy.” That his statement is now a truism is no reason for us not to be concerned about the truth it states. It will prove timely in the run-up to the next war no less than the present one. We would do well to prepare ourselves now for the propaganda blitz, that we may be the better prepared to resist it.
APPENDIX
II
The Mother of All Clients:
The PR Campaign of Gulf War I
………
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
ON AUGUST 2, 1990, Iraqi troops led by dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-producing nation of Kuwait. Like Noriega in Panama, Hussein had been a U.S. ally for some years. Despite complaints from international human rights groups, the Reagan and Bush administrations had treated Hussein as a valuable ally in the U.S. confrontation with Iran. As late as July 25 – a week before the invasion of Kuwait – U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie commiserated with Hussein over a “cheap and unjust” profile by ABC's Diane Sawyer, and wished for an “appearance in the media, even for five minutes,” by Hussein that “would help explain Iraq to the American people.”1
Glaspie's ill-chosen comments may have helped convince the dictator that Washington would look the other way if he “annexed” a neighboring kingdom. The invasion of Kuwait, however, crossed a line that the Bush administration could not tolerate, for oil was at stake.
Viewed in strictly moral terms, Kuwait hardly looked like the sort of country that deserved defending, even from the likes of Hussein. The tiny but super-rich state had been an independent nation for just a quarter century when in 1986 the ruling al-Sabah family tightened its dictatorial grip over the “black gold” fiefdom by disbanding the token National Assembly and firmly establishing all power in the be-jeweled hands of the ruling Emir. Then, as now, Kuwait's ruling oligarchy brutally suppressed the country's small democracy movement, intimidated and censored journalists, and hired desperate foreigners to supply most of the nation's physical labor under conditions of indentured servitude and near-slavery. The wealthy young men of Kuwait's ruling class were known as spoiled party boys in university cities and national capitals from Cairo to Washington.1
Unlike Grenada and Panama, Iraq had a substantial army that could not be subdued in a mere weekend of fighting. Unlike the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Hussein was too far away from U.S. soil, too rich with oil money, and too experienced in ruling to be dislodged through the psychological-warfare techniques of low-intensity conflict. Waging a war to push Iraq's invading army from Kuwait would cost billions of dollars and require an unprecedented, massive U.S. military mobilization. The American public was notoriously reluctant to send its young into foreign battles on behalf of any cause. Selling war in the Middle East to the American people would not be easy. Bush would need to convince Americans that former ally Saddam Hussein now embodied evil, and that the oil fiefdom of Kuwait was a struggling young democrac
y. How could the Bush administration build U.S. support for “liberating” a country so fundamentally opposed to democratic values? How could the war appear noble and necessary rather than a crass grab to save cheap oil?
“If and when a shooting war starts, reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks,” warned Hal Steward, a retired army PR official. “The U.S. military had better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that will supply the answers the public can accept.”2
Steward needn't have worried. A PR plan was already in place, paid for almost entirely by the “oil-rich sheiks” themselves.
Packaging the Emir
US Congressman Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana – a conservative Democrat who supported the Gulf War – later estimated that the government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 PR, law, and lobby firms in its campaign to mobilize U.S. opinion and force against Hussein.3 Participating firms included the Rendon Group, which received a retainer of $100,000 per month for media work, and Neill & Co., which received $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem, a former U.S. ambassador to the oilrich gulf state of Bahrain, funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars through two front groups, the “Coalition for Americans at Risk” and the “Freedom Task Force.” The Coalition, which began in the 1980s as a front for the contras in Nicaragua, prepared and placed TV and newspaper ads, and kept a stable of fifty speakers available for pro-war rallies and publicity events.1
Hill & Knowlton, then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam's army marched into Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent “Citizens for a Free Kuwait,” a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration. Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK), whose only other funding totaled $17,861 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of CFK's budget – $10.8 million – went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees.2
Neo-Conned! Again Page 113
