THE SPLENDID FAILURE OF OCCUPATION: HOW THE U.S. ENGINEERED THE IRAQI HOLOCAUST
By B. J. Sabri
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Online Journal, FL
May 31 2006
le_856.shtml
“Our dark days — already pitch-black with murder and lies and hatred
and fear — are about to grow even darker”-Chris Floyd, columnist,
Moscow Times [from Blood fruit: the blowback harvest begins]
Did the United States, under the pretext of “liberating” Kuwait from
the Iraqi occupation, engineer and execute an Iraqi holocaust to
implement, consolidate, and entrench American imperialism in Iraq,
and the Middle East?
By judging from the scale of destruction and death the United States
inflicted on Iraq, and by considering the international and regional
objectives of war, history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East
since the 1930s, control of oil, Israel, U.S.-Israel relations,
the answer is yes.
Even so, to back up the charge that the United States committed
a holocaust in Iraq, an investigation on the meaning of the term:
holocaust is indispensable.
As a first step, to qualify the human destruction in Iraq consequent
to the Gulf War as a holocaust, we have to dispense at once with
all preposterous differentiations that American imperialism assigns
to the use of the term or to any other taxonomic categories of mass
violence. Second, to debunk completely the imperialist practice that
restricts the application of the holocaust concept to specific events
but not to others, a discussion on the use of language and derived
political vocabulary is in order.
In language, synonyms do not change the basic meaning of a
word. Take for example, the words, kill, slay, destroy, slaughter,
or exterminate. They all mean the same: take life. Yet, the one
subtlety that distinguishes each term is the imagery associated with
the given taxonomy.
What these terms would not tell is the magnitude of those who died.
Accepted contemporary definitions resolved this problem by adding
either the qualifier: mass (as in mass destruction) to indicate lethal
violence against large groups, peoples, or nations; by inventing
names based on Roman derivation such as genocide; or by reviving the
ancient Hellenic term: holocaust.
Before the first Iraqi holocaust (1991), there were many other
large-scale holocausts committed by marauding, colonialist, and
imperialist polities. Among these were Mongolian herds in Asia and
Eastern Europe; European and American colonialism in the Americas,
Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and Africa; Ottomans against Armenians;
Germans against Jehovah witnesses, Jews, Romanies, communists, etc.;
Japanese against Chinese and Koreans; Israelis against Palestinians;
and the United States against Koreans, Vietnamese, and Panamanians.
A holocaust, as an expression of humanity gone dastardly and violently
bestial, should have neither trophy nor primacy over other despicable
events of mass violence. Still, the Iraqi holocaust is prominent among
all other holocausts for one distinguishing feature: the United States
planned for it with the acquiescence of other colonialist powers of
the U.N. Security Council, and with financing from Japan, Germany,
Saudi Arabia, and other American vassals.
In the end, and for the first time in history, there has been a
“legalized” consensus to perform a holocaust, a fundraising to finance
it, and a deadline to start it.
Since the end of WWII, the emergence of an anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist culture in developing, oppressed, and colonized
countries (thanks to the great role played by the Soviet Union)
tuned to investigate historical truths, there were many attempts by
Western powers to limit the notion of holocausts to the suffering of
Europeans of Jewish faith at the hands of the Nazi regime.
Subsequently, U.S. imperialism and Israel transformed the word
holocaust to an exclusive monopoly belonging to Zionism, and
capitalized the first letter of the word to distinguish and elevate
it above all other holocausts.
Yet, although the mass destruction of a sizable portion of the
Iraqi people by the United States, Britain, and France, is a fact,
imperialist circles, the U.N., official media, and mainstream culture
kept it undisclosed, and rhetorical accounts on Iraq’s victims of war
are bypassed as trivial discussion. Also, imperialist circles often
refer to the Iraqis they killed in 1991 by the generic, numberless
phrase: Iraqi deaths in the Gulf War.
