Re: "smoked salmon socialists"

"pearl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "Rubystars" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> > He committed genocide upon some of his own citizens.
>
> News you might have missed;
>
> Saddam never gassed his own people
>
>      A Stephen C. Pelletiere commentary appeared in the January 31,
> 2003 New York Times, yet no one seems to have noticed.  Here is
> part of what he wrote about frequent statements that Saddam Hussein
> gassed 5000 Kurds at Halabja in 1991:
>
> ...as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq
> during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College
> from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that
> flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In
> addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis
> would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of
> the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.   ............
> http://www.g2mil.com/Dec2003.htm

>From conservative Jude Wanniski . . .

Did Saddam gas his own people?

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© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com


Memo To: Editors, Columnists and Anchor Persons
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: The Gassing of Iraq's Kurds

I'm broadcasting this memo to the major media, hoping it would get more
attention than it did when I initially sent it on April 7, 1998, to Jesse
Helms, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee.

You all know, because you read it in the newspapers over and over again,
that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people." Now, with journalists opening
letters laced with anthrax, The Wall Street Journal editorial page has
decided that "the leading supplier suspect has to be Iraq. Saddam Hussein
used weapons-grade anthrax against his own Kurdish population with lousy
results, before turning to more lethally efficient chemical weapons."

The Journal, of course, has been foaming at the mouth to bomb Baghdad as
soon as we polish off the Taliban. But this kind of stuff is irresponsible.
I'm sorry to see the new editorial-page editor, Paul Gigot, come out of the
box ranting and raving. The clear objective is to scare you folks to the
point where you join in beating the war drums to take out Saddam whatever
the cost. If you have been following my commentaries here recently, you
should know that Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, along with
his henchman Richard Perle, have been supplying the WSJ editorialists with
grist like this for years. They are first and foremost propagandists. So I
urge you to do your own digging, and you will quickly find, I think, that
there is no evidence Saddam Hussein ever "gassed his own people." Here is
the Helms memo:


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I continue to make inquiry into the situation in Iraq, as it is likely to
brew up into another crisis one of these days when the U.N. has no choice
but to conclude that Iraq is not hiding any weapons of mass destruction - or
if they are, they are so well hidden that nobody is going to find them.

As you know, I'm sure, the warhawks in the United States will continue to
insist that the embargo remain in place no matter what, and there will be
assertions from around the world that we have not been acting in good faith.

As you also know, I believe there are serious questions regarding our
behavior toward Iraq that go back further. You would agree, I think, that at
the very least our State Department gave a "green light" to Saddam Hussein
to go into Kuwait in August 1990. The more I read of the events of the
period, the more I believe history will record that the Gulf War was
unnecessary, perhaps even that Saddam Hussein was willing to retreat back to
his borders, but our government decided we preferred the war to the status
quo ante.

In my previous correspondence with you on this matter, I had been in a
quandary about the state of our relations with Baghdad during that critical
period. In the months immediately preceding the "green light" given by our
ambassador, April Glaspie, a number of your Senate colleagues including Bob
Dole had traveled to Baghdad, met with Saddam, and found him to be a head of
state worthy of support. Even Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, a Jewish
liberal and staunch supporter of Israel, gave him a seal of approval.

What disturbs me even now, Jesse, is that these meetings occurred after the
Senate Foreign Relations committee had accused Iraq of using poison gas
against its own people, i.e., the Kurds. Like all other Americans, in recent
years I had assumed that what I read in the papers was true about Iraq
gassing its own people. Once the war drums again began beating last
November, I decided to read up on the history, and found Iraq denied having
used gas against its own people. Furthermore, I heard that a Pentagon
investigation at the time had also turned up no hard evidence of Saddam
gassing his own people.

This is serious stuff, because the U.N. tells us that 1.4 million Iraqi
civilians have died as a result of the sanctions, which is 3,000 times more
than the number of Kurds who supposedly died of gassing at the hands of
Saddam. Many of my old Cold Warrior friends practically demand that we not
lift the sanctions because if Saddam would gas his own people, he would gas
anyone.

