Iraqnophobia!

In 1985 the student organization People for Peace and Justice demonstrated at the SU Placement Center to protest CIA recruitment on campus. I wrote the leaflet for that demonstration: among other things we accused the CIA of being party to genocidal attacks around the world. One example we cited was their aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein in trying to wipe out the Kurds in Iraq, particularly through the use of chemical warfare. Some of us have a fairly long track record of opposing Saddam Hussein’s murderous activities. Unfortunately at that time, since he was a key US ally and we were arming him to the teeth, and since the State Department had recently removed Iraq from the official list of terrorist nations because it was our ally against the heathens in Iran, protesting against Hussein in public was not considered stylish. Once again we learn that timing is everything.

George Bush displayed his timing last month in maintaining what I guess he hopes becomes an American tradition: celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. by bombing civilians. At the time some of us around campus talked of writing articles about it: the running joke was that we could simply run the stuff we’d written two years ago and change the dates. And so, what follows is largely a rehash of all of the information I hope you’ll remember from George Bush’s last I’m a Man tour, 1991.

Some things I hope by now are obvious: we told Hussein outright that we didn’t much care if Iraq invaded Kuwait (“We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreements with Kuwait… the issue is not associated with America.”). The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was by no means a surprise: William Webster and other CIA officials personally warned Bush it was imminent in July, 1990. The US supplied the bulk of the weapons in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. The ballyhooed coalition against Iraq was bought and paid for ($7 billion debt forgiven the government of Egypt, $21 million in arms shipments promised to Saudi Arabia, Syria removed from the State Department list of terrorist states in exchange for their support). The invasion of Kuwait was not why we deployed forces in the first place (James Baker told Congress in September 1990 that even if Iraq pulled out of Kuwait, US troops will remain in the Middle East indefinitely). George Bush sent troops into the Middle East with the intention of slaughtering civilians and violating international law.

“From the beginning, the allies’ bombs and missiles were never as accurate as might have appeared… There were craters where missiles had hit houses or waste ground, or were far away from any obvious targets. The switch to attacks on roads and bridges — so-called ‘dual use’ targets, which have potential military use — means that more non-military people will be killed and wounded because, whatever its potential, the transport system is primarily used by civilians… [Allied forces] have pretended they can carry out surgical strikes; but mass bombing is a blunt instrument.” (Patrick Cockburn, the Independent , 2-91). The point here is not that US forces hit and killed civilians with no concern for the aftermath, which is hardly news anymore. It is rather that that was the plan from the start, which is why George Bush is a war criminal.

The Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War requires participants in combat to implement the provision that the “wounded and the sick shall be collected and cared for,” pointed out Eizens Silins in the AO of February 13-27, 1991. The US, in a war situation, was required to insure that proper health care was available for victims of our attacks. “Analysts have indicated that the Bush plan for bombing and shelling targets in Iraq’s industrial and urban areas could entail the infliction of hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties,” Silins warned (and of course he was absolutely right in his prediction). “Because this is war, the international laws of war apply to regulate and restrain the behavior of governments and forces involved. Disregard of these laws constitutes war crimes.”

“Even a preliminary analysis of the Bush war plan in action shows that there is no intention on his part to comply with either the letter or the spirit of the law to spare the innocent civilians unnecessary suffering.”

In that issue we relayed a Turkish radio news report of 150,000 Iraqi deaths in air attacks. That was, of course, only the beginning.

This may be the biggest irony: while the Bush administration planned from the outset to violate international law, we were fed the line that the US was going to war to prevent Saddam Hussein from committing war crimes. Remember the fears? Of course you do — they’re still being parroted to condone new, improved, Desert Storm II. Hussein had chemical weapons, and he might use them on civilians. The only chemical weaponry used in Desert Storm was by the US and the allies: for example white phosphorous, which burns deep into the skin and bones of any unfortunates caught in its wake. Before the war the LA Times warned that Iraq was rumored to possess fuel-air bombs, which it called a “terrorist” weapon. In fact, however, Iraq did not possess this modern answer to mustard gas — but the US did. And used it during Desert Storm. Western European press reported the aftermaths of a US fuel-air bomb attack early in the war, in which oxygen and blood were literally sucked from the lungs of thousands of victims.

Once again, as I write this, we are being fed the line that the bombing is necessary in order to destroy Saddam Hussein, who does not understand that in the New World Order nations must abide by international law as dictated by the United Nations (by the way, has the US paid any damages yet for its terrorist war on Nicaragua, as dictated by the World Court in 1986? Sorry. I digress). What must not be forgotten is that this has never been a war against Saddam Hussein: it is a war against the Iraqi people. We should hold out no hope that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians will worry Hussein, since while we were paying him to do so he sent probably 1 million Iraqi’s to death over 8 years. Mark Lance warned in these pages the first time that George and Saddam got into a testosterone fight: “So let us not be distracted into a silly debate over whether it is a good thing to kill Saddam. . . . Maybe it isn’t but that is hardly the primary evil of this war. . . . The issue is the innocent people who are dying and the war is against them and their culture. For what they have done to these people, I personally hope that there is a hell and that Saddam and Bush get to share a semi-private room for all of eternity.”

[The bulk of this material is from AO articles and editorials by Richard Stuchiner, Mark Lance, Eizens Silins, Randy Divinski, me and others during the first attack on the Iraqi people. A number of these have been collected for reference in the office in 126T Schine, and are available for public consumption.]

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