Friday, December 12, 2003
I wrote the following letter to a friend. It deals with US support for Iraq during the Iran Iraq war.
"I hear people liken the relationship the US had with Iraq during the Iran Iraq war to the relationship the US had with the Soviets in WW2. In making the comparison, they invariably trot out the maxim that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The fact of the matter is that things were much more complicated.
A key error people make in commenting on the situation is that the US’s sparring partner was not, as it is now, Islamic extremism. It was, rather, the Soviet Union. Hence, although one of the US’s goals was to contain Iran and weaken the leadership there, its primary aim was to increase its economic and political presence in region at expense of the Soviet Union. In so doing, they sought not only to strike at the Soviets, but also to secure long term access to the region’s oil.
Of course, sometimes these two goals were not compatible and all cases they choose to pursue the latter goal rather than the former. Take the role the US played in solidifying the rule of the mullahs. Opposition to the Shah had of course come from a broad cross selection of society and to a call it an Islamic revolution is somewhat misleading. However, the Mullahs held the upper hand by the time the war broke out and as war progressed, the Iranian people began to rally around their rule. So what did the US do? While according to the Tower Commission, "in 1983, the United States helped bring to the attention of Teheran the threat inherent in the extensive infiltration of the government by the communist Tudeh Party and Soviet or pro-Soviet cadres in the country. Using this information, the Khomeini government took measures, including mass executions, which virtually eliminated the pro-Soviet infrastructure in Iran [and all real resistance to the Mullahs.]" To insure that the Iranians went the extra mile, the US passed on both "real and deceptive intelligence" about Soviet troops movements near the Iranian border. All the while, US officials expressed public concern for those purged.
Once the purge was complete, the US sought to engage Iran by selling it weapons. This is not as strange as it first seems. Even as Iran funded Hezbollah attacks on its soldiers in Lebanon, the Israelis were busily supplying Iran with arms and it was the Israelis that the Americans ended up using as a middle man. As far as Iran was concerned, there some very practical benefits of dealing with the US. Namely, it did not have the same access to arms on the open market as Iraq and most of its equipment was American, from when the Shah was in power, and so was in need of American parts.
Now, one of the reasons Iran’s access to the arms market was limited was that the US had launched “Operation Staunch” the year before. Supposedly worried about Iranian military gains and wanting to secure its relationship with Baghdad established earlier that year, the US put pressure on its Western allies put not to sell arms to Iran as set forth in the 1980 embargo. Needless to say, planned, or not Staunch helped grease the wheels of the Iran Contra deals.
Anyway, the amount and quality of arms the US supplied gave the Iranians increased offensive capability and the intelligence supplied it was significant. For example, as CIA deputy director McMahon, stated at the Tower commission, he had warned Poindexter that some of the intelligence passed to the Iranians would give them “a definite edge” with potentially “cataclysmic results”. However, neither Poindexter nor CIA Director Casey headed McMahon’s warnings and American intelligence helped secure a victory for the Iranians on the Fao Peninsula.
The cynic in me believes that these warnings were ignored for good reason. For as the Iran contra thing was going on and Iranian battle field success mounted, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia sought the protection of the US. It was during this time that Saudi Arabia agreed to allow the use to use its territory in a time of crisis.
At rate, the whole meticulous plan came crashing down when the Iranians leaked that the US was using Israel to supply them with arms. It was at this time, and everyone agrees on this, that the Americans tilted heavily in favor Iraq. It was also after that time that the US began supplying Iraq with the means of making more chemical weapons. Even that idiot, McDonald picked up on this. “Let us … go back to 1987,… when corporations employed influential board members like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to sell materials for chemical warfare …. They were selling them to Hussein, who was at the peak of his murdering days and the darling ally of the U.S.”
This was not the only thing that the US did. In September of 1986, before the scandal broke, the Kuwaitis approached both Washington and Moscow and asked if they would be interested in reflagging some Kuwaiti vessels. The initial U.S. reaction was lackadaisical. Attacks on shipping had not slowed down the flow of oil (world oil prices had dropped 50% since the start of the war) and besides reflagging the ships might upset a balance that existed between the Iraqis and the Iranians. However, when the Soviet Union offered to reflag eleven tankers in March of 1987, the US promptly offered to reflag the same eleven ships. In so doing they hopped to stick it in the eye of the soviets and at the same time show both support for the Gulf States and Iraq.
