Whatever you think of the Iraq War, for the Kurds it was a liberation

Talk of ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation’ ignores the effect on a long-suffering minority

When I walked towards the memorial in Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan a fortnight ago to attend the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the genocide, I passed by a seemingly endless stream of images. Men. Women. Children. Entire families. All of them victims of Saddam Hussein’s crime regime. The walls inside the monument are engraved with their names – a bridge between the past and the present.

On March 16, 1988, life was forever changed beyond recognition for the people of Kurdistan. In the early hours of Friday evening, a strange smell filled the air over Halabja. It resembled the scent of fresh apples. What actually rained down was a toxic cocktail of mustard gas and nerve agents.

The perfect weapon. The invisible death.

Before they knew the truth, birds were falling from the sky and bodies started piling up in the streets. Some died in their sleep. Others suffocated at work. Still others were found sitting up as if only lost in thought. Some just dropped dead.

Others painfully choked on their own vomit or suffered severe burning and blistering. Children sought the shelter of their mothers’ arms but there was no escape. Two days of conventional artillery attacks had destroyed all sanctuaries. The thanatophoric gas was everywhere, mercilessly and indiscriminately filling the lungs of the infants, young and old.

5000 Iraqi Kurds died within seconds. Thousands more were disfigured. The overwhelming majority of them were civilians. They had attacked no one. Their only “crime” was to be Kurdish.

Halabja became a ghost town and it was as if the human race had been eradicated.

The attack was part of the wider genocidal Al-Anfal campaign, initiated by the Iraqi Ba’athists, which claimed over 182,000 lives. Out of 4,655 villages roughly 90% were destroyed and between April 1987 and August 1988, 250 towns and villages were exposed to chemical weapons. It was the first time a government used such weapons against its own civilian population.

Saddam Hussein was a modern-day Hitler. When I visited one of his concentration camps, the Red House in Sulaymaniyah, it starkly reminded me of Auschwitz. Women were gang-raped for hours in what the prison guards called “party rooms”; men faced mutilation and death in the most barbaric fashion in the notorious torture chambers; foetuses and babies were burnt in incinerators.

The Kurds have experienced their own Holocaust. The crusade against them was not simply a by-product of the Iraq-Iran war but a deliberate act of genocide – the crime of all crimes – the aim to annihilate an entire people.

25 years later, the people of Kurdistan are struggling with their bloody past. It will always be a scar on the soul of the Kurdish nation and will forever be embedded in their collective identity. But there is reason for hope. Their hearts have not been consumed by darkness. While they are still grieving and hurting, they have little appetite for vengeance. The Kurds have learnt an essential lesson: hatred only leads to more suffering and death.

Such spirit was reflected in the motto of the anniversary celebrations – “From Denial To Recognition. From Destruction To Construction. From Tears To Hope”. Kurdistan is now the most prosperous and democratic part of Iraq. As British-Kurdish Member of Parliament Nadhim Zahawi – a speaker at the genocide conference in Erbil – pointed out, Kurdistan has become one of the safest places for Christians in the Middle East. Business is booming. New houses are being built on every corner. The peace is fragile, life is not perfect, but when you talk to ordinary people you realise just how far the region has come.

Whatever you may think of the controversial war in 2003, for the Kurds it came as liberation rather than an invasion or occupation. The vast majority hold no animosity towards America or Britain. In fact, they are grateful for the roles we played in the removal of Saddam Hussein.

To say that he possessed no WMDs is not a popular thing to say with people still suffering from the consequences of the very same weapons; and the argument, made by some of the opponents of the war, that the Ba’athist regime someone provided stability and contained Iran is perceived as a hideous excuse and apology for genocide and ethnic-cleansing.

Ten years later, the opinion of Iraqis is virtually absent from the debate in the West. If we ever want to gain a balanced and nuanced view of the complexities of the lead-up to the war, it is time to give the victims of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror the attention they deserve.

