PRESIDENT BUSH DESCRIBED the Gulf War to David Frost as ‘the greatest moral crusade since World War II’. To date, the war has virtually destroyed the infrastructure of two countries, caused the violent death of as many as 200,000 people, triggered an ecological disaster, ensured that a fascist regime retains power in Iraq and stimulated the world arms trade. (Reviewing its war budget, the Pentagon reports a ‘profit’ of several billion dollars.)
It is now clear to many people who honestly defended the war on the basis of George Bush’s word and John Major’s word that they were misled. It is the Kurds’ struggle for life that has opened eyes and allowed people to perceive the ‘moral crusade’ as one whose aim was never to ‘liberate’ anyone, but to weaken Iraq’s position in relation to other US clients in the Gulf and Israel, and to demonstrate America’s unchallenged military power in the ‘post-Cold War era’.
The propaganda was always fragile; hence the ferocious attacks on those who identified and resisted it. What has given the game away is the suffering of the minority peoples of Iraq, especially the Kurds and the Shi’a. Why, people now ask, if the war was a matter of right against wrong, of good against evil, as its salesmen pitched it, was the regime of the ‘new Hitler’ preserved, deliberately and legalistically, and his victims left to their fate? Why did Bush, who saluted before Congress ‘the triumph of democracy’, refuse to meet Iraq’s democratic opposition until Saddam Hussein’s terror apparatus had been restored?
To people in Britain watching the news, who live their lives by the rules of common decency, none of this makes sense – unless they have been lied to. In undermining Iraq, then watching the Kurds perish, the Americans are doing what the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese in their time did elsewhere. Imperialism has no use for democracy, which may be difficult to control, or for troublesome minorities, which threaten to upset the imperialist board game with its frontiers intended to divide ethnic nations. History provides no evidence that imperialist wars have anything to do with ‘morality’. Rather, they are about power and naked self-interest, and are fought accordingly with the utmost ruthlessness.
If further evidence is required to demonstrate this, the massacre of the Iraqi minorities during as well as since the Gulf War is a testament. I am not referring here to the actions of Saddam Hussein, whose barbarism towards the Kurds has been graphically documented (notably by Martin Woollacott in the Guardian). What has been overlooked is that the Allies have been more successful in killing, maiming and terrorising the Kurds and other minorities than Saddam Hussein: a considerable achievement.
During the war little attention was paid to the fact that Iraq was not a homogeneous nation. Little mention was made of the Kurds and Shi’a as the Allied bombs fell on populated areas. Certainly ‘Hannibal’ Schwarzkopf did not say he was bombing Kurdistan or Shi’a communities. Anyway, where was Kurdistan? Was it marked on the war-room map at Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping HQ?
And why were the Iraqi prisoners-of-war so pleased to see their captors? Only a careful scrutiny of the media coverage will suggest why. Reporting from the carnage on the Basra road, where American pilots conducted their famous ‘turkey shoot’ on a retreating convoy, Kate Adie said: ‘Those who fought and died for Iraq here turned out to be from the north of the country, from minority communities, persecuted by Saddam Hussein – the Kurds and the Turks.’ Shortly afterwards, Jeffrey Archer reported for ITN: ‘The Shi’as have a powerful incentive for opposing Saddam Hussein. Most of the thousands of conscripts who died in the trenches of Kuwait were Shi’as.’71
In other words, those sections of the Iraqi Army least loyal to Saddam Hussein and most likely to rise up against him – the very people to whom Bush issued his call to rise up – were massacred by the Allies. They were conscripts, positioned on the southern frontline while the loyalists were held further north. Schwarzkopf knew this; Bush must have known it. So for those of us now grieving for the Kurds struggling towards the Turkish border and pursued by Saddam’s gunships, let us also grieve for the tens of thousands of Kurds and Shi’a slaughtered as the price of Schwarzkopf’s ‘famous victory’.
Much of the media ‘coverage’ that galvanised support for the war concentrated on Saddam Hussein’s mistreatment of the environment – an issue close to the hearts of many in the West. When, shortly after the outbreak of war, two tankers off Kuwait started pouring oil into the Gulf at a rate of four million gallons a day, Bush claimed that the Iraqis deliberately caused the spill. For this ‘crime’, he said, Saddam Hussein was ‘kind of sick’. It now appears that Iraqi claims at the time – that American bombers had hit the tankers – were correct. An American scientist, Richard Golob, a world authority on oil spills, told the Boston Globe that the 10.9 million gallons discharged by the Exxon Valdez tanker could turn out to be a ‘small fraction’ of the damage caused by Allied bombing in Iraq and Kuwait.72
The propaganda also misled people on the nature of the bombing itself. Pentagon sources now say that only 7 per cent of American explosives dropped during the war were high-tech ‘smart’ bombs: that is, bombs programmed to hit their targets; and shown around the world doing so.73 How convincing this made the military boast, of the kind heard frequently in Peter Snow’s sandpit, that war, at last, had become a science. The truth was the diametric opposite. Seventy per cent of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait missed their targets completely. The fact that most of these found other ‘targets’ in populated areas ought to be enough for us to conjure up the human consequences.74
In Britain, the drum beaters are still mostly silent on this carnage and the reasons for it. Instead they are ‘disappointed’ in Bush, who goes fishing and plays golf while Kurdish children freeze on the Turkish border. Bush, they say, is ‘remarkably insensitive’, even ‘uncaring’. Oddly, none of this indignation was directed at Bush while his planes were shredding Kurds on the Basra road and incinerating Shi’a conscripts in their Kuwaiti trenches. But those were the days when such people were designated ‘turkeys’; only recently have they become news-fashionable.
These same moral crusaders used to tell us that the old Cold War was a war of attrition between the two superpowers, between East and West. But this was only partly true. Most of the Cold War was fought in faraway, impoverished lands with the blood of expendable brown- and black-skinned people. The Cold War was an imperialist quest for natural resources, markets, labour and strategic position. It was not so much a war between East and West as one between North and South, rich and poor, big and small. And the smaller the adversary the greater the threat, because a triumph of the weak would produce such a successful example as to be contagious.75
As we now know, the ‘new world order’ is the old Cold War by way of Saatchi and Saatchi. The enemy, for imperialist Washington, remains nationalist, reformist and liberation movements, as well as irrepressible minorities. A leading US defence journal has called them ‘that swirling pot of poison made up of zealots, crazies, drug-runners and terrorists’.76 The means of combating them is currently a matter of conjecture and competition within the US war establishment. According to a classified study for the Pentagon, the US Air Force wants to send its Stealth bombers against the Third World (they can fly 14,000 miles non-stop), and the US Navy wants to send its carriers and cruise missiles.77
In the end, the means of ‘keeping the violent peace’, as they say in Washington, will almost certainly be the usual, reliable client regimes and their revolving-door tyrants, who are encouraged to use all forms of violence and are equipped and trained accordingly. The crimes committed against the Kurdish and Iraqi peoples by Saddam Hussein and George Bush are but current examples.
April 12, 1991 to June 1992