The US reasons for orginally not wanting to reflag the ships were warranted. The, so called, tanker War expanded significantly. Between 1981 and April 1987, when the U.S. reflagging was announced, Iran struck 90 ships; in the subsequent 15 months, Iran struck 126 ships. It was also during this time that an Iraqi plane attacked the USS Stark and the USS Vincennes downed an Iranian jet liner. (One of the guys at the pub (Older, Middle Eastern guy doing MA in Political Science) maintained that the downing the air liner was no accident. He said the Iranian commercial traffic had ignored restrictions the US had placed on air traffic following the Stark incident. So, to prove they meant business, they shot the thing out of the sky without warning. They claimed that mistook it for fighter jet, but he said this was a lie. Before, you ask, no he was not the least bit of offended by this and in fact took a certain delight in the policy. He told me the story several times.)
So to answer your assertion about the US supporting Iraq during the Iran Iraq war, I will have to say yes and no. After 1987 they did and Saddam came out of the war stronger as a result, but before then no. Before then they had supplied the Iranians far more arms than they did the Iraqis. That being said, the real consequences of what they did during the War was that the establishment of much larger political and economic footprint in the region during this time helped give ammunition to the fruit loops returning from Afghanistan and for the fruit loops already in the region. Another important consequence was that US actions helped solidify the rule of the Mullahs in Iran.
By the way, there is a strange twist to story how the US actually gained basing rights in Saudi Arabia. Following the invasion of Iraq, Iraq placed some divisions on the Saudi border. This made the Saudis and indeed the whole Arab League extremely nervous. The Saudis then invited the Americans in and thus began Operation Desert Shield. What the CIA learned later though was that the Iraqis did not have any plans to invade Saudi Arabia. They thought that by placing troops on the border that this would deter anyone from attacking Iraqi controlled Kuwait."
(0) comments
"I hear people liken the relationship the US had with Iraq during the Iran Iraq war to the relationship the US had with the Soviets in WW2. In making the comparison, they invariably trot out the maxim that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The fact of the matter is that things were much more complicated.
A key error people make in commenting on the situation is that the US’s sparring partner was not, as it is now, Islamic extremism. It was, rather, the Soviet Union. Hence, although one of the US’s goals was to contain Iran and weaken the leadership there, its primary aim was to increase its economic and political presence in region at expense of the Soviet Union. In so doing, they sought not only to strike at the Soviets, but also to secure long term access to the region’s oil.
Of course, sometimes these two goals were not compatible and all cases they choose to pursue the latter goal rather than the former. Take the role the US played in solidifying the rule of the mullahs. Opposition to the Shah had of course come from a broad cross selection of society and to a call it an Islamic revolution is somewhat misleading. However, the Mullahs held the upper hand by the time the war broke out and as war progressed, the Iranian people began to rally around their rule. So what did the US do? While according to the Tower Commission, "in 1983, the United States helped bring to the attention of Teheran the threat inherent in the extensive infiltration of the government by the communist Tudeh Party and Soviet or pro-Soviet cadres in the country. Using this information, the Khomeini government took measures, including mass executions, which virtually eliminated the pro-Soviet infrastructure in Iran [and all real resistance to the Mullahs.]" To insure that the Iranians went the extra mile, the US passed on both "real and deceptive intelligence" about Soviet troops movements near the Iranian border. All the while, US officials expressed public concern for those purged.
Once the purge was complete, the US sought to engage Iran by selling it weapons. This is not as strange as it first seems. Even as Iran funded Hezbollah attacks on its soldiers in Lebanon, the Israelis were busily supplying Iran with arms and it was the Israelis that the Americans ended up using as a middle man. As far as Iran was concerned, there some very practical benefits of dealing with the US. Namely, it did not have the same access to arms on the open market as Iraq and most of its equipment was American, from when the Shah was in power, and so was in need of American parts.
