IF THE U.S. REALLY IS CONCERNED ABOUT IRAQ'S "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION," IT HAS A FUNNY WAY OF SHOWING IT.
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It was interesting to see Tom Clancy, of all people, contributing to the New York Times op-ed page about false alarm elements in all the propaganda about chemical and biological weapons. His barely readable novel, "Executive Orders" -- which like all his others, is supposed to be "authentic," at least in its depiction of weaponry -- has the evil Iranians launching the Ebola virus on an unsuspecting American public. It's also ironic that Clancy's novel is filled with Arab and Japanese bad guys, when in fact the original techniques of such "weapons of mass destruction" were annexed by the British and American military from the Japanese imperial "laboratories" in occupied Manchuria, where they had been tested on live human subjects.

It's true of course, as the skeptics point out, that nerve gases and toxins are unstable and hard to deploy, and can easily dissipate far from their target. It's also true that they are a menace to those who are vile enough to make use of them. (The British were planning extensive use of poison gas in World War I until, with indescribable results, it blew back into their own trenches.) Finally, it's true that -- as with nuclear weapons -- their possession has apocalyptic consequences for all concerned. Stockpile the stuff on your own territory, and all a foe has to do is figure out a way of blowing it up. "Mutual Assured Destruction" doesn't begin to describe the folly and criminality of the thing.

Nevertheless, if you have a clear day and a relatively undefended target at your disposal, chemical weapons are a devastatingly effective tool in themselves, and also a dandy means of spreading alarm and despondency. In the closing stages of the last Gulf War, I visited the Kurdish city of Halabja, which is located just inside northern Iraq on the border with Iran. This town's name isn't very well known to most of the world; among Kurds everywhere it is like saying "Guernica" or "Wounded Knee" or "My Lai."

One woman I interviewed, a school janitor named Amina Mohammed Amin, was still being treated for horrific burns that hadn't healed in over three years. Twenty-five members of her family had died almost instantly, along with 5,000 other citizens of the town, when Saddam Hussein blitzed it with chemical bombs on March 16, 1988. The Baathists have always denied that it was their planes that had conducted the assault, and an Iraqi shock brigade was sent into Halabja to carry away all the missile casings and unexploded projectiles. But I still possess a photograph of myself, sitting queasily next to an undetonated chemical bomb with Iraqi air force markings. It was embedded in the basement of a ruined house, and had escaped the vigilance of the much-vaunted Republican Guard.

President George Bush, as part of Operation Desert Storm's marketing campaign, used to bang on a lot about this and other Iraqi atrocities, saying almost correctly that Saddam had "used chemical weapons on his own people." But back at the time of the Halabja bombing in 1988, the declared view of the United States was that the city had been poisoned by the Iranians. Remember, at that time, Iran had been our official enemy and Iraq the unofficial but definite friend. Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., convinced by staff reports to the Foreign Relations Committee that tactics of extermination were being employed in Iraqi Kurdistan, introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act in the Senate, but decisive pressure was employed by the Reagan administration to get the measure killed. Nizar Hamdoon, then Saddam's ambassador in Washington, was one of the most favored diplomats in the city, freely reaping licenses and trade deals from every commercial department and even earning the prized certificate of "moderate" from the bulletin of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

I said that Bush was "almost" correct because the Kurds, of course, are not Saddam Hussein's "own people." Like the Shiite Muslims who form the majority in southern Iraq, and who are centered on the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, they have no allegiance to the regime, which is formed around a core of regional bosses and gangsters from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit (ironically, the birthplace of Salah al-Din or Saladin, the greatest Kurd in history).

While it was wonderful to see the Clinton administration get a pie in the face from its own citizens in Columbus, Ohio, the heckling around "double standards" (what about Israel and Indonesia?) was too simplistic. Saddam Hussein does run a quasi-fascist regime, and there is meaning in the old slogan that "fascism means war." And nobody knows this better than the American national security apparat, which gave Saddam a green light to invade Iran in 1980 and at best mixed signals about taking at least some of Kuwait in 1990. In both cases the expendable people included the Kurds and the Iraqi Shiites -- the Kurds because their cause offends our client Turkey and the Shiites because their cause terrifies our client, Saudi Arabia.

Since U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, at least temporarily, has thrown a spanner into President Clinton's revved-up war machine, there are two immense opportunities that this latest crisis offers. The first is the chance to inaugurate an international discussion on the all-around abolition of genocidal arsenals, instead of the spasmodic demonization of just one of their owners. The second would be to give free and open support, and not the conditional covert and manipulative kind, to the peoples of a future democratic Mesopotamia. Visiting it with warplanes and missiles every five years or so simply voids any such opportunities.
SALON | March 2, 1998

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor and columnist for Vanity Fair.

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PHOTOGRAPH ON PREVIOUS PAGE BY ED KASHI