IRAQ 1990-1991

Desert holocaust

“This is the one part I didn’t want to see,” said a 20-year

-old private. “All the homeless, all the hurting. When we came

through the refugee camp, man, that’s something I didn’t need.”

“It’s really sad,” said the sergeant. “We’ve got little

kids come up and see my gun, and they start crying. That really

tears me up.”

“At night, you kill and you roll on by,” said another GI.

“You don’t stop. You don’t have to see anything. It wasn’t

until the next morning the rear told us the devastation was

total. We’d killed the entire division.”{1}

While many nations have a terrible record in modern times of

dealing out great suffering face-to-face with their victims,

Americans have made it a point to keep at a distance while

inflicting some of the greatest horrors of the age: atomic bombs

on the people of Japan; carpet-bombing Korea back to the stone

age; engulfing the Vietnamese in napalm and pesticides; providing

three decades of Latin Americans with the tools and methods of

torture, then turning their eyes away, closing their ears to the

screams, and denying everything … and now, dropping 177 million

pounds of bombs on the people of Iraq in the most concentrated

aerial onslaught in the history of the world.

What possessed the United States to carry out this

relentless devastation for more than 40 days and nights against

one of the most advanced and enlightened nations in the Middle

East and its ancient and modern capital city?

It’s the first half of 1990. The dismantling of the Berlin wall

is being carried out on a daily basis. Euphoria about the end of

the cold war and optimism about the beginning of a new era of

peace and prosperity are hard to contain. The Bush

administration is under pressure to cut the monster military

budget and institute a “peace dividend”. But George Bush,

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, former Texas oil man, and

former Director of the CIA, is not about to turn his back on his

many cronies in the military-industrial-intelligence complex. He

rails against those who would “naively cut the muscle out of our

defense posture”, and insists that we must take a cautious

attitude towards reform in the USSR.{2} In February, it’s

reported that “the administration and Congress are expecting the

most acrimonious hard-fought defense budget battle in recent

history”; and in June that “tensions have escalated” between

Congress and the Pentagon “as Congress prepares to draft one of

the most pivotal defense budgets in the past two decades”.{3} A

month later, a Senate Armed Services subcommittee votes to cut

military manpower by nearly three times more than recommended by

the Bush administration … “The size and direction of the cuts

indicate that President Bush is losing his battle on how to

manage reductions in military spending.”{4}

During this same period Bush’s popularity was plummeting:

from an approval rating of 80 percent in January — as he rode

the wave of public support for his invasion of Panama the

previous month — to 73 in February, down to the mid-60s in May

and June, 63 on 11 July, 60 two weeks later.{5}

George Herbert Walker Bush needed something dramatic to

capture the headlines and the public, and to convince Congress

that a powerful military was needed as much as ever because it

was still a scary and dangerous world out there.

Although the official Washington version of events presented

Iraq’s occupation of neighboring Kuwait as an arbitrary and

unwarranted aggression, Kuwait had actually been a district of

Iraq, under Ottoman rule, up to the First World War. After the

war, to exert leverage against the abundantly oil-rich Iraq, the

British Colonial Office established tiny Kuwait as a separate

territorial entity, in the process cutting off most of Iraq’s

access to the Persian Gulf. In 1961, Kuwait became

“independent”, again because Britain declared it to be so, and

Iraq massed troops at the border, backing down when the British

dispatched their own forces. Subsequent Iraqi regimes never

accepted the legitimacy of this state of affairs, making similar

threats in the 1970s, even crossing a half-mile into Kuwait in

1976, but Baghdad was also open to a compromise with Kuwait under

which Iraq would gain access to its former islands in the

Gulf.{6}

The current conflict had its origins in the brutal 1980-88

war between Iraq and Iran. Iraq charged that while it was locked

in battle, Kuwait was engaged in stealing $2.4 billion of oil

from the Rumaila oil field that ran beneath the vaguely-defined

Iraq-Kuwait border and was claimed in its entirety by Iraq; that

Kuwait had built military and other structures on Iraqi

territory; and worst of all, that immediately after the war

ended, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates began to exceed the

production quotas established by the Organization of Petroleum

Exporting Countries (OPEC), flooding the oil market, and driving

prices down. Iraq was heavily strapped and deeply in debt

because of the long war, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein

declared this policy was an increasing threat to his country –

“economic war”, he called it, pointing out that Iraq lost a

billion dollars a year for each drop of one dollar in the oil

price.{7} Besides compensation for these losses, Hussein

insisted on possession of the two Gulf islands which blocked

Iraq’s access to the Gulf as well as undisputed ownership of the

Rumaila oilfield.

In the latter part of July 1990, after Kuwait had continued

to scorn Iraq’s financial and territorial demands, and to ignore

OPEC’s request to stick to its assigned quota, Iraq began to mass

large numbers of troops along the Kuwaiti border.

The reaction to all this by the world’s only remaining

superpower and self-appointed global policeman became the subject

of intense analysis and controversy after Iraq actually invaded.

Had Washington given Iraq a green light to invade? Was there, at

a minimum, the absence of a flashing red light? The controversy

was fueled by incidents such as the following:

19 July: Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney stated that the

American commitment made during the Iran-Iraq war to come to

Kuwait’s defense if it were attacked was still valid. The same

point was made by Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for

Policy, at a private luncheon with Arab ambassadors.

(Ironically, Kuwait had been allied with Iraq and feared an

attack from Iran.) Later, Cheney’s remark was downplayed by his

own spokesman, Pete Williams, who explained that the secretary

had spoken with “some degree of liberty”. Cheney was then told

by the White House: “You’re committing us to war we might not

want to fight”, and advised pointedly that from then on,

statements on Iraq would be made by the White House and State

Department.{8}

24 July: State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiler, in

response to a question, responded: “We do not have any defense

treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or

security commitments to Kuwait.” Asked whether the United States

would help Kuwait if it were attacked, she said: “We also remain

strongly committed to supporting the individual and collective

self-defense of our friends in the gulf with whom we have deep

and longstanding ties” — a statement that some Kuwaiti officials

said privately was too weak.{9}

24 July: The US staged an unscheduled and rare military

exercise with the United Arab Emirates, and the same Pete

Williams then announced: “We remain strongly committed to

supporting the individual and collective self-defense of our

friends in the gulf with whom we have deep and longstanding

ties.” And the White House declared: “We’re concerned about the

troop buildup by the Iraqis. We ask that all parties strive to

avoid violence.”{10}

25 July: Saddam Hussein was personally told by the US

ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, in a now-famous remark, that

“We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border

disagreement with Kuwait.” But she then went on to tell the

Iraqi leader that she was concerned about his massive troop

deployment on the Kuwaiti border in the context of his

government’s having branded Kuwait’s actions as “parallel to

military aggression”.{11}

25 July: John Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for Near

Eastern and South Asian Affairs, killed a planned Voice of

America broadcast that would have warned Iraq with the identical

party-line words used by Tutweiler and Williams.{12} Hussein may

not have known of this incident, although in April he had been

personally assured by visiting Senate Minority Leader Robert

Dole, speaking in behalf of the president, that the Bush

administration dissociated itself from a Voice of America

broadcast critical of Iraq’s human-rights abuses and also opposed

a congressional move for economic sanctions against Iraq.{13}

27 July: The House and Senate each voted to impose economic

sanctions against Iraq because of its human-rights violations.

However, the Bush administration immediately reiterated its

opposition to the measure.{14}

28 July: Bush sent a personal message to Hussein (apparently

after receiving Glaspie’s report of her meeting with the Iraqi

leader) cautioning him against the use of force, without

referring directly to Kuwait.{15}

31 July: Kelly told Congress: “We have no defense treaty

relationship with any Gulf country. That is clear. … We have

historically avoided taking a position on border disputes or on

internal OPEC deliberations.”

Rep. Lee Hamilton asked if it would be correct to say that

if Iraq “charged across the border into Kuwait” the United States

did “not have a treaty commitment which would obligate us to

engage U.S. forces” there.

“That is correct,” Kelly responded.{16}

The next day (Washington time), Iraqi troops led by tanks

charged across the Kuwaiti border, and the United States

instantly threw itself into unmitigated opposition.

Official statements notwithstanding, it appears that the

United States did indeed have an official position on the Iraq-Kuwait

border dispute. After the invasion, one of the documents the Iraqis

found in a Kuwaiti intelligence file was a memorandum concerning a

November 1989 meeting between the head of Kuwaiti state security and

CIA Director William Webster, which included the following:

 

 

 

 

We agreed with the American side that it was important to take

advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq

in order to put pressure on that country’s government to

delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency

gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that

broad cooperation should be initiated between us on condition

that such activities be coordinated at a high level.

 

 

The CIA called the document a “total fabrication”. However,

as the Los Angeles Times pointed out, “The memo is not an obvious

forgery, particularly since if Iraqi officials had written it

themselves, they almost certainly would have made it far more

damaging to U.S. and Kuwaiti credibility.”{17} It was apparently

real enough and damaging enough to the Kuwaiti foreign minister

– he fainted when confronted with the document by his Iraqi

counterpart at an Arab summit meeting in mid-August.{18}

When the Iraqi ambassador in Washington was asked why the

document seemed to contradict US Ambassador Glaspie’s avowal of

neutrality on the issue, he replied that her remark was “part and

parcel of the setup”.{19}

Was Iraq set up by the United States and Kuwait? Was Saddam

provoked into his invasion — with the conspirators’ expectation

perhaps that it would not extend beyond the border area — so he

could be cut down to the size both countries wanted?

In February 1990, Hussein made a speech before an Arab

summit which could certainly have incited, or added impetus to,

such a plot. In it he condemned the continuous American military

presence in the Persian Gulf waters and warned that “If the Gulf

people and the rest of the Arabs along with them fail to take

heed, the Arab Gulf region will be ruled by American will.”

Further, that the US would dictate the production, distribution

and price of oil, “all on the basis of a special outlook which

has to do solely with U.S. interests and in which no

consideration is given to the interests of others.”{20}

In examining whether there was a conspiracy against Iraq and

Saddam Hussein, we must consider, in addition to the indications

mentioned above, the following:

Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat has

asserted that Washington thwarted the chance for a peaceful

resolution of the differences between Kuwait and Iraq at an Arab

summit in May, after Saddam had offered to negotiate a mutually

acceptable border with Kuwait. “The US was encouraging Kuwait

not to offer any compromise,” said Arafat, “which meant there

could be no negotiated solution to avoid the Gulf crisis.”