Emphatically though, and based on the planned and executed destruction
of Iraq’s infrastructure, water supply, agricultural-industrial
base, hospital systems, as well as the use of radioactive uranium
shells, it is elementary to state that the United States consciously
applied all three categories of extermination: genocide, holocaust,
and mass destruction. Why did I include three denominations denoting
extermination of life as if they were the same? And, what do words
such as holocaust, genocide, or mass destruction mean any way?
To find answers, let us discuss the cogent meaning of genocide,
holocaust, and mass destruction:
Genocide
Article 2 of The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the term as:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children
of the group to another group.
The Convention’s language is unequivocal. It states that, “any of
the following acts committed with intent . . . etc.” constitutes
genocide. By sheer force of logic, items, A, B, and C powerfully
qualify the premeditated American war on Iraq as a genocide that had
for finality the destruction of Iraq’s military population while,
in advance, it qualified potential civilian deaths as unavoidable
“collateral damage.”
Holocaust
Among the plethora of definitions given to holocaust, WordNet.com
(by Cognitive Science Laboratory, Princeton University) offers the
most concise definition of the concept. It says, “holocaust: an act
of great destruction and loss of life.” [Italics added]
When the United States executed the burning of the cradle of
civilization, it, unequivocally committed “an act of great destruction
and loss of life.” By the simplicity of WordNet.com’s definition,
that was a holocaust.
Mass Destruction
Unlike genocide or holocausts, mass destruction is an ambiguous Western
(American) military concept that implies mass death caused by weapons
of mass destruction (WMD.) Are all weapons of mass destruction equal?
It is a known fact that the United States is the only terrorist state
who used true WMD: nuclear bombs. Technically, other weapons such as
chemical weapons that the U.S. categorized as WMD, cannot qualify to
be of equal value to the dreadful destruction that nuclear weapons
can do – read below. Aside from that, the United States used Agent
Orange (contains Dioxin, a lethal toxin) in Vietnam, it bombed Iraq
(1991), Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq (2003) with radioactive
uranium shells.
Simply, it is a propaganda ploy that the United States places nuclear,
bacteriological, and chemical weapons at equal footing, which is
false; and attributes equal mass destruction to their potential use,
which is false too. For instance, it is a known fact that both Iraq
and Iran used chemical weapons in their eight-year war. Yet, from my
research on that war, I could not find any documentation confirming
mass destruction by them. On the other hand, Iraqi and Iranian
conventional weapons killed hundreds of thousands on both sides.
To be sure, chemical weapons can kill a lot of people, but the number
of people who died by them cannot be treated as full-fledged mass
destruction as in the case of nuclear weapons. For example, in the
attack against the Iraqi city of Halabja attributed to the Iraqi
forces fighting separatist Kurds, American and Kurdish propaganda
kept inflating the figures from 1,500 in 1988 to over 50,000 before
and after the U.S. invasion in Iraq in 2003, while the true figures
could range from several hundreds up to 5,000. (Source)
Compare a chemical bomb with a 15,000-pound “daisy cutter bomb” that
the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan and on Iraq: “The bomb [daisy cutter]
sprays a mist of chemicals over a large target area, and then ignites
the mist for a huge explosion that incinerates everything within up
to 600 yards.”[Source] [Italics added]
Notice though, that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima turned over 140,000
people into ashes instantly. Now . . . That was a mass destruction!
What is the game behind Washington’s exaggerated use of the term:
weapons of mass destruction? Remember one thing: while nuclear weapons
are expensive and require advanced technological capability, chemical
and bacteriological weapons have existed in crude forms since time
immemorial, are cheap, and easy to produce. Then, who is raising the
uproar on chemical weapons as WMD?
Here is the catch: Israel. While some Arab countries developed chemical
weapons as a minimum “deterrence” against nuclear Israel, imperialist
states developed nuclear weapons as offensive-defensive weapons to
establish both deterrence and hegemony. American imperialism, however,
bundled non-conventional weapons in one category to deflect attention
from the real issue: Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. Attacking
Iraq or any other country that opposes Israeli imperialism under the
pretext of possessing weapons falsely deemed WMD had become a tenet
of U.S. military strategy in the region and around the world.