Now, one of the reasons Iran’s access to the arms market was limited was that the US had launched “Operation Staunch” the year before. Supposedly worried about Iranian military gains and wanting to secure its relationship with Baghdad established earlier that year, the US put pressure on its Western allies put not to sell arms to Iran as set forth in the 1980 embargo. Needless to say, planned, or not Staunch helped grease the wheels of the Iran Contra deals.
Anyway, the amount and quality of arms the US supplied gave the Iranians increased offensive capability and the intelligence supplied it was significant. For example, as CIA deputy director McMahon, stated at the Tower commission, he had warned Poindexter that some of the intelligence passed to the Iranians would give them “a definite edge” with potentially “cataclysmic results”. However, neither Poindexter nor CIA Director Casey headed McMahon’s warnings and American intelligence helped secure a victory for the Iranians on the Fao Peninsula.
The cynic in me believes that these warnings were ignored for good reason. For as the Iran contra thing was going on and Iranian battle field success mounted, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia sought the protection of the US. It was during this time that Saudi Arabia agreed to allow the use to use its territory in a time of crisis.
At rate, the whole meticulous plan came crashing down when the Iranians leaked that the US was using Israel to supply them with arms. It was at this time, and everyone agrees on this, that the Americans tilted heavily in favor Iraq. It was also after that time that the US began supplying Iraq with the means of making more chemical weapons. Even that idiot, McDonald picked up on this. “Let us … go back to 1987,… when corporations employed influential board members like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to sell materials for chemical warfare …. They were selling them to Hussein, who was at the peak of his murdering days and the darling ally of the U.S.”
This was not the only thing that the US did. In September of 1986, before the scandal broke, the Kuwaitis approached both Washington and Moscow and asked if they would be interested in reflagging some Kuwaiti vessels. The initial U.S. reaction was lackadaisical. Attacks on shipping had not slowed down the flow of oil (world oil prices had dropped 50% since the start of the war) and besides reflagging the ships might upset a balance that existed between the Iraqis and the Iranians. However, when the Soviet Union offered to reflag eleven tankers in March of 1987, the US promptly offered to reflag the same eleven ships. In so doing they hopped to stick it in the eye of the soviets and at the same time show both support for the Gulf States and Iraq.
The US reasons for orginally not wanting to reflag the ships were warranted. The, so called, tanker War expanded significantly. Between 1981 and April 1987, when the U.S. reflagging was announced, Iran struck 90 ships; in the subsequent 15 months, Iran struck 126 ships. It was also during this time that an Iraqi plane attacked the USS Stark and the USS Vincennes downed an Iranian jet liner. (One of the guys at the pub (Older, Middle Eastern guy doing MA in Political Science) maintained that the downing the air liner was no accident. He said the Iranian commercial traffic had ignored restrictions the US had placed on air traffic following the Stark incident. So, to prove they meant business, they shot the thing out of the sky without warning. They claimed that mistook it for fighter jet, but he said this was a lie. Before, you ask, no he was not the least bit of offended by this and in fact took a certain delight in the policy. He told me the story several times.)
So to answer your assertion about the US supporting Iraq during the Iran Iraq war, I will have to say yes and no. After 1987 they did and Saddam came out of the war stronger as a result, but before then no. Before then they had supplied the Iranians far more arms than they did the Iraqis. That being said, the real consequences of what they did during the War was that the establishment of much larger political and economic footprint in the region during this time helped give ammunition to the fruit loops returning from Afghanistan and for the fruit loops already in the region. Another important consequence was that US actions helped solidify the rule of the Mullahs in Iran.
By the way, there is a strange twist to story how the US actually gained basing rights in Saudi Arabia. Following the invasion of Iraq, Iraq placed some divisions on the Saudi border. This made the Saudis and indeed the whole Arab League extremely nervous. The Saudis then invited the Americans in and thus began Operation Desert Shield. What the CIA learned later though was that the Iraqis did not have any plans to invade Saudi Arabia. They thought that by placing troops on the border that this would deter anyone from attacking Iraqi controlled Kuwait."
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Verne when will you Learn
Verne McDonald “The Thanksgiving visit by U.S. President George W. Bush to Iraq was a beautifully coordinated photo opportunity that will undoubtedly give him positive momentum going into next year's election. That the U.S. head of state flew into an occupied country under a cloak of secrecy, for no other reason than to have his picture taken with his victorious troops, plays very well indeed in the insecure homeland.
