Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (23 page)

The trajectory of proxy war in the rough decade from the end of the Cold War to 9/11 is best illuminated on the common ground of Iraq. America’s post-Vietnam preoccupation with low-intensity proxy war reached its high point in Iraq, where it was waged in the entirely novel form of a multilateral proxy, taking the form of UN sanctions, mitigated by an “oil-for-food” program, justified in the language of humanitarian intervention but at a cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent children’s lives. After 9/11, Iraq, more than Afghanistan, became the real launching pad for a brazen U.S. intervention undertaken in the midst of international opposition, including in the halls of the UN.

Iraq: Collective Punishment in War and Peace

The two decades of proxy war, from the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s to the regime of UN sanctions, provide a background to the invasion of Iraq and highlight a novel development in U.S. strategy in the region. If U.S. attitude to the Iraq-Iran War recalls a time-tested strategy of big powers fueling and sustaining a local conflict in order to weaken both sides, the regime of sanctions that followed the Gulf War was a remarkable development in the history of low-intensity conflict: for the first time, the proxy was not bilateral but multilateral. Whereas the sanctions regime demonstrated the success with which the United States turned the UN into a multilateral proxy, the invasion of Iraq demonstrated that approach’s limits and, ultimately, failure.

To understand how Iraq became central to U.S. strategy in the Middle East, we need to return to Iran in 1979. We have seen that postwar U.S. foreign policy operated on the simple assumption that Islam was an anti-Communist and antinationalist force; the Iranian Revolution changed this by giving the United States the taste of a nationalist Islamist regime. To contain Iranian nationalism and the force of its example, the United States turned to Iraq. Neither the brutal dictatorship that Saddam Hussein ran at home nor his determination to create a modern and independent state made much difference at the time. The relationship between the United States and Iraq was marked by three phases in the two decades that followed. The first phase was an alliance in which the United States supported Iraq in the war against Iran, but it was also a setup, designed to keep the war going rather than to bring it to a swift conclusion. The second phase, the Gulf War that followed Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait, was a war of vengeance. The third phase was a vicious low-intensity, high-casualty campaign
conducted through the offices of the UN; in reality, this was nothing short of an officially conducted and officially sanctioned genocide, primarily of children, most under five.

On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic U.S. support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Nicholas D. Kristof of the
New York Times
reported that “the United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988.” Training in the use of chemical and biological agents had been provided to Iraqi military officers as early as the 1960s. An official army letter published in the late 1960s noted that “the U.S. army trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967.” At the time Iraq got access to U.S. chemical and biological weaponry, the U.S. military was advertising these weapons not only as less expensive but also as more humane. Harvard professor Matthew Meselson, codirector of the Harvard-Sussex Program on Chemical-Biological Warfare Armament and Arms Limitation, explained: “The argument was you would lose fewer American lives if you fought a war because you would knock the enemy out right away.”

Further, a report in the February 2003 issue of
Foreign Policy
says the United States provided Iraq satellite imagery of Kurdish militias and Iranian troops so the Iraqis could target both more effectively. A central figure in Reagan’s effort to court Saddam was the person who was one of the most hawkish on Iraq after 9/11: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who, as Reagan’s envoy, met Saddam Hussein in December 1983 and Tariq Aziz, then the foreign minister, on March 24, 1984, the very day the UN released its report on Iraq’s use of poison gases against Iranian troops.

American assistance to Saddam Hussein ranged from commercial
credits to political protection. When Saddam began gassing the Kurdish minority in Iraq in May 1987, the United States was already providing Iraq with aid worth $500 million per year. In spite of public revelations about the use of chemical weapons, the United States doubled aid to the regime. Additionally, the United States blocked attempts to raise the topic in the UN Security Council. But when Saddam Hussein’s forces gassed Iraqi Kurds for a second time, after the September 1988 cease-fire with Iran, the brutality received wide publicity, including in the American press. Compelled to acknowledge the crime, the United States asked that the UN response be limited to appointing a fact-finding team to confirm the event.

