A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (34 page)

On August 20, 1988, Iran and Iraq signed an armistice ending their bloody struggle. Despite the vivid images from Halabja and the brief flurry of Western interest in the Kurds, their suffering had faded from public view. Al-Majid continued his ruthless drive to empty rural Kurdistan throughout the summer, dragging away any Kurd who dared remain in the prohibited areas. On August 25 Iraq launched a new attack on Kurdish villages, using aircraft, fixed-wing helicopters, tanks, and tens of thousands of Iraqi troops. It was the "final" offensive in al-Majid's six--month Anfal campaign.

After ignoring Iraqi attacks for so long, senior U.S. officials had to take notice of this one. Perched at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Rankin remembers his reaction to the news:

We at the embassy thought that once the Iran-Iraq war ended, Hussein would bring his country and his people, who had so much potential and who had suffered for so long, out of oblivion. We told ourselves that if he no longer had to fight Iran, he could become the man we wished he could be. But when he signed the cease-fire with Iran and tI en gassed the Kurds, he lost his cover. It was clear he could never be that man. He was a nionster.These attacks had nothing to do with his Iranian security threat.They had to do with killing Kurds.

The final offensive against the Kurds was widely known. Two days after it began, the New York Times reported that in late July Iraq had dispatched at least 20,000 elite forces to the north and quoted one regional expert as saying, "We get the impression that the Iraqis wanted to finish the whole business" A long front-page story on September 1, 1988, described the deployment of more than 60,000 troops and led with the sentence," Iraq has begun a major offensive [meant to] crush the 40-year-long insurgency once and for all"' The media gave this offensive more intensive coverage than previous Iraqi assaults because it quickly sent 65,000 Kurdish victims and survivors flooding into Turkey. The Turkish government was nonetoo-pleased by the destabilizing Kurdish influx, but it set up encampments along its border and refused to grant Iraq the reciprocal right of "hot pursuit" that Turkish forces had invoked so often to track down armed Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurdish refugees did what Cambodians had done: They poured out their stories to journalists, who had full and free access to southern Turkey. These stories got Galbraith's attention immediately and that of the U.S. secretary of state eventually.

"Genocide"

Galbraith had kept his eye out for bad news from northern Iraq since March, when he had learned of the Halabja attack. There was no question that Hussein's recent deeds suggested a ruthlessness that boded extremely ill for the Kurdish people: the elimination of the Kurdish villages, the widespread disappearances (and probable execution) of Kurdish men, and Hussein's repeated, brazen use of chemical weapons. Galbraith had begun to wonder whether Hussein was committing genocide.

Galbraith saw a certain internal logic in Hussein's piecemeal campaign. He believed the Iraqi dictator might be husbanding the full might of his armed forces, knowing that a more gradual campaign against the Kurds would enable him to keep his soldiers committed, forestall a more spirited international reaction, and enable the local economy (fueled largely by Kurds) to remain afloat.

On Galbraith's trip to Iraq in 1987, he had seen dozens of villages and small cities demolished far from the sensitive border with Iran. He also knew that al-Majid's dragnet was sweeping up women and children as well. All Kurds in rural Kurdistan were vulnerable, regardless of their political sympathies. Loyalty to the Baghdad regime was no protection, as the Kurdish jash, those who worked for the Iraqi government, discovered. At a meeting in 1987, al-Majid told one jash, "I cannot let your village stay... I will attack it with chemical weapons.'Then you and your family will

it was with Hussein's August offensive, launched after the end of his war with Iran, that Galbraith's worst suspicions were confirmed. On August 28, 1988, tucked away in Vermont for a relaxing Labor Day weekend, Galbraith came across a short Neu' York Times report buried back on page A15.The piece, "More Chemical Attacks Reported," described Iraqi Kurds crossing into Turkey and reporting gas attacks.'? He froze, as images of the rubbled remains of Kurdish life flashed into his mind. He read the same sixty-three words over and over again, draining the news item for any details that might be lurking between the lines.

Galbraith was sure that the reports of chemical attacks were true. Although he could not gauge precisely the breadth of the brutal campaign of gassing, execution, and depopulation under way, Galbraith believed Hussein's regime had set out to destroy Iraqi Kurds. It was genocide.