Oddly, little attention was paid to the fact that the grateful, liberated people of Iraq were left unaware of his presence until he left. There are very good security reasons for that. But what are the reasons for the security considerations that prevented Bush from giving his good wishes to the people he has spent so much money and blood to save from dictatorship? Let's review just a few, from the Iraqi point of view.
Back when Saddam Hussein was the good friend and ally of the U.S. and the new theocracy in Iran was the big threat in the Middle East, the U.S. gave Hussein a nod and a wink and, along with Britain, the USSR, France, and China, sold him enough arms to turn his invasion of Iran into an eight-year mutual slaughter prolonged by the fact that the U.S. famously also passed arms to their archenemies, the ayatollahs of Iran. The U.S. blithely supplied Hussein with the means to develop chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and looked the other way when he used such weapons on his own people as well as Iranian troops.
What was called the Persian Gulf War at the time resulted in nearly three million deaths, more than a million of them Iraqis. (In 1991, the U.S. media's informal Ministry of Truth for obscure reasons renamed the conflict the Iran-Iraqi War.) There were also the usual multiple number of injured and maimed, all in the name of a shrewd policy of divide-and-weaken that even noncynical Americans thought was a good idea. Throughout Iraq, in every little town, there are disabled veterans to remind thoughtful people of when Hussein was duped by the U.S. into using their sons as cannon fodder. Hussein's own propaganda after 1991 has omitted the duping but highlighted U.S. complicity in arms sales to Iran.
Since Gulf War II in 1991, Iraqis have constantly been reminded by Ba'athist propaganda of some undisputed and, for the U.S., uncomfortable truths. In killing a minimum of 150,000 (some say 300,000) Iraqis, the U.S. committed such acts as bombing and strafing civilians, deliberately burying troops alive, bombing and strafing troops retreating under flags of surrender, and targeting nonmilitary infrastructures essential to meeting basic human needs of civilians. The U.S. fomented insurrection in Iraq, then left the rebels to Hussein's devices, including deployment of his few remaining weapons of mass destruction. And UN sanctions sponsored and administered with malice by the U.S. resulted in about 1.5 million Iraqi deaths between 1991 and 2002, nearly half of them children under five, because of lack of potable water, proper nutrition, preventive medicines, and medicines for the treatment of diseases resulting from such conditions.
The U.S. in its recent invasion spoke constantly of its objective of removing its former friend Hussein and of using "smart" weaponry to avoid civilian casualties as far as possible when targeting government and military centres. The U.S. avowedly was not counting Iraqi deaths, and the Iraqi military mostly fired off its immediately available ammunition and ran, so we only have estimates of military deaths that run from 6,000 to 8,000. The independent journalist organization Iraq Body Count's verified civilian deaths as of November 30 were a minimum of 7,918 and a maximum of 9,745, and those numbers come only from areas where the U.S. military does not deny access. In other words, the best efforts of the U.S. resulted in more civilian than military casualties, and the odds are the U.S. knew perfectly well that this would happen. The U.S. has gone on this spree of violence because of some 3,000 civilian deaths at the World Trade Center. What is the natural reaction of average Iraqis, people like you and me, to nearly three million Iraqi deaths over 25 years that can be blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the U.S.?
On November 30, the U.S. announced with some satisfaction that 46 ambushers were killed in attempting to attack convoys in Iraq. The U.S. has finally started counting bodies, just as it did in Vietnam. Once again it has not done its arithmetic and has not reckoned that counting up thousands, or even tens of thousands, of righteous killings is futile when the potential number of insurgents number in the millions. For three decades the slogan summing up U.S. foreign policy has been No More Vietnams. It might be that in political cartoons next year, the turkey Bush served to his troops will be labelled Another Vietnam.”
As usual, Verne McDonald does a fine job of offering up a distorted and simplified version of things. Take his views on the Iran Iraq war. However well things might of turned out for the US, it takes a certain ideological blindness to think that a nation, who had helped finance a guerilla campaign against Iraq (the Kurds) and with whom Iraq had no diplomatic relations in 1980, was somehow able to “dupe” Saddam into going to war with Iran. The idea of attacking Iran originated with Saddam and as with his belief that the key to defeating American was capture American prisoners and tie them to the front of Iraqi tanks, for the sake of their own self preservation his aides dared not argue with his reasoning.
