http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,6119,2-10-1460_1736309,00.html Can you believe it? ======= Issam Ghazzawi, who was part of Saddam's defence team, told the daily Die Presse that "Iran is responsible for the murders of the Kurds" killed by poison gas in 1988. The lawyer was quoted as saying: "Iraq did not possess poison gas at this time." Ghazzawi reportedly said that Iran also was responsible for the mass killings of Shiites who rose against Saddam in 1991.
HA! This could be a genius plot by the Bush administration! The court will find that Iran indeed was behind the slaughter of Kurds and Shiites, Saddam will be sent to jail for other crimes, but the Iranian regime will be on record for massive crimes against humanity! Security Council here we come! WAR WAR WAR!
Are the ex-Baathists paying you? You've gone from merely being an inarticulate anti-war poster to a Saddam apologist lately.
Actually, in 1990, the Strategic Studies Institute of the United States Army War College released a report that said: "In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing many deaths. Photographs of the 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." See Stephen C. Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson II, and Leif R. Rosenberger, Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1990. (quoted by Representative of Texas, Ron Paul, at http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2002/cr100802.htm)
I hope you are not suggesting you believe it? I am sure the Kurds will testify to what happened to them. Indeed, sadly the only reason there is even a slight debate in some quarters regarding who was responsible for Halabja is because the entire coalition which had backed Saddam in the war against Iran (US, NATO, Warsaw Pact, Arab states) tried to find ways to act as Saddam's apologist afterwards. In the meantime, what is Saddam's lawyer going to say about the tens of thousands of war veterans in Iran who still suffer from the effects of Iraq's chemical attacks? That Iran did it to its own soldiers?
Damn this thread will soon goto crap, the name "IRAN" was mentioned so now we will all get to either see the "this user is on ignore" or long rambling posts about how Iran created everything from IM. Way togo. I oughta neg rep you just for that.
What is he suggesting? That Iranian troops wore Iraqi uniforms, secretly invaded the south, put down an anti-Saddam uprising among the shias, and butchered those responsible? I don't think even OJ's defense team could pull that off!
I bet the chief prosecution lawyer is already looking forward to his moment in court waving the State Department receipts around.
That would be quite the funny sight. "Saddam, is this not your signature on the FedEx AirBill marked 'stuff for chemical weapons'?" Seriously, I'd like our in-house Saddam apologist to explain how Saddam acquired chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War, somehow lost it, but then ended up with their remnants discovered during the US invasion.
Hey there were no remnants found, there were no WMD's of any size, shape, or design ever found in iraq.
It was suggested Kurds were killed by the Blood agent, which Saddam didn't have. DynamoKiev_USA might have a point. Bush knew it all along, it may just not agree with his invasion plan. Now the truth be told. Iran, here we come!
Except that the War College report came out in 1990, the year Saddam invaded Kuwait, at which time America was busy turning him into an arch-villian that ripped babies out of incubators and left them on the floor. So it's a little difficult to believe that we would be whitewashing the truth at that time to make Saddam look better. The author of that report (a former senior CIA political analyst on Iraq, who headed an investigation in 1991 into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States) still believes to the present day that the actual deaths were caused by Iranian gas: "We know the circumstances under which the alleged attack took place. It was a battle. The Iranians had infiltrated the town and were attempting to take it over so they could use it as a staging ground to perpetuate—to perpetrate an invasion into Iraq. The Iraqi commander ordered the use of chemical weapons in order to drive the Iranians out of the town. Those chemicals were delivered by mortar shells. Chemical Ali had nothing to do with this operation. That was a decision of the Iraqi commander on the spot, and he took that decision because it was essential to regain the town. Now, the Kurds that were killed, and it’s an unfortunate expression, collateral damage. The Iraqis were not aiming at the Kurds, they were aiming at the Iranians. And there was a report done by the D.I.A. at the time, which also investigated it, in which the D.I.A. determined because of the condition of the bodies that the Kurds had been killed by Iranian gas, not by Iraqi gas. And they determined this because the extremities were blue, and that indicated a cyanide-based gas, and the Iraqis didn’t have it."
