Ba'ath Party and Western governments

here is an article from this month's english le monde diplomatique about the history of the baath party and western governments (US and France mainly). Kind of makes you think twice about Kerry's, "I will bring in the French platform as being so much better than Bush (not that Bush's reaganite team isn't scary). Thought it would spur discussion.

40 years of western support for the ba’athists

Iraq: crimes and collusions
I
raq’s provisional authority is determined to put Saddam Hussein on trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But the United States has curtailed the scope of the court and its judges. The dictator’s foreign accomplices will be immune from prosecution and nothing will be said about those western governments who allowed the Ba’athist regime to crush all opposition.

By Michel Despratx, Barry Lando

IN a cafe in Baghdad’s old city, you get a serious response at first to questions about the forthcoming trial of Saddam Hussein. Then, after a few remarks about his crimes, or acknowledgments that there is a need for a trial, people just smile and look a way, as if they expect nothing useful to come of it. All are convinced that the tribunal before which Saddam Hussein will appear is entirely controlled by the United States and that no foreigners will be called to account.

"If this trial really goes ahead, which I doubt," says a teacher, "it won’t tackle Saddam’s relations with foreign countries." An engineer says: "There are too many things that the West doesn’t want anyone to know."

The US Department of State played a key role in setting up the tribunal. In advance it consulted a US legal expert, Charif Bassiouni, who said: "All efforts are being made to have a tribunal whose judiciary is not independent but controlled, and by controlled I mean that the political manipulators of the tribunal have to make sure the US and other western powers are not brought in cause. This makes it look like victor’s vengeance: it makes it seem targeted, selected, unfair. It’s a subterfuge."

US and Iraqi officials have decided that the special tribunal that will pass judgment on Saddam Hussein will not be able to accuse any foreigner of complicity. Yet the history of the past 40 years is full of instances where non-Iraqis, including five US presidents, at least three French presidents, several British prime ministers and many western businessmen, have been aware of and even implicated in the crimes of the Ba’athist regime.

US support for mass killings in Iraq began as early as the presidency of John Kennedy. In 1963, alarmed by the sight of President Abdel-Karim Qassem cosying up to Moscow and threatening to nationalise Iraq’s oil industry, the US decided to act. In February 1963 it supported a coup by the fiercely anti-communist Ba’ath party. James Akins, a political adviser at the Baghdad embassy just after the coup and later ambassador to Saudi Arabia, confirmed: "The revolution was of course supported by the US in money and in some equipment as well. I don’t think equipment was terribly important, but money was to the Ba’ath party leaders who took over in the revolution. It wasn’t talked about openly, that we were behind it. But an awful lot of people knew."

After shooting Qassem, the Ba’athists killed and tortured thousands of communists and leftwing sympathisers: doctors, magistrates, workers. One of those responsible for these massacres was Abdallah Hatef, now the headmaster of a primary school in Baghdad. He says: "We had one simple order: exterminate the communists. The young Saddam Hussein needed no encouragement. He was in charge of torturing workers by pumping water into their bodies, breaking their bones and electrocuting them." The US has always denied involvement, but several leaders of the coup have revealed that the CIA played an active part, especially by supplying lists of communists. In 2003 a former US diplomatic official admitted, anonymously: "We were glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to be kidding. This was serious business." (1).

In June 1963 US and Ba’athist officials met in Baghdad. The minutes of this meeting (2), which have only recently come to light, confirm a shared desire to contain communism throughout the region. But the "enemy" also included Kurds who resisted the Ba’athists in the north of the country. During this period Subhi Abdelhamid was in command of Iraqi army operations against the Kurds (3). In Baghdad recently he confirmed that he negotiated with the US attaché for the delivery of 5,000 bombs intended to crush resistance. He also said: "The Americans gave Iraq 1,000 napalm bombs for use against Kurdish villages." Kurds who survived say the napalm burned their livestock and villages. They assumed at the time that it had been supplied by the Soviet Union.

At his trial Saddam Hussein will be accused of having launched in September 1980 a war against Iran that cost a million lives. But several witnesses insist that the US encouraged him to start this conflict. The West, which felt threatened by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, had everything to gain from an attack. A top-secret US government document from 1984 reveals that "President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran" (4).

