Daily Archives: June 26, 2006

Gassing Our Own People

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I hope you won’t mind my going back in time a bit, but lots of threads to the past are converging these days. Recently this post generated some comments about support given to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s by St. Ronald of Blessed Memory, even as Saddam was going through his “gassing the Kurds” phase. I was reminded of this episode again today. Murray Waas posts a lovely bit of writing at Huffington Post in which he explains why he dedicated himself to exposing the Reagan-Bush I support for Saddam and his war machine. He also speaks to why he is dedicating himself to exposing the lies and manipulations that got us into Iraq. Be sure to read it; it’s very moving.

Back to the gas: You’ll remember that in the weeks before the Iraq invasion, a hoard of operatives infested talk radio and cable news, babbling about how Saddam “gassed his own people,” meaning the Kurds, which was why we had to invade Iraq right now. A month before the invasion I wrote this piece for Democratic Underground about why the “gassing his own people” talking point fell way short of a casus belli. And in that I linked to this 1993 Los Angeles Times article by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas about how Bush I secretly continued to build Iraq’s war machine after the gassing of the Kurds. Just nine months before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, President Bush I approved $1 billion in aid to Iraq. The Bush I Administration also provided Iraq with access to sophisticated “dual use” (military and civilian) technology, “despite emerging evidence that they were working on nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction.” Frantz and Waas uncovered

…a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by Bush — both as President and as vice president — to support and placate the Iraqi dictator. Repeatedly, when serious objections to helping Hussein arose within the government, Bush and aides following his directives intervened to suppress the resistance.

The reason for this, ostensibly, was that while Saddam Hussein might have been an odious little toad, he was an enemy of Iran, which after the fall of the Soviet Union had moved into the #1 spot on the Real Bad Places list.

But classified records show that Bush’s efforts on Hussein’s behalf continued well beyond the end of the Iran-Iraq War and persisted in the face of increasingly widespread warnings from inside the American government that the overall policy had become misdirected.

Moreover, it appears that instead of merely keeping Hussein afloat as a counterweight to Iran, the U.S. aid program helped him become a dangerous military power in his own right, able to threaten the very U.S. interests that the program originally was designed to protect.

Clearly, U.S. aid did not lead Hussein to become a force for peace in the volatile region. In the spring of 1990, as senior Administration officials worked to give him more financial aid, the Iraqi leader bragged that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and threatened to “burn half of Israel.” Nor did he change his savagely repressive methods. In the summer of 1988, for example, he shocked the world by killing several thousand Kurds with poison gas.

Even today, the Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons programs carried forward with the help of sophisticated American technology continue to haunt U.S. and United Nations officials as they struggle to root out elements of those programs that have survived the allied victory in the Persian Gulf War.

I remember when Halabja was gassed, in March 1988. I remember especially the photographs of dead mothers, their arms wrapped protectively around their dead babies. At the time I did not understand what was going on. But I remember there was some movement in the Senate toward doing something about it. Senators Claiborne Pell, Al Gore, and Jesse Helms introduced legislation to impose sanctions on Iraq, and the Senate passed a Prevention of Genocide Act, unanimously, just one day after it was introduced.

But the Reagan White House vetoed the Act [lobbied against the Act so that it died in the House], and squelched any reprisals or sanctions against Saddam, and continued to shovel truckloads of money and technology to Baghdad. And President Bush I continued Reagan’s policies.

This part of the Franz-Waas article caught my attention:

What drove Bush to champion the Iraqi cause so ardently and so long is not clear. But some evidence suggests that it may have been a case of single-minded pursuit of a policy after its original purpose had been overtaken by events — and a failure to understand the true nature of Hussein himself.

Maybe Junior isn’t as different from Poppy as we had thought. Anyway, Saddam’s behavior was erratic and threatening, yet Bush I continued to treat him as if he were America’s Best Bud. I dimly remember hearing that when he invaded Kuwait, Saddam sincerely believed George Bush I wouldn’t mind.

And some of you will remember the glorious episode that occurred after the Persian Gulf War, in which President Bush I encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then stood by while Saddam crushed the rebellion, ruthlessly. I believe some of the mass graves found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion — the ones that didn’t date to the Iran-Iraq War or the Persian Gulf War — held the bodies of Kurdish rebels.

