Questioning Halabja: Genocide and the Expedient Political Lie

...For just as the U.S...

...The U.S...

...government attempted to shift the blame onto the Iranians...

...That simple observation can be lost these days, as we find ourselves caught in a debased political culture of spin, where the art of image control and deception often seems the most valued skill...

...It was this context that produced the urtext of Kurdish genocide denial—a 1988 DIA report suggesting that Iran, not Iraq, was responsible for the use of poison gas at Halabja...

...This is antidemocratic reasoning...

...But they planted the seeds for a third wave of denials that exploded on the scene during the buildup to the Iraq War...

...Yet no sooner had the pictures of the dead 62 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 of Halabja appeared on television screens than the campaign to deny Iraqi responsibility began...

...A 1991 DIA report concluded that "Iraq is known to have employed . . . a blood agent, hydrogen cyanide gas...

...The first reports of the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis referred to battles against Iranian troops, and the U.S...

...T T HE GULF WAR denials were relatively few in number...

...There was a total of forty known incidents involving the Iraqi use of chemical gas on the Kurds, including Halabja...

...Even if one were to ignore all the other evidence of Iraqi state responsibility for Halabja, as Pelletiere and his co-authors do, and even if one were to suspend disbelief regarding the plausibility of the claim that Iran would use poison gas on a city held by its Kurdish allies and then bring international news media to the scene to report on it, these documents are unconvincing...

...In panic, with many already dying and others blinded or paralyzed, the people of Halabja fled their city...

...But in the fall of 1988, this most spurious of arguments served the purposes of a U.S...

...Beginning in October of 1988, seven months after Halabja, a series of forensic investigations, some sponsored by Middle East Watch (now the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch) and Physicians for Human Rights and others organized by independent medical scientists, undertook medical examinations of survivors, conducted tests for trace chemicals on soil samples and bomb fragments, and performed autopsies of exhumed bodies...

...Ample documentation of the plans and the implementation of the poison gas attacks was found, including a tape of a particularly damning speech by the chief architect and executioner of Anfal, Ali Hassan al-Majid...

...Instead, Reagan and then the first Bush administration officials fought back congressional efforts to place sanctions on Iraq for its use of poison gas at Halabja...

...For those who have studied the literature of Holocaust denial, the parallels with the denial of Halabja and the genocide of the Kurds are striking...

...eventually, they specifically cited and decried the Iraqi use of poison gas against the Kurds...

...The deliberate refusal to engage the evidence of what was done and who did it...

...The poison gassing of the Kurds, which had been the most inconvenient of facts, suddenly acquired major propaganda value in the battle against the Saddam's regime...

...The War College report containing the original disinformation on the use of poison gas at Halabja can be found at http:// fas.org/man/dod-101 /ops/war/docs/3203...

...But many in the reflexive opposition school of thought did not recognize the legitimacy of any efforts by the United States and its allies to undo the Baathist regime's annexation of Kuwait...

...Much remains to be done...

...Based on these studies, scientists concluded that the victims of Halabja and other sites had been exposed, in the words of medical geneticist Christine Gosden, "to the highest doses of the most potent cocktails of chemical and biological nerve and mustard agents ever used against civilians...

...This selfgenerated amnesia had unfortunate side effects...

...in a number of columns in the liberal Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, one of which was reproduced on the progressive Common Dreams Web site...

...Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas" (or purchase from the Times archives at www.nytimes.com/), on the September 1990 Frontline program "The Long Road to War" (www...

...Denials of Halabja from both the extreme left and the extreme right gained undeserved credibility as a result of a decision of the editors of the New York Times that stunned the human rights community: on January 31 of this year, as the debate over the looming invasion of Iraq reached fever pitch, the Times published a lengthy op-ed piece by Pelletiere, in QUESTIONING HALABJA which he reasserted the claims of the DIA and War College reports that he had had a hand in writing...

...The Gulf War and its aftermath set the stage on which a second wave of denials of the Kurdish genocide would play itself out...

...As the evidence mounted, and especially after Halabja, the Reagan administration finally issued public condemnations of the use of poison gas...

...government is also true, it must be said, of those in the movements against the Gulf War and the recent invasion of Iraq who denied Halabja and the genocidal campaign waged against the Kurds...

...The Origin of the Denials During the Gulf War and the popular uprisings that followed it, significant stores of Iraqi Baathist government documents and tapes were seized, mostly by the Kurdish Peshmerga...