Did the US also contribute to the battle plan? Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, then Iran’s prime minister, insists that this is what happened. He claims that Iranian secret services acquired a copy of this plan which, according to his sources, had been drawn up by the Iraqis and Americans in a Paris hotel. "I’ll tell you why I know it’s genuine: because the Iraqis conducted the war exactly according to this battle plan. It was only because we had a copy that we were able to withstand their attacks" (5).

Although Washington was officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq war, a US commission of inquiry has revealed that the White House and the CIA secretly supplied weapons, including fragmentation bombs, to Saddam Hussein. US satellite intelligence allowed Irani an troops to be more effectively targeted; Washington was aware that Iraqi units were using chemical weapons. According to Rick Francona, then an officer with US military intelligence, the lists of bombing targets he gave Iraqis in 1988 secured Iraq’s fi nal victory over Iran.

Saddam Hussein will be held accountable for the crime of gassing 5,000 civilians, whom he accused of having collaborated with the Iranians, in the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988. The US and France did everything in their power at the time to prevent him being condemned for this. President Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill intended to block US trade with Iraq, and his administration telexed embassies around the world with instructions to claim that the Iranians were responsible.

France forgot to condemn this atrocity. Although Michel Rocard’s (6) government issued a communiqué in the immediate aftermath denouncing the chemical attacks "wherever they came from", it failed to mention the Iraqi president. Roland Dumas, then foreign minister, explains: "It’s fair to say that the West closed its eyes to some degree but that was because we regarded Iraq as essential to the balance of power in the region." Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then defence minister, told us: "You have to put the Halabja affair in context and take account of the vital importance of the region to world oil supplies: whoever controls the Middle East controls the financial balance of the entire planet. There is never a clear-cut choice between good and evil; there is merely a choice between horror and terror."

It was not just a question of oil: France was also Iraq’s main supplier of military equipment. By 1981 Pierre Marion, head of the external security service (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) was concerned about the military support offered to Saddam by the French president, François Mitterrand. He now maintains this support was encouraged by arms dealers, who would benefit from the continuation of the Iran-Iraq war.

Western support
IN 1992 a small European legal pressure group, Juristes contre la raison d’Etat, took legal action against French arms companies Dassault, Thomson and Aérospatiale. Courts in Paris concluded that, by selling weapons to a country that deployed them against civilians, the companies had potentially exposed themselves to legal consequences.

It is no longer a secret that only the support of western companies and governments allowed Saddam to attack neighbours and commit crimes. Germany supplied poison gas; France and the US equipped factories for its manufacture in Iraq. The complete list of companies involved has still not been made public. In December 2002 the CIA seized in the middle of the night a 12,000-page report on the arming of Saddam Hussein drawn up for the United Nations. When they handed it back 48 hours later, 100 pages had been removed.

A government leak enabled Gary Milhollin, a US arms control expert, to recover the missing pages. We have been able to read them. They claim that the Pasteur Institute sold biological materials to Iraq; and that the US firm Bechtel, which has helped finance the electoral campaigns of members of the Bush family, supplied Iraq with a chemicals factory. Other documents that may implicate western companies are still hidden in UN headquarters in New York, along with the reports of UN inspectors in Iraq. Asked whether he had talked to UN officials, Milhollin replied: "It’s confidential. Right now, the UN is not busy inspecting anything in Iraq. My impression is that this is just a large stack of information the UN is sitting on for no good reason - unless it wants to protect the companies."

Further accusations against Saddam will concern the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, which overnight transformed the former ally into a tyrant. President George Bush Snr described him as "a new Hitler". Yet several Iraqis and Americans involved in the crisis accuse Bush of having failed to react in time to prevent it. Ruined by the Iran war, Iraq had sought the help of its neighbours in reconstructing its economy. But when Saddam asked Kuwait to defer Iraq’s debts, the tiny emirate, with US support, inexplicably refused to negotiate. Kuwait had suddenly increased its oil production, bringing down prices and sabotaging the recovery of the Iraqi economy. Saddam thought he detected a plot to destroy Iraq. According to Eric Rouleau, a former French diplomat and a Middle East specialist: "For Saddam Hussein it was a question of life and death. When threats got him nowhere, he sent his troops to the Kuwaiti frontier."