It was just one of those moments of recognition. I just knew it was true.... I knew then that we could never be fully certain that Hussein wanted to destroy the Kurds, but we would also never be more certain.

Unlike the Cambodia watchers of the late 1970s or most of Washington's Iraq watchers at the time, Galbraith knew that the genocide convention did not require an intent to exterminate every last Iraqi Kurd. Working for Senator Pell, one of Proxmire's co-conspirators in pushing for U.S. ratification of the convention, Galbraith had come to appreciate some of the nuances inherent in the law's notion of "destruction" He had surveyed Lemkin's writings and the drafting history of the genocide convention, and he knew that a perpetrator did not have to be executing attacks as holistic in scope as the Holocaust to qualify as genocide. The category of genocide was valuable because it described an ongoing or outstanding intent, where as the "Holocaust" described a singulary monstrous event that had already happened. "These things accelerate," Galbraith says. "Hitler, when he took power in 1933, did not have a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. Evil begets evil." Hussein and Hitler were both fascist ideologues intent on destroying groups they found distasteful or, for their own reasons, threatening. Hussein's aims were clearly more limited than Hitler's. It was only Kurds in the "prohibited areas" who had thus far been marked for destruction. But Galbraith believed the million or more Kurds living in Baghdad would eventually be targeted as well: "While at that time the extermination campaign was focused on Kurds in rural areas and small towns, I thought that the logic of his program could culminate in the elimination of the entire Kurdish population of Iraq."

Galbraith raced back to Washington to begin making his case on Capitol Hill. He knew a great deal about Lemkin's law, but he knew almost nothing about his lobbying. Yet within days Galbraith had drafted a new law and begun pursuing its passage with all the blunt zeal of his Polish predecessor.

Response

Sanctioning Saddam

When word of the August offensive broke, the Reagan administration had a number of options available. It could have condemned the new wave of gas attacks. It could have demanded that its ally stop destroying rural Kurdish life. It could have urged that the men and women taken away in the previous offensives be released. And it could have threatened to suspend some of the economic perks it had been extending to Baghdad for the past five years.

Because Congress controlled the purse strings, Galbraith understood that legislators could have considerable influence on how the United States used its economic leverage abroad. Senate staffers were not permitted to speak on the record to the press. Nor could they publish articles under their own names.Yet with the backing of a powerful senator, they could do something far more influential: They could draft U.S. law. Most U.S. laws are proposed by the executive branch. Some are drafted by lobbyists and adopted by the Senate. And many more are drafted by House and Senate staff, especially the committee staff. Having worked for Pell on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a decade, Galbraith knew that the senator, the son of the Roosevelt administration's representative to the Allied War Crimes Commission, would want to use U.S. law to take a stand. He was right.

After its month-long August recess, the Senate returned for its last weeks of business of the year on September 7, 1988. At the urging of his boss, Galbraith dashed off the draft law in an hour, writing in English that all could understand (a gift he attributed to avoiding law school)."This was not a deeply reflective process," Galbraith remembers. "I included every sanction that I could think of"; indeed, his bill contained harsher sanctions than those imposed against apartheid South Africa. The sanctions package barred Iraqi oil imports, worth $500 million per year; instructed U.S. officials to vote against Iraqi loans at the IMF and World Bank; eliminated $500 million in annual CCC credit guarantees to Iraq for the purchase of U.S. agricultural foodstuffs; terminated $200 million in annual exportimport credits for manufactured goods; and prohibited exports to Iraq of any item that required an export license (e.g., sensitive technology or any item with possible military use).

One of the boldest features of the bill was also one of its most novel. Instead of requiring the president to prove that genocide was being committed, which is always hard to do while atrocities are still under way and which an administration aligned with Hussein had no incentive to demonstrate, Pell's legislation reversed the burden: President Reagan was required to certify that Iraq was not using chemical weapons against the Kurds and that it was not committing genocide."' If Reagan wished to avoid sanctions, he would have to defend Iraqi conduct affirmatively.

