A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (30 page)

U.S. Prism: The Enemy of My Enemy

The U.S. refusal to bar the genocidal Khmer Rouge from the United Nations during the 1980s was an explicit outgrowth of U.S. hostility toward Vietnam. So, too, in the Middle Fast, the U.S. response to Iraq's atrocities against the Kurds stemmed from its aversion toward revolutionary Iran.The United States was aghast at the prospect of Iraqi oil reserves falling into the Ayatollah Khomeini's hands; it feared that radical Islam would destabilize the pro-American governments in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates.Thus, with each Iranian battlefield victory, the United States inched closer to Iraq-a warming that had tremendous bearing on the American response to Hussein's subsequent atrocities against the Kurds.

During the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Khmer Rouge terror, the United States had been neutral or, eventually, in World War II, at war with the genocidal regime. Here, the United States ended up aligned with one. Unwilling to see an Iranian victory, the Reagan administration began in December 1982 to intervene to offset Iranian gains. In what Secretary of State George Shultz called "a limited form of balance-ofpower policy," the United States provided Iraq with an initial $210 million in agricultural credits to buy U.S. grain, wheat, and rice under the CCC. This figure soon climbed to $500 million per year. The credits were essential because Iraq's poor credit rating and high rate of default made banks reluctant to loan it money." The United States also gave Iraq access to export-import credits for the purchase of goods manufactured in the United States.7 And after Baghdad expelled the Abu Nidal Black June terrorist group, the United States removed Iraq from its list of countries sponsoring terrorism. In November 1984 the United States and Iraq restored diplomatic relations, which had been severed during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. U.S. officials had detailed knowledge of Hussein's reliance on torture and executions, but the United States could not allow Iran to defeat him."

Because both Iran and Iraq were stockpiling weapons and ideological resentments that could hurt the United States, U.S. leaders did not protest much as the two sides destroyed one another. A clear victory by Iraq would not be terribly good for U.S. interests either. Iran might collapse, allowing the brutal Hussein to dominate the Gulf. Americans lapsed into thinking about the conflict (to the extent that they thought of it at all) as one between Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini. They thought little of the poorly trained teenagers being hurled into battle.

As Iraq gathered favor with the United States, the Kurds continued to lose favor with Iraq. In 1982 Baghdad began clearing more Kurdish territories, forcing many of those who had been relocated into housing complexes to move again.The prohibited zones were expanded inward from the border and the resettlement policies intensified. Because Iraq wanted to move all Kurds it did not control, any Kurds who did not live along the main roads or in the major towns were targets. This time, when Hussein's regime deported the Kurds, it paid no compensation to those who left, and it cut off all services and banned trade for those who stayed. Because Iraq was concentrating its military resources on Iran, however, its enforcement of the zones remained somewhat erratic.

The Kurds had always been opportunists, and as the Iraq-Iran conflict wore on, both major Kurdish political parties opted to team with Iran. In 1983 one of the two main Kurdish factions (loyal to Barzani) helped the Iranian fighters capture an Iraqi border town, Haj Omran. Iraqi forces swiftly responded, rounding up some 8,000 Kurdish men from the Barzani clan. Among them were 315 children, aged between eight and seventeen. "I tried to hold on to my youngest son, who was small and very sick," remembered one mother. "I pleaded with them, `You took the other three, please let me have this one: They just told nie, `If you say anything else, we'll shoot you,' and then hit me in the chest with a rifle butt. They took the boy. He was in the fifth grade"The men (and boys) were loaded onto buses, driven south, and never seen again. The women, who became known as the "Barzani widows," still carry framed photographs of their missing husbands, sons, and brothers and remain, like their spiritual sisters in Buenos Aires and Bosnia, desperate to learn the fates of their men. Saddam Hussein was not shy about admitting what his forces had done. In a speech reminiscent of Turkish interior minister Talaat's public boastings in 1915, Hussein proclaimed, "They betrayed the country and they betrayed the covenant, and we meted out a stern punishment to them and they went to hell"" Although the Kurds attempted to press their case in Western circles, neither the United States nor its allies protested the killings.