As for US support for Iraq during the war, had the US congress not blocked other Western nations from supplying arms to Iran while allowing sales of arms to Iraq to go ahead, Iraq might have been hurt. However, the embargo was never designed to help Iraq, but was put in place prior to the war to punish Iran for the attack on the US embassy. What is more, by limiting who Iran could deal with, ironically the embargo helped grease the wheels for the Iran Contra arms deal.
Overall the US was far from being one of Iraqis strongest backers. Indeed, although the US occasionally supplied valuable intelligence information to the Iraqis (and sometimes to the Iranians), the fact of the matter is that US support for Iraq was piece meal and not significant in material terms until after the Iran Contra scandal broke. Faced with a scandal that not only threatened their newly minted diplomatic ties with Iraq, but also their role as protector of the Gulf States and particularly of Gulf State shipping, the US tilted heavily in favor of Iraq. Such a tilt, far from prolonging the war, as McDonald suggests, helped, as planned, to end it. It was with hope of ending Iran’s stranglehold on Iraq and so forcing the Iranians to the bargaining table, that the US encouraged the development of Iraqis chemical and biological weapons programs.
In the end, the Soviets were by far Iraqis biggest by consistent arms supplier, France was the biggest backer of their nuclear program, the Saudis and Kuwaitis their biggest financial backers and West German companies were their biggest suppliers of chemical weapons.
McDonald is equally brazen when it comes to the first gulf war. The fact of the matter is that credible estimates of Iraqi dead range from 10,000 to 100,000 and not from 150,000 to 300,000. Moreover, the vast majority of historians, such as the esteemed John Keegan, tend to think that the low end figure is more accurate.
The funny thing is that with the casualty figures cited by McDonald for the first Gulf war and this last one, it is a wonder why he puts the word “smart”, as in smart bombs, in scare quotes. After all, as a significantly higher proportion of munitions dropped this time around where so called smart bombs, if any thing proves their effectiveness, it is that Iraqi causalities were, by his account, significantly lower than they were 12 years ago.
As for McDonald’s claim that the coalition -- there actually was a coalition in 1991 – bombed and strafed Iraqi troops retreating under flags of surrender, sure, two days before Iraq had announced that it was withdrawing its forces from Kuwait, but it did not surrender and it also announced that it was unwilling to adhere all of the relevant UN resolutions. Hence, the war continued. It was only later that Iraq agreed to sign a cease fire agreement incorporated into UN resolution 687.
Incidentally, a few graphic photos notwithstanding, very few Iraqis actually died in the misleadingly named “highway of death”. Most had abandoned their vehicles. This proves that while some in congress were duped into believing stories of Iraqis pilfering incubators by the Kuwaiti ambassador and his daughter, they were not the only ones to hold dubious beliefs about the course of events. However, whereas the incubator story has long since died and is only used a proof that the dog was waged, the myth of the Highway of death has never really gone away.
All that being said, what is truly amazing, though, is just how little McDonald’s account furthers our understanding of the guerrilla campaign in Iraq. Indeed, according to McDonald, it is only “natural” that millions of average Iraqis have come to resent the US and that these millions oppose the US occupation. The problem is that “natural” or not while it was the Kurds that were gassed, while it was the Shia South that was hit hardest during the Iran Iraq war, while it was the Shia that bore the brought of Saddam’s reappraisals in 1991, while it was the Shia that suffered the most under the sanctions regime and while the Iraqi city with the highest civilian casualty rate during the last war was the predominately Shia city of Nasirah, resistance to the US occupation is strongest in areas that were least affected by the sanctions, dominated by the Sunnis and that saw little or no ground fighting in any of the wars.
(0) comments
Verne McDonald “The Thanksgiving visit by U.S. President George W. Bush to Iraq was a beautifully coordinated photo opportunity that will undoubtedly give him positive momentum going into next year's election. That the U.S. head of state flew into an occupied country under a cloak of secrecy, for no other reason than to have his picture taken with his victorious troops, plays very well indeed in the insecure homeland.