When American spy satellites detected tank movements, US advisers recommended that the White House send a strong, clear warning to the Iraqi president (7). But Bush Snr saw Saddam primarily as a major trading partner and chose to believe other advisers, who thought they detected a bluff. The US never issued any warning - it did the opposite. Eight days before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam summoned the US ambassador, April Glaspie, to Baghdad. When he announced that Kuwait’s attitude amounted to a declaration of war, she replied: "We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait" (8). Two days later, in Washington, her superior, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly, publicly repeated that. Asked what the US would do if Iraq attacked Kuwait, he replied: "We have no defence treaty relationship with any Gulf country."

A few weeks later Congressman Tom Lantos criticised US policy: "This obsequious treatment of Saddam by a variety of high-ranking officials encouraged him to take this action and there is no way that we can escape this responsibility."

After the invasion it became clear that the US intended to use force. A senior Ba’ath official, Abdel Majid Rafai, told us that from the fifth day of the invasion Saddam advised party members that preparations were under way for a withdrawal from Kuwait. But all attempts at negotiation ended in stalemate because of tactical mistakes by Saddam and the immovable position adopted by US officials. James Akins explains: "Once George Bush had begun to mobilise his troops, there

was no way that he and his aides were going to let the Iraqi dictator escape. They were anxious to have a war that would be rapid and triumphal" (9).

Operation Desert Storm
THE real reasons behind the war were recalled in a recent interview by then Secretary of State, James Baker: "The policy of protecting secure access to the energy reserves in the Persian Gulf was adopted because without that access, at least in those days, the US economy would be adversely impacted. And if the economy is impacted, people lose jobs, and when people lose jobs they become disaffected and your political support diminishes. And that’s what that was about. And I will tell you to this day that that was one of the reasons we fought that war. Even if a lot of people jumped on that statement to say, ’Oh well, you fight a war on principles because Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, because it’s unprovoked aggression against a small neighbour, or because he’s developing weapons of mass destruction’. But there was another reason we fought that war, and that was because if we let him dominate access to the energy reserves in the Persian Gulf it would have adversely affected the economy in the US. Still true today" (10).

In 1991, after Operation Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein crushed a Shia revolt at the cost of tens, even hundreds of thousands of lives. This is the most serious crime of which he is accused, the one most commonly cited by President George Bush Jnr as a reminder of Saddam’s cruelty. But the reality is that the US and its allies were accomplices to a slaughter that happened before their eyes.

President Bush Snr called on Iraqis to rise up on 15 February 1991: "There is another way for the bloodshed to stop and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside." That there should be no doubt, he had his message broadcast across Iraq on the Voice of America and via several clandestine CIA stations, and distributed on leaflets dropped by US planes. Believing that the regime was on the brink of collapse after defeat in Kuwait, the Shia population rose up. The revolt spread, drawing in soldiers from Saddam’s army. The northern Kurdish population followed.

This was the start of a tragedy. Bush ordered the premature cessation of hostilities in Kuwait, allowing most of Iraq’s elite units to escape destruction. When General Norman Schwartzkopf dictated peace terms to Saddam’s defeated generals, he let them continue to use their combat helicopters. Iraqi generals claimed they needed them to transport food supplies and officers. They used them to crush the rebellion.

The US and its allies, including the French, did nothing. They refused even to meet the leaders of the rebellion, who were begging for support. The truth is that Bush and his advisers did not want the revolt to succeed. They hoped that Saddam’s military defeat would persuade his generals to replace him with another strongman more susceptible to reason and western influence. It had never occurred to them that their call for a rising would inspire so explosive a response. The last thing they wanted was an uncontrollable popular revolt fragmenting Iraq along ethnic and religious lines, spreading instability throughout the region and increasing Iranian influence.