Kuwait, he said, was led to believe it could rely on the force of

US arms instead.{21}

Similarly, King Hussein of Jordan revealed that just before

the Iraqi invasion the Kuwaiti foreign minister stated: “We are

not going to respond to [Iraq] … if they don’t like it, let

them occupy our territory … we are going to bring in the

Americans.” And that the Kuwaiti emir told his military officers

that in the event of an invasion, their duty was to hold off the

Iraqis for 24 hours; by then “American and foreign forces would

land in Kuwait and expel them.” King Hussein expressed the

opinion that Arab understanding was that Saddam had been goaded

into invading, thereby stepping into a noose prepared for

him.{22}

The emir refused to accede to Iraq’s financial demands,

instead offering an insulting half-million dollars to Baghdad. A

note from him to his prime minister before the invasion speaks of

support of this policy from Egypt, Washington and London. “Be

unwavering in your discussions,” the emir writes. “We are

stronger than they [the Iraqis] think.”{23}

After the war, the Kuwaiti Minister of Oil and Finance

acknowledged: But we knew that the United States would not let us be overrun.

I spent too much time in Washington to make that mistake, and

received a constant stream of visitors here. The American

policy was clear. Only Saddam didn’t understand it.{24}

We have seen perhaps ample reason why Saddam would fail to

understand.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz declared that a sharp drop

in the price of oil was something the Kuwaitis, with their vast

investment holdings in the West, could easily afford, but which

undercut the oil revenues essential to a cash-hungry Baghdad.

“It was inconceivable,” said Aziz, that Kuwait “could risk

engaging in a conspiracy of such magnitude against a large,

strong country such as Iraq, if it were not being supported and

protected by a great power; and that power was the United States

of America.”{25} There is, in fact, no public indication that

the United States, despite its very close financial ties, tried

to persuade Kuwait to cease any of its provocative actions

against Iraq.

And neither Washington nor Kuwait seemed terribly concerned

about heading off an invasion. In the week prior to the Iraqi

attack, intelligence experts were telling the Bush administration

with increasing urgency that an invasion of at least a part of

Kuwait was likely. These forecasts “appear to have evoked little

response from Government agencies.”{26} During this period Bush

was personally briefed and told the same by CIA Director William

Webster, who showed the president satellite photos of the Iraqi

troops massed near the Kuwaiti border. Bush, reportedly, showed

little interest.{27} On 1 August, the CIA’s National

Intelligence Officer for Warning (sic) walked into the offices of

the National Security Council’s Middle East Staff and announced:

“This is your final warning.” Iraq, he said, would invade Kuwait

by day’s end, which they did. This, too, did not produce a rush

to action.{28} Lastly, a Kuwaiti diplomat stationed in Iraq

before the invasion sent many reports back to his own government

warning of an Iraqi invasion; these were ignored as well. His

last warning had specified the exact date (Kuwaiti time) of 2

August. After the war, when the diplomat held a press conference

in Kuwait to discuss the government’s ignoring of his warnings,

it was broken up by a government minister and several army

officers.{29}

In July, while all these warnings were ostensibly being

ignored, the Pentagon was busy running its computerized command

post exercise (CPX), initiated in late 1989 specifically to

explore possible responses to “the Iraqi threat” — which, in the

new war plan 1002-90, had replaced “the Soviet threat” — the

exercise dealing with an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia

or both.{30} At a war-games exercise at the Naval War College in

Newport, R.I., participants were also being asked to determine

the most effective American response to a hypothetical invasion

of Kuwait by Iraq.{31} While at Shaw Air Force Base in South

Carolina, another war “game” involved identifying bombing targets

in Iraq.{32}

And during May and June, the Pentagon, Congress and defense

contractors had been extensively briefed by the Center for

Strategic and International Studies of Georgetown University on a

study of the future of conventional warfare, which concluded that

the most likely war to erupt requiring an American military

response was between Iraq and Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.{33}

Another person who seems to have known something in advance

was George Shultz, who was Reagan’s Secretary of State and then

returned to the Bechtel Corp., the multinational construction

giant. In the spring of 1990, Shultz convinced the company to

withdraw from a petrochemicals project in Iraq. “I said

something is going to go very wrong in Iraq and blow up and if

Bechtel were there it would get blown up too. So I told them to

get out.”{34}

Finally, there was this disclosure in the Washington Post:

 

Since the invasion, highly classified U.S. intelligence

assessments have determined that Saddam took U.S. statements

of neutrality … as a green light from the Bush administration

for an invasion. One senior Iraqi military official … has

told the agency [CIA] that Saddam seemed to be sincerely

surprised by the subsequent bellicose reaction.{35}

 

On the other hand we have the statement from Iraqi Foreign

Minister Aziz, who was present at the Glaspie-Hussein meeting.

 

She didn’t give a green light, and she didn’t mention a red

light because the question of our presence in Kuwait was not

raised. … And we didn’t take it as a green light … that

if we intervened militarily in Kuwait, the Americans would not

react. That was not true. We were expecting an American

attack on the morning of the second of August.{36}

 

But one must be skeptical about so casual an attitude toward

an American attack. And these remarks, in effect denying that

Iraq was played for a sucker, must be considered in light of the

Iraqi government’s stubborn refusal for some time to admit the

harm done to the country by US bombing, and to downplay the

number of their casualties.

The Bush administration’s position was that Iraq’s Arab

neighbors, particularly Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, had urged

the United States all along not to say or do anything that might

provoke Saddam. Moreover, as Ambassador Glaspie emphasized, no

one expected Hussein to take “all” of Kuwait, at most the parts

he already claimed: the islands and the oilfield.

But, of course, Iraq had claimed “all” of Kuwait for a

century.

 

The invasion

 

When Iraq invaded, the time for mixed signals was over. Whatever

devious plan, if any, George Bush may have been operating under,

he now took full advantage of this window of opportunity. Within

hours, if not minutes, of the border crossing, the United States

began mobilizing, the White House condemned Iraq’s action as a

“blatant use of military aggression”, demanded “the immediate and

unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces”, and announced that

it was “considering all options”; while George Bush was declaring

that the invasion “underscores the need to go slowly in

restructuring U.S. defense forces”.{37}

Before 24 hours had passed, an American naval task force

loaded with fighter planes and bombers was on its way to the

Persian Gulf, Bush was seeking to enlist world leaders for

collective action against Iraq, all trade with Iraq had been

embargoed, all Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets in the United States had

been frozen; and the Senate had “decisively defeated efforts to

end or freeze production of the B-2 Stealth bomber after

proponents seized on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to bolster their

case for the radar-eluding weapon”; the attack, they said,

“demonstrates the continuing risk of war and the need for

advanced weapons” … Said Senator Dole: “If we needed Saddam

Hussein to give us a wake-up call at least we can thank him for

that.”{38}

“One day after using Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to help save

the high-tech B-2 bomber, senators invoked the crisis again

Friday to stave off the mothballing of two World War II-vintage

battleships.”{39}

Within days, thousands of American troops and an armored

brigade were stationed in Saudi Arabia. It was given the grand

name of Operation Desert Shield, and a heightened appreciation

for America’s military needs was the prevailing order of the day …

 

Less than a year after political changes in Eastern Europe

and the Soviet Union sent the defense industry reeling under

the threat of dramatic cutbacks, executives and analysts say

the crisis in the Persian Gulf has provided military companies

with a tiny glimmer of hope.

“If Iraq does not withdraw and things get messy, it will

be good for the industry. You will hear less rhetoric from

Washington about the peace dividend,” said Michael Lauer, an

analyst with Kidder, Peabody & Co. in New York.

 

“The possible beneficiaries” of the crisis, added the

Washington Post, “cover the spectrum of companies in the defense

industry.”{40}

By September, James Webb, former Assistant Secretary of

Defense and Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration,

felt moved to speak out:

 

The President should be aware that, while most Americans are

laboring very hard to support him, a mood of cynicism is just

beneath their veneer of respect. Many are claiming that the

buildup is little more than a “Pentagon budget drill,” designed

to preclude cutbacks of an Army searching for a mission as bases

in NATO begin to disappear.{41}

 

Remarkably, yet another cynical former Assistant Secretary

of Defense was heard from. Lawrence Korb wrote that the

deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia “seems driven more by

upcoming budget battles on Capitol Hill than a potential battle

against Saddam Hussein.”{42}

But can anything be too cynical for a congressman stalking

re-election? By the beginning of October we could read:

 

The political backdrop of the U.S. military deployment in Saudi

Arabia played a significant role in limiting defense cuts in

Sunday’s budget agreement, halting the military spending “free

fall” that some analysts had predicted two months ago, budget

aides said. Capitol Hill strategists said that Operation Desert

Shield forged a major change in the political climate of the

negotiations, forcing lawmakers who had been advocating deep

cuts on the defensive.

The defense budget compromise … would leave not only

funding for Operation Desert Shield intact but would spare

much of the funding that has been spent each year to prepare

for a major Soviet onslaught on Western Europe.{43}

 

Meanwhile, George Bush’s approval rating had recovered. The

first poll taken in August after the US engagement in the Gulf

showed a jump to 74 percent, up from 60 percent in late July.

However, it seems that the American public needs the rush of a

regular patriotic-fix to maintain enthusiasm for the man

occupying the White House, for by mid-October, due to Bush’s

extreme obfuscation of why the US was in the Persian Gulf, the

rating they granted him was down to 56 — since Bush’s first

month in office, it had never been lower; and it stayed close to

that level until the citizenry’s next patriotic-invasion-fix in

January, as we shall see.{44}

 

Prelude to war

 

As Iraq went about plundering Kuwait and turning it into Iraqi

Province 19, the United States was building up its military

presence in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding waters, and –

employing a little coercion and history’s most spectacular bribes

– creating a “coalition” to support US-fostered United Nations

resolutions and the coming war effort in a multitude of ways: a

figleaf of “multinational” respectability, as Washington had

created in Korea, Grenada and Afghanistan, for what was

essentially an American mission, an American war. Egypt was

forgiven many billions of dollars in debt, while Syria, China,

Turkey, the Soviet Union, and other countries received military

or economic aid and World Bank and IMF loans, had sanctions

lifted, or were given other perks, not only from the US but,

under Washington’s pressure, from Germany, Japan and Saudi

Arabia. As an added touch, the Bush administration stopped

criticizing the human rights record of any coalition member.{45}

But Washington and the media were unhappy with Germany for

not enthusiastically jumping on the war bandwagon. The Germans

who only yesterday were condemned as jackbooted fascists marching

through Poland, were now called “cowards” for marching for peace

in large demonstrations.