So what would be the plausible explanation for the Iranians using chemical weapons on a town that they were allegedly using as a staging base? Why in earth would you use chemical weapons in a town you've got troops in? Futhermore, the Kurds were there allies in that part of the war. This makes no sense.
First, I'm only offering evidence available as to "what", not making conjectures as to "why". But since we don't know the disposition of either the Iraqi or the Iranian troops, nor the location of the Kurds killed in relation to either, I don't think we can come to a conclusion as to why either side may have dropped gas on the Kurds, other than that they they thought it a good idea at the time. Perhaps the Kurds that were killed were close to the Iraqi troops. Perhaps they were close to the Iranian troops. Without a copy of the classified reports, which I have never been able to find online, I can't say. But given the choice to believe reports by experts composed shortly after the event, based upon evidence gathered immediately after the event, as opposed to believing political statements 15 years lated totally devoid of factual evidence, espoused by an administration already hell-bent on invasion ... I might be more ready to accept the former as closer to the truth.
Seriously though, it doesn't really matter who gassed the Kurds, does it? Except for history enthusiasts?
Even your link hypothesizes that both sides used chemical weapons on the same town within roughly the same time-span. I just can't fathom why the Iranians would be willing to risk the use of banned weapons to take some nothing Kurdish town in a sideshow theater of operations, while refusing to do so in the south, where they were literally losing hundreds of thousands of brainwashed youth in largely futile human wave assaults that, if successful, could have given them key cities like Basrah or Baghdad.
US sources did try to create "doubts" as to who was responsible for the attack on Halabjah. To this day, however, there has not been even ONE victim of a chemical attack that can be traced to Iran by any independent source. Until the eve Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, the US was still playing footsie with that guy. Indeed, if Saddam had restricted his invasion to capturing Kuwait's Bubiyan island, he would still be in power. After all, the instruction from the US to April Gelespie was to let Saddam know that the US "takes no position on Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait". This as reports showed Saddam's troops were massing on the Iraq-Kuwait border, poised for an invasion. During the entire Iran-Iraq war, even after UN had sent teams to study what was happening, the US government was using its influence to muddy up the waters with unsubstantiated allegations against Iran. As a result, for several years, Iraq was able to get away using chemical weapons on a massive scale, killing 100,000 Iranian soldiers and leaving another 80,000 injured and disfigured for life. If Iran was willing to use poison gas, even to kill its own allies (the Kurds), why is there not one Iraqi soldier that can be shown to have suffered from any Iranian chemical or poison gas attack? I get sick to my stomack even listening to this nonsense. You know who are the most hardline, anti-American, groups in Iran? They are not the mullahs. Indeed, that is why the election of non-mullahs like Ahmadinejad worries Western diplomats more than if any mullah was elected. The base of support for the hardliners in Iranian politics today comes from veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, their family members, and the network known broadly as the "basijis". These folks, with relatives still suffering from the effects of Iraqi chemical attacks, know better anyone else how hallow are claims of US concern about "human rights" when not only the US (along with many other Western nations) helped develop Saddam's chemical arsenal, but stood silently (and worked hard to keep the silence) as Iraq used those weapons indiscriminately against Iranian troops. As well as on Iranian border towns. Halabjah is not the only town whose inhabitants were wiped off by Iraqi poison gas attacks. It is the only one that became famous because it lies outside of Iran's borders. Otherwise, there are many towns and villages in Iran which were subjected to the same attacks. Those towns and villages are still around, even if many of their inhabitants have died. Someone from all these "human rights" organizations need to visit them to tell the world a story that you don't often hear.
Well, I suppose, if they're going to start extracting blood vengeance on whoever did this. But other than that -- they were stuck in the middle of a bad war and got screwed. If the Iranians did it to get at the Iraqis and the Kurds were collateral damage -- or vice versa -- is really poor consolation to anyone.