Chemical weapons from the United States were not just unleashed on those for whom they were meant. In at least one disasterous instance during the 1991 Gulf War, over 100,00 American soldiers were exposed to Sarin nerve gas when the U.S. military improperly blew up chemical weapon sites in Khamasiyah. Today, hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans are sick—estimates range “up to half”—many suffering from a variety of symptoms collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome. Matters came to public attention after the current invasion of Iraq when a class-action suit, introduced on behalf of over 100,000 Gulf War veterans in August 2003, named “11 companies and 33 banks alleged to have helped Iraq with its chemical weapons program in the 1980s, despite knowledge Saddam Hussein was actively using WMD against both Iranians and his own people.”

This alliance between the United States and Saddam Hussein is better understood by looking at the Ba’athist and the Islamist regimes in Baghdad and Tehran. Two forms of nationalism, one secular and the other religious, they represented the more successful attempts at state building in the region. Washington’s support
of Baghdad in the war was an indication of which it thought was the greater danger. But Washington’s real strategic objective was to bleed
both
to death. The sentiment behind it was brazenly articulated by Kissinger in the middle of the Iraq-Iran War, perhaps because he was already out of office: “We hope they kill one another.”

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait ended the alliance. Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the United States. The 1991 Gulf War was literally a punishment. It was the first time the United States applied the military doctrine it had forged in Laos during the long war from 1964 to 1974: “to compensate for the absence of ground forces by an aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity, without regard to the ‘collateral damage.’ “The political prerequisite was that collateral damage must not become public, as it had in Laos. Then as it “panned the Ho Chi Minh trail in the jungles of the south” and “the heavily populated areas of the Plain of Jars in the north,” the bombing aroused great concern in antiwar circles in the United States. A group of Cornell University scientists pointed out that the bombing violated the principle of proportionality—“that a reasonable proportionality exist between the damage caused and the military gain sought”—under international law. In his introduction to the scientists’ report, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times
journalist Neil Sheehan concluded: “The air war may constitute a massive war crime by the American government and its leaders.” It is this doctrine of aerial bombing, without regard to the principle of proportionality or to consequences for the civilian population, that the United States applied during the Gulf War in Iraq, after it, in Kosovo, and then in Afghanistan.

The Gulf War was waged with little restraint, and in the
process the United States committed many war crimes. Former attorney general Ramsey Clark charged that the administration used “all kinds of weapons in violation of international law,” from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs. As Iraq’s infrastructure was comprehensively targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties, which were explained away as “collateral damage.” Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor who was also coordinator of a Harvard team on Iraq, reported that the bombardment of 1991 had “effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq—electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry and health care.” Thomas Friedman, the chief diplomatic correspondent of the
New York Times
, openly claimed that “the best of all worlds” for the United States would be another Saddam-like dictator, “an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.” But George H. W. Bush hesitated to replace Saddam Hussein, uncertain of what consequences regime change would have had for the region. Bush faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the Kurdish minority was the group best organized among the Iraqis to take advantage of Saddam’s overthrow, but its objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close U.S. ally in the region. On the other hand, there was also the possibility that Iraq’s majority Shi’a population, which had religious and cultural ties to Iran, would assert itself, surely dimming America’s hopes of isolating Iran. So Bush feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq. The alternative was to continue punishing Iraq in peacetime, so as to keep the regime from arming effectively against anyone but its own population.