...The Reagan State Department also approved, before being overruled by the Pentagon, the sale to Iraq of 1.5 million atropine injectors, a drug used to counter the effects of chemical weapons...

...The results of a number of these studies were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals...

...The international community...

...Among the items purchased by Iraq, these reports determined, were Americanbuilt helicopters that were used, U.S...

...The initial impetus for these efforts came from within the U.S...

...The Denials Spread In August of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait...

...This essay is not an account of Halabja and the Anfal...

...As soon as word of the gassing reached Iran with the fleeing residents of Halabja, the Iranian government brought international news media to the scene, and film of the devastation was soon aired on newscasts around the globe...

...and on a number of alternative Internet Indymedia sites...

...government support for the Baathist arguments against the war to receive a full hearing...

...Writing in the London Review of Books at the very moment the Baathist regime was launching its brutal suppression of the post–Gulf War uprisings of the Kurds and Shiites, Said declared that It] he claim that Iraq gassed its own citizens has often been repeated...

...Those events have been fully documented in the Human Rights Watch book Genocide In Iraq and told in painful detail in many other places...

...At the same time, Wanniski managed to dismiss Jeffrey Goldberg's March 2002 New Yorker article on Halabja and the gassing of the Kurds, which includes a number of survivor testimonials, on the grounds that Goldberg is "seriously biased" because he is a dual U.S.-Israel citizen...

...But at no time, the New York Times reports, did the Reagan administration end the top-secret program through which more than sixty officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency provided the Iraqi government with intelligence information and battle plans that QUESTIONING HALABJA facilitated the use of chemical weapons...

...Human rights organizations have another name for that campaign: genocide...

...German, British, and American corporations sold Iraq military hardware, arms technology, advanced computers, and key ingredients for the manufacture of missiles and chemical and biological weapons, with the active approval of the U.S...

...Kurds were forcibly removed from traditional villages, imprisoned in concentration camps, tortured, raped, and forced into exile...

...government officials concluded, in poison gas attacks on the Kurds...

...the reliance upon conspiracy theories to dismiss such evidence en masse...

...None of the authors of these documents, the most notable of whom was Stephen Pelletiere, the senior CIA political analyst of Iraq during the Anfal campaign and later professor at the Army War College, had any expertise in medical and forensic sciences, and their speculation doesn't stand up to minimal scrutiny...

...Reports on a number of the forensic studies of gassing in Kurdish Iraq can be located at www.phrusa.org/research/chemical_weapons/ index.html#2...

...government behind it...

...Fuck the international community and those who listen to them...

...Most of the left, though, shared the dominant view—perhaps best expressed by Dilip Hiro in the Nation and elsewhere—which was unequivocal in its condemnation of the Baathist campaign of genocide against the Kurds, of the U.S...

...Following the Iranian Islamist Revolution, the seizing of hostages from the American embassy, and the Iraqi invasion of Iran, Ronald Reagan's administration entered into "an enemy of my enemy" alliance with the Baathist state: it became an American proxy in its war with Iran...

...Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of Kurds who were annihilated in the two-year period during which the Anfal was waged, estimates range from a conservative low of 50,000 to Kurdish figures of 182,000...

...the changing of facts to fit the theory—this much and more mark both denials...

...government, according to PBS Frontline, Washington Post, and Newsweek reports...

...In hundreds of eyewitness interviews conducted over the next few years, survivor after survivor identified the source of the gas at Halabja (and at other sites) as Iraqi military aircraft that flew low enough so that their markings were visible DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 61 QUESTIONING HALABJA from the ground...

...Many who escaped bear grim physical injuries from that day: blindness and major respiratory and skin diseases, cancers, and, in the next generation, congenitally malformed infants...

...The bombing of Halabja with chemical gas was the opening salvo in what the Baathist Iraqi regime called its Anfal campaign, a term taken from the title of the eighth sura of the Quran, which calls upon Muslims to "strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah...

...0N A LATE March morning fifteen years ago, as the war between Iran and Iraq was winding down, the Iraqi army began an artillery barrage on Halabja, a Kurdish city situated about fifteen miles from the border with Iran...

...government, did not trust their audiences with the truth...

...Not to be outdone, critics of the war from the right joined in the denials, often with a nastier edge...

...Few people mention such reports in the media today...

...As powerful as the film of Halabja is, it is only a small portion of the evidence...

...Every group that has examined this question— the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, the U.S...