Oddly, little attention was paid to the fact that the grateful, liberated people of Iraq were left unaware of his presence until he left. There are very good security reasons for that. But what are the reasons for the security considerations that prevented Bush from giving his good wishes to the people he has spent so much money and blood to save from dictatorship? Let's review just a few, from the Iraqi point of view.
Back when Saddam Hussein was the good friend and ally of the U.S. and the new theocracy in Iran was the big threat in the Middle East, the U.S. gave Hussein a nod and a wink and, along with Britain, the USSR, France, and China, sold him enough arms to turn his invasion of Iran into an eight-year mutual slaughter prolonged by the fact that the U.S. famously also passed arms to their archenemies, the ayatollahs of Iran. The U.S. blithely supplied Hussein with the means to develop chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and looked the other way when he used such weapons on his own people as well as Iranian troops.
What was called the Persian Gulf War at the time resulted in nearly three million deaths, more than a million of them Iraqis. (In 1991, the U.S. media's informal Ministry of Truth for obscure reasons renamed the conflict the Iran-Iraqi War.) There were also the usual multiple number of injured and maimed, all in the name of a shrewd policy of divide-and-weaken that even noncynical Americans thought was a good idea. Throughout Iraq, in every little town, there are disabled veterans to remind thoughtful people of when Hussein was duped by the U.S. into using their sons as cannon fodder. Hussein's own propaganda after 1991 has omitted the duping but highlighted U.S. complicity in arms sales to Iran.
Since Gulf War II in 1991, Iraqis have constantly been reminded by Ba'athist propaganda of some undisputed and, for the U.S., uncomfortable truths. In killing a minimum of 150,000 (some say 300,000) Iraqis, the U.S. committed such acts as bombing and strafing civilians, deliberately burying troops alive, bombing and strafing troops retreating under flags of surrender, and targeting nonmilitary infrastructures essential to meeting basic human needs of civilians. The U.S. fomented insurrection in Iraq, then left the rebels to Hussein's devices, including deployment of his few remaining weapons of mass destruction. And UN sanctions sponsored and administered with malice by the U.S. resulted in about 1.5 million Iraqi deaths between 1991 and 2002, nearly half of them children under five, because of lack of potable water, proper nutrition, preventive medicines, and medicines for the treatment of diseases resulting from such conditions.
The U.S. in its recent invasion spoke constantly of its objective of removing its former friend Hussein and of using "smart" weaponry to avoid civilian casualties as far as possible when targeting government and military centres. The U.S. avowedly was not counting Iraqi deaths, and the Iraqi military mostly fired off its immediately available ammunition and ran, so we only have estimates of military deaths that run from 6,000 to 8,000. The independent journalist organization Iraq Body Count's verified civilian deaths as of November 30 were a minimum of 7,918 and a maximum of 9,745, and those numbers come only from areas where the U.S. military does not deny access. In other words, the best efforts of the U.S. resulted in more civilian than military casualties, and the odds are the U.S. knew perfectly well that this would happen. The U.S. has gone on this spree of violence because of some 3,000 civilian deaths at the World Trade Center. What is the natural reaction of average Iraqis, people like you and me, to nearly three million Iraqi deaths over 25 years that can be blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the U.S.?
On November 30, the U.S. announced with some satisfaction that 46 ambushers were killed in attempting to attack convoys in Iraq. The U.S. has finally started counting bodies, just as it did in Vietnam. Once again it has not done its arithmetic and has not reckoned that counting up thousands, or even tens of thousands, of righteous killings is futile when the potential number of insurgents number in the millions. For three decades the slogan summing up U.S. foreign policy has been No More Vietnams. It might be that in political cartoons next year, the turkey Bush served to his troops will be labelled Another Vietnam.”
As usual, Verne McDonald does a fine job of offering up a distorted and simplified version of things. Take his views on the Iran Iraq war. However well things might of turned out for the US, it takes a certain ideological blindness to think that a nation, who had helped finance a guerilla campaign against Iraq (the Kurds) and with whom Iraq had no diplomatic relations in 1980, was somehow able to “dupe” Saddam into going to war with Iran. The idea of attacking Iran originated with Saddam and as with his belief that the key to defeating American was capture American prisoners and tie them to the front of Iraqi tanks, for the sake of their own self preservation his aides dared not argue with his reasoning.
