A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (37 page)

Hoagland's September 8 editorial in the Washington Post was entitled "Make No Mistake-This Is Genocide." Hoagland noted that the "Iraqi version of genocide ... does not have the maniacal pace or organization of Hitler's Germany or Pol Pot's Cambodia," but urged that the United States stop shrinking "from branding Iraq's actions with the horrible word." The State Department's low-key "expressions of concern" to the Baghdad government would do little to comfort the Kurds, who he wrote were being dynamited, bulldozed, and gassed to oblivion."" In a later editorial, Hoagland stuck with the Holocaust theme. Hussein's attack on the Kurds was "the most ghastly case of the use of poison gas since the Nazi death camps."The Reagan administration's endless search for "evidence" provided a familiar fig leaf for inaction. "Reports of massive gassing of Jews by the Nazis were regularly dismissed because they lacked `evidence,"' he wrote. "Those who did not want to know, or act, in World War I I were always able to find the lack of proof at the night moment""` The Washington Post editorial board followed Hoagland's lead. "In a world in which many things are muted, this one is clear," the Post said."If gas is not to be considered beyond the limits, then there are no limits.''

Galbraith maintained periodic contact with Safire and Hoagland during this period because he knew that a single editorial would be more valuable in the legislative fight than an entire committee report.

Galbraith also invoked the Holocaust when possible. He named the report from his trip "Iraq's Final Solution." But Gerald Christianson, staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wanted to shy away from the controversy that Galbraith seemed to court and insisted that the committee report title be changed to "Iraq's Final Offensive" Christianson thought that the Holocaust analogy would alienate some members of Congress and that those it moved would not need such blatant cues. He argued that the combination of gas, haggard refugees, and destruction would be enough to stir the association.

Special Interests, National Interest

Galbraith found bedlam on Capitol Hill on the day of his return from Turkey. Some eighty yellow message slips lay scattered on his desk. The sanctions bill faced steep opposition from the White House and State Department, which he had expected, but also from the House. Most disappointing, many of the senators who had supported the measure a week before had since been clued into its contents and consequences. They were now reconsidering.

Some of the opposition on the Hill was structural. The House Foreign Affairs Committee leadership tended to be more deferential than the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the foreign policy prerogatives of the executive branch, which opposed sanctions in this case. Representative Bill Frenzel (R.-Minn.) testified to this concern, asking, "How can our government provide effective leadership, moral and otherwise, if the administration must always be second-guessed by a Congress which wants to make its own foreign policy with splashy headlines?"`7 The White House blanched every time Congress went about making foreign policy. Similarly, the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over trade, frowned upon using trade as a political tool and thus generally objected to sanctions bills.

But the real opposition derived from an excessive faith in diplomacy and, more fundamentally, from a desire to advance U.S. economic interests. First, the Reagan White House could not accept that years of investment in Iraq would not create a kinder, gentler dictator. "They were sure they were going to convert Saddain Hussein and make him `my fair lady,"' says David Korn, the former State Department Middle East specialist. Some genuinely believed carrots would achieve more than sticks.They spoke of Iraq's assurances as if they were reliable. Iraq was coming around. "If [our objective] is to prevent the further use of chemical weapons in Kurdistan in the immediate future, this may no longer be an issue," one analyst wrote on September 9, 1988. "We have been told in Baghdad that the campaign against the Kurds is coming to an end, and as a practical matter, there will be little or no need for continued Iraqi use of chemical weapons once the Kurdish insurgence has been suppressed""" Private overtures were paying dividends. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz said on September 17 that Iraq "respects" its obligations under international law. In the weeks ahead, the administration repeatedly referred back to Aziz's single, incomplete statement as evidence that Washington's gentle persuasion was working. Aziz's credibility had apparently not suffered for having repeatedly denied that Iraq had used poison gas in the first place."" U.S. officials even filled in the blanks left open in Iraq's renunciation. "We take this statement to mean that Iraq forswears the use of chemical weapons in internal as well as international conflicts," State Department spokesman Charles Redman said.'"' The United States would neither punish past use of chemical weapons nor threaten punishment for future use. The farthest it went was to warn that additional attacks would cause the department to "reconsider" its opposition to sanctions."' Representative Tom Lantos (D.-Calif.), a Holocaust survivor, declared: "I am intrigued by the logic which views a criminal act, sweeps it aside and focuses on the intent of the criminal to engage in further criminal acts"12