...Their arguments disputed the notions that the people of Kuwait had a right of self-determination—for them, Kuwait as a national entity was simply an artifact of imperialism—and that the Baathist regime was as morally depraved as the United States and its allies claimed...

...pb s . o rg/wgbh/p age s/frontline /sh ows/longro ad/etc / arming.html), and in the September 23, 2002 Newsweek article, "How Saddam Happened" (for purchase from the Newsweek archives at www.msnbc.com/news/NW front_Frontasp...

...he also offered the DIA and CIA claims as confirmation of his judgment...

...Despite its powerful and lasting influence on our political culture, the experience of the Holocaust has apparently not immunized American discourse from genocide denial, any more than it kept the American government from establishing a strategic alliance with the authors of genocide...

...And once this Pandora's box was opened, this expedient political lie gained a life of its own...

...At first, the statements criticized both Iraq and Iran...

...But as they gathered in their shelters, it quickly became apparent that there was something dreadfully different about this bombardment...

...Significant segments of the movement opposed to the invasion of Iraq seized upon the old DIA and War College reports to cast doubt upon the Bush administration's arguments for regime change...

...This report, and a subsequent Army War College study and book incorporating its argument, provide one single piece of evidentiary conjecture for placing responsibility on the Iranians: film and eyewitness reports of the dead at Halabja indicated that their mouths and extremities had turned blue, and such symptoms were consistent with exposure to blood agents using cyanide, which, it was argued, only the Iranians were known to use...

...At best, this is uncertain...

...Among the 64 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 liberal and left opponents of the war, these documents were recycled in a Roger Trilling Village Voice column...

...the obsessive focus on a few minor details of the genocide and the fixation with the instrumentality of death, the gas...

...Who is going to say anything...

...Faced with the prospect of Saddam Hussein gaining strategic control of much of the Persian Gulf oil reserves, American policy toward Iraq literally changed overnight: the Baathist state was now a threat...

...The contempt for the political wisdom of the people revealed by such a posture made it that much more difficult for the meritorious The Human Rights Watch book Genocide In Iraq is available at www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal...

...But there is more at stake here than the failure or success of political arguments...

...The claim that one had to oppose every argument that the Bush I and Bush II administrations made for war against Iraq, regardless of its particular merit, went hand in hand with the contention that the American people could not grasp the full evil of the Baathist regime and still make an informed decision that war was not necessary to contain it...

...The people of Halabja first took that attack, and the subsequent bombing by the Iraqi air force, as a routine matter, the everyday consequence of living in a stronghold of a Kurdish Peshmerga militia then allied with Iran...

...government documents or on the editorial pages of the New York Times...

...DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 65...

...To begin, it is not true that Iran alone used blood agent weapons...

...But in one crucial respect, there is a difference: one cannot imagine finding the Holocaust denied in official U.S...

...ally, which claims that the gassings of the Kurds at Halabja was done by Iran...

...Hassan says of the Kurds, "I will kill them all with chemical weapons...

...There simply is no reasonable doubt...

...government's alliance with the Iraqi state during the period of the genocide, and of the 2003 invasion...

...Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and others—has come to the same conclusion: that the Iraqi Baathist regime used poison gas on its Kurdish population during the Anfal campaign, in Halabja and at other sites...

...government...

...The denier of genocide is, to use Pierre Vidal-Naquet's apt phrase, an assassin of memory...

...There is at least one War College report, done while Iraq was a U.S...

...Yet at a fundamental level, lies were told about Halabja and the Iraqi genocide of the Kurds because the authors of those lies, starting with agencies of the U.S...

...What is true of the U.S...

...It is far more likely that, as forensic studies of the survivors and soil of Halabja indicate, the poison gas cocktail had as its main components a combination of mustard gas and the nerve gases sarin and tubin...

...LEO CASEY writes on politics, education, and international solidarity for Dissent and other journals...

...In a way, genocide denial reenacts the crime, seeking to erase the historical record of what was done—which is all that now remains of the murdered...

...Documentation of U.S...

...Heavy, dark yellow clouds formed close to the ground, and overwhelming smells, a mixture of sweet apples and garlic, followed by an odor of rotten eggs, pervaded the air...

...Reflections Political lies—and genocide denial is a political lie—are antidemocratic acts, rooted in the refusal to trust a citizenry to act appropriately on the truth...

...government never formally disavowed the DIA and War College reports, these documents could now be cited as grounds for challenging the truth of the Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds...