Even after this punishing war, the idea persisted that Iraq was a danger to the region, capable of mounting an invasion, as with Kuwait, and a danger to the world, capable of unleashing weapons of mass destruction. In the worst-case scenario, Iraq was said to be
close to possessing a nuclear device. The editor of the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
commented after the 2003 Iraq War that “many of the charges that had been dangled in front of [the media] failed the laugh test, but the more ridiculous, the more the media strove to make the whole-hearted swallowing of them a test of patriotism.” These fictions supported the argument that Iraq must be policed and punished simultaneously. That combination was carried out by the United States and Britain through the intermittent aerial bombardment that continued even after the Gulf War ended. By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than had the U.S. invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, U.S. officials told the
Wall Street Journal
they would soon run out of targets: “We’re down to the last outhouse.” That was two months before President Clinton, bedeviled by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and faced with a vote in the House of Representatives indicting him for perjury and obstruction of justice, decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. Round-the-clock bombing began on December 16, 1998, and ended on December 19. The mission was called Operation Desert Fox, also the nickname of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The U.S. government reported that American and British forces flew more than 650 strike and strike-support sorties, that navy ships and submarines fired 325 cruise missiles, and that an additional 90 cruise missiles were fired by U.S. Air Force B-52s.

The intermittent bombing of Iraq ran parallel with an indefinite regime of economic sanctions. The UN adopted economic sanctions as part of its 1945 charter, as a way of maintaining global order. Since then, sanctions have been used fourteen times, twelve of those since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Iraq represents the first time a country has been comprehensively sanctioned
since the Second World War, meaning that virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the UN and subject to a U.S. veto.

The UN Security Council imposed comprehensive multilateral economic sanctions in resolution 661 on August 6, 1990. All exports from and imports to Iraq were banned, with exemptions for medical supplies and, in some instances, foodstuffs. Resolutions 665 and 670 that same year imposed a marine and air blockade to enforce the sanctions. The sanctions regime was renewed, with the same humanitarian caveats, in resolution 687 (1991). A further set of resolutions in 1991 permitted the sale of petroleum and petroleum products, up to $1.6 billion every six months, but it was not implemented until resolution 986 (1995) set up the oil-for-food program.

The rationale for the sanctions regime kept on shifting. First, it was meant as a lever to get Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. When Iraq withdrew, the rationale shifted to the need to disarm it, particularly of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The real objective was to compromise its sovereignty. When a proposal was floated as early as 1991 that UN-controlled Iraqi oil sales be used to purchase humanitarian goods, Iraq objected on the grounds that the proposal would undercut its sovereignty and reduce the government to an internal civil administration. The sanctions regime continued even longer than the Iraqis had expected. As the concomitant humanitarian crisis deepened, Iraq and the UN finally came to agreement on the oil-for-food program.

This regime signified a truly novel and sinister development in the history of low-intensity conflict. Waged as a human-rights campaign, it claimed to soften a punishment meted out according to a rule of law with provisions for “humanitarian goods” supervised by on-the-ground “UN Humanitarian Aid Coordinators.”
In reality, it unleashed the mass murder of hundreds of thousands, mainly children, in the full and callous knowledge that the victims were not the target and a cynical acceptance that sanctions so effectively centralized the official export-import trade that it put the surviving population at the mercy of the very regime it claimed to target. Done in the name of the UN, it turned the UN into an American proxy for low-intensity conflict.

Since no foreign loans or foreign investment—and no access to foreign exchange—were permitted, this is how the program worked: Iraq was allowed to sell a set amount of oil over six months (initially $1.2 billion net, later $3 billion net). The revenues went directly into a UN account. The United States and Britain required that nearly one third of this (30 percent from 1996 to 2000, 25 percent thereafter) be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Another 10 percent went to pay for UN operating expenses in Iraq. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who disbursed funds to contractors and suppliers of foodstuffs and basic medicines approved by the sanctions committee. But as a working paper prepared for the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights noted, “Of the revenue from sale, only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the majority of the rest going towards reparations and administrative costs.” Finally, the sanctions regime treated the northern Kurdish part of Iraq preferentially—both in the funds provided and the degree of autonomy allowed its local administrators—to the central and southern parts. Whereas child mortality decreased in the three northern governorates during the period of the sanctions regime, it increased in the fifteen governorates of central and southern Iraq.