Washington pushed a dozen resolutions through the Security

Council condemning Iraq, imposing severe economic sanctions, and

getting “authorization” to wage war. Only Cuba and Yemen voted

against any of them. When Yemen’s delegate received some

applause for his negative vote on the key use-of-force resolution

of 29 November, US Secretary of State Baker, who was presiding,

said to his delegation: ” I hope he enjoyed that applause,

because this will turn out to be the most expensive vote he ever

cast.” The message was relayed to the Yemenis, and within days,

the tiny Middle-East nation suffered a sharp reduction in US

aid.{46}

UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar acknowledged

that “It was not a United Nations War. General Schwarzkopf

[commander of the coalition forces] was not wearing a blue

helmet.”{47} The American control of the United Nations prompted

British political commentator Edward Pearce to write that the UN

“functions like an English medieval parliament: consulted, shown

ceremonial courtesy, but mindful of divine prerogative, it

mutters and gives assent.”{48}

The paramount issue in the United States soon became: how

long should we wait for the sanctions to work before resorting to

direct military force? The administration and its supporters

insisted that they were giving Hussein every chance to find a

peaceful, face-saving way out of the hole he had dug himself

into. But the fact remained that each time President Bush made

the Iraqi leader any kind of offer, it was laced with a deep

insult, and never offered the slightest recognition that there

might be any validity to Iraq’s stated grievances.{49} Indeed,

Bush had characterized the Iraqi invasion as being “without

provocation”.{50} The president’s rhetoric became increasingly

caustic and exaggerated; he was putting it on a personal level,

demonizing Saddam, as he had done with Noriega, as Reagan had

done with Qaddafi, as if these foreigners did not have pride or

reason like Americans have. Here’s how the Los Angeles Times

viewed it:

 

Shortly after Iraq’s invasion … Bush carefully compared

Iraq’s aggression with the German aggression against Poland

that launched World War II. But he stopped short of a

personal comparison of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with

Adolf Hitler. That caution went out the window last month,

when Bush not only compared Hussein to Hitler but also

threatened Nuremberg-style war crime trials. Then, last week,

Bush went further, briefly maintaining that the Iraqi leader

is worse than Hitler because the Germans never held U.S.

citizens as “human shields” at military sites.

 

After this trivializing of the Holocaust, Bush went on to

warn that any acceptance of uncontrolled aggression “could be

world war tomorrow”. Said one of his own officials: “Got to get

his rhetoric under control.”{51}

Saddam Hussein could not help but soon realize that by

seizing all of Kuwait — not to mention sacking and pillaging it

– he had bitten off substantially more than he could chew. In

early August and again in October, he signaled his willingness to

pull Iraqi forces out of the country in return for sole control

of the Rumaila oil field, guaranteed access to the Persian Gulf,

the lifting of sanctions, and resolution of the oil

price/production problem.{52} He also began to release some of

the many foreigners who had had the misfortune of being in Iraq

or Kuwait at the wrong time. In mid-December the last of them

was freed. Earlier that month, Iraq began laying out a new

Iraqi-Kuwait border, which might have meant a renunciation of its

claim of Kuwait being a part of Iraq, though its meaning was not

clear.{53} And in early January, as we shall see, his strongest

peace signal was reported.

The Bush administration chose to not respond in a positive

manner to any of these moves. After Saddam’s August offer, the

State Department “categorically” denied it had even been made;

then the White House confirmed it.{54} A later congressional

summary of the matter stated:

 

The Iraqis apparently believed that having invaded Kuwait,

they would get everyone’s attention, negotiate improvements

to their economic situation, and pull out. … a diplomatic

solution satisfactory to the interests of the United States

may well have been possible since the earliest days of

the invasion.

The Bush administration, said the congressional paper,

wanted to avoid seeming in any way to reward the invasion. But a

retired Army officer, who was acting as a middle man in the

August discussions, concluded afterward that the peace offer “was

already moving against policy”.{55}

After a certain point in the American military buildup,

could the United States have given peace a chance even if it

wanted to? Former Assistant Defense Secretary Lawrence Korb

observed in late November that all the components of the defense

establishment were pushing to get in on the action, to prove

their worth, to prove that there was still a need for them, to

assure their continued funding …

 

By mid-January … the United States will have over 400,000

troops in the Gulf [it turned out to be over 500,000] from

all five armed services (yes, even the Coast Guard is there).

This is about 100,000 more troops than we had in Europe at any

time during the Cold War. The Army will eventually have eight

divisions on the ground in Saudi Arabia, twice as many as it had

in Europe. … two-thirds of the entire Marine Corps’ combat

power [will be there] … The Navy will deploy six of its 14

aircraft carrier battle groups, two of its four battleships and

one of its two amphibious groups … The Air Force already has

fighters from nine of its 24 active tactical wings … as well as

bombers … Even the combat reserves are scheduled to be sent …

The reserve lobby recognized that their future funding may be

jeopardized if their units do not get involved. … Just as every

service wants to be involved in the deployment, will not each want

a piece of the real action?

And would the military high-command be able to resist the

pressures from each service, Korb wondered. The Navy, which had

moved some its carriers into the narrow and dangerous waters of

the Gulf just to be closer to the action? The Marines, who might

want to demonstrate the continuing viability of amphibious

warfare by staging an assault on the coast? And could the Army

lay back while air power carried the day?{56} [They couldn't,

and it prolonged the war.]

The US military and President Bush would have their massive

show of power, their super-hi-tech real war games, and no signals

from Iraq or any peacenik would be allowed to spoil it. Fortune

magazine, in an ingenuous paean to Bush’s fortitude, later summed

up the period before the war began thusly:

 

The President and his men worked overtime to quash freelance

peacemakers in the Arab world, France, and the Soviet Union

who threatened to give Saddam a face-saving way out of the

box Bush was building. Over and over, Bush repeated the mantra:

no negotiations, no deals, no face-saving, no rewards, and

specifically, no linkage to a Palestinian peace conference [a point

raised by Iraq on several occasions].{57}

 

On 29 November, the UN Security Council authorized the use

of “all necessary means” to compel Iraq to vacate Kuwait if it

didn’t do so by 15 January. Over Christmas, we have learned,

George Bush pored over every one of the 82 pages of Amnesty

International’s agonizing report of Iraqi arrests, rape, and

torture in Kuwait. After the holiday, he told his staff that his

conscience was clear: “It’s black and white, good vs. evil. The

man has to be stopped.”{58}

It’s not reported whether Bush ever read any of Amnesty’s

many reports of the period on the equally repulsive violations of

human rights and the human spirit perpetrated by Washington’s

allies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Angola and

Nicaragua. If he did, the literature apparently had little

effect, for he continued to support these forces. Amnesty had

also been reporting about Iraq’s extreme brutality for more than

a decade, and only a few months before the August invasion had

testified about these abuses before the Senate, but none of this

had filled George Bush with righteous indignation.

As the 15 January deadline neared, the world held its

breath. Was it possible that in five and a half months no way

could have been found to avoid inflicting another ghastly war

upon this sad planet? On the 11th, Arab diplomats at the UN said

that they had received reports from Algeria, Jordan and Yemen,

all on close terms with Iraq, that Saddam planned an initiative

soon after the 15th that would express his willingness “in

principle” to pull out of Kuwait in return for international

guarantees that Iraq would not be attacked, an international

conference to address Palestinian grievances, and negotiations on

disputes between Iraq and Kuwait. The Iraqi leader, the

diplomats said, wanted to wait a day or two after the deadline

had passed to demonstrate that he had not been intimidated.

For the United States, with half-a-million troops poised for

battle in Saudi Arabia, this was unacceptable. Saddam Hussein

will “pass the brink at midnight, January 15″, said Secretary of

State Baker, and could not expect to save himself by offering to

pull out of Kuwait after that time.{59}

 

 

The multiple explanations of George Bush

go to notes

 

Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom, and the freedom of

friendly countries around the world will suffer if control of

the world’s great oil reserves fell in the hands of that one

man, Saddam Hussein.{60}

 

Thus spaketh George Herbert Walker Bush to the people of

America. As Theodore Draper observed:

 

These reasons were both mundane and implausible. That “jobs”

should have been mentioned first suggested that Bush, as in a

domestic political campaign, sought primarily to appeal to the

voters’ pocketbook. It was, however, a peculiarly crass reason

to go to war, if it came to that, halfway around the world.{61}

 

During the entire lengthy buildup to the war, during the

war, after the war, no one was sure they understood why Bush had

intervened in the Persian Gulf, and then taken the United States

into war. Congressmen, journalists, editors, plain citizens kept

asking, almost pleading at times, for the president to clearly

and unambiguously explain his motivations, and without

contradicting what he had said the previous week. (Economists

and think-tank intellectuals found it professionally awkward to

admit their uncertainty, and thus wound up writing lots of

authoritative-sounding mumbo-jumbo.)

The prevailing bewilderment prompted the Wall Street Journal

to assemble a group of “voters” to discuss the issues. “They are

confused about what’s happening and are crying out for more

information,” reported the newspaper about the participants.

“And they are unsettled by the perception that Mr. Bush seems to

be switching his reasoning day to day.” Said one participant:

“So far it’s been like David Letterman’s Top 10 Reasons for Being

There. There’s a different story every week or so.”{62}

Taking place in the Persian Gulf, as it all did, of course

lent itself to the belief that the liquid gold had a lot, if not

everything, to do with the conflict. This, however, is a thesis

which can not be supported by the immediate circumstances.

Supply was not a problem — the Energy Department acknowledged

that there was not an oil shortage, and Saudi Arabia and other

countries increased their production to more than make up for the

oil lost from Iraq and Kuwait, which, in any event, together

accounted for only about five percent of American consumption.

There was a whole world ready to supply more oil, from Mexico to

Russia, as well as large untapped American sources. This

indicates the difficulties faced by any single producer –

Hussein or anyone else — who might try to control or dominate

the market; which in turn raises the question: what would such a

country do with all the oil, drink it? By December it was

reported that “OPEC is pumping oil at the highest levels since

early summer, and unless a war in the Middle East disrupts

supplies, there’s a prospect again of an oil glut and sharply

lower prices.”{63}

As to the price of oil: did oilmen George Bush and James

Baker and the depressed American oil states want it to go up or

down? A case could be made for either hypothesis. (In January

1990 the US had secretly urged Saddam to try to raise the OPEC

oil price to $25 a barrel.){64} And how easily could Washington

control it either way in a chaotic situation? As it is, oil

prices fluctuate on a regular basis, often sharply — between

1984 and 1986, for example, the price of a barrel of oil fell

from around $30 to less than $10, despite the ongoing Iraq-Iran

war which cut into the production of both countries.

