I ONCE GLIMPSED Henry Kissinger in Bangladesh when he was Richard Nixon’s secretary of state. His visit was described by the American Embassy as a ‘hardship stopover’; and he was driven in haste to the ambassador’s residence, where he spent the night before being delivered back to the airport.
Bangladesh was then in the grip of flood and famine; and I, and other reporters, enquired if Kissinger’s motorcade might be diverted a few miles to a camp where tens of thousands of desperate people had been herded. This seemed especially relevant, as Kissinger had earlier dismissed Bangladesh as a ‘basket-case’ and had established in the State Department the Office of Multilateral Diplomacy, better known as the ‘Zap Office’. It was here that the voting patterns of Third World members of the United Nations were scrutinised so that those countries which voted against US motions could be identified and warned and, if need be, ‘zapped’ – that is, their US food ‘concessions’ would be cut off.
In a land of starving people, Kissinger probably saw not one. I mention this because Kissinger has always exemplified for me those who exercise imperial power and seldom see the consequences of their actions. There is also the ingredient of hypocrisy.
Latter-day Kissingers, ‘statesmanlike’ men of equally impeccable manner if not repute, are prosecuting the colonial war in the Gulf without the slightest risk of confronting the consequences of their actions, such as human beings ‘zapped’ by British and American cluster bombs. I once saw a rare survivor of a cluster attack; minute shrapnel, like needles, were ‘swimming’ through her organs, according to a doctor, torturing her to death.
Latter-day Kissingers often use a language few people speak: a semantic syrup that reveals nothing, omits a great deal and dispenses words like ‘principles’. In an article in the Guardian last week, Douglas Hurd managed to mention ‘principle’ and ‘oil’ in the same column. Addressing critics of the war, and those he described as ‘cynics’, Hurd wrote, ‘What of the charge that the problem of Saddam Hussein is of the West’s own creating? Critics claim we supported and armed him during the Iran–Iraq War. But . . . we refused to sell armaments to either side’.21
In July 1981 Hurd, then a foreign office minister, flew to Baghdad as a ‘high level salesman’ (Guardian, July 17, 1981). His mission was to court Saddam; what he was hoping to sell, once the Iran–Iraq War was over, was a British Aerospace air defence system: a sale that ‘would be the biggest of its kind ever achieved’. Ostensibly, Hurd was in Baghdad to ‘celebrate’ with Saddam the coming to power of the Iraqi Ba’athists in 1968, one of the bloodiest episodes in modern Middle Eastern history, which, with Washington’s help, extinguished all hope of a pluralistic Iraq. Hurd would have known that the man whose hand he shook, the man to whom he came as a ‘super salesman’ of British technology, was renowned as an interrogator and torturer of Qasr-al-Nihayyah, the ‘Palace of the End’.
Far from ‘refusing to sell armaments’ to Iraq, the British Government has played a critical role in building what Hurd now constantly refers to as ‘the massive Iraqi military machine’. This has been done by subterfuge and sleight of hand. According to a report soon to be released by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, at least 20 British companies have been allowed to supply Saddam Hussein with missile technology, radar and computerised machine tools. Although ‘lethal defence equipment’ to Iraq has been banned, ‘existing contracts’ have been honoured. A number of British companies, including at least one owned outright by Iraqis tied to the Iraqi military, have exported equipment that has gone straight to weapons and ammunition factories. The ‘super gun’ is the most famous example. Others have exported machine tools said to have been designed for civilian production, which have ‘dual use’. Indeed, ‘lethal defence equipment’ apparently does not include British-machined shells, British-designed bomb shelters, British-made anti-gas kits, British uniforms and the training of Iraqi fighter pilots in the Lake District.22
Following Saddam Hussein’s genocidal gassing of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, Trade Minister Tony Newton flew out with 20 British officials and offered ‘the Butcher of Baghdad’ £340 million worth of British trade credit – more than double that of the previous year. The flow of British largesse was not interrupted by Saddam Hussein’s murder of the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft.
‘Some people,’ wrote Douglas Hurd, ‘ask why if principle is involved, the West or the UN did not try to reverse Israel’s occupation of Arab territories? Again, the parallel is partial and false. Israel occupied the territories as a result of war in which her neighbours were clamouring for an end to Israel’s existence.’23
No, it is Hurd’s reply that is partial and false. He makes no mention that the West has blocked all attempts to legally enforce Resolution 242 and most of the other UN resolutions on the Middle East. Only last October the United States blocked the Security Council from imposing sanctions on Israel after the massacre of unarmed Palestinians in Jerusalem. Similarly, Israel was able to invade and effectively carve off a piece of Lebanon, causing untold civilian deaths, without a single American or British bomb ‘taking out’ with ‘surgical precision’ the sources of this outrage.
George Bush also refers incessantly to the ‘principle’ of the ‘Allied’ cause. As a former director of the CIA, Bush will know the facts. He will know that the CIA helped put Saddam and his Ba’athist fascists in power. He will know that Saddam and his gang competed for CIA favours; that a CIA-directed campaign oversaw the slaughter of the Iraqi opposition: socialists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists.24
Like other American-sponsored tyrants before him – Diem in Vietnam, Noriega in Panama – Saddam Hussein outlived his usefulness, especially when he had the temerity to challenge America’s divine right to the resources of the Gulf. And for this ‘principle’ many thousands of people are about to be zapped.
February 1, 1991