Fascist Iraq

Peter Galbraith served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Iraq-Iran conflict and the US war with Iraq in the early 1990s. During this time he smuggled out of Iraq 14 tons of documents detailing, among other things, the Iraqi regime’s attempted genocide of the Kurds within Iraq via the use of chemical weapons.  These documents were created by Saddam’s government, but were stolen by the Kurds during a revolt, and one of the 2 Kurdish leaders handed them over to Galbraith to be taken to the US for study.

NPR’s Terry Gross interviewed Galbraith recently.  You should listen to it.  It’s 32 minutes long.  Here are some quotes from the interview:

"There’s no question but that in Bosnia the United States intervention, the NATO bombing saved many many more lives than were cost by that action.  It helped bring the war to an end.  It was a war in which 200,000 people had been killed, and it enabled Bosnia to get on with the process of reconstruction.  And it is, admittedly slowly, becoming a more normal part of Europe."

"Iraq, in the 30 years that Saddam Hussein has been in power, at least a half a million Iraqis have died as a result of actions taken by Saddam Hussein... it’s likely to come to some kind of military action, and if it’s sooner, we’re simply going to save the lives of Iraqis."

"You have a situation in Iraq in which 80% of the population are Kurds, Shiites, or Christians... groups that have been brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein."

"Iraq is today very much a third-world country as a result of what Saddam Hussein has done to the country, but it wasn’t, it was a country making great progress back in the late 1970s... in which a lot of people had gotten educated, a lot of professional people..."

"We’re not going to find anybody inside Iraq who can be part of the government, except from the Kurdish area which has been free from Saddam’s control for 11 years, because anybody inside the country who might have opposition tendencies either has kept them very secret and is not known, or if it is known, he’s in prison or dead."

"Iraq is going to need to have a period of de-Nazification.... It’s inconceivable to me that any person who has served as a judge in Saddam’s Iraq could possibly continue to be a judge in post-Saddam Iraq, because inevitably, this person has been involved in the enforcement of tainted law, of law that grossly violates human rights."

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Comments:

01. Feb 6, 2003 at 8:31am by Anthony:

More quotes from the interview:

"In Iraq, the problem is that the Kurds, who live in a geographically defined area in the north, who have been de-facto independent for 11 years, don’t feel Iraqi.  Over the last 11 years, the Iraqi identity has been disappearing in the north, for example the language used is no longer Arabic, but Kurdish: the schools teaching Kurdish, there’s been a flowering of media, 20 television stations of different political views, all of this in Kurdish.  For younger people, they don’t really have a memory of Iraq.  And for older people, the memory of Iraq is a nightmare."

"The Kurds have a deep hatred of Saddam Hussein, he gassed the Kurds, and he exiled a lot of Kurds, and destroyed some of their villages."

"As I travelled from the last Arab town into the Kurdish region, I noticed that things that I expected to be there, weren’t there.  There were villages on the map that we had that simply didn’t exist anymore.  And as I went on I saw villages and towns in the process of being destroyed... It became clear to me that there was this process, which ultimately destroyed 4000 villages and towns in Kurdistan, of wiping out the rural areas of Kurdistan.  And the population was then being concentrated into what the Iraqi regime called "victory cities," but what were effectively concentration camps of some 50,000 people each, in which the population was very carefully guarded, without possibility of employment, dependent on government-issued rations."

"A year later, when Kurdish villagers crossed into Turkey reporting that Iraq had used chemical weapons, I went back and I thought about those destroyed villages.  And I put the two together, and I came to the conclusion that what was really going on was a strategy aimed at eliminating the Kurdish presence in Iraq, that this was in fact a policy of genocide."

"And then I went out with a junior staffer on the committee named Chris van Holland... we went all along the Iraq-Turkey border talking to these refugees who had just come out.  There were about sixty-five thousand of them, and all of them, virtually all of them, had been witnesses to the chemical weapons attacks.  And we interviewed hundreds who described firsthand what had happened, many of whom had actually seen family members or friends or acquaintances die before their eyes.  But it was a very very brutal campaign, overall we documented that between the 25th and 28th of August 1988, 49 villages had been attacked, but it turned out that these attacks had been going on since 1987, and perhaps as many as one hundred and eighty villages and towns had been attacked by Iraqi aircraft using chemical weapons."

"[Terry Gross:] The anti-genocide act that you mentioned passed the senate, but it didn’t finally pass congress. [Peter Galbraith:] No, it did not... the Reagan administration’s position was that taking action was pre-mature.  And so they were able to derail the process in the House of Representatives.  I think it was a great tragedy that this legislation didn’t pass, because I think Saddam got the message that while his atrocious acts might generate protest, nobody in fact was really prepared to take action against him.  And I think had comprehensive sanctions passed, he might have thought twice before he invaded Kuwait, he might have thought that there would be consequences from doing it."