However, this analysis of the immediate circumstances does

not take into consideration the formidable and continual

influence of the “mystique of oil” upon the thinking of American

policy makers. If Bush was looking for a “crisis” to impress

upon the congressional mind the enduring danger of the world we

live in, then getting involved in a conflict between two major

oil producing countries would certainly generate the desired

effect much more readily than if he had seized upon Bolivia

attacking Paraguay, or Ghana occupying Ivory Coast.

The president’s remark about the American way of life and

everyone’s freedom reflects the life-and-death seriousness that

he and other policy makers publicly ascribe to oil. (What these

men really believe and feel in each instance is something we are

not privy to.) Earlier in the year, CIA Director William Webster

had told Congress that oil “will continue to have a major impact

on U.S. interests” because “Western dependence on Persian Gulf

oil will rise dramatically” in the next decade; while General

Schwarzkopf, who had lifelong ties to the Middle East, testified:

 

Mideast oil is the West’s lifeblood. It fuels us today, and

being 77 percent of the Free World’s proven oil reserves, is

going to fuel us when the rest of the world has run dry. …

It is estimated that within 20 to 40 years the U.S. will have

virtually depleted its economically available oil reserves,

while the Persian Gulf region will still have at least 100 years

of proven oil reserves.{65}

 

It was actually 69 percent at the time, and since the Soviet

Union has joined the “Free World”, it’s even less.{66} It should

also be noted that the good general’s prediction for the US is

rather speculative, and that the term “economically available” is

a reference to the fact that US domestic oil reserves are more

costly to exploit than those in the Gulf. But this only makes it

a profit problem, not an oil-supply problem. Moreover, the vast

potential residing in alternative energy sources must be included

in the equation.

At this time, the United States — seemingly in a panic

about danger to the Gulf oil supply — was receiving about 11

percent of its oil from the region, while Japan, which got 62

percent of its oil, and Europe which got 27 percent from there,

were hardly stirred up at all, except for Margaret Thatcher who

foamed at the mouth when it came to Saddam and former colony

Iraq.{67} Germany’s figure was about 35 percent, yet both Bonn

and Tokyo had to have their arms twisted by Washington to support

the war effort. The two countries may, in fact, have been leery

about helping the United States acquire greater influence and

control over the region’s oil.

Official Washington’s embrace of the oil mystique has given

rise to a long-standing policy, expressed as follows by political

analyst Noam Chomsky:

 

It’s been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy

since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources

of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United

States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent,

indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence

on the administration of oil production and price.{68}

 

This has not always meant the use of force. In 1973, when

OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, used substantial price increases and

an oil boycott in an attempt to force Washington to influence

Israel into withdrawing from its recently occupied territories,

the United States did not launch, or even threaten, an invasion.

The matter was resolved through extensive diplomacy without a

shot being fired. What saved the OPEC states from a violent fate

may have been the combination of the Vietnam war still hanging

heavy in the air in Washington, and the Nixon administration on

the verge of being swallowed up by Watergate.

In addition to issuing several dire warnings early on about

the invasion’s severe economic consequences for the United

States, which never came to pass, Bush warned of an even worse

fate if Iraq took over Saudi Arabia. The danger-to-Saudi Arabia

explanation was a non-starter. Iraq never had any designs on

Saudi Arabia, as a simple look at a map makes clear. The Iraqis

have a long border with that country; they didn’t have to go

through Kuwait to invade the Saudis; and even if they did, they

could have moved into Saudi Arabia virtually unopposed during the

three weeks following their takeover of Kuwait, as General Colin

Powell later conceded.{69} Bush administration officials in fact

admitted that neither the CIA nor the Defense Intelligence Agency

thought it probable that Iraq would invade Saudi Arabia.{70} The

Saudis didn’t think so either, until Defense Secretary Cheney

flew to Riyadh on 5 August and personally told King Fahd that his

country stood in great potential danger and desperately needed a

very large infusion of American military forces to defend it.{71}

Bush backed away from the oil rationale when critics charged

that he was only trying to protect the interests of the oil

industry. In October, he was interrupted while making a speech

by some people calling out: “Mr. President, bring our troops home

from Saudi Arabia! No blood for oil!” To which George Bush

replied — as the hecklers were hustled out — “You know, some

people never get the word. The fight isn’t about oil. The fight

is about naked aggression that [we] will not stand.” A month

later, if not sooner, the president again began to play the oil

card, tying America’s economic security to that of Saudi Arabia.

Shortly afterward, he returned to “the devastating damage being

done every day” to the US and international economies by the

disruption of oil markets.{72}

As to Iraq’s naked aggression — a remark requiring

selective-memory skills of a high order coming from a government

that held all modern records for international aggression, naked

or otherwise, and from a man who, less than a year before, had

nakedly invaded Panama — both Syria and Israel had invaded

Lebanon and still occupied large portions of that country, Israel

bombarding Beirut mercilessly in the process, without a threat of

war emanating from Washington. Saddam Hussein, perhaps wondering

when they had changed the rules, said to the United States: “You

are talking about an aggressive Iraq … if Iraq was aggressive

during the Iran war, why then did you speak with [us] then?”{73}

During Iraq’s epic struggle against the Ayatollah Khomeini,

the United States of course had more than spoken to Baghdad.

Washington — choosing Iraq as the lesser evil against Shiite

extremism — was responsible for huge amounts of weaponry,

military training, sophisticated technology, satellite-photo

intelligence, and billions of dollars reaching a needy Hussein,

who was also lavishly supported by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they

being concerned that Iran’s anti-monarchist sentiments might

spread to their own realms. Indeed, there is evidence that

Washington encouraged Iraq to attack Iran and ignite the war in

the first place.{74} And during this period of American support

of Hussein, he was certainly the same odious, repressive, beastly

thug as when he later came under American moralistic rhetorical

fire. Similarly, absent Washington’s prodding, the UN did not

condemn Iraq’s invasion, nor did it impose any sanctions or lay

down any demands.

Even as it officially banned arms sales to either combatant,

the US secretly provided weapons to both. The other bête noire

of the region, the Ayatollah, received American arms and military

intelligence on Iraq during the war, so as to enhance the ability

of the two countries to inflict maximum devastation upon each

other and stunt their growth as strong Middle-East nations.

In contrast to Iraq-the-enemy now were the two “allies” most

involved, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Although Washington did not

make a big thing about the “virtue” of either country, official

policy was always that the United States had a principled

commitment to defending the former and liberating the latter.

And they were not a pretty pair. Saudi Arabia regularly featured

extreme religious intolerance, extrajudicial arrest, torture, and

flogging.{75} It also practiced gender apartheid and systematic

repression of women, virtual slavery for its foreign workers,

stoning of adulterers, and amputation of the hands of thieves.

US chaplains stationed in the country were asked to remove

crosses and Stars of David from their uniforms and call

themselves “morale officers”.{76}

Kuwait, oddly enough, was virulently anti-American in its

foreign policy.{77} Though more socially enlightened than Saudi

Arabia (but less than Iraq), it was nonetheless run by one family

as an elitist oligarchy, which closed down the parliament in

1986, had no political parties, and forbade criticism of the

ruling emir; no more than 20 percent of the population possessed

any political rights at all. After the country had been returned

to its rightful dictators, it behaved very brutally toward its

large foreign-worker population, holding them without charge or

trial for several months; death squads executed scores of people.

“Torture of political detainees was routine and widespread,” said

Amnesty International, and at least 80 “disappeared” in custody.

The targets of the campaign, which took place in the presence of

thousands of US troops, were primarily those who were accused of

collaboration with the Iraqis, although this was something most

of them had no choice in, and those who were involved in a

nascent pro-democracy movement. Additionally, some 400 Iraqis

were forced to return to Iraq despite fears that they would be

harmed or executed there.{78}

The elite of the region did not display much gratitude for

all that George Bush said America was doing for them. Said one

Gulf official: “You think I want to send my teen-aged son to die

for Kuwait?” He chuckled and added, “We have our white slaves

from America to do that.” A Saudi teacher saw it this way: “The

American soldiers are a new kind of foreign worker here. We have

Pakistanis driving taxis and now we have Americans defending us.”

Explaining the absence of expressed gratitude on the part of Gulf

leaders, a Yemeni diplomat said: “A lot of the Gulf rulers simply

do not feel that they have to thank the people they’ve hired to

do their fighting for them.”{79} Apart from anything else,

people in the Arab world were very sensitive about the killing of

Muslims and Arabs by foreigners, as well as foreign military

presence on Arab soil, a reminder of a century of Western, white

colonialism.

Bush also warned that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. True

enough. But so did the United States, France, Israel, and every

other country that already had nuclear weapons. Iraq, on the

other hand, according to American, British and Israeli experts,

was five to ten years away from being able to build and use

nuclear weapons.{80} It’s unlikely that the president himself

believed there was any such danger. His warning came only after

a poll showed that a plurality of Americans felt that preventing

Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons was the most persuasive

argument for going to war.{81}

One factor not mentioned by Bush as a reason for the

intervention, but which, in fact, probably played an important

role, was the Pentagon’s desire to make or strengthen agreements

with Gulf-region countries for an ongoing US military presence;

and considerable progress along these lines appears to have been

made.{82} General Schwarzkopf had earlier told Congress that

“U.S. presence” in the Gulf is one of the three pillars of

overall military strategy, along with security assistance and

combined exercises, all of which lead to all-important “access”,

which one can take as a euphemism for influence and control.{83}

After the war, the existence of a network of military-communication

-systems “superbases” in Saudi Arabia was revealed. Ten years in the

building by the United States, in maximum secrecy, its cost of almost

$200 billion paid for by the Saudis, its use during the Gulf War

indispensable, it may explain why Bush moved so quickly to defend

Saudi Arabia, albeit against a non-existent threat.{84}

 

 

“Stop me before I kill again!”

 

Josef Stalin studied for the priesthood … Adolf Hitler was a

vegetarian and anti-smoking … Herman Goering, while his

Luftwaffe rained death upon Europe, kept a sign in his office

that read: “He who tortures animals wounds the feelings of the

German people.” … this fact Elie Wiesel called the greatest

discovery of the war: that Adolf Eichmann was cultured, read

deeply, played the violin … Charles Manson was a staunch

anti-vivisectionist …

About Panama, as we have seen, after he ordered the bombing,

George Bush said that his “heart goes out to the families who

have died in Panama.” And when he was asked, “Was it really

worth it to send people to their death for this? To get

Noriega?”, he replied, “… every human life is precious, and yet

I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it.”

About Iraq, Bush said: “People say to me: `How many lives?