But the Reagan administration continued to act as though economic incentives and warm ties would influence Saddam Hussein's regime. James Baker, then secretary of the treasury, wrote later:

Diplomacy-as well as the American psyche-is fundamentally biased toward "improving relations." Shifting a policy away from cooperation toward confrontation is always a more difficult proposition-particularly when support for the existing policy is as firmly embedded among various constituencies and bureaucratic interests as was the policy toward Iraq."'

The Defense Intelligence Agency was issuing predictions that Hussein would likely try to "defeat decisively" or crush "once and for all" the Kurds, but U.S. diplomats downplayed the campaign against the Kurdish minority and hoped for the best."'

U.S. patience would have worn thin far sooner if not for American farming, manufacturing, and geopolitical interests in Iraq. The policy of engagement was virtually uncontested at the State Department and White House. Internal memoranda thus tended to lament Iraqi repression only parenthetically: "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.""'

One-quarter of the rice grown in Arkansas, Galbraith swiftly gathered, was exported to Iraq. Approximately 23 percent of overall U.S. rice output went there. One staffer representing Senator John Breaux of Louisiana actually appeared before Galbraith in tears and accused him of committing genocide against Louisiana rice growers. U.S. farmers also annually exported about I million tons of wheat to Iraq. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the father of the author of the sanctions package, mused to me years later, "The one thing you don't want to do is take on the American farmer. There aren't many left, but you've got to take care of them." The administration got immediate assistance from U.S. farm and industry lobbyists who had read the Congressional Record and were horrified that the sanctions bill had slipped quietly by their Senate friends. With a hideous lack of irony, several chemical companies also called to inquire how their products might be affected if sanctions were imposed to punish chemical weapons use.

What is both remarkable and typical about the shift in Senate sentiment toward the bill is that the senators who had voted for the sanctions bill on September 9, 1988, changed their votes without even taking the time to substantiate that a vote for the prevention of Genocide Act would necessarily cost them the support of the special interests. Committee Staff I )irector Christianson recalls that this happened often on Capitol Hill:

In many cases the Senators and their staffs overreact in terms of what they feel needs to be done to placate the special interests.They go one better. Or they anticipate a problem even before somebody has cotn- plained.They are so sensitive. They don't say to themselves,"We vote with this lobby nine out of ten times, so we can afford to go our own way this tinge" It is not a rational calculation. They feel that nothing is worth the risk of losing the support.

Although these sources of opposition were obvious at the time, none of the bill's critics dared argue that it was wrong to stop Hussein's gassing of the Kurds; they "simply" argued that, "unfortunately," the means that Senators Pell and Helms had selected-economic sanctions-and the place that foreign policy was being made-Capitol Hill--were inappropriate.

The stories the U.S. officials told themselves are by now familiar and can be grouped into Hirschman's futility, perversity, and jeopardy categories of justification. From the futility perspective, the Iraqi regime had already retreated into isolation and would not respond to outside pressure. What's more, farmers and manufacturers from other countries would quickly fill the vacuum, so Hussein would end up with all the farm goods, credits, and trade he needed. From the perversity standpoint, slapping sanctions on Iraq would only anger the Iraqi dictator and make him more likely to punish the Kurds of northern Iraq. Economic sanctions would be "useless or counterproductive," the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau argued. They would reduce U.S. influence over Iraq and allow European and Japanese businesses to help Iraq rebuild its economy.'' "If it wasn't us," the State Department's Larry Pope insists today,"it would have been someone else." France had a thriving arms business with Iraq. Germany nonchalantly sold insecticide and other chemicals to Baghdad. Britain's commercial interests also took priority. One secret State Department briefing memo listed a set of sanctions, ranging from economic to diplomatic-for example, placing Iraq back on the terrorism list, withdrawing the U.S. ambassador from Baghdad, or suspending the military intelligence liaison relationship. The U.S. analyst concluded: "The disadvantages of all of these actions are obvious. In differing degrees, they would have a sharp negative impact on our ability to influence the Iraqi regime, and set in motion a downward spiral of action and reaction which would be unpredictable and uncontrollable.""' U.S. diplomats in Baghdad warned, "If [Hussein] perceives a choice between correct relations with the USA and public humiliation, he will not hesitate to let the relationship fall completely by the wayside.""'

