GWELTY@DESIRE.WRIGHT.EDU Tue Dec 1 18:48:26 1992 Gordon Welty "The Gulf Crisis and the United Nations" UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON REVIEW, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer 1991), pp. 75-85. >PART II of II< [/78] II. George Bush's war occurred and the Gulf Crisis continues until today because the United States (and its allies) first armed and supported Iraq against the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and then opposed and ultimately disarmed Iraq on behalf of Israel. Before developing this point, let us note one important implication. It is not the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the arsenals of regional powers which threatens World War III, as some have suggested in behalf of Operation Desert Storm./20/ Rather it is the proclivity of the United States to violate the Principle of sovereign equality of other nations, a principle guaranteed by Article 2:1 of the United Nations Charter, which threatens world peace. We will return to this implication towards the end of our remarks; now let us consider the background of the Gulf Crisis. The Iranian Revolution of the late 1970's occurred, in large part, in response to United States violation of the sovereign equality of Iran in 1953, at a time when both countries were signatory to the UN Charter./21/ The United States continued in these violations for the next quarter century, through its restoration and support of Shah Pahlavi, and other measures. According to the UN Charter, the United States could have been expelled from the United Nations on those grounds alone, except that according to Article 6, such action must be initiated by the Security Council, where the united States itself could veto such an initiative. As Oppenheim and Lauterpacht observe "measures of enforcement cannot be taken against a permanent member of the Security Council."/22/ Finally, the United States sold the Pahlavi regime of Iran some twenty billion dollars worth of weapons in the Seventies. And then the chickens came home to roost; revolution drove the Shah from the Peacock Throne. Recently, there has been considerable renewed attention in the commercial media to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. As you recall, this crisis was an aspect of the Iranian Revolution. When the United States offered a visa to the once again deposed Shah Pahlavi in late 1979, the Iranian revolutionaries responded in an act of what an earlier age would have called "revolutionary self-defense," occupying the US Embassy in Teheran and taking the Embassy officials hostage./23/ Gary Sick, staff member of the National Security Council during the Carter administration, has suggested that "individuals associated with the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of the [fifty-two] American hostages until after the Presidential election. For this favor, Iran was rewarded with a substantial supply of arms from Israel."/24/ The hostages were eventually released, of course, on January 21, 1981, only minutes after Ronald Reagan took his oath of office as President. Let us make four points in this regard. First, this is not really `new' news. Two `insiders,' Abdol Hassan Bani-Sadr, former President of Iran, and Barbara Honegger, White House policy analyst during the Reagan Administration, had made the similar charges in the Eighties./25/ Second, if these charges are proven to be true, they will have a devastating impact upon the American political scene. Because the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution holds, to quote, "no person shall hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress [such as George Bush did], or as an executive officer of any state [as Ronald Reagan did], shall have given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." [78/79] By most understandings, revolutionary Iran was an enemy of the United States; the two countries were committing belligerent acts against one another during this period, etc. Third, the United States was thus not only arming Iran during the Sixties and Seventies, but also during the Eighties. Finally, the role of Israel in this arms supply scheme, as in the subsequent Iran-Contra Conspiracy, would put it in a position to assert profound `influence' over both the Reagan and the Bush Administrations -- providing an hypothesis which goes a long way to explaining what Professor Naseer Aruri has called the "rejectable peace plans" of Secretaries of State Schultz, James Baker, etc. After these successes, Ayatollah Khomeini sought to direct the revolutionary enthusiasm of Iranians -- as well as the armaments supplied by the United States, and by its client, Israel -- towards the liberation of the holy cities of Karbala (in Iraq) and Mecca (in Arabia). Iraq was the only country with a large enough population and armed forces to resist this. The royal families of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia bankrolled the effort, while the United States and its "allies" sold Iraq some twenty- four billion dollars worth of weapons in the first half of the Eighties alone./26/ Three staff members of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA., Dr. Stephen C. Pelletiere, Col. Douglas Johnson, and Dr. Leif Rosenberger completed, in early 1990, a study of Iraqi military posture which was then published by the U.S. Government Printing Office./27/ The book recounts how Iraq decisively defeated Iran in the final months of their eight-year war. The fortunes of war had shifted rather inconclusively until 1987, due in part to the Iraqi strategy of "static defense." Iraq sought to minimize its human losses during the war. The fortunes of war also depended in part upon shifting alliances. The authors point out that "Israel backed the Iranians throughout the war. Israel practically initiated the Irangate conspiracy and, had the Israelis their way, they would have tipped the balance of power to the Iranians." They note, however, that a number of Israelis opposed this official "tilt."