How many lives can you expend?’ Each one is precious.”{85}

Just before ordering the start of the war against Iraq in

January, Bush prayed, as tears ran down his cheeks. “I think,”

he later said, “that, like a lot of others who had positions of

responsibility in sending someone else’s kids to war, we realize

that in prayer what mattered is how it might have seemed to

God.”{86}

God, one surmises, might have asked George Bush about the

kids of Iraq. And the adults. And, in a testy, rather

un-godlike manner, might have cracked: “So stop wasting all the

precious lives already!”

Tanks pulling plows moved alongside trenches, firing into the

Iraqi soldiers inside the trenches as the plows covered them with

great mounds of sand. Thousands were buried, dead, wounded, or

alive.{87}

US forces fired on Iraqi soldiers after the Iraqis had

raised white flags of surrender. The navy commander who gave the

order to fire was not punished.{88}

The bombing destroyed two operational nuclear reactors in

Iraq. It was the first time ever that live reactors had been

bombed, and may well have set a dangerous precedent. Hardly more

than a month had passed since the United Nations, under whose

mandate the United States was supposedly operating, had passed a

resolution reaffirming its “prohibition of military attacks on

nuclear facilities” in the Middle East.{89} Sundry chemical,

including chemical-warfare, facilities and alleged biological-

warfare plants, were also targets of American bombs. General

Schwarzkopf then announced that they had been very careful in

selecting the means of destruction of these as well as the

nuclear facilities, and only “after a lot of advice from a lot of

very, very prominent scientists,” and were “99.9 percent” certain

that there was “no contamination”.{90} However, European

scientists and environmentalists detected traces of chemical-

weapons agents that the bombings had released; as well as

chemical fallout and toxic vapors, also released by the air

attacks, that were killing scores of civilians.{91}

The American government and media had a lot of fun with an

obvious piece of Iraqi propaganda — the claim that a bombed

biological warfare facility had actually been a baby food

factory. But it turned out that the government of New Zealand

and various business people from there had had intimate contact

with the factory and categorically confirmed that it had indeed

been a baby food factory.{92}

The United States also made wide use of advanced depleted

uranium (DU) shells, rockets and missiles, leaving tons of

radioactive and toxic rubble in Kuwait and Iraq. The United

Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, in an April 1991 secret report,

warned that “if DU gets in the food chain or water this will

create potential health problems.” The uranium-238 used to make

the weapons can cause cancer and genetic defects if inhaled.

Uranium is also chemically toxic, like lead. Inhalation causes

heavy metal poisoning or kidney or lung damage. Iraqi soldiers,

pinned down in their bunkers during assaults, were almost

certainly poisoned by radioactive dust clouds.{93}

The civilian population suffered in the extreme from the

relentless bombing. Middle East Watch, the human-rights

organization, has documented numerous instances of the bombing of

apartment houses, crowded markets, bridges filled with

pedestrians and civilian vehicles, and a busy central bus

station, usually in broad daylight, without a government building

or military target of any kind in sight, not even an anti-

aircraft gun.{94}

On 12 February, the Pentagon announced that “Virtually

everything militarily … is either destroyed or combat

ineffective.”{95} Yet the next day there was a deliberate

bombardment of a civilian air raid shelter that took the lives of

as many as 1,500 civilians, a great number of them women and

children; this was followed by significant bombardment of various

parts of Iraq on a daily basis for the remaining two weeks of the

war, including what was reported for the 18th in The Guardian of

London as “one of [the coalition's] most ferocious attacks on the

centre of Baghdad.”{96} What was the purpose of the bombing

campaign after the 12th?

The United States said it thought that the shelter was for

VIPs, which it had been at one time, and claimed that it was also

being used as a military communications center, but neighborhood

residents insisted that the constant aerial surveillance overhead

had to observe the daily flow of women and children into the

shelter.{97} Western reporters said they could find no signs of

military use.{98}

An American journalist in Jordan who viewed unedited

videotape footage of the disaster, which the American public

never saw, wrote:

 

They showed scenes of incredible carnage. Nearly all the

bodies were charred into blackness; in some cases the heat

had been so great that entire limbs were burned off. …

Rescue workers collapsed in grief, dropping corpses; some

rescuers vomited from the stench of the still-smoldering

bodies.{99}

 

Said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater after the

bombing of the shelter: It was “a military target … We don’t

know why civilians were at this location, but we do know that

Saddam Hussein does not share our value in the sanctity of

life.”{100} Said George Bush, when criticized for the bombing

campaign: “I am concerned about the suffering of innocents.”{101}

The crippling of the electrical system multiplied

geometrically the daily living horror of the people of Iraq. As

a modern country, Iraq was reliant on electrical power for

essential services such as water purification and distribution,

sewage treatment, the operation of hospitals and medical

laboratories, and agricultural production. Bomb damage,

exacerbated by shortages attributable to the UN/US embargo,

dropped electricity to three or four percent of its pre-war

level; the water supply fell to five percent, oil production was

negligible, the food distribution system was devastated, the

sewage system collapsed, flooding houses with raw sewage, and

gastroenteritis and extreme malnutrition were prevalent.{102}

Two months after the war ended, a public health team from

Harvard University visited health facilities in several Iraqi

cities. Based on their research, the group projected,

conservatively, that “at least 170,000 children under five years

of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of

the destruction of electrical power, fuel and transportation; “a

large increase in deaths among the rest of the population is also

likely. The immediate cause of death in most cases will be

water-borne infectious disease in combination with severe

malnutrition.”{103} One member of both the Harvard group and a

later research group which visited Iraq testified before Congress

that “Children play in the raw sewage which is backed up in the

streets … Two world renowned child psychologists stated that

the children in Iraq were `the most traumatized children of war

ever described’.”{104}

Despite repeated statements by American authorities about taking

the greatest of care to hit only military targets, using “smart

bombs” and laser-guided bombs, and “surgical strikes”, we now

know that this was little more than an exercise in propaganda,

just as referring to this suffering as “collateral damage” was.

After the war, the Pentagon admitted that non-military facilities

had been extensively targeted for political reasons.{105}

Comprehensive post-World War II government studies had concluded

that “the dread of disease and the hardships imposed by the lack

of sanitary facilities were bound to have a demoralizing effect

upon the civilian population”, and that there was a “reliable and

striking” correlation between the disruption of public utilities

and the willingness of the German population to accept

unconditional surrender.{106}

In the Iraqi case there was a further motivation: to

encourage desperate citizens to rise up and overthrow Saddam

Hussein. Said a US Air Force planner:

 

Big picture, we wanted to let people know, “Get rid of this

guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding.

We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime.

Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”{107}

 

Those who tried to escape the bombing horror in Iraq by fleeing

to Jordan were subjected to air attacks on the highway between

Baghdad and the Jordanian border — buses, taxis, and private

cars were repeatedly assaulted, literally without mercy, by

rockets, cluster bombs and machine guns; usually in broad

daylight, the targets clearly civilian, with luggage piled on

top, with no military vehicles or structures anywhere to be seen,

surrounded by open desert, the attacking planes flying extremely

close to the ground … busloads of passengers incinerated, and

when people left the vehicles and fled for their lives, planes

often swooped down upon them firing away. … “You’re killing

us!” cried a Jordanian taxi driver to an American reporter.

“You’re shooting us everywhere we move! Whenever they see a car

or truck, the planes dive out of the sky and chase us. They

don’t care who we are or what we are. They just shoot.” His cry

was repeated by hundreds of others. … The US military, it

appears, felt that any vehicle, including those filled with

families, might be a cover for carrying military fuel or other

war materiel, some perhaps related to Scud missiles; and even

carrying civilian fuel was a violation of the embargo.{108}

At the very end, when the hungry, wounded, sick, exhausted,

disoriented, demoralized, ragged, sometimes barefoot Iraqi army,

which had scarcely shown any desire to fight, left Kuwait and

headed toward Basra in southern Iraq, Saddam tried to salvage a

pathetic scrap of dignity by announcing that his army was

withdrawing because of “special circumstances”. But even this

was too much for George Bush to grant. “Saddam’s most recent

speech is an outrage,” declared the president, forcefully. “He

is not withdrawing. His defeated forces are retreating. He is

trying to claim victory in the midst of a rout.”

This could not be permitted. Thus it was that American air

power in all its majesty swept down upon the road to Basra,

bombing, rocketing, strafing everything that moved in the long

column of Iraqi military and civilian vehicles, troops and

refugees. The nice, god-fearing, wholesome American GIs, soon to

be welcomed as heroes at home, had a ball … “we toasted him”

… “we hit the jackpot” … “a turkey shoot” … “This morning

was bumper-to-bumper. It was the road to Daytona Beach at spring

break … and spring break’s over.”

Again and again, as loudspeakers on the carrier Ranger

blared Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”, the rousing theme song

of the Lone Ranger, one strike force after another took off with

their load of missiles and anti-tank and anti-personnel Rockeye

cluster bombs, which explode into a deadly rain of armor-piercing

bomblets; land-based B-52s joined in with 1000-pound bombs. …

“It’s not going to take too many more days until there’s nothing

left of them.” … “shooting fish in a barrel” … “basically

just sitting ducks” … “There’s just nothing like it. It’s the

biggest Fourth of July show you’ve ever seen, and to see those

tanks just `boom,’ and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them

… they just become white hot. It’s wonderful.”

The British daily, The Independent, although it supported

the war, denounced the glee with which the Americans carried out

the barrage, saying it “turned the stomachs” and was “sickening

to witness a routed army being shot in the back”.{109}

A BBC Radio reporter summed up the attack by asking: “What

threat could these pathetic remnants of Saddam Hussein’s beaten

army have posed? Wasn’t it obvious that the people of the convoy

would have given themselves up willingly without the application

of such ferocious weaponry?”{110}

And all this against a foe that had for five days been

calling for a cease-fire.