...It is a tale of the politically expedient lie, in service of a denial of genocide...

...The appearance of cyanide symptoms could have resulted either from the decomposition tubin undergoes when it is used or from the inclusion of hydrogen cyanide in the poison-gas cocktail...

...government turned on a dime, so too did those who oppose everything the United States does: in their eyes, once the United States saw the Baathist regime as an implacable foe, that regime acquired anti-imperialist legitimacy...

...government alliance with Iraq against Iran, and so it was circulated with the authority of the intelligence apparatuses of the U.S...

...against Iranian soldiers, civilians, and Iraqi Kurdish civilians...

...There were many valid objections to this war, the biggest one being that the decision to go to war DISSENT / Summer 2003 • 6 3 QUESTIONING HALABJA was premature, taken before less violent and destructive measures, such as economic sanctions, had a chance to work...

...Those horrifying scenes made Halabja into the Guernica of the Kurds, symbolizing the entire Anfal campaign of annihilation...

...Rather, the story told here is about the efforts to deny the Baathist regime's use of poison gas on the Kurds, efforts that began as soon as the world first learned of Halabja and that have continued to this day...

...The nerve gases sarin and tubin, as well as mustard gas, are known to have been used, and there is good reason to believe that the nerve agent VX and biological weapons such as anthrax and mycotoxins may also have been employed at different times...

...government became a major broadcaster of the genocidal horrors of Halabja, and remains so to this day...

...Moreover, cyanide gas is not very effective in the open air, and could not have caused, by itself, the widespread devastation at Halabja...

...regime at the time of the gassing of Halabja appeared in the August 18, 2002 New York Times article, "Officers Say U.S...

...In addition to Said, the other prominent denier was New Yorker writer Milton Viorst, who, after a one-day helicopter tour of Kurdish Iraq provided courtesy of the Baathist regime, decided there was no gassing of Kurdish civilians...

...Genocide denial leaves a stain of moral and political dishonor, for it is a political lie unlike other political lies...

...Birds and animals began to expire, and as the clouds gradually permeated the shelters, people became ill, some vomiting, some finding it hard to breathe, others experiencing skin burns and sharp, stabbing pains as their eyes and noses began to bleed...

...On virtually any other question one could contemplate, Said would dispute the conclusions of the American intelligence and military apparatuses in the strongest possible terms, yet when it comes to the question of the use of poison gas on the Kurds, discredited and transparently false CIA and DIA claims suddenly become trustworthy...

...once the United States proclaimed the fiendishness of the gassing of the Kurds, there was reason to question its authenticity...

...the discounting of eyewitness, survivor testimony...

...The Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas," one of the veterans of the DIA program told the Times...

...When Iran temporarily gained the upper hand in the war, the United States provided Iraq with "detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes, and bomb assessment damage," a New York Times investigative report concluded...

...Because the U.S...

...To understand how this came to pass, one must examine the Iraq policy of the United States during the 1980s...

...The Evidence I will begin with a brief summary of the volumes of evidence regarding what took place that day fifteen years ago in Halabja, as well as in other poison gas attacks on Kurdish civilians, and who was responsible for what happened...

...There would be no mention of the support given to the Baathist regime, no formal retraction of the disinformation that had been generated to cover that regime's crimes...

...Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and political activist, was one of the more articulate exponents of this view...

...Jude Wanniski, best known as the conservative economist who founded the supply-side school, published a barrage of memoranda from his Polyconomics Web site, citing Pelletiere and the DIA and War College reports...

...Behind them lay thousands of dead (estimates range from 3,200 to 5,000...

...Why the Times editors would publish a piece that could not withstand fifteen minutes of Internet research only they can explain, but the consequences of their action are undeniable: from that point on, the authority and legitimacy of the Times was used, again and again, to support the denial of Iraqi genocide...

...Speaking from the floor of the House of Representatives, the far-right libertarian Representative from Texas, Ron Paul, asked his colleagues, "Are you aware of a Pentagon report studying charges that thousands of Kurds in one village were gassed . . . which found no conclusive evidence that Iraq was responsible, that Iran occupied the very city involved, and that evidence indicated the type of gas used was more likely controlled by Iran than Iraq...

...It was just one more way of killing people— whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference...

...Wanniski included in his memoranda several lengthy e-mails from an Iraqi whose family was highly placed in the Baathist regime, who offered fulsome assurances that poison gas was never used by that regime...