Report Suppressed: Iran Gassed Kurds, Not Iraq

[RBHam]

US Army War College (USAWC) undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by Iran and Iraq in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare. They concluded that it was Iran and not Iraq that killed the Kurds.

by Raju Thomas
Times of India, 16 September 2002.

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/GaseousLies.htm
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The repeated American propaganda weapon to rationalise the deaths of more than one million innocent Iraqis since 1991 through economic sanctions is that Saddam Hussein used poison gas against Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war and against Iraq’s own Kurdish citizens. The accusation is now being invoked to launch a full-scale American assault on Iraq. This claim of Iraq gassing its own citizens at Halabjah is suspect. First, both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons against each other during their war. Second, at the termination of the Iran-Iraq war, professors Stephen Pelletiere and Leif Rosenberger, and Lt Colonel Douglas Johnson of the US Army War College (USAWC) undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by Iran and Iraq in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare. They concluded that it was Iran and not Iraq that killed the Kurds.

In the first report they wrote: “In September 1988 — a month after the war had ended...the state department abruptly, and in what many viewed as sensational manner, condemned Iraq for allegedly using chemical weapons against its Kurdish population...with the result that numerous Kurdish civilians were killed. The Iraqi government denied that any such gassing had occurred...Having looked at all the evidence that was available to us, we find it impossible to confirm the state department’s claim that gas was used in this instance. To begin with there were never any victims produced. International relief organisations who examined the Kurds — in Turkey where they had gone for asylum — failed to discover any. Nor were there any found inside Iraq. The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

Regarding the Halabjah incident where Iraqi soldiers were reported to have gassed their own Kurdish citizens, the USAWC investigators observed: “It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, Congress was influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraq-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing many deaths. Photographs of the Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemical weapons in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.”

In March 1991 as the massive US-led attack on Iraq ended, I was visiting the USAWC to give a lecture on South Asian security and discussed this problem with professor Pelletiere at lunch. I recall Pelletiere telling me that the USAWC investigation showed that in the Iranian mass human wave battlefield strategy, Teheran used non-persistent poison gas against Iraqi soldiers so as to be able to attack and advance into the areas vacated by Iraqis. On the other hand, Baghdad used persistent gas to halt the Iranian human wave attacks. There was a certain consistency to this pattern. However, in the Halabjah incident, the USAWC investigators discovered that the gas used that killed hundreds of Kurds was the non-persistent gas, the chemical weapon of choice of the Iranians. Note it was the Iranians who arrived at the scene first, who reported the incident to UN observers, and who took pictures of the gassed Kurdish civilians. However, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in August and the truth of the Halabjah incident became inconvenient.

more...

[rkc3]

1. Is the point of this article to downplay Iraq's past...

or to beat the drums more vigorously for a war against Iran?

[RBHam]

3. No...

Truth...

And the way it was manipulated to justify the deaths of a million Iraqi civilians for a decade.

[hatrack]

4. And after the Iran invasion, it will be Syria which gassed the Kurds

And then after we invade Syria, it will be the Turks who gassed the Kurds.

And after we invade Turkey, it'll be over, since there aren't any other nations within gassing distance of Kurdistan. Well, Azerbaijan, maybe, but at least they've got some oil . . .

[GiovanniC]

9. I Think PNAC Might Be Able to Tie Cuba to Gassing of the Kurds

n/t

[RaleighNCDUer]

11. Sorry, we're going into Syria first. Gotta protect our rear.

Syria will go down much more easily, and take Lebanon with it. That will leave Iran all the more isolated and vulnerable, after the '06 election cycle.

[Mikimouse]

2. If I recall, the information appeared in the NYTimes...

three or four years ago, and of course, was completely ignired by most people. If I understood it all, the Iraqis only had blister agents at the time, and those were not the types of wounds found by the investigators. The deaths were attributed to a blood agent, which only the Iranians had at the time. The article cast great doubts on the propaganda against Hussein and his supposed use of gas in Halabjah. Thanks for posting this, it needs to be broadcast again, and again, and again!

[The Magistrate]

5. The Problem With This Report, Sir

Is that it was prepared at a time when Hussein was essentially a U.S. client, prosecuting U.S. policy towards Iran with material U.S. assistance. Thus, there is a grave suspicion of white-wash over this report, as the client's conduct was most embarrassing....

[htuttle]

7. So it's not really a question of whether the US government lied about it

But rather the question is when they lied about it -- either in 1998 or 2002.

Hard to say. They had pretty strong motivations to lie in both cases. They did seem to lie more blatantly (or ham-handedly) in 2002/2003. It seems just as likely in either case.

[The Magistrate]

10. To My View, Sir

The matter is of little importance.

Hussein used poison gas on a wide scale during his invasion of Iran; that was a clear-cut war crime, by any standard. He had assistance in the crime from the Reagan administration.

Hussein carried on a program of brutal expropriation of the Kurds, in which many were murdered and driven from their homes. What the instrumentaloity of the killing was does not much matter. Since the inception of modern Iraq in 1922, its central government, in whatever hands it was held, has waged a war against Kurdish irridentism, and often done so by extraordinarily brutal means.