Senator Pell asked the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, to cosponsor the bill, which he did. Helms had battled Pell and Proxmire over the genocide convention, but he often took a strong stand against flagrantly abusive regimes. In this instance he and his wife had been moved by an encounter with three Kurds who were on hunger strikes to protest the Iraqi atrocities, whom they met through their church, the First Baptist in Alexandria, Virginia." Four other senators-Proxmire, Al Gore (D.-Tenn.), Wendell Ford (D.-Ky.), and Senate majority leader Robert Byrd (D.-W.Va.)-heard of the draft law and joined in introducing it. Pell and Helms were able to "hotline" the measure, bypassing the Foreign Relations Committee, which had already held its last business meeting of the year. This gave staff members and senators virtually no time to review the bill. Galbraith had named the law the "Prevention of Genocide Act," a title that he thought would resonate. "I wanted a title that would call attention to the crimes taking place and rally support for the legislation," Galbraith recalls. He also wanted to make it less likely that senators would in fact read the bill. If he had called the measure the "Iraqi Sanctions Act," he knew U.S. business lobbies would read and scuttle it. Additionally, because of the "moral hightone" of the label, senators might assume that this bill, like others in such a tenor, was merely hortatory.

Galbraith had something unseemly working in his favor. Since April 1987 Hussein had been purging and killing Kurds with a variety of weapons. But this most recent offensive involved chemical weapons, which killed in a more grisly way than machine guns and captured the imagination of U.S. lawmakers. Ensconced in a country attacked only once in the twentieth century, most Americans did not feel vulnerable when foreign slaughter was discussed. Before September 11, 2001, most Americans believed that the large-scale murder of civilians could only occur miles from home. But chemical weapons were different. They had crept into American consciousness because they did not respect national rankings and were unimpressed by geographic isolation. No matter how thick U.S. defenses, the gasses could penetrate. The horrors of gassing entered the Western imagination back in April 1915, when British soldiers were subjected to what Churchill called the "hellish poison" of German mustard gas. At the Battle of Ypres in Belgium, these gases wounded 10,000, killed some 5,000, and ushered in a tit-for-tat series of chemical attacks that left more than 100,000 dead. The gasses blistered the skin and singed the lungs. The deaths were slow; the last days of life ghastly. British poet Wilfred Owen, who was himself exposed to the chemicals, lived the horror of the trenches and brought it vividly home to postwar Britain with his wrenching "Dulce et Decorum Est." The poem describes the "helpless sight" of stricken soldiers, "guttering, choking, drowning," and "gargling from froth-corrupted lungs." Decades later, Owen's words remained artifacts of a substance to be abhorred and a weapon to be avoided. Gassing could happen to us because it had happened and because victims of gassing attacks, scientists, and artists have detailed the vomiting, blistering, choking, singeing, and peeling associated with chemical weapons.

U.S. senators knew that chemical weapons had become all too easy to acquire in the 1980s. Nuclear weapons required either plutonium or highly enriched uranium, which had few suppliers, and sophisticated chemical and engineering processes and equipment were needed to convert the fissionable material. Chemical weapons, by contrast, were cheap and said to take a garage and a little high school chemistry to make. They were the poor man's nuke.The news media were filled with accounts of rogue states and terrorist groups that had stockpiled deadly chemicals.

Galbraith recognized that generic fears about chemical weapons use and proliferation could he a kind of Trojan horse by which he could muster congressional support for punishing Iraq for its broader campaign of destruction aimed at the Kurds. Like Lemkin and Proxmire, he made a prudential, interest-based case for the Pell-Helnis bill, emphasizing the gassing more than Hussein's other means of killing. "Right now the Kurds are paying the price for past global indifference to Iraqi chemical weapons use," he wrote. "The failure to act now could ultimately leave every nation in peril.""' In private Galbraith worried that if a pro-sanctions Senate coalition were held together only because of Hussein's use of poisons, the Iraqi dictator might simply revise his tactics and massacre civilians in other ways. "Most of those senators were concerned not with the Kurds but with the instrument of death, the chemical weapons," Galbraith remembers. "I wasn't concerned with the use of chemical weapons as such but with their use as a way of destroying the Kurdish people.These weapons were not any more evil than guns" Nevertheless, he needed all the help he could get on the sanctions legislation, and he took it.