Vol. 13 No. 5 · 7 March 1991
pages 7-8 | 3599 words
Edward Said, an American and an Arab, writes on the eve of the Iraqi-Soviet peace talks
The United States is at an extraordinarily bloody moment in its history as the last superpower. Perhaps because I come from the Arab world, I have often thought during the past few months, and more anxiously during the past few days, that such a war as we Americans are now engaged in, with such aims, rhetoric, and all-encompassing violence and destruction, could now have been waged only against an Arab-Islamic-Third World country. It does no one in it any credit, and it will not produce any of the great results which have been predicted, however ostensibly victorious either side may prove to be, and whatever the results may prove to be for the other. It will not solve the problems of the Middle East, or those of America, now in a deep recession, plagued by poverty, joblessness, and an urban, education and health crisis of gigantic proportions.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 7 · 4 April 1991
From Steven Rose
It is a great pity that Edward Said tarnishes his excellent article about the criminal folly of Desert Storm (LRB, 7 March) by mentioning the unsustainable claim that the gassing of the Kurdish civilian population of Halabjah in March 1988, in which some five to six thousand people died, was an Iranian rather than an Iraqi atrocity. This piece of disinformation was propagated by the Pentagon at a time when the US was massively supporting Iraq in its war with Iran, a policy continued, as Said points out, until 2 August last year, and reflected, as I write, in the current paradoxical US attempts to preserve Saddam Hussein against the less palatable alternative forces fighting against him in Basra and Kurdistan.
I had the opportunity, in the aftermath of Halabjah, to interview a number of the Kurdish survivors, who had been flown by the Iranians to London for treatment. Their accounts of what had taken place were clear and consistent: the chemical weapons had been delivered by Iraqi Sukhoi 22 fighter-bombers. The survivors I saw were all extensively burned by mustard gas, for which the Iraqis had a production plant at Samara. The same plant manufactured the nerve gas which was almost certainly responsible for most of the deaths at Halabjah. The US defence analysts who disputed this did so on the extraordinary and unsustainable grounds that the Halabjah deaths were caused by blood gases (cyanide) and that Iraq did not possess such weapons. Their version of events is refuted not only by my own observations but by the UN investigators, by the UK pathologist who saw victims in Tehran not long after the gassing occurred, and by the team from the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights who interviewed Kurdish refugees in eastern Turkey.
Halabjah represented a turning-point in the history of warfare as significant as Hiroshima. It was the first time that chemical weapons had been used on such a scale against a defenceless population and the first time that nerve gas had ever been used. It was a clear breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical and biological weapons (to which Iraq had been one of the early signatories). That Iraq was allowed by its Western backers to get away with such an atrocity has undoubtedly compromised subsequent attempts to demilitarise in the Middle East or to negotiate an effective new chemical weapons treaty at Geneva. That Iraq’s chemical weapons capability was provided by Western European technical support, and that the US turned a blind eye to its use, contributes one more twist to the spiral of disaster which led the world into Desert Storm and which that savage campaign has merely added to. But in condemning Western imperialist goals in that war, there is no need to try to wash the bloody stains from the Iraqi dictator’s record.
Steven Rose
Open University, Milton Keynes
