The Gulf War

...Hafez al Assad, whose human rights record includes the massacre of some twenty thousand of his people, now becomes the model for "the new world order...

...It is clear that those Iraqis who fought the regime took Bush's words to mean more than just the talk they turned out to be...

...The victory in the Gulf was hailed as restoring national self-confidence and pride in being confirmed as a superpower ready to come to the aid of its allies...

...We may not get any oil out of Kuwait for a number of years as it is burning away, but yes, we chased Hussein out, and that was good...

...Comel West: Author of Prophetic Fragments, The American Evasion of Philosophy and Ethical Dimensions of Marx's Thought, he is an honorary chair of Democratic Socialists of America...

...I offer, with all due qualifications, an analogy: It was necessary to defeat Hitlerism in the Second World War...

...George Bush never gave negotiations a chance...

...Here is the nub of the deep sense of uneasiness about our present situation...

...Even those who were against the war seem inclined to acknowledge as much—and perhaps also to acknowledge that a useful precedent has been set for United Nations action against obvious aggressors...

...There is no running water in Baghdad or other cities...

...The point of the analogy, let me stress, is not to compare Hitler with Hussein but to suggest that necessary yet terribly painful actions can often be followed by a costly aftermath, and still remain necessary...

...Everybody has seen the heart-rending television shots...

...After all, who knows where a genuine rebellion with a broad social base will lead...

...There is little or no fuel...

...cutting with knives...

...SUMMER • 1991 • 325...

...This Saudi Arabia, which we had come to protect, apparently was influential in the White House decision not to interfere with Saddam Hussein's crackdown against the Kurds (New York Times, April 10, 1991...

...Alan Ryan: A political theorist, he is now teaching at Princeton University after many years at Oxford...

...So much for human rights and a new world order...

...they report four hundred to a thousand deaths each day, the primary causes of death being diarrhea and dehydration—a condition that afflicts 88 percent of the children under five years of age...

...And how do the internal affairs look after we did our job...

...When we decided to end the war we left him just enough military force so he could squelch revolts in his country, killing many thousands of his people...

...He was being compared to Hitler—a foolish comparison...

...We saw this division as normal among people with common values and ideas but different estimates of a particular event...

...According to William Safire, Prince Bandar told James Baker that only a Sunni Moslem military dictator in Baghdad would be stable enough to provide a balance against Iran...

...No doubt, many social evils remain in the Gulf area, but for the time at least there is no possibility that Saddam Hussein will be able to launch a nuclear war in the next several years or grab up the supply of oil on which modern society depends...

...and we would have had to face the same or a similar problem: whether to intervene or not...

...Wasn't that intervening in Iraqi internal affairs...

...Among his books are a study of John Stuart Mill and a biography of Bertrand Russell...

...The more than a dozen forms of torture that AI catalogued included electric shocks...

...whipping with electric cables...

...The (understandable) emphasis on the low number of American casualties and the lack of attention to Iraqi casualties present a picture of an almost bloodless war, the same idea the surgical strike metaphor encouraged...

...Less powerful people also held such views...

...certainly a settlement of the Arab-Israel conflict remains as dubious as ever...

...but that does not absolve the Bush administration of its responsibility for encouraging the Kurds into disaster...

...There is almost no electricity...

...Once the fighting stopped, we learned that most of the bombs used were conventional ones, which increased the destruction in the surrounding areas...

...Only one-third of the 18 percent of the women who are breast feeding are producing milk, as a result of malnutrition, dehydration, or stress...

...In any case, the military defeat of Saddam Hussein is a reality—a decidedly positive consequence...

...People as young as eighteen and as old as sixty—some of whom had lived in Saudi Arabia for more than a decade or were born there—have been picked up by the police, tortured, and beaten...

...Although the Kurds had been deceived by us before, they did not count on it this time...

...It derived from the view, apparently favored by the State Department, that a popular uprising in Iraq, because it could lead to unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences, was "against U.S...

...Hospitals are without medical supplies...

...It appears that "one senior State Department official recently told a visiting European envoy that 'an Iraqi Assad' would be the best the United States could hope for— 'a reliable and predictable enemy' " (New York Times, April 7, 1991...

...but other immediate consequences of the war provide sufficient grounds for uneasiness...

...We had to go to war to punish aggression against Kuwait, but we sat still when it came to aggression against Iraq's own people...

...Just as Bush wrapped himself in the American flag, so his appeals to American values have deflated these very values, converting them into yellow ribbons and shouts of ecstasy...

