Bush has failed to teach Iraq 101
Here’s a test that most educated Americans ought to be able to pass on the eve of war with Iraq: What is Halabja? Al-Anfal? The Mukhabarat? Who was Michel Aflaq? How did Saddam Hussein come to run Iraq, anyway?
I know from testing a number of intelligent people the Bush administration has failed to teach Iraq 101 to the public. Americans have been told — endlessly, by the administration — that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is “evil,” “a dictator” and “a menace.”
It’s all true. It’s well documented that he’s a sadistic, murderous monster, responsible for more than a million deaths. If Americans — and people around the world — only knew the stomach-turning details, the Bush administration might have less difficulty making its case for war. Liberating Iraq would be seen as a moral imperative.
Administration officials claim they have tried to make the human rights case against Hussein, and they say they’ve had some success around the country, though less with the Washington media. “We’ve been persistent, repeated and consistent,” said Tucker Eskew, chief of the White House’s Office of Global Communications. “You can’t find a speech of the president’s in which he doesn’t mention the plight of the Iraqi people.”
The problem is, he said, that “the press, with its nose against the glass, is not paying attention to this. It’s focused on United Nations diplomacy, inspections and preparations for war.” And, Eskew said, “It’s very difficult to make news about human rights because Saddam Hussein sees to it that there’s not much new information coming out.”
Still, the administration is forging ahead, its human rights campaign evidently timed to accompany the release of plans for post-war reconstruction and governance of Iraq.
This weekend, the White House plans to observe the 15th anniversary of Halabja. What happened there was chillingly described by British writer Gwynne Roberts in the 1999 book “Crimes of War” (W.W. Norton) as follows: “It was 6:20 p.m. on March 16, 1988, when a smell of apples descended on the town of Halabja. This Iraqi Kurdish town of 80,000 was instantly engulfed in a thick cloud of gas, as chemicals soaked into the clothes, mouths, lungs, eyes and skin of innocent civilians.
“For three days, Iraqi Air Force planes dropped mustard gas, nerve agents known as sarin and tabun and VX. … These chemicals murdered at least 5,000 civilians within hours and maimed thousands more over the next several years.
The attack on Halabja was part of a wider, genocidal campaign against the Kurds known as Al-Anfal, which killed 30,000 to 60,000 between 1983 and 1988.
The eight-year Iran-Iraq war launched by Hussein in 1980 killed an estimated 1 million people on both sides of the conflict, many by poison gas.
Thousands more died as a result of his attack on Kuwait in 1990, which led to the first Persian Gulf War. As it ended, then-President George H.W. Bush encouraged Iraqis to liberate themselves from Hussein’s rule. When Shiites and Kurds rose up, they were decimated by Iraqi forces. The United States did nothing.
Michel Aflaq? He was an early leader of the Baath party and Saddam Hussein’s ideologiCritics of Bush’s war policy often say, “I know he’s a bad guy, but …” The problem is, no one has educated them on just how bad a guy he is.
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)