The American tendency to write off the region was so pronounced that the United States did not even complain when Hussein acquired between 2,000 and 4,000 tons of deadly chemical agents and began experimenting with the gasses against the Iranians."' Policymakers responded as if the ayatollah had removed the Iranian people (and especially Iranian soldiers) from the universe of moral and legal obligation. Iraq used chemical weapons approximately 195 times between 1983 and 1988, killing or wounding, according to Iran, some 50,000 people, many of them civilians." One Iraqi commander was quoted widely saying, "for every insect there is an insecticide."'' These weapons instilled such psychological terror that even well-equipped troops tended to break and run after small losses."

The United States had much to lose from the use and proliferation of chemical weapons. But still the State Department and even the Congress largely let the Iraqi attacks slide. Reports of Iraq's chemical use against Iran first reached Secretary of State Shultz in late 1983. It was not until March 5, 1984, that the State Department spokesman finally issued a condemnation. And even then he tempered the sting of the demarche by rendering it two-sided. "While condemning Iraq's resort to chemical weapons," the spokesman said, "the United States also calls on the government of Iran to accept the good offices offered by a number of countries and international organizations to put an end to the bloodshed"" And even this even-handed statement went too far for many in the U.S. intelligence community. On March 7, 1984, an intelligence analyst complained: "We have demolished a budding relationship [with Iraq] by taking a tough position in opposition to chemical weapons ."" Internal efforts to promote a new international treaty banning chemical weapons production, use, and transfer met with stiff resistance from the Washington national security community and from allies like West Germany, which were profiting handsomely from the sale of chemical agents.The most that the international community mustered was a 1987 UN Security Council Resolution that generally "deplored" chemical weapons use."'

U.S. officials justified their soft response to Iraqi chemical weapons use on several grounds. They portrayed it as a weapon of last resort deployed only after more traditional Iraqi defenses were flattened. Although Iraq carried out first-use attacks, the operations were frequently presented as defensive attacks designed mainly to deflect or disrupt Iranian offensives, not to gain ground." This, of course, was a fine line to walk, as proponents of the preemptive, defensive rationale might have applied the same logic to rationalize nuclear first use.

A typical U.S. response to reports of chemical attacks was to demand further investigation. On several occasions the UN dispatched fact-finding teams, which verified that the Iraqis had used mustard and tabun gas. But policymakers greeted their reports with an insistence that both sides were guilty." Once Hussein saw he would not be sanctioned for using these weapons against Iran, the Iraqi dictator knew he was on to something.

A Friend Beyond the Mountains

Peter Galbraith monitored developments in the Gulf from Capitol Hill, where he was a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Galbraith, the son of Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was an unusual Washington operator. On the one hand, he earned widespread respect for his conviction and his willingness to explore foreign hot spots in person. On the other hand, he was notorious for arriving late to meetings, for dressing sloppily, and for acquiring tunnel vision on behalf of his causes. I met him for the first time in 1993, five years after the Anfal campaign, at a plush Washington breakfast in honor ofTurkish president Turgut Ozal. The guest list was refined, including Pamela Harriman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. When Powell arrived at the breakfast, the waters seemed to part before him. He had height, width, grooming, and striking confidence, a marked contrast to the frazzled thirty-something man who rushed into the room after the guests had moved from their breakfast fruit plates to their second cups of coffee. When Galbraith noted that the only empty seat was at the head table, he maneuvered clumsily toward the front of the banquet hall. It was early morning, but his tie was already as loose as one that has freed itself at the end of a draining day. One side of his shirt was untucked in the front. His straight, thinning brown hair stood on end. General Powell eyed Galbraith skeptically as the young Senate staffer plopped down beside him.

In the question-answer session that followed Ozal's presentation, most of the distinguished guests inquired politely about the future of U.S.-Turkish ties or heaped profuse praise upon the Turkish leader for his country's cooperation during the 1991 Gulf War. Galbraith quickly assumed the role of spoiler, posing the only taxing question of the morning. "The first goal of Kurds in northern Iraq is independence," Galbraith said. "Their second preference is some kind of affiliation with'Turkey. The last thing they want is to remain part of Iraq. What is your view?"

