When Saddam gassed the Kurds, what did the U.S. do?

This is a well-written blog entry by Eric Black of the Mpls Star Tribune.

http://www.startribune.com/blogs/bigquestion/?p=192

The trial of Saddam Hussein has now moved to consideration of his biggest, most despicable crime, the Anfal, or the massacre of the Kurds. It was a major genocide, tens of thousands of victims, perhaps a hundred thousand, mostly civilian, whole villages wiped out.

Dropping chemical weapons from aircraft was only one of many methods of Kurd-killing between 1986 and 1989, but it became the shorthand for the whole contemptible campaign, even for Saddam’s whole quarter-century of savagery.

“Saddam Hussein is a man who is willing to gas his own people,” Pres. George W. Bush said on march 22, 2002, he he built the case for regime change by means of war.

Most of us, I suspect, would like to believe that our great nation is a moral force in the world, spreader of democracy, friend to the oppressed, scourge of the genocidal dictator. There are serious historical problems in applying this fairy tale, to this case, starting with this fact, which is seldom mentioned in the coverage of the trial:


Saddam Hussein was an ally of the United States before, during and after the Anfal.


Saddam started a war with Iran in 1980. Because of U.S. emnity with Iran, the Reagan Administration “tilted” toward Iraq in 1981. In 1982, the State Department removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

In December 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then a special presidential envoy, met with Saddam in Baghdad and told him that the United States wanted to resume full diplomatic relations. Saddam agreed. During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States provided Saddam with military and economic aid. Some of the forms of aid are summarized in this Star Tribune story by your future Big Questioner, which ran on the eve of the current war.

It was still the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, and the heyday of the U.S.-Iraq alliance, that Saddam began systematically slaughtering the Iraqi Kurds to punish them for the rebellions against his rule. The most famous attack was the gassing of Halabja, a mostly Kurdish city near the Iranian border, on March 16, 1988. Rebel Kurds, working with Iranian troops, had taken the town a few days earlier. The gassing, which killed an estimated 5,000 Kurds, was part of the successful Iraqi counterattack.

The genocide continued after the war with Iran had ended. The United States publicly condemned Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, but never suspended its aid programs to Saddam.

From the next portion of my own effort to deal with this unpleasant history, I outlined one senator’s unsuccessful effort to punish Saddam for the massacres:

U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., horrified at the attacks on the Kurds, got the Senate to unanimously adopt the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would end U.S. subsidies, U.S. purchases of Iraqi oil and ban the export to Iraq of technology that would help advance its weapons programs.

Still seeking to maintain its relationship with Iraq, and mindful that U.S. farmers and U.S. corporations were making a lot of money selling to Iraq, the White House opposed the sanctions.

One internal State Department memo put the tradeoff between ethical, political and economic considerations this way: “Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.”

The Prevention of Genocide Act died in the House.

In 1989, President George Bush opposed a second stripped-down Iraq sanctions bill right up to the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Within hours of the invasion, the bill passed 416-0 and Bush, by executive order, imposed a total embargo on Iraq and a freeze on Iraqi assets in the United States.

The story of what Saddam did to the Kurds is heart-breaking and will be retold in the phase of his trial just under way. May the opportunity to prove their case bring some measure of comfort to the survivors. Jefferson said “I tremble when I reflect that God is just.” May the Butcher of Baghdad so reflect and so tremble.

The story of how our country dealt with the crimes when they occurred is for us to face squarely and maturely and take into account in whatever way each of us chooses. History is not a fairy tale.