/28/ Iran escalated the war at several points, for instance by being first to attack civilian targets with its Scud missiles in 1985. By February 1988, Iraq was finally able to respond by attacking Teheran with Scud-B missiles. Iraq then attained victory through the "In Allah We Trust" campaign, including the decisive battles of Faw (April 1988), Basra (May), Majnoon (June), Dehloran (July), and Qasr-e-Sherin (August 1988). We should not forget that the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iran Airways # 655 on July 3, 1988, killing all 290 persons on board, dramatically illustrating United States' military resolve. Iran accepted the cease fire on July 18, 1988. Pelletiere et al. attribute the Iraqi victory in the 1988 campaign to an overall reorganization of the Army, including the Republican Guards, and to a shift from "static defense" to a high-tech offensive strategy. They conclude their account of the Iran-Iraq War with an assessment of Iraqi military vulnerability. This assessment anticipated Operation Desert Storm in many respects, especially as it highlighted the necessity for an adversary to have absolute air superiority over Iraq. Pelletiere and his colleagues predicted that "Iraq's military policies will be restrained" in the post-armistice era, that is to say after August 1988, while acknowledging that "at the same time Iraq has enemies."/29/ These included Iran, [79/80] Syria, and Israel -- and the latter was "the greatest threat to Iraq -- as the Iraqis perceive it." As Saddam Hussein stated to US Ambassador Glaspie, "if the capability of our army is lowered, then Iran could achieve [its military] goals. And if we lowered the standard of our defenses, this could encourage Israel to attack us."/30/ Further, the Pelletiere et al. observed -- in early 1990! -- that "the United States seems to be on a collision course with the Ba'thists."/31/ That may prove to be the under- statement of the decade. By late 1988, Iraq had fended off Iran with a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. At this point, it had become clear that Iraqi military power was roughly equal to that of Israel. It is a premiss of Israeli strategic planning that it must have greater military power than any single Arab state, or any combination of Arab states./32/ The United States has repeatedly pledged to support Israel in this respect, under what has come to be called the Nixon Doctrine, and it surely has. In late December 1988 and again in late 1989, the Washington Post claimed that Iraq was rapidly developing it missile capabilities, a development which precipitated harsh verbal exchanges and veiled threats between Iraq and Israel./33/ The impression was widespread that Israel seeking an encore to its 1981 assault on Iraq's Osirik nuclear research facility. Saddam Hussein cautioned Israel in February 1989 not to attempt "direct aggression."/34/ The threats and counter-threats between Israel and Iraq continued well into 1990. It might be recalled in this regard that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir again praised the July 1981 Israeli attack, in his address at the opening session of the Knesset on October 15, 1990. So Israel seemed unable by itself to cow Iraq, and thus was no longer able to -- in the words of Pelletiere, Johnson, and Rosenberger -- "exert hegemony over all the Arab states."/35/ Iraq had to be disarmed. But how? The campaign had already begun, soon after Iraq had turned back the Islamic Revolution of Iran. In September 1988, the State Department surprisingly levelled charges that Iraq had used chemical warfare -- poison gas -- against its Kurdish population. These charges have become part and parcel of the current demonization of Iraq. Yet Pelletiere, Johnson, and Rosenberger point out that "the Iraqi government denied that any such gassing had occurred." Further, they state that "having looked at all the evidence that was available to us, we find it impossible to confirm the State Department's claim." The authors go on that "Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack [in March 1988], even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemical [weapons] in this [military] operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds."/36/ When the United States made these charges, then Iraqi Foreign Minister, Sa'dun Hammadi, was caught unprepared and questioned the "true motives" behind the charges. Pelletiere, Johnson, and Rosenberger, for their part, simply decline to speculate about the identity of the motive force behind the State Department action./37/ In January 1989, the United States further orchestrated an international conference in Paris against chemical weapons. When the United States refused to expand considerations to all weapons of mass destruction -- including Israeli nuclear weapons -- all the Arab states balked and the conference ended inconclusively./38/ Since a country acquires weapons of mass destruction in response to a perceived threat from another country, the answer to the problem of proliferation is regional [80/81] -- if not world-wide -- disarmament of nuclear, chemical, etc. weapons. This multilateral disarmament policy is evidently not in U.S. interests. So Iraq alone had to be disarmed. Again, how was this to be accomplished? On the one hand, there are political limits even to the exercise of United States military power. These limits were severely tested in early 1990 in Operation Just Cause -- the brutal United States attack on Panama, the installation of the Endara puppet regime there, another imperialist intervention -- which has found Bush being questioned even a year later about the "embarrassment" of it all, the pretexts, the provocations, the phony evidence, etc. On the other hand, Iraq and Israel have been in a state of war, without so much as an armistice, for forty years. While one could attack the other at will, the United States was at war with neither. A military exchange between Israel and Iraq would have incited another Arab-Israeli War, and that would have necessitated a United States' intervention against a number of the Arab states on behalf of Israel. So Iraq had to be disarmed, but how? What was needed was a pretext for massive United States intervention against Iraq. That pretext came to be contrived through Kuwaiti provocations against Baghdad. During the Eighties, while Baghdad was distracted by the war, Kuwait had slowly encroached upon Iraqi territory. This gave Kuwait more land along its northern border, as well as greater access to the rich Rumailia oil field west of Basra. Kuwait not only pumped oil from the Rumailia field, oil which Iraq claimed, but Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates also exceeded OPEC petroleum production quotas, driving down the world price of oil and furthering the economic crisis in Iraq. As King Hassan II put it in an August, 1990 interview, "Kuwait was trying to stifle Iraq, according to Saddam Hussein -- and that claim doesn't seem to me to be completely unjustified."/39/ United States' intervention against Iraq would give Kuwait an occasion to consolidate its gains. With assurances from the United States, Kuwait provoked an Iraqi incursion into the disputed territories, an intervention which the United States was to respond to with force./40/ As Ambassador Glaspie put it on her way out of Baghdad, however, "We never expected Iraq to take all of Kuwait." Once Iraq had occupied Kuwait, the Bush Administration rapidly swung into action to freeze the situation. The Arab League was effectively disabled, to preempt an "Arab Solution to an Arab Problem." The Rapid Deployment force was sent into Arabia, and Operation Desert Shield began to form behind the preposterous claim that Iraq was about to invade Saudi Arabia. We say "preposterous" because satellite photos taken in early September 1990 showed no signs whatever of previous Iraqi troop movements towards the southern border of Kuwait./41/ Of course, these alleged satellite photos were the `evidence' which convinced King Fahd to `invite' the United States to begin the invasion of Arabia in the first place./42/ As the possibilities of diplomatic resolution were eliminated, Iraq was faced with two alternatives: military confrontation or abject retreat. As Michael Dugan made clear on September 17, Israel was already identifying Iraqi targets for the U.S. Air Force. The ensuing series of UN Security Council Resolutions should be no source of pride./43/ As Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D-TX) has argued, their passage was crassly bought and paid for by the Bush Administration./44/ This demeaning episode of "bribery and [81/82] intimidation" was paralleled by a series of diplomatic blunders that we have come to expect from the Bush Administration, culminating in the undignified quibbling over dates for Secretary of State Baker to go to Baghdad. Were it not so tragically serious, it would have been pure buffoonery. Muhammad Ali surely came out best when Bush compared him to James Baker. But it was tragically serious. The United States spent more than a trillion dollars during the Eighties, preparing for this war. Actually, Reagan was preparing for any war whatever, preferably with a Grenada or a Nicaragua rather than an Iraq or a Soviet Union. But disarming Iraq would do, following the "warmups" of Grenada or Panama. "Any means necessary" to get Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait was glibly interpreted to promote "peace and security" in the Gulf region, and that in turn was reinterpreted to mean the crushing of Iraq, the obliteration of its military power. As King Hussein stated to the Jordanian people on February 6, 1991 "the real purpose behind this destructive war, as proven by its scope, and as attested to by the declarations of the parties, is to destroy Iraq." The deluge lasted forty days and forty nights. Who stood to gain by this destructive war? Hardly the Saudis or the Gulf shaikhdoms, who would be confronted again by the spectre of an Islamic Revolution from Iran moving into the power vacuum. The King continued "if this situation continues, it will only benefit those who covet our [Arab] lands and resources, with Israel at their forefront." Now we are in the aftermath of George Bush's War. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, so many a body-count cannot be permitted. The infrastructure of Iraq is shattered; no food, no potable water, no electricity./45/ Emir al-Sabah is restored to his throne by the U.S. Marines, now reduced to the role of a Praetorian Guard. The Emir's death squads -- including members of the ruling family -- are busy assassinating democratic Kuwaitis, as well as Palestinian guest workers who have outlived their economic usefulness./46/ The Shamir government in Israel has repeated its rejection of negotiations with the PLO, preferring to authorize further Zionist settlements in the Occupied Territories instead. In sum, the Middle East tinderbox is more explosive than ever. As the State Department and the corporate media speculate (or fabricate) which Arab state will next attain strategic military parity with Israel -- will it be Syria? will it be Egypt? and recently, we have heard that it may be Algeria! -- the possibility looms of Operations Desert Storm without end. Perhaps they will be subtitled "First Blood," "Second Blood," etc. This will be the legacy of Bush's New World Order.[82/] NOTES to PART II. 20. Even if Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear by any of the full range of ABC weapons (Atomic, Bacteriological, and Chemical weapons) -- and suitable delivery systems -- Operation Desert Storm is not an effective disarmament program. These ABC weapons are incorporated into the arsenals of regional powers in response to perceived threats. Hence the only effective disarmament program is multi-lateral regional disarmament of all weapons of mass destruction, such as Iraq proposed in early 1990. 21. Kennett Love makes this point in Bill Moyers' Secret Government Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press (1988), pp. 38-39; see W.R. Louis and J. Bill (eds.) Masaddiq, Iranian Nationalism and Oil London: Tauris (1988); also Mansoor Moaddel "State-centered versus Class-centered Perspectives on International Politics: the Case of US and British Participation in the 1953 Coup Against Premier Mossadeq in Iran," Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 24:2 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-23. 22. Oppenheim and Lauterpacht, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 414. 23. See Gordon Welty "The Iranian Crisis," Holiday, Vol. 15 (December 1979). 24. Gary Sick, "Election Story of the Decade", New York Times, (April 15, 1991). 25. See Barbara Honegger October Surprise NY: Tudor Publ. (1989), and Abdol Hassan Bani-Sadr L'Esperance trahie Paris: Papyrus (1982) and his Le Complot des Ayatollahs Paris: Editions la Decouverte (1987); the latter is now available as his My Turn to Speak (McLean, VA: Brassey, 1991). In neither case have these `insiders' used their priviledged status as effectively as might be expected. 26. See also Akins, op. cit., p. 18 and Chomsky, op. cit., pp. 23-24. 27. Stephen C. Pelletiere, D. Johnson, and L. Rosenberger Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College (1990). 28. Pelletiere et al., op. cit., p. 45; see also Jonathan Mar shall et al, The Iran-Contra Connection Boston: South End Press, (1987), esp. Chapter 8. For Israelis opposed to the official "tilt," see e.g. Amatzia Baram "Israel and the Gulf War," New Outlook (March 1987), pp. 18-19. 29. Pelletiere, et al, op. cit., p. 41. 30. As reported in the New York Times, (September 23, 1990). 31. Pelletiere, et al, op. cit., p. 69. 32. Pelletiere, et al, op. cit., p. 70. 33. See C. Murphy and D. Ottoway "Iraq has Tested Satellite Rocket," Washington Post (December 9, 1989). 34. Pelletiere, et al, op. cit., p. 89. 35. Pelletiere, et al, op. cit., p. 46. See also Philip Agee op. cit., p. 5. 36. Pelletiere, et al, op. cit., p. 52. 37. Pelletiere, et al, op. cit., p. 90. 38. See M. Heylin "Chemical Weapons," Chemical and Engineering News, Vol. 67:3 (1989), p. 5, and L. Ember "Chemical Arms Action Urged at World Meeting," Chemical and Engineering News, Vol. 67:3 (1989), p. 7. 39. As reported in Le Monde (August 16, 1990). See also Akins op. cit., pp. 19-20. 40. See also Michael Emery "How the U.S. Avoided Peace" Village Voice (March 5, 1991), pp. 22-27. 41. See St. Petersburg Times, (January 6, 1991), p. 1-A, p. 9-A. 42. For a differing account of the subterfuges of early August, see Bob Woodward The Commanders NY: Simon and Schuster (1991)., pp. 239-261; e.g. "The prince [Bandar] had been working overtime," p. 255, etc. 43. Chomsky, op. cit., pp. 24-26. 44. Henry Gonzalez "Terms of Impeachment," The Texas Observer (January 25, 1991), p. 11. 45. See "Excerpts from U.N. Report" New York Times (March 23, 1991). 46. See Nora Boustany "Beatings and Torture by Kuwaiti Interrogators Alleged" Washington Post (March 13, 1991), and Middle East Watch's executive director Andrew Whitley's "Dirty War in Kuwait" New York Times (April 2, 1991).