Post was published in The Independent.

Interview: Kurdistan, Iraq war & Humanitarian Intervention

I talked to Damian Counsell of Ricochet in a wide-ranging conversation about my recent visit to Iraqi Kurdistan to mark the 25th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s genocide against its people; why the survivors viewed Allied action as a liberation; the surprising preference of many Kurds for Turkey over the United States as a future partner, and the meaning of humanitarian intervention 10 years after the Iraq War.

Listen in above or subscribe in iTunes. Direct link here.

Syrians Are Dying At The Wrong Time

When looking at the pictures coming out of Syria, one must resist the temptation of resigning from the human race in disgust. Never again will we allow a crisis to escalate to the point where crimes against humanity are committed on a large-scale basis – so the promise of the international community following the tidal wave of atrocities in the conflict-stricken 1990s.

Yet we have a situation in which 30,000 Syrian men, women and children have already lost their lives and another 1, 5 million people have been wounded, tortured, detained and displaced over the past 18 months. There are not enough words in any idiom to encapsulate the shame the international community once more brought upon itself by standing by and remaining silent, while Assad is mercilessly butchering and raping his people and country.

The window of opportunity for the West to engage in principled humanitarian interventionism in the face of utter destruction is rapidly closing. We have long passed the point of a political solution and now the only way to stop Assad is by military action. The immediate enforcement of a NFZ and the creation of humanitarian corridors are essential to ensure the safety of civilians under siege. It is our ‘Responsibility to Protect’, in a situation in which the state on whose territory the assault takes place is unwilling or incapable of providing security for its subjects.

The idea that the hands of the international community are tied, as a result of the Russian and Chinese veto in the UN Security Council, must be wholeheartedly rejected as a hideous obfuscation for inaction. It relativises the moral responsibility of those who decided to endow Assad with a blanco check for killing with impunity. When in the past controversies over the question of legitimacy arose in the UN Security Council, coalitions of the willing never considered them as ultimate kisses of death for action, as for instance in the case of Kosovo and Iraq.

Syria’s on-going violence is the product of a lack of political will combined with an absence of leadership and moral authority. Apparently, the incentive to intervene cannot compete with a complex matrix of domestic and international political, economic and strategic interests.  The Obama administration’s ‘red line’ policy stands out in particular.  It is s a deeply cynical, reactionary, and risk-averse approach for righting a humanitarian catastrophe. Not only does it send out a message of indifference and incompetence but the logic behind is that it is acceptable for Assad’s crime regime to kill with conventional weaponry as long as no chemical or biological agents are involved.

Instead of pushing for a robust internationalism, the West has embraced an amoral isolationism: an isolationism the world cannot afford and for which the Syrian people pay the price in blood. For now, they are left to the mercy of their killers and the question remains how many more innocent lives will be lost.

Gaddafi’s End should be the Beginning of the End of Assad

Watching the extraordinary scenes in Tripoli, when Gaddafi’s decades of bloody tyranny were finally coming to an end, felt like déjà vu. I was reminded of the fall of Saddam and how the Iraqis had embraced their new freedom.

It is not too bold to say the Arab Spring had its origin in Iraq in 2003. At the time, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and a small group of like minds challenged the received wisdom of Arab exceptionalism – the myth that Arabs are somehow allergic to freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Condemning whole generations to despotism for historical reasons is no less than cultural relativism at its worst.

Bush’s and Blair’s Iraq policy further led to the disarmament of Libya, a result almost collectively ignored by the intellectual elite, political establishment and media. But given the current circumstances, it seems in order to stress once more the reason Gaddafi is no longer in possession of WMDs is because the regime dropped its nuclear advances after the fall of Saddam.

In the Middle East everything is linked. The circle is slowly closing. It provides the West with the unique opportunity to make unequivocally clear the era of dictatorships is over and a new zero-tolerance policy in place.