...There is now good reason to believe that the CIA was also covertly active in encouraging an uprising...

...Washington's arguments justifying its policy are rational and not inherently disreputable...

...The aftermath of the Gulf War has been, mostly, disastrous—about this I agree with my two editorial colleagues...

...Such questions are not easy to answer, except of course for those who know in advance what a socialist or liberal position on war should always be...

...War also means the destruction of resources, natural and man-made, that are the foundations of a people's life and culture...

...I don't have to spend much time pointing out that the Kuwaitis have thrived on greed, that they treated their servants as slaves, and that they had a bad human rights record...

...Those who used it conveniently forget that all surgery, no matter how precise and skillful, entails a loss of the patient's blood...

...The rest of us cannot speak with such certainty...

...The Kurds had read Bush's lips and believed Americans were kinder and gentler...

...But the question that remains is whether the betrayal of the Kurds by the Bush administration and its tacit acquiescence in maintaining an Iraqi dictatorship (with or without Saddam Hussein) was an inevitable consequence of the war...

...None of this is unrelated to the major scandal of the administration's policy in the Gulf...

...His article "Socialism for the Nineties" appeared in our Fall 1990 issue...

...Two unhappy questions concern the extent of the bombing: whether it was necessary to bomb the country, in the words of a United Nations report, "back to a pre-industrial age" and whether that bombing was one of the unstated objectives of the operation...

...But other violations have been less well publicized...

...But now that the war is a reality, I want to see a defeat of Saddam Hussein sufficient to destroy his nuclear, biological, and chemical capacities...

...Nor was there anything 324 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions inherent in the military action against Saddam Hussein that made it inevitable that the United States would betray the Kurds...

...There is good reason to believe that to have allowed Saddam Hussein a free hand—which might also have been a consequence had the sanctions failed—would have brought still more terrible results...

...burning with cigarettes, candles, and acid...

...But now it seemed more important to safeguard the status quo, to safeguard Iraq's territorial integrity...

...They arrested six hundred Palestinians who are supposed to go on trial, according to an Amnesty International (Al) report...

...And he uses his deception at times when it is easy to appeal to the credulity of people rather than to their intelligence, that is, during political campaigns and in preparation for war...

...As I wrote in the spring issue of Dissent: I favored the embargo and wished it had been kept going, without military measures...

...But continually to encourage Iraqis to revolt while knowing that we would not intervene to help was unconscionable...

...Like Brzezinski, they foresaw that much of the war's aftermath could be catastrophic...

...hat have we accomplished...

...It is perhaps too much to ask that a nation, worried about its own soldiers, be equally concerned with enemy deaths...

...More positive results are still possible...

...I spare our readers the details of individual cases AI reports...

...Still, it is curious that, while there was an almost obsessive counting of how many artillery pieces and tanks were destroyed, there is still no official estimate of the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded...

...Bush "described Saddam Hussein as a modern Hitler, but he is allowing Iraqis who oppose the tyrant to be slaughtered," wrote Anthony Lewis...

...This picture, along with the celebration of the triumph of military technology—"smart bombs" —makes war seem something abstract, removed from human life and emotions...

...Later, of course, the United States provided substantial humanitarian help, which was good...

...With the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait and the destruction of its military power, two major stated aims of the war were achieved...

...Meanwhile, there are over a million homeless Kurds, another of our century's historic catastrophes...

...There are seven hundred thousand Kurds along the Iraqi-Turkish border...

...SUMMER • 1991 • 321 .C..o.m..u.2seaatnd Opisisns We now hear that we should not interfere in the "internal affairs" of the country we have brought to its knees...

...His article "The New History and its Critics" appeared in Spring 1989...

...we killed at least a hundred thousand Iraqis and destroyed the infrastructure of the country...

...I cannot restrain myself from an aside in regard to the American political scene...

...A team of Physicians for Human Rights visited several camps of Kurds...

...None of the celebrants seemed troubled by the fact that the nation's recovery of confidence and pride was the result of a superior capacity to bring death and destruction to millions of people...

...Many among those who so uneasily supported the war worried about its consequences, fears that turned out to be justified...

...We permitted Hussein to murder the Kurds to a degree that has been called genocide and set in motion a migration of almost five million people...

...it has done damage to our values by endangering a free press and the critical minds of its people...

...yet the aftermath was both an enormous increase in the power of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the miseries of the cold war...

...Those who favored sanctions rather than war— whether they declared themselves for or against the war—have to consider the real possibility that if sanctions had worked, there would have been an uprising in Iraq...