02. Feb 6, 2003 at 9:01am by Anthony:

I’m halfway through transcribing this interview. It’s half an hour long.  I discovered it takes me about 4 minutes to transcribe 1 minute of audio, because I can’t type fast enough to do it in real-time, so I have to keep pausing it.  Anyway... more quotes will follow later today when I have some time to transcribe the second half.

03. Feb 10, 2003 at 3:53am by Anthony:

I finally finished transcribing this interview. Here are some quotes from the second half:

"[Terry Gross:] You were one of two people who smuggled out Iraqi documents documenting human rights violations and atrocities committed against the Kurds.  What were the documents, how did you get them? [Peter Galbraith:] In March of 1991 there was an uprising in northern Iraq, and the Kurds took over all the Kurdish-majority cities and towns.  And when they did that, they captured the buildings and the records of the Iraqi secret services, as well as of the Bath party.  They took these records to the mountains so that when the Iraqis retook the Kurdish area at the end of March, they didn’t get the records back...when I went back in September of 1991...I talked to Jalal Talabani who is one of the two main Kurdish leaders, and he told me indeed that most of the documents had been rescued and moved to the mountains.  So I said to him, "Well if they stay here, there’s a good chance that they will fall into Iraqi hands, and anyhow, they won’t be useful."  And so he said, "Well, I agree, I think they should go out of Iraq, but I’m not going to give them to the Bush administration, I just don’t trust the American administration."  He was very angry at the Americans for having called for the uprising and then failed to support it.  So he said, "I’ll give it to you personally."  Well that was a bit of a dilemma because I didn’t know what I would do with what turned out to be fourteen tons of documents.  But in the end, we were able to get them out, actually on US military aircraft, [with] cooperation of the Pentagon.  And then I deposited them in the files of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which meant they went into the US national archives, a special room was built for them below ground, out in Sutland, Maryland.  And then Human Rights Watch, the human rights organization, began to do research on them.  And they turned out to be extraordinary documents.  They were ledgers of executions.  They included the orders for the destruction of the villages, what was known as the Anfal Campaign.  They included orders for the use of special weapons, which meant for chemical weapons.  They included the tapes of meetings of the northern bureau.  One of these tapes, for example, is Ali Hassan Majeed -- who is Saddam’s cousin who had been put in charge of the north -- in which he talks about using chemical weapons.  He says, "We will use chemical weapons on the Kurds; who will object?  The international community?"  And here, I paraphrase the language: "To hell with them."  So it is an extraordinary record, from the point of view of the Iraqi regime, of their activities."

"Looking at what the Iraqi regime has done, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a fascist regime that bears close resemblance to the fascist regimes in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe.  It has an official ideology that glorifies one group, the Arabs, over the others.  It has engaged in escalating atrocities against the minority that ultimately -- in my view but also in the view of Human Rights Watch -- rose to the level of genocide.  And I think that it is appropriate for the United States to take action -- preferably with others in the international community, preferably, but not necessarily, pursuant to security council authorization -- against regimes that commit genocide.  Genocide is an internationally recognized crime, and there is a convention, to which the US is a party, that obliges states to do something to stop and to punish the crime of genocide."

"In February of 1991, the first president Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein...By the middle of March of 1991, most of Iraq was in the hands of rebels.  Saddam was about to topple.  At that time, president Bush took the decision to let the rebellion fail.  Not just to let it fail, but actually to facilitate its failure.  So American troops who were on the Euphrates valley in southern Iraq, permitted Iraqi Republican Guard units to pass by their lines, and in some cases through American lines, to put down the rebellion in the southern city of Basra and Nasiriyah and in some other places.  In the north, general Schwarzkopf allowed the Iraqis to use helicopters against the Kurds.  And one has to understand the role of helicopters in the Kurdish psyche.  Helicopters had often been used to deliver chemical weapons, so for the population in the city, when they saw those helicopters flying, they panicked, they fled.  The helicopters also gave the Iraqis intelligence that they could use to target Kurdish militia units.  The final thing that happened is that those people in Baghdad and in the Iraqi military who were wavering -- who were trying to figure out if they should overthrow Saddam or not -- looked at what the Bush administration was doing, got the clear message that the Bush administration did not want the rebellion to succeed, and decided to back Saddam.  And as a consequence, Saddam stayed in power.  We are dealing today with the failure of the first Bush administration to support the rebellion."

"The first Bush administration never talked to anybody in the opposition.  There was a ban on talking to the Iraqi Kurds that continued until the beginning of April of 1991.  So they had no idea of what the Iraqi Kurds were thinking....The current Bush administration is not repeating those mistakes.  Paul Wolfowitz, who is the deputy secretary of defense, has known the Iraqi opposition leaders for many years.  There are very regular contacts with the Kurdish leaders, there are developing contacts with the Shiite leaders, so I think that they have taken that lesson on board."

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