http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000522/t000048419.html
The Gulf War Brought Out the Worst in Us
Foreign policy: Demonizing one general diverts us from assessing
responsibility for the slaughter.
By ROBERT JENSEN
Did a U.S. general in the Gulf War violate rules of engagement
and, in effect, murder Iraqis after the cease-fire?
That's the claim of journalist Seymour Hersh in the May 22
New Yorker magazine. The former general and current federal
drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, has counter-punched, arguing that he
is the victim of a journalistic vendetta.
Which one is right? It doesn't really matter.
The incidents Hersh writes about are, in the context of the
massacre we call the Gulf War, relatively trivial, and therein lies the
problem with the controversy. By focusing on the actions of a
commander in a limited arena, we risk forgetting what U.S. military
forces did in Iraq in 1991--across the board, on a daily basis, in full
view of all the world, with impunity. What we did has a name in the
rest of the world, though it can't be spoken in polite circles here:
War crimes.
We have yet to come to terms with the enormity of the crimes
our government and military carried out in 1991. If Hersh's
allegations are true, McCaffrey's conduct was reprehensible and
criminal, but those actions pale in comparison to the brutality the
U.S. military unleashed on the people of Iraq throughout the war.
What brutality? What crimes? Start with the most basic facts
about the U.S. attack on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Iraq.
The Geneva Conventions are clear on these matters: "Civilians
shall not be the object of attack." The charge to military forces in
the U.N. Security Council resolution was to expel the Iraqi forces
that had invaded Kuwait. To do that, we dropped 88,000 tons of
bombs over Iraq, one of the most concentrated attacks on an entire
society in modern warfare. Those bombs killed civilians--both
directly and over time through the destruction of the country's
power grid, food, water treatment and sewage systems. Some of
that bombing of civilians was targeted, some indiscriminate; both
are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.
Recall the "Highway of Death," the deadly stretch of road in
Kuwait that was littered with burned-out vehicles and charred
bodies. U.S. military forces, in violation of international law, fired
on retreating and largely defenseless Iraqi soldiers just before the
cease-fire. U.S. pilots described it in news accounts as a "turkey
shoot" and "like shooting fish in a barrel." The carnage was not only
unnecessary but grotesque.
Remember the brutality of U.S. weapons. We used napalm to
incinerate entrenched Iraqi soldiers. We dropped fuel-air
explosives, ghastly weapons often called "near-nukes" because of
their destructive capacity through fire, asphyxiation and concussion.
We dropped cluster bombs that use razor-sharp fragments to shred
people. To penetrate tanks, we used depleted-uranium shells, the
long-term health effects of which are unknown. Widely accepted
notions of proportionality and protection of civilians go out the
window with such weapons.
Though the shooting war has stopped, the most onerous
economic embargo ever imposed on a nation continues today.
Supposedly designed to rein in the regime of Saddam Hussein, the
harsh economic sanctions have only killed innocents--as many as 1
million in the past decade, according to U.N. studies.
In short: It is misleading to call the Gulf War a war; it was a
massacre. In the words of British journalist Geoff Simons, who has
studied the war in detail, it was a massive slaughter of a largely
helpless enemy, with much of the killing occurring after the time
when constructive diplomacy would have brought an end to the
conflict and a secure "liberation of Kuwait."
That is an assessment many people--likely the vast
majority--around the world would agree with, but one rarely voiced
in this country.
My goal is not to defend McCaffrey. But no matter how guilty
he might be, I fear that demonizing him will divert us from assessing
the responsibility of those politicians and top officers who planned
and executed the slaughter. And it will keep us from asking why
we--citizens with so much political freedom--have done so little to
hold those politicians and officers accountable for the crimes
committed in our name.
Robert Jensen Is an Associate Professor of Journalism at the
University of Texas at Austin.
E-mail: Rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