When Ben Ali’s regime crumbled into pieces, Mubarak said he would not go. Gaddafi reacted similarly when his Egyptian brother fled the country. Now Assad is fervently insisting Syria is not affected by the Arab Spring.

Over 2200 protestors have already lost their lives in Syria – 2200 souls too many. If the West is serious about saving lives, the time for action in Syria is now. There must be a line no sovereign nation should ever be allowed to cross. Assad crossed this line weeks ago and should pay for it.

Humanitarian militarism is far from perfect, but if the point of settlement has passed, the less of all evil. Cameron’s leadership over Libya deserves praise. The intervention also showed that, against all odds, the Blair Doctrine was not buried in the sand of Iraq but is alive and working.

As I have argued before: Those who oppose humanitarian interventionism have to understand that, if innocent people are killed en mass, the decision not to intervene is as much a declaration of interest as a decision to intervene is a commitment to bring to justice those who commit such crimes.

IICRS Daily Mail Special

The Mail on Sunday claims that ‘well-placed sources’ have told them what the key findings of the Iraq Inquiry are. Either it is a notorious  example of purposeful poisoned propaganda to mislead the public and a cheap attempt to pre-judge a report that has not even been written yet or Chilcot and his team have grossly violated their responsibility.

Whatever the case, let us take a closer look at some of the ‘damning criticism’ of Tony Blair’s handling of what the Mail describes as one of the ‘biggest foreign policy fiascos in modern history’ and sensible people regard as the liberation of oppressed people from tyranny.

According to the Mail, Tony Blair will be criticised for

a) telling parliament that intelligence proved ‘beyond doubt’ that Saddam was in possession of WMDs at the time of the invasion.

Um, but you will find that it is not quite what he told the chamber. What he actually said was that he BELIEVED ‘the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt (…) that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.’

b) ‘signing in blood’ to go to war at George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in April 2002.

This is of course a claim made by Sir Christopher Meyer in his evidence to Chilcot. It is worth remembering, however, that while Jonathan Powell and David Manning were at Crawford, Christopher Meyer was not at the ranch but at Waco, about 30 miles away. Let alone that not even Meyer himself ‘believes that an operational decision was taken in April 2002 or September of 2002.‘

c) operating a so called ‘sofa government’.

John Major used to hold meetings in the Cabinet room, Margaret Thatcher in the sitting room and Tony Blair in his den. So what? The ‘sofa government’ thesis is nothing more but a synonym for saying that Blair took a decision people did not agree with and therefore the process by which it was taken must have been flawed.

————————————————————————————

Max Dunbar kindly refers to this post here and adds his own two cents about it:

Is the Mail right about what the inquiry will say? There are two ways this could go:

1) The inquiry says that the evil Tony Blairs made a pact, signed literally in blood, with George Bush to invade Iraq as part of his plan to spend all our money on foreigners. In which case the Daily Mail will say that Chilcot is a model of integrity, in the best traditions of the independent judiciary, and speaking truth to power.

2) The far more likely scenario is that the Chilcot inquiry, like the Hutton and Butler inquiries that came before, will conclude that there was some incompetence but no actual wrongdoing. The Mail will then say that the inquiry was a whitewash and that Sir John Chilcot is a government stooge, and possibly an agent of Israeli intelligence. They will then call for a new inquiry.

Plus, my fellow ‘We Few, We Happy Few’ colleague, BlairSupporter, exposes the Mail’s malicious practices:

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE?

The main culprit or rather prime mover on truth, half-truths and lies is, quelle surprise(!) The Mail on Sunday.

It says, side-stepping its own responsibility for ANY of this -

“A spokesman for Tony Blair said: ‘This is a deliberate attempt to pre-judge a report that hasn’t even been written yet.

‘We’re not going [sic] [careful, careful!] comment until it has been published.’ “

Note: No “by the Mail on Sunday” in this partial quote. Fancy that!