In the specific issue which weapon can cause more deaths, the Gulf
War proved that that the combination between massive bombardment with
super-conventional and non-conventional (radioactive uranium that U.S,
military calls, “depleted”) weapons can cause mass destruction equal
to that caused by full-fledged nuclear weapons.
Did the United States then commit mass destruction in Iraq?
A U.S. Department of Defense document: Instruction Number 5240.16.,
e1.1.4 defines WMD as follows: “Any weapon or device that is intended,
or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to
a significant number of people through the release, dissemination,
or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors;
a disease organism; or radiation or radioactivity.”
[Italics added]
The key phrase in this definition is “to cause death and serious bodily
injury to a significant number of people . . .” But the bombing of
Iraq in 1991 that left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead because,
as I just stated, of the combined use of destructive conventional
weapons as well as uranium and other non-conventional weapons proves
that the United States wantonly committed an act of mass destruction,
although it did not use atomic bombs.
Ashton B. Carter, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton
administration, and Co-Director of the Preventive Defense Project at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government pointed to this intentional
(although he never dubbed it as such) imperialist reductionism. In
his article, How to Counter WMD, Carter wrote the following:
The term WMD generally applies to nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons; ballistic missiles; and, more recently, ‘dirty bombs,’
ordinary explosives containing some radioactive material. But this
definition is too broad. Chemical weapons are not much more lethal
than conventional explosives and hardly deserve the WMD label.
Similarly, long-range ballistic missiles are especially destructive
only if they have a nuclear or biological warhead, and so should not be
considered a separate category. Dirty bombs cause local contamination
and costly cleanup but not true mass destruction; they too should be
given lower priority.
Having demonstrated that holocaust, genocide, and mass destruction
share similar meaning, it is inescapable that when we look back at
the aftermath of Iraq’s bombardment and ground “war” that killed tens
of thousands of Iraqi civilians and military in just 100 hours, we
cannot name that horrific carnage except by one term: holocaust. Of
course, other synonyms still apply depending on the context of the
intended use.
How did the Iraqi holocaust of 1991 influence the American people
at large?
Incessant anti-Iraqi propaganda combined with the adroit use of
fascist psychological tactics to mobilize the American people to
support the war were so powerful that an army of Iraqi and Arab haters,
ideological acolytes of U.S. wars, and bogus freedom lovers from all
creeds celebrated the Iraqi holocaust as a catharsis for the United
States (read example). Yet, decency, compassion, and principle still
prevailed among countless other Americans whom the system could not
buy, corrupt, or silence.
Writing for the World Association for Christian Communication,
Thomas J. Gumbleton, a bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
Detroit, addressed the attitude of the American people toward the
Iraqi holocaust, but not in relation to the Gulf (War) Aggression,
rather to the price paid by the Iraqis for the genocidal sanctions
imposed on them after the cease-fire. Sadly, what Gumbleton powerfully
described has been, through to the present, the norm that still
governs most people’s attitudes toward the atrocities committed by
the United States in its 16-year continuing unilateral war with Iraq.
In his article: Choosing not to know: The spiritual crisis that
faces the nation, Gumbleton recalled what former Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright told CBS program, 60 Minutes. On that occasion,
a Nazi-minded Albright stated that the death of over 500,000 Iraqi
children due to the sanctions was “worth the price.” Wrote Gumbleton:
I believe that the fact that there is not absolute moral outrage in
our nation when this sort of thing can be shown on ’60 Minutes’ to an
audience of millions of people, and everybody goes to work the next
day without even thinking twice about it, is itself a moral outrage.
To me, that’s a case of collateral damage and we justify it somehow.
It’s a ‘hard decision,’ yes, of course it’s a hard decision. I almost
want to get vulgar in what I want to say in response to that, but
I’ll try to be polite.
