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.
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.
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