Just A Lot of Gas?
It would be ludicrous to deny that Saddam Hussein was brutal and ruthless. He had no compunction about killing those he perceived as 'traitors.' To quote someone a bit closer to home, Hussein lived by the maxim "If you're not for me, you're against me."
In I Was Saddam's Son by Latif Yahia, a 'double' for Uday Hussein, Yahia claims that "As a five-year-old, Uday's father took him to executions of opposition figures, as a 10-year-old he watched torture sessions." It is no surprise then that Uday became sociopathic and psychotic.
Saddam Hussein was particularly brutal toward those he considered enemies. But does this excuse the Bush Administration's distortion of information to convince Americans that ousting Hussein was imperative? That a man horrible enough to gas his own people would have no compunction about using WMD against others?
It is often reported as fact that Hussein gassed the Kurds in Halabja. But according to an opinion piece in the New York Times by former senior CIA analyst Dr. Stephen Pellitiere, a Defense Intelligence Agency report produced in 1990 determined that Iranian gas, not Iraqi gas, killed the Kurdish citizens in Halabja.
A report produced by the US Army War College Institute (USAWCI), of which Pellitiere was a co-author, concluded that the gas that killed the Kurds was more consistent with Iran's known weapons than Iraq's. The conclusion was that Iran gassed the Kurds by accident, believing Iraqi soldiers to have displaced the Kurds in Halabja and that Iraq gassed them for much the same reason--a belief that Iranian soldiers were in Halabja--but that the more lethal Iranian gas resulted in the deaths.
Although several media outlets reported on this report's conclusion, the information seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of the administration's oft-repeated claim that Hussein gassed the Kurds. Indeed, on an episode of MSNBC's Buchanan and Press, one Republican congressman--eyes almost glazed--answered every question about Bush misleading the country by waving pictures of Halabja's gassed Kurds and repeating the mantra "This is all the convincing I need."
Slate takes issue with the USAWCI report's conclusion, referring to opposing conclusions by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, and in Iraq: Eye of the Storm by Dilip Hiro, Hiro makes the argument that Iraqis gassed the Kurds believing Iranian soldiers to be occupying the town.
It may be impossible to determine who was responsible without someone in Iraq or Iran making an admission or unless documents are uncovered by coalition troops in Iraq. Still, there is another question to consider. Is it correct to label the Kurds "Saddam's own people"?
The Kurds joined forces with Iran to fight against Iraq and the Iraqi government. In our country, we call this treason, punishable by death. Indeed, Americans are imprisoned at Guantanamo as unlawful combatants for allegedly fighting alongside the Taliban against US forces.
It would be like California aligning with Mexico in a bid to overthrow the US government. If Bush dropped bombs on California towns that harbored Mexican soldiers, would we consider the casualties justified? Or would Bush be branded a man who committed a horrible crime 'against his own people'?
This question should be considered when discussing Hussein's crushing of the Shiite rebellion. The Shiites attempted to join forces with the United States--Iraq's enemy--to overthrow the government. While the brutality of Hussein's revenge on these people was unquestionably reprehensible, it is hard to imagine that our government, faced with an alliance of US citizens and the armies of a foreign nation intent on overthrowing our own government, would allow this to occur without bloodshed.
It is all too easy to paint people like Hussein as insane monsters. In R. Stephen Humphreys' Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age, Humphreys examines the perils of this kind of thinking. For one thing, writing off an opponent's actions as those of a madman results in a tactical failure to recognize his cleverness. Our government's characterization of Hussein as a tyrannical madman (contrary to how our government perceived him prior to the first Gulf War) may result in underestimating his skill at inflaming the Iraqi people against the US and turning the US occupation into a Viet Nam-like quagmire.
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