BY NORM DIXON
Iraq's President Saddam Hussein is the “only leader in the world to have used chemical weapons against his own people” — this has become a mantra repeated by US President George Bush, British PM Tony Blair, Bush's political subordinates and string-pullers and the compliant capitalist mass media as they cultivate public acceptance for Washington's coming war on Iraq.
Yet, even as the Hussein regime's atrocities in the 1980s are loudly being denounced to justify war, US officials are quietly seeking to find a replacement for Hussein from among former high-ranking Iraqi military dissidents who have themselves ordered the use of chemical weapons “against their own people”.
Until recently, focus of the Central Intelligence Agency and the US state department was on engineering “regime change” that originates within, and is based upon, Iraq's powerful military machine, which is dominated by the country's minority Sunni Muslim elite. This scenario would see Hussein ousted by, or replaced with, a pro-Western military dictator who retains the support of the majority of the Iraqi army command.
The CIA and the state department have always argued that the only other
viable strategy to overthrow Hussein — funding and arming the pro-imperialist
Kurdish nationalist forces that control northern Iraq, and the pro-Iranian
Shiite forces in southern Iraq — risks encouraging the political break-up
of Iraq. This is a concern shared by the governments in neighbouring Turkey
and Saudi Arabia (which also meant that there would little cooperation
from these countries for such an enterprise).Ìý
The CIA and the state department fear that an unintended consequence could be the creation of a new “rogue states” which might undermine US interests in the region: an independent Kurdish state could reinspire the oppressed Kurdish populations of Turkey, Syria and Iran to fight for the independence or — even more worrying for Washington, Israel and its pro-US Arab regime — a central government in Iraq could take power that is more representative of the 65% of the population who are Shiite Muslims, and which might seek cooperation with Iran.
The CIA and the state department have also all but dismissed the corrupt and discredited Iraqi National Congress (INC) as being incapable of leading or maintaining control of a viable alternative regime to that of Saddam Hussein. Unlike the Kurdish and Shiite organisations, the INC has no demonstrated support or social base within Iraq.
On the other side of the Bush administration's factional divide, the Pentagon is much less concerned about the “dangers” that may arise from arming, funding or directly launching a war to install a regime in which Hussein's Kurdish and Shiite opponents play a major role. The Department of Defense (DoD) also argues that the CIA's and the state department's hopes that a section of the military will launch a coup is misplaced. All such attempts have been crushed by Hussein.
The faction that dominates the DoD has championed the INC for many years. So does the Republican right in Congress. The DoD faction has long promoted a scheme that would involve thousands of US troops entering northern Iraq at the “invitation” of a government-in-exile composed of the INC and Kurdish and Shiite parties. Using northern Iraq as a base, opposition armed forces backed by massive US air strikes would overthrow Hussein's regime. In this scenario, a military coup might also play a role.
Consensus
However, the Bush administration factions seem to have put aside their pet strategies for “regime change” in Iraq, in favour of a “compromise” battle plan: the outright invasion of Iraq by US and British troops in early 2003.(Incidentally, this illustrates just how inappropriate the mainstream media's designation of the Pentagon faction as being “hawks” is. This implies that the state department faction are “doves”. Both factions want war, they just disagree about the best way to win it.)
According to a report in the April 28 New York Times, clearly based on “off-the-record” briefings by “senior administration, Pentagon and military officials”: “The Bush administration ... is concentrating on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops... Consensus has emerged that there is little chance for a military coup to unseat Mr Hussein from within ...
“Similarly, officials say they do not believe that even an expanded version of the strategy used to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan would work. In that model, precision air strikes combined with indigenous armed opposition under the leadership of American Special Operations Forces and CIA officers did the job.
“The parallel strategy in Iraq would involve the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south. But Mr Hussein's military, while only one-third its strength from before the Gulf War, is strong enough to defeat any confrontation by proxy, officials said.”
With this plan, the argument over what is more likely to succeed — a military coup or a Kurdish-Shiite insurgency — simply becomes redundant. US military power will be the decisive factor in removing Hussein.
The “danger” of creating militarily confident Kurdish and Shiite statelets would be minimised, easing the concerns of the state department and Washington's regional allies.
The US would be able to impose a “coalition” government that includes the INC or the Kurdish and Shiite parties — keeping the Pentagon and Republican right happy — while ensuring that the Iraqi top brass also plays a key role.
The outstanding bone of contention between the Pentagon and state department-CIA factions is over whether an attack can be launched against Iraq without the cooperation — or at least the acquiescence — of Washington's Arab allies. The course of this debate may affect the timing of the US war on Iraq.
