There’s a strong smell of double-talk around American and British pressure for air strikes on Iraq. After all, who armed Saddam? Why, we did, of course
Emperors, like gods, open doors that are closed to lesser beings. The emperor in Washington, whose dutiful British King Charles spaniel, Tony, yaps approval from the imperial lap, has decreed that no doorway in Iraq remain shut. In the voice of President Clinton, Saddam Hussein may recognise echoes of Ishtar, his country’s ancient goddess of the heavens. When Ishtar confronted the gatekeeper of the Babylonian underworld, she threatened, much as Bill does today:
If thou openest not the gate so that I cannot enter, I will smash the door, I will shatter the bolt, I will smash the doorpost, I will move the doors, I will raise up the dead, eating the living, So that the dead will outnumber the living.
Knowing the old girl was as good as her word, the Mesopotamian Cerberus stood aside, something Saddam himself may well do before Clinton smashes his doorposts to dust. Ishtar flew, like a US Navy F-14, into hell, shedding one bit of clothing at each its seven gates. In the end, the other gods had to rescue her from shameful nakedness and death.
To prise open the doors of Saddam’s palaces the US is choosing explosive displays over a diplomatic “open sesame”. While American officials claim to pursue diplomacy, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, boasts: “The United States is not for any compromise.”
Not any compromise? Not even one that increases the number of UN weapons inspectors to include more members from countries other than the US and Britain? Without the possibility of compromise, what are negotiations? “Force can never be the first answer,” Clinton told the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday, “but sometimes it’s the only answer.”
It seems to be America’s only answer. The US claims its only goal is to preserve the integrity of the UN and its UNSCOM weapons inspections, but UN sources insist the US initially blocked a last-minute peace mission to Baghdad by the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, before eventually agreeing to it on terms that made it seem certain to fail. Many at the UN fear it has lost any say in how its resolutions are enforced and its authority preserved.
Most of the UN, including three permanent Security Council members, do not accept the American option of choice: massive bombardment. US Marine General Anthony Zinni, who is commanding the proposed operation, has 300 aircraft at his disposal, about a tenth of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s 1991 aerial armada. Advanced bombers and missiles can inflict suffering, if not on the gatekeeper himself, then on his subjects. An article by John Mintz in the Washington Post, based on discussions with many military sources, reported that: “Collectively, they describe a campaign that would involve 300 daily bombing runs against a wide range of targets that would last two to five days.”
That would mean between 600 and 1,500 bombing missions, each dropping more than a dozen bombs. One general told the Senate that this would probably kill 1,500 Iraqis, but Mintz wrote without irony of America’s “consuming desire to avoid killing Iraqi civilians”.
Washington reeks of what Tennessee Williams called the “strong smell of mendacity”. Advocates of a bombing campaign speak as if they had just discovered Saddam’s lethal potential. America has known about his chemical and biological weapons programmes for a generation. In 1975 an American corporation, Pfaulder of Rochester, New York, sold Saddam the plans for a chemical weapons factory that he built at Akashat for $78 million. In 1983 Saddam first deployed chemical gas against Iran, killing 45,000 Iranian soldiers over the next five years in clear violation of international law. In 1988 Saddam sprayed mustard gas and satin on the Kurdish village of Halabja to murder at least 5,000 civilians. A few months later, in January 1989, ABC News uncovered details of Saddam’s germ-warfare programme at a facility south of Baghdad. The State Department, which now issues briefings on the same site at Salman Pak, denied its existence at the time. Despite the use of chemicals and clear evidence of Saddam’s development in the 1980s of anthrax, tularaemia and cholera, the US and Britain increased their export credit guarantees to his regime. It is only – now not ten years ago when it happened – that the US defence secretary points to a photograph of a family killed at Halabja and calls it, on national television, “Madonna and child, Saddam-style”.
All the time Saddam was massacring his citizens and invading his neighbour, Iran, the American Karkar corporation supplied him with communications for his Ba’ath Party spies. The CIA gave him satellite reconnaissance pictures of Iranian troop positions. British Aerospace, Westland Helicopters, Dassault of France and Karl Kolb of Germany were adding to an Iraqi arsenal already oversupplied by the Soviet Union. (For an interesting account of this, see Said Aburish’s A Brutal Friendship: the west and the Arab elite, published last year by Gollancz.) Even after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when the US belatedly ostracised him from what it called “the international community”, the German company Rotexchemie found it hard to break the habit of trading with Iraq. Turkish authorities discovered a Rotexchemie shipment of sodium cyanide, a poison gas ingredient, bound for Saddam via brokers in Belgium. This helps to explain the concerns of three retired British officers, Generals Sir Michael Rose and Sir Hugh Beach and Admiral Sir James Eberle, who wrote to the Daily Telegraph: “Our own armed forces are endangered by irresponsible exports.”
They called it the “boomerang effect”, something of far greater concern than Saddam’s massacres of Persians, Kurds and his fellow Arabs.
Speaking in a debate on Sunday at Chatham House, the former Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden said there was a greater danger from inaction than action against Saddam. His point was that the US could not leave a maniac like Saddam in control of weapons of mass destruction. Good point. Saddam has the weapons, and UN resolutions require him, under UN supervision, to relinquish them. Yet UN Resolution 687, which created UNSCOM and its inspectorate, has no enforcement mechanism; and the UN has not delegated sole enforcement to the United States. The US, abetted by whichever countries choose to support it, has assumed the sole power to decide which UN resolutions to enforce and how to enforce them.
John Keegan, the Daily Telegraph’s defence correspondent and one of the best military analysts in Britain, wrote that the American targets would most likely be “the presidential palaces, military headquarters, communication centres – with the object of humiliating Saddam, reminding his supporters of his inability to strike back and unsettling the civilian population.”
The goal is not to depose him, something the CIA and MI6 spectacularly failed to do last year, when Saddam executed at least 80 Iraqi officers who may have been involved in the plot. Nor is it to encourage the Iraqi people to rise against him, as they did in the aftermath of the war over Kuwait when Saddam, with US permission, used his air force to subdue them. Nor is the goal of military action to destroy his chemical and biological stocks. The US does not know where all the stocks are, and conventional bombardment of anthrax or tularaemia would disperse deadly germs in the atmosphere and kill thousands of people, not only in Iraq.
As the CBS news programme Sixty Minutes reported last year, the UN weapons inspectors destroyed some stocks of anthrax, botulinum and aflatoxin in June 1996, but they believed the Iraqis had hidden and could develop far more than they found. CBS noted that “when a microscopic amount [of anthrax] escaped from a secret biological weapons factory” in Russia in 1979, it killed sheep grazing 50 kilometres downwind. Anything short of a major fire-bombing or a nuclear detonation would fail to guarantee that the germs would be killed before they spread.
The US intends to make Saddam back down. This, in its purest form, is diplomacy by gunboat. The US is saying to a school bully: “Back down, or we will beat up the people you beat up.”
Would any thug, especially the mother of all thugs, give in to that? When it comes to killing Iraqis, Saddam is the master. He will be little concerned if someone else has a go, whether for two days, five days or more. An American strike against his citizens will enhance his reputation in the Arab world, where his tough anti-imperial pose already makes him far more popular with ordinary Arabs than their own leaders.