While the revolt raged, James Baker explained: "We are not in the process of assisting or giving arms to these groups that are in uprising against the current government. We don’t want to see a power vacuum develop in Iraq. We want to see the territorial integrity of Iraq preserved. So do all the other coalition partners." Roland Dumas now acknowledges that this was true: "We should never have tolerated the extraordinary brutality that Saddam used to subjugate the Iraqi people. But I suppose you’d call it a question of realpolitik." And Maurice Schmidt, then the French chief of staff, admits: "At the time we preferred a tyrant to having clerics in power." So the allies stood aside while Saddam’s helicopters and tanks annihilated the rebels.

In Baghdad we talked to survivors of the carnage. They described how US troops stationed in southern Iraq refused to give them arms and provisions. Their accusation is confirmed by Rocky Gonzales, who served with US special forces in southern Iraq in March 1991. "People started showing up at our perimeter with chemical burns - we were guessing mustard gas - blisters, burns on their faces, on their hands, places where the skin was exposed. Some who were armed wanted us to give them weapons and ammunition so they could fight. We were under orders not to assist or to aid in any way, so we could not. And I said, ’President Bush said the war is over’." But the Americans were not just spectators. There were cases US soldiers helped Iraqi troops to crush the revolt. Surviving rebels describe how US soldiers prevented them from reaching Baghdad to topple Saddam. One, who is not alone, maintains: "An American soldier threatened to kill us if we didn’t turn back." These witnesses are supported by General Najib al-Salhi, charged by Saddam with repressing the insurrection in the Basra region: "At their roadblocks, the Americans disarmed insurgents before they could attack us. At Safwan I even saw them prevent the rebels from reaching our lines." The US destroyed significant stocks of weapons abandoned by the retreating Iraqi army. "If we had been able to get our hands on those weapons," says a former rebel, "the course of history would have been different, because this happened at a point when Saddam was defenceless."

Of all the killings in Iraq, the most deadly was not the work of Saddam Hussein, but of the UN Security Council. The sanctions imposed upon Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait forbade all trade. According to UN figures, these are thought to have caused the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million children over a period of 12 years.

The Irish humanitarian coordinator for the UN in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned in 1998 rather than continue to apply the sanctions programme, which he described as genocide. He maintains that the UN sanctions committee destroyed Iraq’s health system by preventing the import of cleaning equipment and vital medicines, always on the same grounds: that these could be used to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

After 1991 sanctions could have been lifted. But the UN decided to maintain them and announced a new objective: to pressure Saddam to abandon WMD. These measures mainly affected ordinary Iraqis, particularly children. In 1995 a journalist asked the US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, if maintaining the sanctions was worth the deaths of 500,000 children. Her reply was enlightening: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."

In retrospect, it is clear that the real target of sanctions was not Iraq’s weapons but Saddam Hussein (11). Halliday says: "The theory goes that if you hurt the people of Iraq, and kill the children particularly, they’ll rise up with anger and overthrow his tyrant." The US tried to put this theory into effect for 12 years. In 1991 US planes systematically bombed Iraq’s water system, its sewers and purification plants, and power stations. Over the next decade Iraqis had to live without clean drinking water. Halliday recalls: "People were drinking from the Tigris and Euphrates, so there were outbreaks of typhoid and water-borne diseases. It was extraordinary and devastating." Was the US aware that it was causing thousands of deaths? A secret Pentagon document from 1991 confirms unambiguously that it was. This study, Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities (12), estimated that the destruction of the supply would cause wholesale death and epidemics. Throughout the period Britain and the US dominated the sanctions committee. For 12 years they used the embargo to prevent importation of spare parts that might allow the water system to be repaired. But as Halliday points out, the Iraqi people "didn’t blame Saddam Hussein, they blamed the US and the UN for these sanctions and the pain and anguish that sanctions brought to their lives."

US politicians gradually realised that sanctions, far from toppling Saddam, were ineffectual and were killing thousands of Iraqis. Despite that, they continued to apply them because - as Thomas Pickering, the US representative who defended sanctions before the UN, has admitted - "there was no alternative programme to do it better".

Sanctions finally ended in April 2003, when Saddam Hussein was ousted. Eighteen months later the water supply and sewerage systems and the hospital infrastructure have not been repaired. Babies, sick or dying from lack of potable water, continue to fill hospitals throughout Iraq.