But heaven forbid that the Americans should offend any of

the people of the Gulf. Thus it was that GIs were taught things

like never to use their left hand when offering food or drink,

for that hand is traditionally reserved for sanitary functions;

and the proper way to beckon an Arab with one’s hand and fingers,

so as not to confuse it with beckoning a dog.{111}

We also have the story of the American pilot who, during an

earlier bombing operation, stuffed into his identification packet

a $20 bill and a note written in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and

English. It said: “I am an American and do not speak your

language. I bear no malice toward your people.” Then he was

off, roaring through the skies toward Iraq with his payload of

bombs.{112}

Did the GIs bear any malice toward their female soldiers-

in-arms? One post-war study found that more than half the women who

served in the Gulf War felt that they had been sexually harassed

verbally, while eight percent (almost 3,000) had been the objects

of attempted or completed sexual assaults.{113}

And immediately after George Bush ordered the bombing to

begin, his rating with the American people jumped for joy: an 82

percent approval rating, the highest ever in his two years in

office, higher even than after his invasion of Panama.{114} One

journalist later noted:

 

One minute of nightly truth on this “popular” war would

have changed American public opinion. … if for just 60

seconds the 6 o’clock Monday news had shown 5,000 Iraqi

soldiers with hideous phosphorous burns that alter human

anatomy followed by 60 seconds Tuesday night of the slaughter

at the Baghdad bomb shelter … What if on Wednesday Americans

had seen 10,000 Iraqi soldiers incinerated by American high-tech

weapons?{115}

 

 

Ever since the Iraqi invasion in August, and despite the many

confusing soundbites and heavy rhetoric emanating from the White

House, one thing seemed clear enough: if Iraq agreed to withdraw

from Kuwait, military attacks against it would not take place, or

would cease, whatever other punishment or sanctions might

continue. Thus, it seemed like a ray of hope, however late, when

the Soviet Union succeeded on 21-22 February 1991 in getting Iraq

to agree to withdraw completely the day after a cease-fire of all

military operations went into effect. The agreement came with

specified timetables and monitoring.{116}

George Bush refused to offer a cease-fire, per se. He could

not even bring himself to mention the word in his replies. All

he would say was that the retreating Iraqi forces would not be

attacked (which turned out to be untrue), and that the coalition

“will exercise restraint.” Saddam could have chosen to take this

as the cease-fire, but he was as proud and stubborn as George.

The point Bush emphasized the most during these two crucial

days, as well as earlier, was that Iraq must comply with all 12

UN resolutions. In evaluating Bush’s legalistic demands, it

should be kept in mind that the policy and practice of the

American war had repeatedly violated the letter and the spirit of

the United Nations Charter, the Hague Conventions, the Geneva

Conventions, the Nuremberg Tribunal, the protocols of the

International Committee of the Red Cross, and the US

Constitution, amongst other cherished documents.{117}

In the end, Bush gave Saddam 24 hours to begin withdrawing

from Kuwait, period. When the time came and went, the United

States launched the long-expected ground war, while the aerial

attacks — including the carnage on the road to Basra –

continued until the end of the month.

Said Vitaly Ignatenko, a spokesman for Soviet President

Mikhail Gorbachev: “It seems that President Gorbachev cares more

about saving the lives of American soldiers than George Bush

does.”{118}

In a postwar survey, a United Nations inspection team declared

that the allied bombardment had had a “near apocalyptic impact”

on Iraq and had transformed the country into a “pre-industrial

age nation” which “had been until January a rather highly

urbanized and mechanized society.”{119}

It will never be known how many hundreds of thousands of

Iraqis died from the direct and indirect effects of the war; the

count is added to every day. With the United States refusing to

end the embargo against Iraq, everything has continued:

malnutrition, starvation, lack of medicines and vaccines,

contaminated drinking water, human excrement piling up, typhoid,

a near-epidemic of measles, several other diseases … Iraq’s

food supply had been 70 percent dependent on imports, now

billions of dollars were frozen in overseas accounts, and with

prohibitive restrictions on selling its oil … an inability to

rebuild because vital parts could not be imported, industry

closing its doors, mass unemployment, transportation and

communications broken down{120} … By September 1994, with

Washington still refusing to release its death grip on the

embargo, the Iraqi government announced that since the sanctions

had begun in August 1990 about 400,000 children had died of

malnutrition and disease.{121}

After the war, when the Iraqi government was repressing a

Kurdish revolt — which the US had encouraged, then failed to

support — Bush said: “I feel frustrated any time innocent

civilians are being slaughtered.”{122}

This was the second time the United States had led the

Kurdish lambs to slaughter with a broken commitment. (See Iraq

1972-75 chapter.)

The United States had also encouraged the Shiite muslims in

Iraq to rebel, then did not back them, presumably because

Washington only wanted to drive Saddam up the wall some more,

make him irrational enough to incite a coup against him; but

Washington was not looking to foster a pro-Iranian regime and

inspire muslim fundamentalists elsewhere in the Middle East.

American mental hospitals and prisons are home to many people who

claim to have heard a voice telling them to kill certain people,

people they’d never met before, people who’d never done them any

harm, or threatened any harm.

American soldiers went to the Persian Gulf to kill the same

kind of people after hearing a voice command them: the voice of

George Herbert Walker Bush.

 

NOTES

return to mid-text

 

1. Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1991, p. 8.

2. Washington Post, 13 January 1990, p. 11; 8 February 1990.

3. Ibid., 12 February 1990, 16 June 1990, p. 6.

4. Los Angeles Times, 11 July 1990, p. 1.

5. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1990 (Wilmington, Del. 1991)

6. a) Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the

Gulf (Thunder’s Mouth Press, NY, 1992), pp. 12-13; this book is

based largely on the findings of the Commission of Inquiry for

the International War Crimes Tribunal, which gathered testimony

from survivors and eyewitnesses.

b) Ralph Schoenman, Iraq and Kuwait: A History Suppressed, pp.

1-11, a 21-page monograph published by Veritas Press, Santa

Barbara, CA.

c) New York Times, 15 September 1976, p. 17; the incursion was

resolved without war.

7. a) “Note from the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Tariq

Aziz, to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, July 15,

1990″, Appendix 1 of Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, Secret

Dossier: The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf War (Penguin Books,

New York 1991), pp. 223-234.

b) New York Times, 3 September 1990, p. 7.

c) Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1990, p. M4 (article by Henry

Schuler, director of energy security programs for the Center for

Strategic and International Studies, Washington).

d) John K. Cooley, Payback: America’s Long War in the Middle

East (Brassey’s [US], McLean, Va., 1991) pp. 183-6.

8. Murray Waas, “Who Lost Kuwait? How the Bush Administration

Bungled its Way to War in the Gulf”, The Village Voice (New

York), 22 January 1991, p. 35; New York Times, 23 September 1990.

9. New York Times, 23 September 1990.

10. Ibid., 25 July 1990, pp. 1, 8.

11. Ibid., 23 September 1990.

12. Ibid., 17 September 1990, p. 23, column by William Safire.

13. Waas, p. 31.

14. New York Times, 28 July 1990, p. 5.

15. Los Angeles Times, 21 October 1992, p. 8.

16. “Developments in the Middle East”, p. 14, Hearing before the

Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the House Committee

on Foreign Affairs, 31 July 1990.

17. Kuwaiti document: Los Angeles Times, 1 November 1990, p. 14.

18. Washington Post, 19 August 1990, p. 29.

19. Los Angeles Times, 1 November 1990, p. 14.

20. Schoenman, pp. 11-12; New York Review of Books, 16 January

1992, p. 51.

21. Christian Science Monitor, 5 February 1991, p. 1.

22. Michael Emery, “How Mr. Bush Got His War” in Greg Ruggiero

and Stuart Sahulka, eds., Open Fire (The New Press, New York,

1993), pp. 39, 40, 52, based on Emery’s interview of King

Hussein, 19 February 1991 in Jordan. (Revised version of article

in the Village Voice, 5 March 1991).

23. Ibid., p. 42; “they” also referred to the Saudis, for reasons

not pertinent to this discussion.

24. Milton Viorst, “A Reporter At Large: After the Liberation”,

The New Yorker, 30 September 1991, p. 66.

25. Schoenman, pp. 12-13, from a letter sent by the Iraqi Foreign

Minister to the Secretary-General of the UN, 4 September 1990;

Emery, pp. 32-3.

26. New York Times, 5 August 1990, p. 12.

27. Waas, pp. 30 and 38.

28. New York Times, 24 January 1991, p. D22.

29. Washington Post, 8 March 1991, p. A26.

30. a) Major James Blackwell, US Army Ret., Thunder in the

Desert: The Strategy and Tactics of the Persian Gulf War (Bantam

Books, New York, 1991), pp. 85-6.

b) Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian

Gulf War (U.S. News and World Report/Times Books, 1992) pp. 29-30.

c) AIR FORCE Magazine (Arlington, Va.), March 1991, p. 82.

d) Newsweek, 28 January 1991, p. 61.

31. Los Angeles Times, 5 August 1990, p. 1.

32. Washington Post, 23 June 1991, p. A16.

33. Blackwell, pp. 86-7.

34. Financial Times (London), 21 February 1991, p. 3.

35. Waas, p. 30.

36. New York Times, 31 May 1991.

37. Ibid., 2 August 1990, p. 1; Washington Post, 3 August 1990,

p. 7; the Bush quotation is the Post summary of his remarks.

38. New York Times, 3 August 1990; Los Angeles Times, 3 August

1990, p. 1; Washington Post, 3 August 1990, p. 7.

39. Los Angeles Times, 4 August 1990, p. 20.

40. Washington Post, 10 August 1990, p. F1.

41. New York Times, 23 September 1990, IV, p. 21.

42. Washington Post, 25 November 1990, p. C4.

43. Los Angeles Times, 2 October 1990, p. 18. See Washington

Post, 10 October 1990, p. 5, and 18 October, p. 1, for some of

the actual numbers and programs testifying to how Congress went

out of its way not to rock the new war boat.

44. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1989 (Wilmington, Del. 1990);

ditto for 1990, published in 1991.

45. Reported in many places; see, e.g., Wall Street Journal, 14

January 1991, p. 14; Fortune magazine (New York), 11 February

1991, p. 46; Clark, pp. 153-6; Washington Post, 30 January 1991,

p. A30 (IMF and World Bank); Daniel Pipes, “Is Damascus Ready for

Peace?”, Foreign Affairs magazine (New York), Fall 1991, pp. 41-2

(Syria); Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1992, p. 1 (Turkey); Elaine

Sciolino, The Outlaw State: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Power and

the Gulf Crisis (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1991), pp. 237-9

(China, Russia).

46. Sciolino, pp. 237-8. Baker’s exact words differ slightly in

several of the sources reporting this incident; also, whether he

said it out loud or not; the amount of aid lost by the Yemenis

differs widely as well.

47. Los Angeles Times, 4 May 1991, p. 8.

48. The Guardian (London), 9 January 1991.

49. For an analysis of the Bush administration’s method of

negotiating, see John E. Mack and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, “Is This Any

Way to Wage Peace?”, Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1991, op. ed.;

also see ibid., 1 October 1990, p. 1, and 2 November 1990, p. 18.

50. New York Times, 9 August 1990, p. 15.

51. Los Angeles Times, 6 November 1990, p. 4.

52. August: Robert Parry, “The Peace Feeler That Was”, The

Nation, 15 April 1991, pp. 480-2; Newsweek, 10 September 1990, p.

