With the public growing skeptical that Iraq poses a serious, immediate threat to the United States, and the UN weapons inspectors still without the hard evidence that would theoretically justify war, the war-heads have turned much of their rhetoric to the humanitarian benefits of invading Iraq. This is indeed questionable because war, by definition, involves the murder of many, many people. Regardless, the argument must be examined.
Many who support invading Iraq compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic. They call advocates of a peaceful solution in Iraq hypocrites because we would surely have supported intervention in Kosovo and in the face of Nazi oppression. Hitler was the head of an expansionist genocidal regime that killed millions of people. Milosevic was in charge of the systematic removal and murder of thousands of ethnic Albanians from the province of Kosovo. In the process of war and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, men and women of all ages were killed. Many were tortured or raped. In both cases, racism was a core tenet within the dogma of organized and encouraged mass killing. The question is: how does Saddam stack up? Is he a true expansionist or an ethnic cleanser?
A quick look at the history of modern Iraq may uncover some answers. 1979 is a good place to start. In February of that year, the Iranian Revolution took place and the Shah fell from power, despite economic stability and U.S. support. Saddam Hussein rose to power in Iraq through the Ba'ath party that summer, and on Christmas Eve Russia invaded Afghanistan. In simple terms, the Soviets were pushing from the east towards an oil-rich region, and the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini had taken control of Iran and was threatening to push into Iraq, where the majority of the population are Shi'ite Muslims, like Khomeini.
U.S. policy in the region, which had relied on the Shah as a major ally, had been turned on its ear. Saddam, whose political power base pushed a comparatively secular form of government, was on a collision course with the new Iranian leadership. In 1980 war broke out between the two countries. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait were among the nations supporting Iraq through monetary loans and weapons sales. Most people did not expect the war to last eight years or cause about 1,000,000 casualties and cost $1 trillion.
Regardless, the oil-rich nations to the south and the United States were happy to have Iraq bog down volatile Iran in a long war, preventing the revolution from spreading. To fight Iran, Iraq had borrowed about $90 billion from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Saddam asked his two neighbors to forgive the debt that Iraq had incurred. They refused and commenced in breaking their OPEC production quotas, driving down the cost of oil on the global market and making it increasingly difficult for Iraq to get out of debt. After attempts to draw international attention to the issue failed, Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. The rest is relatively familiar history.
The point of this brief account is not to show that Iraq was justified in its attack of either Iran or Kuwait. Rather, the point is that Saddam has not followed an ideology of expansion. Whether these wars were defensive or aggressive is debatable. Both were certainly regrettable. But, was Saddam's cause for invading Iran very different from the Bush doctrine of preemption?
Many accusations have been made that Saddam has used chemical weapons against his own people, particularly the Kurds. The arguments are largely based on an incident that occurred at the Kurdish village of Halabja near the Iranian border, in March 1988, close to the end of the Iran-Iraq War. The problem with using this incident as an example of Hussein's homicidal tendencies towards civilians is that the Kurds were fighting on the side of the Iranians during the war.
It remains unclear whether it was the Iraqis or the Iranians who deployed the cyanide-based agent that killed the Kurds during the battle Halabja. Both sides were using chemical weapons in the battle. This much and more is reported by former CIA senior political analyst and Army War College Professor Stephen C. Pelletiere in his article "A War Crime or an Act of War?" which was published in the New York Times on Jan. 31.
What's more, America was complicit in Iraq's use of chemical warfare in the 1980s, both selling Saddam the chemicals to use and providing the military intelligence to help them be used lethally. More information on this subject can be found in Michael Dobbs's article "U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup," published in the Washington Post on Dec. 30, 2002.
Saddam has often used political killings and torture as tools of his power. He is, however, not comparable to either Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are skeptical that humanitarian aid is the true cause for U.S. intervention in Iraq. Amnesty International has warned Bush that "selective and opportunistic attention to human rights serves only to undermine international human rights standards."
It's no wonder that they're concerned: the Pentagon's war plan calls for 3,000 guided bombs and missiles to be unleashed in the first 48 hours of war alone. War causes humanitarian disaster. If the U.S. government was serious about humanitarian aid, why spend a decade starving Iraqi civilians through sanctions? Why did we refuse to ratify the International Landmine Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Bio-weapons Protocol or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Preemptive war is no way to get serious about improving global human rights. War will make a bad situation much worse.