Nowhere in the internal debates about the sanctions package can one find U.S. officials arguing that Hussein was more vulnerable to economic levers than ever before. After the war with Iran, Iraq was looking to roll over some $70 billion in debt, one of the highest per capita debts in the world. The Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have required Washington to vote against loans to Iraq at international financial institutions, could have ravaged Iraq's credit rating and provoked a massive financial crisis that Hussein surely hoped to avoid.

The United States had tremendous leverage with Iraq. Apart from supplying hefty agricultural and manufacturing credits, the United States was Iraq's primary oil importer. But the Reagan administration viewed U.S. influence as something to be stored, not squandered.

The administration and the special interests got help making their case for futility, perversity, and jeopardy from Middle East analysts. One scholar, Milton Viorst, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitled "Poison Gas and `Genocide':The Shaky Case Against Iraq" Nearly a full month after Shultz had confirmed Iraqi chemical attacks,Viorst urged Congress not to impose sanctions against Iraq because the punishment would be exacted for a crime "which, according to some authorities, may never have taken place." He suggested that Iraqi radio intercepts were likely "subject to conflicting interpretations" and hinted that the United States might be adopting its new stand simply to placate Iran or to secure the release of U.S. hostages. Having spent a whole week in Iraq "looking into the question," Viorst described the findings he had gathered from an Iraqi helicopter. He explained away the ruins of hundreds of Kurdish villages he had seen by arguing that the Iraqi army was simply denying sanctuary to Kurdish rebels. He could not say for sure that lethal gas had not been used, but even though he had been serviced and escorted by the Iraqi authorities, he felt confident enough to "conclude that if lethal gas was used, it was not used genocidally." Without mentioning that any Kurd in Iraq who spoke to the press risked execution,Viorst noted," If there had been large-scale killing, it is likely they would know and tell the world about it. But neither I nor any westerner I encountered heard such allegations." He wrote, "In Baghdad, I attended a gala Kurdish wedding, where the eating, drinking and dancing belied any suggestion that the community was in danger"""

Opposing "Inaccurate Terms"

The State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs had lost the fight with INR over Iraq's culpability. But it succeeded in convincing Shultz to offend Iraq no further. "Our condemnation of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish insurgency has shaken the fragile U.S.-Iraqi relationship and been heavily criticized in the Arab world," NEA head Murphy wrote. "We need to move quickly to ensure that our action is seen as anti-[chemical weapons], not anti-Iraq or pro-Iran" "Specifically," Murphy urged, "we should oppose legislation which uses inaccurate terms like genocide.."'"' He offered no suggestions as to how the United States might influence Iraq so that it would refrain from attacking the rural Kurdish populace.The bureau's focus was on preservation of the U.S.-Iraq relationship.

Shultz's State Department heeded Murphy's advice and framed virtually all criticism of Iraq in terms that focused on the particular weapons employed rather than the attacks themselves. Both publicly and in private meetings with senior Iraqis, Shultz described steep stakes to allowing chemical weapons use and proliferation. "For a long while this genie had been kept in the bottle," Shultz said, explaining the diplomatic assault. Now, he added, "it's out"121 President Reagan used his final speech before the United Nations to propose the staging of an international conference that would nourish and reinforce the commitment of signatories to the 1925 Geneva protocol ban on chemical weapons use. His spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, stressed that U.S. relations with Iraq had warmed considerably in recent years. "We want to see those relations continue to devel op," he said. "Our position that we've taken on chemical warfare, chemical weapons, is in no way intended to diminish our interest in those bilateral relations"'"