In 2003, before the invasion, I remembered Halabja, and I remembered the crushed Kurdish rebellion. The righties who were fired up to to go war had never heard of these things before; they seemed to think the Kurds were still being gassed, and we had to invade quickly to rescue them. And after the invasion, whenever troops found a mass grave of Kurdish rebels, the righties would dance about and yell See? We told you Saddam was evil. But the mass graves were no surprise. The righties were always oblivious to the rest of the story, and wouldn’t listen, and wouldn’t believe us if they did listen.

But it strikes me now that all of the trouble surrounding Iraq going back 20 years resulted from Republican presidents being soft with a ruthless dictator. Appeasing, even. It’s a damn shame the Dems didn’t push that point through the Noise Machine years ago, because not doing so allowed the next generation of soft little Republican fatasses to portray themselves as hardened he-men warriors, even as they call Democrats “weak” and swift-boat any real warriors who dare oppose them.

Swift Boating Murtha

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Over the past few days several bloggers, including Taylor Marsh and Bob Geiger, have discussed the recent swift-boat campaign against John Murtha.

Last week Sean-Paul Kelley of the Agonist reported that Murtha’s Republican opponent in the November elections, Diane Irey, has teamed up with some of the old “swift boat” crew to smear Jack Murtha. One of crewpersons, an operative named Amanda Doss, set up a web site called Murthalied.com from which to spread smears. Kelley included Doss’s email address in his post.

Now Raw Story reports that Doss’s site went “live” early so that she could post some of the hateful email she received. Apparently she thought she was proving a point.

Well, says Taylor Marsh, they can post emails, and we can post emails. Taylor’s collection of fan mail from righties makes the notes Doss posted seem almost affectionate.

And I nominate this little beauty for the nasty prize.

However, I would like to gently suggest that one does not have to send abusive emails to people one does not like. And it is possible to express disagreement without calling the person with whom you disagree a bleeping bleeping bleep. I know I’m bucking conventional wisdom here, but I still think I’m right.

Memo to Donkey Cons

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… bloggers who lack the guts to permit comments: They let me in for free, and I got there by mass transit. Still jealous?

Update: Oooo, now the poor babies are whining that they can’t leave up comments threads because lefties are mean to them. And then they launch into a diatribe that somehow blames liberals for every atrocity visited upon mankind since the invention of socks, including the French Terror, 100 million people slaughtered by Communist regimes (they link to a book about it, in case I didn’t know), ax murders, nasty things allegedly done by the Black Panthers, and the demise of Kathleen Willey’s cat.

Righties are such weenies. As I said in the next post, they dish it out a whole lot better than they can take it.

(Anyway, boobies, I already said didn’t pay to get into the Drum Major Institute party. They let me in for free because I was on the blogger host committee.)

Well, since the Donkey Cons blog doesn’t permit comments, you are welcome to leave comments to their post here.

Update update: The children are utterly unglued and raving that they will outkeyboard me. Well, go ahead and keyboard, dears. I find them amusing, but not enough to waste much time on. Especially since they don’t seem to have enough traffic to generate more than a handful of hits. I ‘spect they’re getting some traffic from here, though.

Lacking the moral fiber to admit the exchange began because they called me a “limousine liberal” — which is a knee-slapper to anyone who knows me — now they’re pretending we’re having a disagreement about Kos. The Donkey Cons and other rightie blogs are having a high old time joining the press pile-on of Kos, which they’ve dubbed Kosola, in the assumption that Kos is guilty of influence peddling or something. Once again, they resemble nothing more than a pack of brainless hyenas smelling some dead they can eat.

Now, I have no idea what Kos is peddling to the pols, but the truth is that on the blogosphere he doesn’t have all that much influence to peddle. Some of the charges I’ve heard — that he controls which blogs get advertising from the Advertising Liberally network, for example — are known personally to me to be bogus. And in the larger liberal blogosphere, a Kos endorsement plus a $1 bill will get you whatever you want on the McDonald’s dollar menu. People support candidates when they think the candidates are worthy of support, and if they don’t, they don’t. I’m not seeing a Warner bandwagon, for example.

I don’t know what’s up with Jerome Armstrong and the SEC charges, but the scandal du jour is that Jerome used to be a serious student of astrology. To which I say, so?

Other than general disparagement of blogs and blog readers by people like the Keyboarding Cabbage (which righties are too stupid to realize applies to them, too), the only part of the pile-on that really irritates me is that people like Glenn Greenwald and Steve Gilliard have had to spend time exposing, um, lapses of fact in the stuff the professionals are writing about Kos. A waste, I say; that much brainpower can be put to better use.