Enlighten Me

We've heard it so often that it must be true......But is it really? I would like evidence. When Iraq and Iran were at war Iran had, and used, chemical weapons. Perhaps it was their gases that killed Kurds. Saddam was an evil tyrant, but I'd hate to be guilty of making assertions about him that may not be true....

Spaz

I've heard both sides a gazillion times, yes, a gazillion. Iran and Iraq both gassed the shit out of each other, so either one could be responsible, and they most likely both are, for different amounts of people in different places, etc. It's a bad argument to say "he gassed his own people" but it makes people not like saddam, so it goes around. Aside from the fact that there have been biological and chemical weapons tests on people in the US too, so it's kinda hypocritical to use that argument anyway, but I guess that doesn't really matter.

Daisy

Were those Kurds considered "his own people"? They were insurrectionists in league with Iran - that's what I've read.

CALDONIA

The phrase, "Saddam gassed his own people..." is accepted as the truth. However, its use has been for its value as an emotional appeal to persuade us that the war was just.

Isn't it a given that dictators/strongmen oppress their "own people" by suppression of civil rights and much worse? Stalin and Hussein differ in the scale of their crimes. But is "gassing" your own people equivalent to murdering, imprisoning, and terrorizing them or is it worse? Or is it body count that matters?

What bothers me about the whole "gassing his own people" argument for war is that it amounts to retroactive punishment. Where was our outrage when it happened? There was little of it, officially. Would we have gone to war against the Nazi regime in 1950 for the atrocities it committed against the Jews (not to mention others) that began in the late Thirties? Therefore, our recent horror about events of ten or so years ago is disingenous at best.

The neocons' argument here is twofold -- Saddam is a bad bad man for what he has done in the past and must be punished for humanitarian reasons (as a belated response) and/or that his past behavior PROVES that he is an imminent threat to his neighbors and likely the world. Both arguments are flawed.

Tristan Scott

It was true, and it was proven beyond any reasonable doubt. After the cease fire with Iran, the Iraqis launched an attack on the Kurds in the north of Iraq. As part of the offensive selected towns were hit with gas, notably the town of Birjinni.
Initially there was a disnformation campaign spread that the attacks were commited by the Iranians by accident, or that they never occured at all. In 1993 members of Physicians for Human Rights sent a team of forensics experts to Birjinni. Eyewitnesses of the attack told them that they had seen Iraqi aircraft dropping clusters of bombs around the town and noticed the bombs put out black smoke turning to a yellowish color. The villiagers immediately began vomitting and many of them died. The forensics people exumed bodies of some of the victims and took samples and also too metalic fragmentary evidence from the bomb craters. The evidence proved conclusively that the people had died from the nerve agent GB and Mustard gas.

Now I suppose one could argue that these were not Iraqi aircraft, but imposters. The question would be who and why. Why would Iran do it after they had just agreed to a cease fire. It seems logical that the Iraqis did it when it is common knowledge that they had just launched a major military offensive against the Kurds.

Tristan Scott

http://www.phrusa.org/research/chemi...miraqgas2.html

Sakpo

If you believe that Kurds in Iraq should be considered part of the people of Iraq and that the leader of Iraq is responsible for all the people of Iraq, regardless of ethnicity, then yes, Saddam "gassed his own people," because Saddam's forces undoubtedly gassed Iraqi Kurds (those who deny it invariably engage in the deceptive methods of historical denial common to Holocaust deniers, deniers of Stalin's mass murders, etc). Of course, we must keep in mind that Saddam Hussein almost surely did not consider the Kurds to be "his own people." He comes from a different ethnic group and would undoubtedly see the Iraqi Kurds as being another group entirely, who happen to reside within the same borders as his group and other groups, borders artificially set up by the British. There really isn't a unified "Iraqi people," rather there are various seperate peoples stuck in the same nation.

We should also keep in mind that the United States government was very much complicit in the use of gas in the Iraqi-Iranian War, and that US companies, with White House approval, knowing that the Iraqis were using chemical weapons, sold helicopters capable of deploying chemical weapons (they sold civilian models of military models, that could easily be reconverted to militart models). The future use of chemical weapons against the Kurds was not exactly unpredictable. Not suprisingly, it is believed that US built helicopters were later used in 1988 weh chemical agents were used against the Kurds (US intelligence sources have said this). The American senate passed sanctions to end the sale of US military technology and hardware to Iraq in 1988, after the atrocities, but the White House vetoed them.

Happy Wonderer

Are there any references for Iran using gas? Iran accused Iraq and brought the matter before the UN . The UN report said that Iran would have had the right to use gas in retaliation and so was worried about an escalation, but I haven't found a reference for this happening.

The UN report was careful not to assign blame; they found shells (reported by Iranians) that contained mustard gas, but the implication is pretty obvious. Unless the Iranians were gassing their own soldiers in an effort to implicate Iraq, the gas probably came from Iraq.

Gassing anybody is horrific enough, I don't see why "his own people" has to be added to the Kurdish situation. He gassed not only soldiers, but civilians. Whether or not they considered themselves Iraqi citizens is kind of minor in comparision.

The interesting thing with all the talk of WMDs is that according to the UN report fairly few people were killed (compared to large scale conventional weapons attacks during the war.) My cynical take is that one reason that nations tend to abide by chem warfare treaties is that chem attacks in the modern era are not as lethal as other methods (MOAB and cluster bombs) that do not seem so horrible or indiscriminate.

hw

The SwampThing

I�ve discussed this topic on other forums, and i�m led to believe that although Irak gassed the kurds in some ocasions, the Hallabja incident has the iranian hand on it, instead of Iraq�s.

Read here

The Bush administrations (both of them) used the Hallabja incident to demonize Iraq at the eyes of the coalition, to make it easier the forresting of support in their campaigns.
Saddam is/was no saint, but he had no part in the Hallabja gassing. It doesn�t help his case much, but it does shedd some light on the way the Bushes used false propaganda to achieve their goals.

Optional

It's an interesting historical question. The answer would have to be 'probably' (it is nowhere near as certain as tristan would have you believe, but still, the probabilitiers favor it), however, the phrase 'he gassed his own people' when used to show how evil saddam is/was is vastly misleading, imho.

The kurds rebelled against iraqi rule at a time when iraq was fighting what looked to be a losing war against iran. The kurds did everything they could to help iran win that war. Saddam thought that his only chance at holding the iranians back was to use gas... And most everybody in the international community agreed with him, and quietly encouraged him to do so. Eventually peace was declared... But the kurds maintained that they were a free seperate people. The fact that he would commence to crush them was utterly predictable given all of human history to that point, and the fact that he would use gas to do so was utterly predictable given that he had spent the past eight years hearing from every nation on earth that using gas was a GOOD idea. *shrug*

-me