As for US support for Iraq during the war, had the US congress not blocked other Western nations from supplying arms to Iran while allowing sales of arms to Iraq to go ahead, Iraq might have been hurt. However, the embargo was never designed to help Iraq, but was put in place prior to the war to punish Iran for the attack on the US embassy. What is more, by limiting who Iran could deal with, ironically the embargo helped grease the wheels for the Iran Contra arms deal.
Overall the US was far from being one of Iraqis strongest backers. Indeed, although the US occasionally supplied valuable intelligence information to the Iraqis (and sometimes to the Iranians), the fact of the matter is that US support for Iraq was piece meal and not significant in material terms until after the Iran Contra scandal broke. Faced with a scandal that not only threatened their newly minted diplomatic ties with Iraq, but also their role as protector of the Gulf States and particularly of Gulf State shipping, the US tilted heavily in favor of Iraq. Such a tilt, far from prolonging the war, as McDonald suggests, helped, as planned, to end it. It was with hope of ending Iran’s stranglehold on Iraq and so forcing the Iranians to the bargaining table, that the US encouraged the development of Iraqis chemical and biological weapons programs.
In the end, the Soviets were by far Iraqis biggest by consistent arms supplier, France was the biggest backer of their nuclear program, the Saudis and Kuwaitis their biggest financial backers and West German companies were their biggest suppliers of chemical weapons.
McDonald is equally brazen when it comes to the first gulf war. The fact of the matter is that credible estimates of Iraqi dead range from 10,000 to 100,000 and not from 150,000 to 300,000. Moreover, the vast majority of historians, such as the esteemed John Keegan, tend to think that the low end figure is more accurate.
The funny thing is that with the casualty figures cited by McDonald for the first Gulf war and this last one, it is a wonder why he puts the word “smart”, as in smart bombs, in scare quotes. After all, as a significantly higher proportion of munitions dropped this time around where so called smart bombs, if any thing proves their effectiveness, it is that Iraqi causalities were, by his account, significantly lower than they were 12 years ago.
As for McDonald’s claim that the coalition -- there actually was a coalition in 1991 – bombed and strafed Iraqi troops retreating under flags of surrender, sure, two days before Iraq had announced that it was withdrawing its forces from Kuwait, but it did not surrender and it also announced that it was unwilling to adhere all of the relevant UN resolutions. Hence, the war continued. It was only later that Iraq agreed to sign a cease fire agreement incorporated into UN resolution 687.
Incidentally, a few graphic photos notwithstanding, very few Iraqis actually died in the misleadingly named “highway of death”. Most had abandoned their vehicles. This proves that while some in congress were duped into believing stories of Iraqis pilfering incubators by the Kuwaiti ambassador and his daughter, they were not the only ones to hold dubious beliefs about the course of events. However, whereas the incubator story has long since died and is only used a proof that the dog was waged, the myth of the Highway of death has never really gone away.
All that being said, what is truly amazing, though, is just how little McDonald’s account furthers our understanding of the guerrilla campaign in Iraq. Indeed, according to McDonald, it is only “natural” that millions of average Iraqis have come to resent the US and that these millions oppose the US occupation. The problem is that “natural” or not while it was the Kurds that were gassed, while it was the Shia South that was hit hardest during the Iran Iraq war, while it was the Shia that bore the brought of Saddam’s reappraisals in 1991, while it was the Shia that suffered the most under the sanctions regime and while the Iraqi city with the highest civilian casualty rate during the last war was the predominately Shia city of Nasirah, resistance to the US occupation is strongest in areas that were least affected by the sanctions, dominated by the Sunnis and that saw little or no ground fighting in any of the wars.
Monday, December 01, 2003
I responded to claims of a well known conservative columist's claim that socially and economically things have improved by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years.
"I agree with you. Things are not nearly as bad as many of the cynics contend and the demographic picture in the States is much better than the one in Europe. That said, I would not say that “we may look back on the period beginning in the middle of the 1980's as the Great Rejuvenation. American life has improved in almost every measurable way, and far from regressing toward the mean, the U.S. has become a more exceptional nation.” Indeed, far from it.