The state department argues that regional cooperation is essential and that a war cannot be launched until the Palestinian intifada is ended. It also fears that an attack on Iraq, coming on top of Washington's open support for Israel's all-out assault on the Palestinian people, may provoke mass uprisings that endanger the survival of key pro-US Arab regimes.
The DoD and the Bush administration's right-wing supporters insist that the attack on Iraq should go forward irrespective of the situation in Palestine. They deride the threat that the “Arab street” poses to “moderate” Arab regimes and argue that these regimes will cooperate with Washington's war plans because, when push comes to shove, they will side with US military might against their own people.
War criminal
According to a report in the March 11 Boston Globe, Nizar al Khazraji, who was chief of staff of Iraq's armed forces between 1987 and 1991 and now in exile in Denmark, is the state department-CIA faction's preferred candidate to be replace Hussein.The CIA lured Khazraji to defect with the promise a major political role in a post-Hussein Iraq. He is reported to have been involved in at least one CIA-backed coup attempt against Hussein.
Khazraji is the highest ranking officer from Hussein's military to have defected. Washington believes he still has strong support within the army hierarchy.
Khazraji's hands are drenched in blood. He was head of Iraq's armed forces in the last years of the brutal 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, throughout Baghdad's vicious military pogroms against the Kurdish minority in the north in 1988-89 and he led the 1990-91 invasion of Kuwait.
Under Khazraji's command, the Iraqi army used poison gas in attacks on Iraqi Kurds and Iranian soldiers on at least 10 occasions between August 1983 and March 1988. The number of victims of these attacks has been estimated to be at least 30,000.
In the most notorious atrocity, on March 16, 1988, Iraqi military helicopters attacked the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja with cyanide and mustard gas, indiscriminately killing more than 5000 people, including many children. Many thousands more subsequently died from their injuries.
The attack on Halabja was part of broader military pogrom against Iraqi Kurds, known as the Anfal operation. In just over six months, the Iraqi armed forces killed tens of thousands of people. More than 2000 villages were destroyed. The fate of more than 180,000 Kurds remains unknown.
Denmark's state prosecutor is investigating Khazraji for war crimes after more than 90 Kurdish organisations around the world demanded that action be taken against him.
The US remained silent about these atrocities at the time because it was complicit in them. It supplied Iraq with its weaponry and approved the sale of the chemicals from which Iraq's poison gas was manufactured.
As a 1990 report prepared for the Pentagon by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US War College explained: “Throughout the [Iran-Iraq] war the United States practised a fairly benign policy toward Iraq... Both wanted to restore the status quo ante ... that prevailed before [the 1979 Iranian revolution] began threatening the regional balance of power. Khomeini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him. United by a common interest ... the [US] began to actively assist Iraq.”
After the Iran-Iraq war ended — leaving Iraq as the most powerful state in the Persian Gulf region — the US turned on its erstwhile “ally”, suddenly “discovering” that Hussein had “gassed his own people”.
US and British officials are also cultivating 55 other exiled Iraqi officers, including Wafiq Sammarai, a former chief of military intelligence who left Iraq in 1994, and Najib Salhi, a former army and Republican Guard commander who fled in 1995. US agents meet with these figures “pretty regularly”, a state department official told the Globe.
According to a December 18 United Press International report, the state department, under the cover of the right-wing Middle East Institute think tank, organised a seminar in Washington that attracted representatives of three Iraqi military exile groups — the Iraqi National Accord, the Free Officers Movement and the Iraqi Officers Movement. The meeting was attended by five US officials and representatives of the two Kurdish parties that rule the US protectorate in northern Iraq.
The March 13 British Guardian reported that a “grand opposition conference has been provisionally scheduled for May, and it is hoped to hold it in Bonn, symbolically echoing the Bonn meeting that set up the Afghan interim government”. The aim of the meeting of 400 or so exiles would be to agree “on a new leader to replace Saddam Hussein”.
On March 16, the Boston Globe reported that “State Department officials say the meeting arises from their efforts to recruit the support of former military officers... The [US] hopes to exploit the officers' connections with the Republican Guard and Iraqi Army that have served as the cornerstone of Hussein's rule and helped him quash popular uprisings.”
A state department official admitted to the Globe that allegations of war crimes against Khazraji presented difficulties for Washington, “But there are few people who can claim to have had his rank, his influence and his power inside Iraq”.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 8, 2002.
Visit the Ìý