...Even before the war began, a chorus of experts sang the virtues of a "surgical strike" that would achieve a quick victory with few casualties...

...Has the price been too high for the victory...

...Beginning with the initial deployment of troops, George Bush regularly called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the people of Iraq...

...Yet the metaphor foreshadowed how the matter of casualties is thought about...

...It has been said that Bush wanted to avoid another Lebanon...

...When the war ended and revolts broke out in the south and among the Kurds in the north, Hussein, in actions that included attacks on fleeing Kurdish civilians, brutally repressed both uprisings...

...New York Times, March 29, 1991) When talking of the human rights records of our "Arab friends," we should not forget the Saudis, for whose defense we started it all...

...q We are very pleased to announce the addition of several new members to the Dissent editorial board: Jeff Faux: A well-known economist who heads the progressively oriented Economic Policy Institute of Washington D.C...

...Anthony Lewis quotes a United Nations mission report: The allied bombing . . . had had near apocalyptic results...

...We kept Hussein in power deliberately, after we—and the Iraqi people—had been told (by the CIA, among others) that Hussein had to be deposed...

...During his vice-presidency he continued to deceive—being involved, it seems, in a deal to defer the liberation of hostages till after Reagan's election, and then again in the Iran-contra affair...

...The hue and cry that went up in Washington when CNN televised pictures of dead and wounded civilians confirms the impression that the military and their civilian superiors cooperated in a deliberate masking of an important fact of war, that is, that war means the death of people...

...But what does it mean for a society to see war as bloodless and to have the thousands of deaths of others obscured...

...He warned of chaos, of destabilization, and did not for a moment believe in the realization of the new world order we were being promised...

...It will be objected that destruction, atrocities, and otherwise undesirable bedfellows is what wars are made of, that these are the costs of any war, the price we have to pay for the realization of our goals...

...Whether this has fundamentally changed the Middle East situation for the better is problematic...

...they make your stomach turn...

...we kept Saddam Hussein in power...

...It is hard to form a definitive judgment...

...Iraqi rivers heavily polluted with raw sewage . . pools of sewage lie in the streets...

...In standing by while Saddam Hussein wreaked vengeance on the Kurds, and this at a time when the United States was in a position to stop him at no great cost, the Bush administration made a shameful political decision...

...Yes, we cannot be thankful enough that our casualties were so few...

...We liberated Kuwait from a brutal aggressor...

...We also destroyed his military power (we hope), and that was good also, although it could have been contained by other means...

...The war was something more than a surgical strike, but there were amazingly few American casualties...

...What are the consequences not only for democracy but human sensibilities when success in war is so triumphant a source of national confidence and pride...

...Did that, however, mean it was not worth destroying Hitlerism...

...What are the consequences for such a society when its leaders encourage others to revolt against tyranny and then stand idly by pleading realpolitik when the revolt is cruelly repressed...

...They weren't so wrong after all when they believed that negotiations rather than ultimatums might be more effective in stopping Hussein, taking as an example the handling of the Cuban missile crisis by John Kennedy...

...The outrageousness of SUMMER • 1991 • 323 Comments and Opinions this conduct is intensified by evidence that, despite all the invocations of "democracy" and "the right to self-determination," what Bush had in mind all along was a coup by elements within the ruling Baath party and the Iraqi military that would have substituted one thuggish regime for another—one more predictable and less prone to foreign adventures...

...Blatantly dishonest and hypocritical was the Bush rationale for not trying to stop Saddam Hussein from taking revenge on the Kurds—the rationale that we didn't want to "intervene in Iraqi internal affairs...

...He is co-author of Rebuilding America, and his most recent article in our pages, "Labor in the New Global Economy," appeared in the Summer 1990 issue...

...These have less to do with the realpolitik of international relations than with more intangible considerations...

...It is all the more curious when we recall that enemy casualty rates are a major index of the success of a military operation...

...Although revenge for alleged collaboration appears to have been the motive in some cases," the AI report states, "many people seem to have been targeted simply because of their nationality...

...There was no easy way out for advocates of either the pro- or antiwar position, except perhaps for those who simply clung to pacifism or those who thought Saddam Hussein a noble representative of the Third World...

...to look for political arrangements, probably supervised by the United Nations, guaranteeing their safety...

...This, after destroying the infrastructure of the country and causing a vast number of casualties...

...In September 1990 an Al delegation heard reports that up to twenty thousand Yemenis were being deported from Saudi Arabia every day, that thousands of Yemenis had been arrested on the streets, in schools, at their homes or workplaces...