Now, I have come across the 1990 Pentagon report, published just prior to
the invasion of Kuwait. Its authors are Stephen C. Pelletiere, Douglas V.
Johnson II, and Leif R. Rosenberger, of the Strategic Studies Institute of
the U.S. War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The report is 93 pages, but
I append here only the passages having to do with the aforementioned issue:

Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East
Excerpt, Chapter 5
U.S. SECURITY AND IRAQI POWER

Introduction. Throughout the war the United States practiced a fairly benign
policy toward Iraq. Although initially disapproving of the invasion,
Washington came slowly over to the side of Baghdad. Both wanted to restore
the status quo ante to the Gulf and to reestablish the relative harmony that
prevailed there before Khomeini began threatening the regional balance of
power. Khomeini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and
Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him. United by a common
interest, Iraq and the United States restored diplomatic relations in 1984,
and the United States began to actively assist Iraq in ending the fighting.

It mounted Operation Staunch, an attempt to stem the flow of arms to Iran.
It also increased its purchases of Iraqi oil while cutting back on Iranian
oil purchases, and it urged its allies to do likewise. All this had the
effect of repairing relations between the two countries, which had been at a
very low ebb.

In September 1988, however - a month after the war had ended - the State
Department abruptly, and in what many viewed as a sensational manner,
condemned Iraq for allegedly using chemicals against its Kurdish population.
The incident cannot be understood without some background of Iraq's
relations with the Kurds. It is beyond the scope of this study to go deeply
into this matter; suffice it to say that throughout the war Iraq effectively
faced two enemies - Iran and the elements of its own Kurdish minority.

Significant numbers of the Kurds had launched a revolt against Baghdad and
in the process teamed up with Tehran. As soon as the war with Iran ended,
Iraq announced its determination to crush the Kurdish insurrection. It sent
Republican Guards to the Kurdish area, and in the course of this operation -
according to the U.S. State Department - gas was used, with the result that
numerous Kurdish civilians were killed. The Iraqi government denied that any
such gassing had occurred. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Schultz stood by
U.S. accusations, and the U.S. Congress, acting on its own, sought to impose
economic sanctions on Baghdad as a violator of the Kurds' human rights.

Having looked at all of the evidence that was available to us, we find it
impossible to confirm the State Department's claim that gas was used in this
instance. To begin with there were never any victims produced. International
relief organizations who examined the Kurds - in Turkey where they had gone
for asylum - failed to discover any. Nor were there ever any found inside
Iraq. The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the
border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.

We would have expected, in a matter as serious as this, that the Congress
would have exercised some care. However, passage of the sanctions measure
through the Congress was unusually swift - at least in the Senate where a
unanimous vote was secured within 24 hours. Further, the proposed sanctions
were quite draconian (and will be discussed in detail below). Fortunately
for the future of Iraqi-U.S. ties, the sanctions measure failed to pass on a
bureaucratic technicality (it was attached as a rider to a bill that died
before adjournment).

It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, the Congress was influenced by
another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraqi-Kurdish
city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with
chemical weapons, producing a great many deaths. Photographs of them,
Kurdish victims, were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq
was blamed for the Halabjah attack, even though it was subsequently brought
out that Iran too had used chemicals in this operation, and it seemed likely
that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.

Thus, in our view, the Congress acted more on the basis of emotionalism than
factual information, and without sufficient thought for the adverse
diplomatic effects of its action. As a result of the outcome of the
Iran-Iraq War, Iraq is now the most powerful state in the Persian Gulf, an
area in which we have vital interests. To maintain an uninterrupted flow of
oil from the Gulf to the West, we need to develop good working relations
with all of the Gulf states, and particularly with Iraq, the strongest.



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Editors: There is no evidence Saddam used anthrax or any other chemical
weapons against the Iraqi Kurds. There have been allegations, but Iraq has
always insisted it did not use such weapons in the two 1989 incidents
alleged. There were estimates that 1,400 to 4,000 Kurds died of chemical
weapons in an Iraqi offensive. The Iraq Defense Minister insisted it did not
use gas and that it was neither logical nor feasible to use gas against
small groups of Kurds in areas through which government forces had to pass.

The sole "evidence" seems to be the finding of a British laboratory that
soil samples in the Kurdish region contained mustard gas (not anthrax).
Edward Peck, our ambassador to Iraq in 1977-79, who today teaches at the
government war colleges, recalls a Department of Defense statement at the
time that the gas used in that region was not of the type we had supplied
Iraq for its use in the war with Iran. Nizar Hamdoon, today the deputy
foreign minister of Iraq, told me the army had used gas, but only against
the human waves of suicide soldiers in the Iranian army. He did not know
what kind was used. At the time, I think he was ambassador to the U.S. in
Washington.

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