[RBHam]

8. Quite...

One has to ask just how many times the War College's reports are just a pile of propaganda.

[RBHam]

6. Who should really be on trial here?

Fueling the Iran-Iraq Slaughter

U.S. "Weapons of Mass Destruction" Hypocrisy & So Much More
......... by Larry Everest

excerpt:
It's long been known that the U.S. gave Iraq satellite intelligence and other military support to prevent an Iranian victory. What's new in the Times story is the extent of U.S. involvement: "More than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq."

This Pentagon program continued even when it became clear that the Iraqi military "had integrated chemical weapons throughout their arsenal and were adding them to strike plans that American advisers either prepared or suggested." The obvious implication -- not drawn by the Times -- is that U.S. plans were shaped by the knowledge that Iraq would use chemical weapons. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward reported as much (12/15/86): in1984 the CIA began giving Iraq intelligence which it used to "calibrate" its mustard gas attacks against Iranian troops. An estimated 50,000 Iranians were killed by Iraqi gas warfare. (Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These - Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982-1990, p. 77)

One DIA officer told the Times that the Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas. It was just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference." Another U.S. intelligence officer said, "The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern." The Times continues, "What Mr. Reagan's aides were concerned about, he said, was that Iran not break through to the Fao Peninsula and spread the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia."

more...

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2292

[izzybeans]

12. I agree with the mod about possible white-washing

but perhaps there is some other evidence in this book.

Pelletiere, Stephen C. Terrorism: National Security Policy and the Home Front. Carlisle Barracks: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 1995. 90pp.

Don't know anything about it, just found it on a bibliography of terrorism.

And this visiting lecturer program I found on Information Clearinghouse. If it was a whitewash then why is the author still repeating it years later? Unless it's an out for those who sold Hussein the chemicals in the first place. I'm sure there are other possible answers but its a question to consider when trying to evaluate the trustworthiness of this source.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2097.htm

On edit: Warning: I'm generally skeptical of those making the Israeli conspiracy claim so I'm conflicted on the link just above. Some people show merit others just display some ignorant anti-semitism that I don't want to associate myself with. In other words, I haven't checked enough to endorse it or pretend to know which one of those two this guy is. But the link remains as an marker for the curiousity of those interested.

[The Magistrate]

13. There Has Been, Sir

Throughout the last decade and a half, a serious faction fight in U.S. security circles over whether Iraq or Iran ought to be the focus of enmity. The utility of the report, for those of the latter persuasion, is obvious.

Others are giving this wide circulation now, because this incident is one of the principal propaganda props of discourse on the invasion of Iraq, and they desire to discredit the popular view of that invasion. This particular item does not strike me as a particularly apt tool for doing so, because the popular assessment of Hussein, that he is a damned bad fellow, is substantially accurate, so people will hew to it regardless....

[izzybeans]

16. I totally agree I just thought I'd place it on the table.

I'm not sure anyone doubts Saddam was a bad man. I think people are concerned more about who was pulling his (Saddam's) strings and/or the Iranian's as well. Some equally bad people in my opinion. That debate you reference probably gets carried out in good faith by those who want to do battle on matters of "intellectual" discourse. But there is a common denominator that capitalizes on the uncertainty produced by such disputes for political and/or economic advantage. One of those people thrives off of hiding behind "known unknowns" and the like during his press briefings. He stated as much.

[The Magistrate]

17. Indeed, Sir

We do not seem to have any substantial disagreement.

[izzybeans]

14. Here is a pretty comprehensive source for WMD and Iraq from CUNY

It seems like a pretty impressive archive for the government documents, position papers, conferences, councils, commissions, etc. on the subject. There are similar lists for pretty much every "issue" the government has had with Iraq over the past decade.

http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/library/Divisions/Government/Iraqbib.html#WMD

[Cocoa]

15. AARP gassed the kurds

greedy, murderous seniors!

[applegrove]

18. DUPE

[KharmaTrain]

19. Think Hank Kissinger Would Like To Talk About This?

It was his horsetrading with the Shah and Saddam Hussein in '75 that sold out the Kurds and opened the military and chemical programs going in both countries.

Or maybe Donald Von Rumsfeld could talk about who he was really representing when he paid a friendly visit to Saddam in 1983. Now did Donnie rant all over Saddam that day for his bio-weapons that the world knew were being used in the Iran-Iraq war...from chemicals and plants built with and by Saudi and corporate oil money.

Ooops...that's not history according to the corporate media.

I'm seeing a Syria/Iran shell game developing here by this regime to take the focus off both Iraq and their other "friends" in the Arab world. Better to pick on some long disputed report that looks bad either way you read it as justification for some new folly than to have people focus on the real attrocities that are occuring under the American flag.

[dchill]

20. Whomever

gassed the Kurds probably got the gas from the Reagan/Bush administration and used it with their blessings...