(1) Quoted by US journalist Richard Sale, UPI press agency.

(2) Muhammad Sabah was principal private secretary to the Iraqi prime minister Tahar Yahia. Shortly before his death, he entrusted this document to an Iraqi officer who concealed it for years and recently passed it to Iraqi researcher Abdelkhadi Tamimi.

(3) Subhi Abdelhamid had been interior and foreign minister for the Nasserist government that threw out the Ba’athists nine months later. The Ba’athists seized power again in 1968.

(4) This document, drawn up in 1984 by US Secretary of State Alexander Haig and addressed to President Reagan, was declassified in 1992. See Saddam’s ’Green Light’.

(5) Several former senior US diplomatic officials have admitted to Richard Sale that the US contributed to the battle plan.

(6) Socialist prime minister (1988-1991) during François Mitterrand’s presidency.

(7) This information comes directly from the former Pentagon official Pat Lang, who was an eyewitness.

(8) Information given to us in Baghdad by the Iraqi

translator at the meeting, al-Zubeidi.

(9) This was confirmed to us by Roland Dumas, who claims to have listened in, on the evening of the invasion of

Kuwait, to a telephone conversation between Bush Snr and Mitterrand, during which Bush announced that the US intended to "go for" Saddam - proceed with the war whatever the dictator might decide to do.

(10) From an interview with the journalist Jihan al-Tahri, June 2003.

(11) The former US ambassador to the UN, Thomas Pickering, now acknowledges this.

(12) Accessible online at http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/

Next time could you quote the parts you feel are important and give us a link to the rest of the article?

What do you personally take this article to mean?

i thought the whole thing was important. I take it to mean that there is a clear historical tendency for western powers to manipulate iraq. It seems that the most desired situation is to have an authoritarian centralized government which will prevent fragmentation along ethnic lines, develop friendly ties with western oil and weapons companies, counterbalence iranian military power, and not threaten the oil producing monarchies in the region. The goal is to be able to guarentee access to and de facto control of the world's energy resouces in the future.

So Saddam's power was in western interests?

throughout the 70's and 80's most certainly was when he was actively supported by the US. his invasion of kuwait was not tolerated, but did facilitate the establishment of perminent military bases in the gulf and the continueation of cold war levels of military spending. I think the US's ideal for a new Iraqi govenment is close to Saddam's government during the 80's. This seems particularly true given the growing possiblity of ethnic conflicts.

Permanent military bases? Which ones?

Qatar, Saudi Arabia (now in the process of being moved), and the new ones in Iraq

Russia has the same fragmentation issues as well. A authoritarian centeralized government is the last thing that place needs. The author makes a good arguement, but I think he feel asleep after he got to that portion. There are tons of other systems that would work. All semi democratic, but would promote stability. We shall see.

It seems the only thing that angers the Left more than America supporting an authoritarian regime is America overthrowing one and replacing it with a democracy.

...obscuring the fact that maybe we wouldn't "have" to overthrow them in the future if we didn't support them in the present.

Seriously, is it so fucking hard to hold two ideas at once.

Idea 1 ) Supporting authoritarian regimes = bad
Idea 2 ) Going to war unnecessarily = also bad

Is that concept too fucking hard to grasp?

Or maybe it's because we only "overthrow" those regimes which no longer fit into our international agenda. Once again, we went to Iraq and Afghanistan to make America safer. I'm not too sure either mission has been accomplished. Where are those WMD's anyway?

So if you wish to correct a mistake you made out of Realpolitik calculation, that's bad? We made a mistake during the Cold War and we just have to accept it, no matter how dire the threat from Islamic terrorism is today?

Yep. That's what I call Real Ultimate Power

Once again? We helped the Afghans give the USSR a bloody nose in the 80's, but it was strange how Afghanistan was freer under Soviet military occupation than it was under the Taliban. Now it's freer than ever.

Iraq was not linked to any Terrorist attacks on Americans. Many of our "buddies" in the middle east have been. The people who made the "mistake" you mentioned, are very involved in this current administration. This war is not a humanitarian action. Maybe we should open a new investigation and put some members of this administration behind bars.

Way to dodge the issue. Typical. All this dancing must make you tired.