A question, “How did the U.S. engineer the Iraqi holocaust?” And
by that, I do not mean the details of the operation but rather the
guiding methodology for war and resulting holocaust.
As a starter, considering the colossal imbalance of power between a
developing country and a superpower, U.S. planners knew that a war
with Iraq would inevitably mean a potential Iraqi holocaust followed
by swift massive degradation of Iraq as a functional nation and
more deaths.
Gen. Michael J. Dugan, former Chief of Staff of the U. S. Air Force,
externalized the deliberations of the administration when he stated
(mid summer, 1991) that if war comes, “We will bomb Iraq back into
the Stone Age.” But Dugan went further. In an interview, he delineated
the role of Israel in the planning for war by stating that “a plan to
bomb Iraq existed and that Israel would help the Air Force to select
the targets” [1]. Interestingly, George H. W. Bush fired Dugan. But he
did not fire him because of objection to the essence of the statements,
rather because he revealed decisions already taken.
As you know, what Dugan postulated happened verbatim.
But to seal the matter, and tie in the Gulf (War) Aggression as a stage
in the conquest of Iraq, and to cast light on the determination of the
United States to go to war no matter what happened on the diplomatic
front, I shall provide more details to support my argument.
Military Establishment: War as an Ideological Necessity
Retired Col. Trevor N. Dupuy, U.S. Army provided a terse picture on the
relation between the ideology of imperialism, rigid indoctrination,
lust for war, disregard for international law, and by implication
contempt for human life.
In the book that he wrote in the summer of 1990 (before the U.S.
attacked Iraq) Dupuy envisioned many scenarios on how to annihilate
Iraq. Following in the American strategy to personalize aggressions
abroad by naming the contenders as U.S. power vs. a foreign leader,
Dupuy did not propose the annihilation of the Iraqi army but the
“army of Hussein,” as if the Iraqi national army was the personal
property of the Iraqi president. Dupuy, therefore, named his book:
How to defeat Saddam Hussein.
One such scenario envisioned an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait before
the expiration of deadline imposed by the U.S. (January 15, 1991).
Dupuy called it, the “January surprise” possibility. The importance
of this scenario is that, although it did not happen, it confirms
that U.S. power elites wanted a war with Iraq at any cost. Wrote Dupuy:
If such a situation [January surprise] transpires, it may be tempting
to “declare victory” and accept compromise. That, however, would
simply reward the aggression and would do nothing to implement UN
Security Council resolutions. Nor would it prevent a recurrence of
aggression in the future. It would, in fact, be likely to ensure
future Iraqi aggressions on a much larger scale.
The appropriate response to a “January surprise” would be to reject
outright any Iraqi compromise offer, insist on Iraqi acceptance of
all UN Security Council resolutions, and demand that the Iraqi Army
begin evacuating Kuwait immediately, perhaps a 48-hour extension of the
deadline might be offered. . . . This period would be designated as a
period of “pre-hostilities,” during which the allies would themselves
immediately initiate military activities preparatory to moving into
Kuwait and engaging any remaining Iraqi forces. [2] [Italics added]
First, Dupuy (a theoretician and author on U.S. militarism,)
explained his penchant for war based on presumable “future Iraqi
aggressions.” Two, he postulated, but without any foundation, that the
absence of war against Iraq would encourage larger scale aggression, as
if Iraq’s regional policy, including options for military intervention
in Iran and Kuwait, were purely the results of innate aggressive
impulses but not the outcome of political deliberations by a presiding
government. Third, he clamored for war despite a hypothetical Iraqi
withdrawal. Fourth, he deleted the role of the United Nations that
authorized the war and reassigned it exclusively to the United States.
All the preceding, and the fact that Dupuy cited repeatedly the
“danger” Iraq posed to Israel, proves that the project for a war with
Iraq (and by implication with the Arab world) had become an ingrained
ideological-military-imperialistic paradigm.