17; October: Los Angeles Times, 20 October 1990, p. 6.

53. New border: Wall Street Journal, 11 December 1990, p. 3.

54. Newsweek, 10 September 1990, p. 17

55. Parry, op. cit.

56. Washington Post, 25 November 1990, p. C4.

57. Fortune, op. cit.

58. Ibid.

59. The Guardian (London), 12 January 1991, p. 2.

60. Theodore Draper, “The True History of the Gulf War”, The New

York Review of Books, 30 January 1992, p. 41.

61. Ibid.

62. Wall Street Journal, 21 November 1990, p. 16.

63. New York Times, 3 August 1990, p. 9; 12 August, p. 1; Los

Angeles Times, 17 November 1990, p. 14; Wall Street Journal, 3

December 1990, p. 3.

64. The Observer (London), 21 October 1990.

65. Webster, 23 January 1990, p. 60, and Schwarzkopf, 8 February

1990, pp. 586, 594 of “Threat Assessment; Military Strategy; and

Operational Requirements”, testimony before Senate Armed Services

Committee.

66. Basic Petroleum Data Book (American Petroleum Institute,

Washington), September 1990, Section II, Table 1a, 1989 figures:

Middle East – 572 billion barrels of reserves, “Free World” – 824

billion, USSR – 84 billion.

67. “Threat Assessment; Military Strategy; and Operational

Requirements”, op. cit., p. 600, for 1989 figures.

68. Speaking on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, 11 September 1990.

69. Draper, op. cit., p. 41.

70. Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and the

Crisis in the Gulf (Times Books, New York, 1990), p. 192.

71. Bob Woodward, The Commanders (Simon & Schuster, New York,

1991), pp. 263-73.

72. Los Angeles Times, 17 October 1990 (hecklers); 17 November,

p. 14; 1 December, p. 5.

73. The Guardian (London), 12 September 1990, p. 7.

74. See, e.g., Christopher Hitchens, Harper’s Magazine, January

1991, p. 72; Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military

Conflict (London, 1989), p. 71. US policy had to do with the

hostages held in the US embassy in Teheran.

75. Saudi Arabia: Religious intolerance: The arrest, detention

and torture of Christian worshippers and Shi’a Muslims (Amnesty

International report, New York, 14 September 1993).

76. Miller and Mylroie, pp. 220, 225; Denis MacShane, “Working in

Virtual Slavery”, The Nation, 18 March 1991.

77. Draper, op. cit., p. 38, provides details.

78. See, as a small sample, Los Angeles Times, 7, 13, and 17

March 1991, 12 June 1991, and 10 July 1992 (Amnesty).

79. All three quotations: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “White Slaves

in the Persian Gulf”, Wall Street Journal, 7 January 1991, p. 14.

80. New York Times, 18 November 1990, p. 1.

81. Sciolino, pp. 139-40.

82. Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1991, p. 16; 6 September 1991, p.

17; Clark, p. 92, lists eight countries with whom Washington made

such arrangements.

83. “Threat Assessment; Military Strategy; and Operational

Requirements”, op. cit., pp. 589-90.

84. Scott Armstrong, “Eye of the Storm”, Mother Jones magazine,

November/December 1991, pp. 30-35, 75-6.

85. Los Angeles Times, 1 December 1990, p. 1.

86. Ibid., 7 June 1991, pp. 1, 30.

87. Los Angeles Times, 12 September 1991, p. 1; Washington Post,

13 September 1991, p. 21; this occurred on 24-25 February 1991.

88. Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1991, p. 1; 26 September, p. 16;

occurred on 18 January 1991.

89. United Nations General Assembly Resolution: “Establishment of

a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region of the Middle East”, 4

December 1990, Item No. 45/52.

90. New York Times, 24 January 1991, p. 11; 31 January, p. 12;

Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1991, p. 6.

91. Clark, pp. 97-8; Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, “Is

Military Research Hazardous to Veterans’ Health? Lessons from

the Persian Gulf”, 6 May 1994, pp. 5-6.

92. Peacelink magazine (Hamilton, New Zealand), March 1991, p.

19; Washington Post, 8 February 1991, p. 1.

93. Clark, pp. 98-9. The UKAEA report was obtained and published

by The Independent newspaper of London.

94. Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During

the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War, a report of

Middle East Watch/Human Rights Watch (US and London), November

1991, pp. 95-111, 248-272.

95. Washington Post, 13 February 1991, p. 22, citing Rear Admiral

Mike McConnell, intelligence director for the Joint Chiefs of

Staff.

96. The Guardian (London), 20 February 1991, p. 1, entitled:

“Bombs rock capital as allies deliver terrible warning”.

97. Needless Deaths … op. cit., pp. 128-47; Clark, pp. 70-72,

for an explanation of the 1,500 number and for a particularly

gruesome description of the carnage and the horror.

98. “The Gulf War and Its Aftermath”, The 1992 Information Please

Almanac (Boston 1992), p. 974.

99. Laurie Garrett (medical writer for Newsday), “The Dead”,

Columbia Journalism Review (New York), May/June 1991, p. 32.

100. Needless Deaths … op. cit., p. 135.

101. Los Angeles Times, 18 February 1991, p. 11.

102. Effects of the destruction of the electrical system:

Needless Deaths … op. cit., pp. 171-93. Also see Clark, pp.

59-72, for a discussion of the destruction of the infrastructure.

103. Washington Post, 23 June 1991, p. 16; Los Angeles Times, 21

May 1991, p. 1; Needless Deaths … op. cit., pp. 184-5 (The

Harvard Study Team Report discusses the methodology used to

derive the figure of 170,000.)

104. Julia Devin, Member of the Coordinating Committee for the

International Study Team (87 health and environment researchers

who visited Iraq in August 1991), testimony before the

International Task Force of the House Select Committee on Hunger,

13 November 1991, p. 40.

105. Washington Post, 23 June 1991, pp. 1 and 16.

106. Needless Deaths … op. cit., pp. 177-80.

107. Washington Post, 23 June 1991, p. 16.

108. Needless Deaths … op. cit., pp. 201-24; Clark, pp. 72-4;

Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1991, p. 9; 3 February, p. 8;

apparently these attacks took place mainly during late January

and early February 1991.

109. Road to Basra: Washington Post, 27 February 1991, p. 1; Los

Angeles Times, 27 February 1991, p. 1; Ellen Ray, “The Killing

Deserts”, Lies Of Our Times (New York), April 1991, pp. 3-4

(cites The Independent).

110. Stephen Sackur, On the Basra Road (London Review of Books,

1991), pp. 25-6, cited in Draper, op. cit., p. 42.

111. Los Angeles Times, 24 August 1990.

112. Ibid., 21 January 1991.

113. Ibid., 30 September 1994, p. 26.

114. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1991 (Wilmington, Del.

1992).

115. Dennis Bernstein, quoted in the Newsletter of the National

Association of Arab Americans (Greater Los Angeles Chapter), July

1991, p. 2. For an excellent description of the media as

government handmaiden during the war, see Extra! (Fairness and

Accuracy in Reporting, New York), May 1991, Special issue on the

Gulf War.

116. Micah L. Sifry & Christopher Cerf, eds., The Gulf War

Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (Times Books, New York,

1991), p. 345, for the main provisions of the agreement arrived

at between the Soviet and Iraqi foreign ministers.

117. Clark, chapters 8 and 9 and appendices, plus elsewhere,

explores all this in detail.

118. Interview with Ignatenko on CBS-TV, aired in Los Angeles

during the evening of 22 February 1991.

119. “The Gulf War and Its Aftermath”, The 1992 Information

Please Almanac (Boston 1992), p. 974.

120. Clark, pp. 75-84.

121. Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1994, p. 6.

122. International Herald Tribune, 5 April 1991

 

53. AFGHANISTAN 1979-1992 America’s Jihad

 

His followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces

of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department

officials I have spoken with call him “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist,”

“definite dictatorship material”.{1}

 

This did not prevent the United States government from showering the man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet- supported government of Afghanistan. His name was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was the head of the Islamic Party and he hated the United States almost as much as he hated the Russians. His followers screamed “Death to America” along with “Death to the Soviet Union”, only the Russians were not showering him with large amounts of aid.{2}

The United States began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 despite the fact that in February of that year some of them had kidnapped the American ambassador in the capital city of Kabul, leading to his death in the rescue attempt. The support continued even after their brother Islamic fundamentalists in next-door Iran seized the US Embassy in Teheran in November and held 55 Americans hostage for over a year. Hekmatyar and his colleagues were, after all, in battle against the Soviet Evil Empire; he was thus an important member of those forces Ronald Reagan called “freedom fighters”.

 

On 27 April 1978, a coup staged by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) overthrew the government of Mohammad Daoud. Daoud, five years earlier, had overthrown the monarchy and established a republic, although he himself was a member of the royal family. He had been supported by the left in this endeavor, but it turned out that Daoud’s royal blood was thicker than his progressive water. When the Daoud regime had a PDP leader killed, arrested the rest of the leadership, and purged hundreds of suspected party sympathizers from government posts, the PDP, aided by its supporters in the army, revolted and took power.

Afghanistan was a backward nation: a life expectancy of about 40, infant mortality of at least 25 percent, absolutely primitive sanitation, widespread malnutrition, illiteracy of more than 90 percent, very few highways, not one mile of railway, most people living in nomadic tribes or as impoverished farmers in mud villages, identifying more with ethnic groups than with a larger political concept, a life scarcely different from many centuries earlier.

Reform with a socialist bent was the new government’s ambition: land reform (while still retaining private property), controls on prices and profits, and strengthening of the public sector, as well as separation of church and state, eradication of illiteracy, legalization of trade unions, and the emancipation of women in a land almost entirely Muslim.

Afghanistan’s thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union had always produced a special relationship. Even while it was a monarchy, the country had been under the strong influence of its powerful northern neighbor which had long been its largest trading partner, aid donor, and military supplier. But the country had never been gobbled up by the Soviets, a fact that perhaps lends credence to the oft-repeated Soviet claim that their hegemony over Eastern Europe was only to create a buffer between themselves and the frequently-invading West.

