Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: International Herald Tribune - gas

riposto da ICSM
International Herald Tribune
martedì 22 luglio 2003
it.cultura.storia.militare
America didn't seem to mind poison gas - Halabja
By Joost R. Hiltermann (IHT)
Friday, January 17, 2003
AMMAN, Jordan: In calling for regime change in Iraq, George W. Bush has
accused Saddam Hussein of being a man who gassed his own people. Bush is
right, of course. The public record shows that Saddam's regime repeatedly
spread poisonous gases on Kurdish villages in 1987 and 1988 in an attempt to
put down a persistent rebellion.
The biggest such attack was against Halabja in March 1988. According to
local organizations providing relief to the survivors, some 6,800 Kurds were
killed, the vast majority of them civilians.
It is a good thing that Bush has highlighted these atrocities by a regime
that is more brutal than most. Yet it is cynical to use them as a
justification for American plans to terminate the regime. By any measure,
the American record on Halabja is shameful.
Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and
declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of
Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence
officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that
the UNITED STATES, FULLY AWARE IT WAS IRAQ, ACCUSED IRAN, IRAQ'S ENEMY IN A
FIERCE WAR, OF BEING PARTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ATTACK. The State Department
instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of
this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed
to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the
terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.
This was at a time when Iraq was launching what proved to be the final
battles of the war against Iran. Its wholesale use of poison gas against
Iranian troops and Iranian Kurdish towns, and its threat to place chemical
warheads on the missiles it was lobbing at Tehran, brought Iran to its
knees.
Iraq had also just embarked on a counterinsurgency campaign, called the
Anfal, against its rebellious Kurds. In this effort, too, the regime's
resort to chemical weapons gave it a decisive edge, enabling the systematic
killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children.
The deliberate American prevarication on Halabja was the logical, although
probably undesired, outcome of a pronounced six-year tilt toward Iraq, seen
as a bulwark against the perceived threat posed by Iran's zealous brand of
politicized Islam. The United States began the tilt after Iraq, the
aggressor in the war, was expelled from Iranian territory by a resurgent
Iran, which then decided to pursue its own, fruitless version of regime
change in Baghdad. There was little love for what virtually all of
Washington recognized as an unsavory regime, but Iraq was considered the
lesser evil. Sealed by NATIONAL SECURITY DECISION DIRECTIVE 114 in 1983 ,
the tilt included BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN LOAN GUARANTEES AND OTHER CREDITS
TO IRAQ.
Sensing correctly that it had carte blanche, Saddam's regime escalated its
resort to gas warfare, graduating to ever more lethal agents. Because of the
strong Western animus against Iran, few paid heed. Then came Halabja.
Unfortunately for Iraq's sponsors, Iran rushed Western reporters to the
blighted town. The horrifying scenes they filmed were presented on prime
time television a few days later. Soon Ted Koppel could be seen putting the
Iraqi ambassador's feet to the fire on Nightline.
In response, the United States launched the "Iran too" gambit. The story was
cooked up in the Pentagon, interviews with the principals show. A newly
declassified STATE DEPARTMENT DOCUMENT DEMONSTRATES that U.S. DIPLOMATS
RECEIVED INSTRUCTIONS TO PRESS THIS LINE WITH US ALLIES, and to decline to
discuss the details.
It took seven weeks for the UN Security Council to censure the Halabja
attack. Even then, its choice of neutral language (condemning the "continued
use of chemical weapons in the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran
and Iraq," and calling on "both sides to refrain from the future use of
chemical weapons") diffused the effect of its belated move. Iraq proceeded
to step up its use of gas until the end of the war and even afterward,
during the final stage of the Anfal campaign, to devastating effect. When I
visited Halabja last spring, the town, razed by successive Iranian and Iraqi
occupiers, had been rebuilt, but the physical and psychological wounds
remained.
Some of those who engineered the tilt today are back in power in the Bush
administration.
They have yet to account for their judgment that it was Iran, not Iraq, that
posed the primary threat to the Gulf; for building up Iraq so that it
thought it could invade Kuwait and get away with it; for encouraging Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction programs by giving the regime a de facto green
light on chemical weapons use; and for turning a blind eye to Iraq's worst
atrocities, and then lying about it.
The writer is preparing a book on U.S. policy toward Iraq, with partial
support from the Open Society Institute and the MacArthur Foundation

act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.
Balle.  Appena gli USA si resero conto che era stato l'Iraq condannarono
l'atto in seno alla comunita' internazionale.
-Stefano