To summarize, Dupuy’s imperialistic attitudes for a war with Iraq
clarified one fundamental aspect that unifies U.S. imperialists:
while American propaganda machine depicted the United States as
searching for a political settlement, its leadership had already made
its choice: war.
For instance, in his meeting with Tariq Aziz in Geneva, Switzerland
(a few days before the war) James Baker essentially adapted Dupuy’s
position: a war must happen. Does that premeditated position constitute
engineering for holocaust? If a superior military power plans a war
against a weak country, then it, logically, is engineering a holocaust
among the attacked population.
The case of Tariq Aziz and James Baker
The meeting between former Secretary of State, James Baker and former
Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz proves beyond any doubt that the
United States of America is permanently a belligerent state, whereby,
given the option between war and peace, it will choose war. Moreover,
the predilection of war is decisively a manufactured impulse whose
function is to preempt negotiations. But if negotiation to avoid
war and save life can succeed, why abort it, unless the plan for
genocide to implement imperialism is the dynamo that moves American
decision-making?
James Baker: “I have met with Tariq Aziz not to negotiate, as we made
it clear we would not do – that is, negotiate backwards from United
Nations Security Council resolutions . . . Either comply with the
will of the international community [meaning the United States] and
withdraw peacefully from Kuwait or wait to be expelled by force” [3]
James Baker and the United States dubbed the meeting with Tariq Aziz
with the propagandistic stunt, “going the extra mile to avoid war.”
But in Geneva, there was no extra mile to go or attempts to
negotiate. To reinforce the determination for war, hence, for planned
genocide, Baker treated the deadline by the U.S.-controlled U.N.
Security Council as if it were an immutable physical law of nature.
But, the United States, who imposed on the “United Nations” the
verdict to destroy Iraq, could have changed the rules without calling
any U.N. ambassador.
Did Tariq Aziz come to negotiate?
Tariq Aziz: Pierre Salinger stated that the meeting between Baker
and Aziz failed because “Aziz did not come with any new proposal.”
Surprisingly, Salinger contradicted himself within the same
paragraph. He, himself, stated that Aziz did come with a proposal;
it might have not been new, but considering the nearing deadline and
the high-level encounter, it was a serious proposal that, however,
pivoted on a simple request to extend the expiration of the deadline.
Let me explain. Wrote Salinger, “He [Aziz] had come with only one
objective: to persuade the United States to withdraw the January 15
deadline adopted by the United Nations. Saddam Hussein was not a man
who adopted deadlines. And he sent Tariq Aziz to Geneva to make clear
that Iraq was ready to talk about a peaceful solution, but only after
January 15. This was something that Secretary of State Baker would
never accept.” [4]
The sentence that Iraq “was ready to talk about a peaceful solution,
etc.” was, indeed, a workable proposal since it clearly indicated
that Iraq was ready to give up Kuwait on a condition that the U.S.
not humiliate it by an artificial deadline.
Why did Baker and the United States not accept postponing a deadline
for holocaust?
You guessed it! The United States had other calculations. So what
were they?
Next: Part 46: Preliminary remarks on the second stage of conquest
Notes
[1] Pierre Salinger, Secrete Dossier, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 174
[2] Trevor N. Dupuy, How to Defeat Saddam Hussein, Warner Books, 1991,
[Dupuy published the book in 1990 under different title: If war comes,
how to defeat Saddam Hussein]
[3] Pierre Salinger, Secrete Dossier, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 209
[4] Ibid, p. 210
Recommend Reading
James Ridgeway, editor, The March to War, Four Walls Eight Windows,
1991
Jean Edward Smith, George Bush’s War, Henry Holt and Company, 1992
Ramsey Clark and others, War Crimes, Maisonneuve Press, 1992
Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck, Beyond the Storm, Olive Branch
Press, 1991
Martin Yant, Desert Mirage, Frometheus Books, 1991
B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American antiwar activist. Email:
[email protected].
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