...Finally, there was the self-congratulatory celebration that featured trumpeting about "the end of the Vietnam syndrome...

...What does it mean for a democracy to engage in an action that pushes another society back into "a pre-industrial age...

...I am not sure that what he wanted to avoid was not another Nicaragua—a popular revolt that he might not be able to control...

...His article "Nihilism in Black America" appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of Dissent...

...In any case, at the moment what is important is to press for increasing humanitarian aid to the Kurds and Shiites victimized by Saddam Hussein...

...What he wanted was a coup, the replacement of one strongman by another...

...Many are the people who warned that the peace may be worse than the war itself—the most eloquent one possibly being Zbigniew Brzezinski in his masterful testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Hearings of "U.S...

...The reports of the bombing, with their emphasis on the advanced technology, helped obscure its sheer destructiveness...

...Policy in the Persian Gulf," December 4, 1990, Part 1...

...Not because I was sure it would work, but because I hoped to avoid the horrors of war...

...During the visit of the AI team from March 28 to April 9, victims were still being killed and tortured...

...Sewage systems do not work...

...I am not revealing any secrets when I mention their treatment of women—who aren't even permitted to drive—or their refusal to let our soldiers, who are there to protect them, practice their religions...

...biting and threats of execution and sexual assault...

...he didn't show much gumption in advocating these views, but at least he held them...

...What about our goals...

...We have a president who is a master of deception (following one who had learned make-believe in Hollywood), a talent he perfected in the CIA, no doubt...

...It took the appeal of the president of Turkey—no saint—and of our European allies to shame the American president into extending help...

...And while the exodus was taking place, Bush, who had left the scene of the accident, did nothing while Iraqi gunships sprayed napalm and acid at the rebels...

...After the war was over, the emir didn't want to return (with his forty wives) for fear for his safety—as a gesture of good leadership, I guess...

...And now...

...I would argue that there was nothing inherent in the military action that required President Bush to make his irresponsible and vainglorious appeals to the Iraqis to rise up in revolt...

...AI was told that at least seven inmates had died after torture...

...Sean Wilentz: Author of Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, he teaches history at Princeton...

...In the meantime, the Palestinians were subjected to beatings, electric shocks, and prolonged deprivation of food and water...

...In any case, here are three comments on the happenings since the war's end, written by editors who took different positions on the war itself...

...The war has done damage not only to the Middle East, to millions of people...

...Nothing in the stars or fate mandated that decision...

...and to direct a withering criticism upon the hypocrisies of the Bush administration...

...he was set from the beginning to wage a war, or he would not have made nonnegotiable demands...

...Throughout this period Washington took no action to support those fighting against the regime...

...The Democrats have no reason to behave as if they have been shell shocked into the defensive for having, most of them, opposed the war...

...Then the Kuwaitis started rounding up Palestinians arbitrarily...

...Right now, the aftermath of the war is dreadful...

...Saddam Hussein, with his army intact, might then have been able to crush it...

...Bush went fishing and 322 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions played golf until the Western European countries shamed him into giving help to the mass of Kurdish refugees whose ranks were being decimated by the death of adults and children because of epidemics, because babies could not be fed by mothers who had no milk in their breasts...

...Once the war began, there was no way that the bombing of Baghdad and other parts of the country could be avoided—the defeat of the Iraqi army required the bombing of the military headquarters in Baghdad, as well as roads and bridges...

...Both supporters and opponents of the Gulf War had a niggling feeling that perhaps those on the other side had partly the right idea...

...Hussein can start all over building up his military power, no doubt with the help again of the Western world...

...But the slaughter of the Kurds, their flight to the mountains, the deaths that followed, the unwillingness of the United States even to try to stay Saddam Hussein's hand—was all this an inescapable, a necessary consequence of the military defeat of Saddam Hussein...

...True, he did not foresee—nobody didthe flight of a million Kurds from helicopter and tank attacks, creating a refugee problem unlike any we've seen yet...

...EDs...

...It now appears that General Powell favored keeping the embargo for some months longer and not going to war...

...interests" and that a weakened or sliced-up Iraq might allow Iran to become the dominant power in that region...

...It was never very clear what that term meant, but it seemed to refer to the national unhappiness over the defeat in Vietnam that led to a profound sense of pessimism about America's position as a "world leader...

...But if we rejoice at the liberation of Kuwait and at the destruction of Hussein's military power, we did not accomplish what Bush had promised, namely, to get rid of Saddam Hussein, to encourage a revolt of the Iraqi people, as he had incited them to do several times...