Sure, Teenage pregnancy rates are down, but they have declined elsewhere too and more importantly US rates are higher than in other Western countries. Similar things can be said about crime. As everyone knows, crime rates tend to go down as the percentage of males in the 18-29 year old age bracket goes down and so crimes rates in the Western world are, on the whole, down. However, whereas a reduction in the crime rate has been accompanied by mushrooming incarnation rates in the States, prison populations in other Western countries have not similarly gone up. Today, something in the magnitude of 1 in 3 African American men has spent some time in prison and murder rates in cities, such as Detroit, bear more of resemblance to cities in crime ridden South Africa and Brazil than to anywhere else in the Western world.
On the whole, as your Atlantic Monthly pointed out in the State of the Nation edition, American has a dual nature. Its university system is the envy of the world. In terms of research and development, particularly in the medical field, it is far out in front. Productivity rates are high. Home ownership rates are high. Unemployment is relatively low. At the same time, though, despite being worked like dogs and enjoying far less vacation time than Europeans, personal debt is higher than pretty much anywhere else. What is more, although the steady decline in real wages was momentarily arrested under Clinton, it was actually just huge gains by the top 10 percent of wage earners that threw out the mean. The gains of the top 10 percent coupled with the continued decline in the wages of the other 90% have helped solidify Americans place near the bottom in terms economic equality. Such inequality in turn does not bold well for those who seek to reduce crime. Finally, there is a whole host of problems associated with nearly 50 million Americans who have no Health Care coverage. Problems bad enough for the Atlantic Monthly to state that in terms of many social indicators, the US resembles parts of third world.
Now, I am not sure that this dual nature can be corrected and as a Canadian, for entirely selfish reasons, I am not sure that I want it to. A kinder gentler US economy might improve the plight of some of its citizens, but it might loose some of its economic dynamism in the process and Canada might be the worse for it."
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"I agree with you. Things are not nearly as bad as many of the cynics contend and the demographic picture in the States is much better than the one in Europe. That said, I would not say that “we may look back on the period beginning in the middle of the 1980's as the Great Rejuvenation. American life has improved in almost every measurable way, and far from regressing toward the mean, the U.S. has become a more exceptional nation.” Indeed, far from it.
Sure, Teenage pregnancy rates are down, but they have declined elsewhere too and more importantly US rates are higher than in other Western countries. Similar things can be said about crime. As everyone knows, crime rates tend to go down as the percentage of males in the 18-29 year old age bracket goes down and so crimes rates in the Western world are, on the whole, down. However, whereas a reduction in the crime rate has been accompanied by mushrooming incarnation rates in the States, prison populations in other Western countries have not similarly gone up. Today, something in the magnitude of 1 in 3 African American men has spent some time in prison and murder rates in cities, such as Detroit, bear more of resemblance to cities in crime ridden South Africa and Brazil than to anywhere else in the Western world.
On the whole, as your Atlantic Monthly pointed out in the State of the Nation edition, American has a dual nature. Its university system is the envy of the world. In terms of research and development, particularly in the medical field, it is far out in front. Productivity rates are high. Home ownership rates are high. Unemployment is relatively low. At the same time, though, despite being worked like dogs and enjoying far less vacation time than Europeans, personal debt is higher than pretty much anywhere else. What is more, although the steady decline in real wages was momentarily arrested under Clinton, it was actually just huge gains by the top 10 percent of wage earners that threw out the mean. The gains of the top 10 percent coupled with the continued decline in the wages of the other 90% have helped solidify Americans place near the bottom in terms economic equality. Such inequality in turn does not bold well for those who seek to reduce crime. Finally, there is a whole host of problems associated with nearly 50 million Americans who have no Health Care coverage. Problems bad enough for the Atlantic Monthly to state that in terms of many social indicators, the US resembles parts of third world.
Now, I am not sure that this dual nature can be corrected and as a Canadian, for entirely selfish reasons, I am not sure that I want it to. A kinder gentler US economy might improve the plight of some of its citizens, but it might loose some of its economic dynamism in the process and Canada might be the worse for it."