The audience gasped at what they feared was a characteristically undiplomatic question. In fact, Galbraith knew Ozal to have had a Kurdish grandmother and to be relatively sympathetic. The Turkish president gave an animated, lengthy response.

The Kurdish cause was not the first that had made Galbraith alienate official Washington. His first significant contribution to American law and humanitarian relief had been the McGovern amendment, which he drafted in the summer of 1979 to allow U.S. humanitarian assistance to Cambodia after the country had fallen to the Vietnamese. The law had passed, but Galbraith complained so bitterly about the committee's changes that he was one of the first to be laid off when cutbacks were needed in December 1979. "I was my usual self back then, neither impressing people nor making friends," he remembers. "They had the rap on me right away-I was concerned with a flaky issue, and I was not really a foreign policy professional. I cared too much about the humanitarian aspect, I didn't dress particularly well, and I didn't comb my hair properly." McGovern intervened personally to have Galbraith rehired, this time to work directly for Senator Pell, who was thought to be similarly concerned with flaky issues. It was not long before Galbraith discovered the Kurds.

Galbraith traveled to Iraq for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the first time in 1984. Although he would later become the Kurds' leading advocate in Washington, initially he, like everyone else, allowed his diagnosis of Hussein's behavior to be affected by what he knew to be the overall U.S. objectives in the region. Galbraith agreed with the Reagan administration's assessment that America's highest priority should be making sure that Iran did not win the war, which it seemed on the verge of doing.The young Senate staffer arrived in Iraq knowing nothing about the Kurds and little about the Middle East. He spotted tanned men with baggy pants in the hills, but they barely left an impression. Geopolitics and the interests of the United States dominated his perspective almost entirely.

In 1987 Galbraith made a second committee trip to Iraq. This time he saw scenes that made him more prone to believe subsequent allegations of Iraqi genocide against Kurds. What is surprising, in retrospect, is that Iraq, which had stepped up its brutal counter-insurgency campaign in March 1987, permitted access to American visitors at all. Because Iraq had never been sanctioned for prior atrocities against the Kurds, the regime must have been confident it would pay no price for exposure. In addition, Hussein had become alarmed by recent press reports about American backroom arms deals with Iran.'" The Iraqi ambassador in Washington, Nizar Hamdoon, hoped that by rolling out the red carpet to Galbraith, he would tip the balance back toward Iraq.

Galbraith took up Hamdoon's offer to visit Iraq in early September 1987, joining the U.S. embassy's Haywood Rankin on an eight-day factfinding trip. Travel for diplomats and journalists anywhere in Iraq was severely circumscribed. Those diplomats who wished to leave Baghdad had to apply forty-eight hours in advance to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. They were sure to be followed. Western journalists were granted visas to the country only rarely, and if they wrote critically, they knew they would be barred from return. But the biggest obstacle to intelligence gathering was fear-fear for one's own life and fear of endangering Iraqis. Rankin traveled beyond Baghdad more than any other Western diplomat, but he never lost sight of the risks. "Getting killed in an ambush or running over a land mine weren't high on anybody's list of things to do," Rankin recalls. "I guess it took people either as curious or as dumb as Peter and me to go wandering into the north." Even once they were out of Baghdad, Rankin notes, "we had to be careful not to let our desire for information interfere with the desire of ordinary people to stay alive."A 1984 amendment to the Iraqi penal code prescribed the death penalty for anyone who even "communicated" with a foreign state if it resulted in "damage to the military, political or economic position of Iraq." 21 ' Like their counterparts in the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia, Iraqis deemed critical of the regime would rarely escape with their lives. Indeed, the paranoia of the regime was such that a British civil engineer was arrested, beaten, and tortured for accidentally causing a picture of Saddam Hussein to fall to the ground when he leaned against a wall at a construction site."The Kurds were so frightened by Iraqi officialdom that there was only so much a pair of American sleuths were going to learn as they roamed the countryside. But they could gather stark visual impressions.