Nevertheless, for decades Washington and the Shah of Iran tried to pressure and bribe Afghanistan in order to roll back Russian influence in the country. During the Daoud regime, Iran, encouraged by the United States, sought to replace the Soviet Union as Kabul’s biggest donor with a $2 billion economic aid agreement, and urged Afghanistan to join the Regional Cooperation for Development, which consisted of Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. (This organization was attacked by the Soviet Union and its friends in Afghanistan as being a “branch of CENTO” the 1950s regional security pact that was part of the US policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union.) At the same time, Iran’s infamous secret police, SAVAK, was busy fingering suspected Communist sympathizers in the Afghan government and military. In September 1975, prodded by Iran which was conditioning its aid on such policies, Daoud dismissed 40 Soviet-trained military officers and moved to reduce future Afghan dependence on officer training in the USSR by initiating training arrangements with India and Egypt. Most important, in Soviet eyes, Daoud gradually broke off his alliance with the PDP, announcing that he would start his own party and ban all other political activity under a projected new constitution.{3}

Selig Harrison, the Washington Post’s South Asia specialist, wrote an article in 1979 entitled “The Shah, Not the Kremlin, Touched off Afghan Coup”, concluding:

 

The Communist takeover in Kabul [April 1978] came about when it did,

and in the way that it did, because the Shah disturbed the tenuous

equilibrium that had existed in Afghanistan between the Soviet

Union and the West for nearly three decades. In Iranian and American

eyes, Teheran’s offensive was merely designed to make Kabul more

truly nonaligned, but it went far beyond that. Given the unusually

long frontier with Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would clearly go to

great lengths to prevent Kabul from moving once again toward a

pro-western stance.{4}

 

When the Shah was overthrown in January 1979, the United States lost its chief ally and outpost in the Soviet-border region, as well as its military installations and electronic monitoring stations aimed at the Soviet Union. Washington’s cold warriors could only eye Afghanistan even more covetously than before.

After the April revolution, the new government under President Noor Mohammed Taraki declared a commitment to Islam within a secular state, and to non-alignment in foreign affairs. It maintained that the coup had not been foreign inspired, that it was not a “Communist takeover”, and that they were not “Communists” but rather nationalists and revolutionaries. (No official or traditional Communist Party had ever existed in Afghanistan.){5} But because of its radical reform program, its class-struggle and anti-imperialist-type rhetoric, its support of all the usual suspects (Cuba, North Korea, etc.), its signing of a friends hip treaty and other cooperative agreements with the Soviet Union, and an increased presence in the country of Soviet civilian and military advisers (though probably less than the US had in Iran at the time), it was labeled “communist” by the world’s media and by its domestic opponents.

Whether or not the new government in Afghanistan should properly have been called communist, whether or not it made any difference what it was called, the lines were now drawn for political, military, and propaganda battle: a jihad (holy war) between fundamentalist Muslims and “godless atheistic communists”; Afghan nationalism vs. a “Soviet-run” government; large landowners, tribal chiefs, businessmen, the extended royal family, and others vs. the government’s economic reforms. Said the new prime minister about this elite, who were needed to keep the country running, “every effort will be made to attract them. But we want to re-educate them in such a manner that they should think about the people, and not, as previously, just about themselves — to have a good house and a nice car while other people die of hunger.”{6}

The Afghan government was trying to drag the country into the 20th century. In May 1979, British political scientist Fred Halliday observed that “probably more has changed in the countryside over the last year than in the two centuries since the state was established.” Peasant debts to landlords had been canceled, the system of usury (by which peasants, who were forced to borrow money against future crops, were left in perpetual debt to money-lenders) was abolished, and hundreds of schools and medical clinics were being built in the countryside. Halliday also reported that a substantial land-redistribution program was underway, with many of the 200,000 rural families scheduled to receive land under this reform already having done so. But this last claim must be approached with caution. Revolutionary land reform is always an extremely complex and precarious undertaking even under the best of conditions, and ultra-backward, tradition-bound Afghanistan in the midst of nascent civil war hardly offered the best of conditions for social experiments.{7}

The reforms also encroached into the sensitive area of Islamic subjugation of women. A1986 US Army manual on Afghanistan discussing the decrees and the influence of the government concerning women cited the following changes: “provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women”; “abolished forced marriages”; “bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs”; “extensive literacy programs, especially for women”; “putting girls and boys in the same classroom”; “concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics”.{7a}

The People’s Democratic Party saw the Soviet Union as the only realistic source of support for the long-overdue modernization. The illiterate Afghan peasant’s ethnic cousins across the border in the Soviet Union were, after all, often university graduates and professionals.

The argument of the Moujahedeen (“holy warriors”) rebels that the “communist” government would curtail their religious freedom was never borne out in practice. A year and a half after the change in government, the conservative British magazine The Economist reported that “no restrictions had been imposed on religious practice”.{8} Earlier, the New York Times stated that the religious issue “is being used by some Afghans who actually object more to President Taraki’s plans for land reforms and other changes in this feudal society.”{9} Many of the Muslim clergy were in fact rich landowners.{10} The rebels, concluded a BBC reporter who spent four months with them, are “fighting to retain their feudal system and stop the Kabul government’s left-wing reforms which [are] considered anti-Islamic”.{11}

The two other nations which shared a long border with Afghanistan, and were closely allied to the United States, expressed their fears of the new government. To the west, Iran, still under the Shah, worried about “threats to oil-passage routes in the Persian Gulf”. Pakistan, to t he south, spoke of “threats from a hostile and expansionist Afghanistan”{12} A former US ambassador to Afghanistan saw it as part of a “gradually closing pincer movement aimed at Iran and the oil regions of the Middle East.”{13} None of these alleged fears turned out to have any substance or evidence to back them up, but to the anti-communist mind this might prove only that the Russians and their Afghan puppets had been stopped in time.

Two months after the April 1978 coup, an alliance formed by a number of conservative Islamic factions was waging guerrilla war against the government.{14} By spring 1979, fighting was taking place on many fronts, and the State Department was cautioning the Soviet Union that its advisers in Afghanistan should not interfere militarily in the civil strife. One such warning in the summer by State Department spokesman Hodding Carter was another of those Washington monuments to chutzpah: “We expect the principle of nonintervention to be respected by all parties in the area, including the Soviet Union.”{15} This while the Soviets were charging the CIA with arming Afghan exiles in Pakistan; and the Afghanistan government was accusing Pakistan and Iran of also aiding the guerrillas and even of crossing the border to take part in the fighting. Pakistan had recently taken its own sharp turn toward strict Muslim orthodoxy, which the Afghan government deplored as “fanatic”;{16} while in January, Iran had established a Muslim state after overthrowing the Shah. (As opposed to the Afghan fundamentalist freedom fighters, the Iranian Islamic fundamentalists were regularly described in the West as terrorists, ultra-conservatives, and anti-democratic.)

A “favorite tactic” of the Afghan freedom fighters was “to torture victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their noses, ears, and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another”, producing “a slow, very painful death”.{17} The Moujahedeen also killed a Canadian tourist and six West Germans, including two children, and a U.S. military attaché was dragged from his car and beaten; all due to the rebels’ apparent inability to distinguish Russians from other Europeans.{18}

In March 1979, Taraki went to Moscow to press the Soviets to send ground troops to help the Afghan army put down the Moujahedeen. He was promised military assistance, but ground troops could not be committed. Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin told the Afghan leader:

 

The entry of our troops into Afghanistan would outrage the international

community, triggering a string of extremely negative consequences in

many different areas. Our common enemies are just waiting for the moment

when Soviet troops appear in Afghanistan. This will give them the excuse

they need to send armed bands into the country.{19}

In September, the question became completely academic for Noor Mohammed Taraki, for he was ousted (and his death soon announced) in an intra-party struggle and replaced by his own deputy prime minister, Hafizullah Amin. Although Taraki had sometimes been heavy-handed in implementing the reform program, and had created opposition even amongst the intended beneficiaries, he turned out to be a moderate compared to Amin who tried to institute social change by riding roughshod over tradition and tribal and ethnic autonomy.

The Kremlin was unhappy with Amin. The fact that he had been involved in the overthrow and death of the much-favored Taraki was bad enough. But the Soviets also regarded him as thoroughly unsuitable for the task that was Moscow’s sine qua non: preventing an anti-communist Islamic state for arising in Afghanistan. Amin gave reform an exceedingly bad name. The KGB station in Kabul, in pressing for Amin’s removal, stated that his usurpation of power would lead to “harsh repressions and, as a reaction, the activation and consolidation of the opposition”{20} Moreover, as we shall see, the Soviets were highly suspicious a bout Amin’s ideological convictions.

Thus it was, that what in March had been unthinkable, in December became a reality. Soviet troops began to arrive in Afghanistan around the 8th of the month — to what extent at Amin’s request or with his approval, and, consequently, whether to call the action an “invasion” or not, has been the subject of much discussion and controversy.

On the 23rd the Washington Post commented “There was no charge [by the State Department] that the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan, since the troops apparently were invited”{21} However, at a meeting with Soviet-bloc ambassadors in October, Amin’s foreign minister had openly criticized the Soviet Union for interfering in Afghan affairs. Amin himself insisted that Moscow replace its ambassador.{22} Yet, on 26 December, while the main body of Soviet troops was arriving in Afghanistan, Amin gave “a relaxed interview” to an Arab journalist. “The Soviets,” he said, “supply my country with economic and military aid, but at the same time they respect our independence and our sovereignty. They do not interfere in our domestic affairs.” He also spoke approvingly of the USSR’s willingness to accept his veto on military bases.{23}

The very next day, a Soviet military force stormed the presidential palace and shot Amin dead.{24}

He was replaced by Babrak Karmal, who had been vice president and deputy prime minister in the 1978 revolutionary government.

Moscow denied any part in Amin’s death, though they didn’t pretend to be sorry about it, as Brezhnev made clear:

 

The actions of the aggressors against Afghanistan were facilitated

by Amin who, on seizing power, started cruelly repressing broad

sections of Afghan society, party and military cadres, members of

the intelligentsia and of the Moslem clergy, that is, the very

sections on which the April revolution relied. And the people

under the leadership of the People’s Democratic Party, headed by

Babrak Karmal, rose against Amin’s tyranny and put an end to it.

Now in Washington and some other capitals they are mourning Amin.

This exposes their hypocrisy with particular clarity. Where were

these mourners when Amin was conducting mass repressions, when

he forcibly removed and unlawfully killed Taraki, the founder of

the new Afghan state?{25}

 

After Amin’s ouster and execution, the public thronged the streets in “a holiday spirit”. “If Karmal could have overthrown Amin without the Russians,” observed a Western diplomat, “he would have been seen as a hero of the people.”{26} The Soviet government and press repeatedly referred to Amin as a “CIA agent”, a charge which was greeted with great skepticism in the United States and elsewhere.{27} However, enough circumstantial evidence supporting the charge exists so that it perhaps should not be dismissed entirely out of hand.

During the late 1950s and early 60s, Ami n had attended Columbia University Teachers College and the University of Wisconsin.{28} This was a heyday period for the CIA — using impressive bribes and threats — to regularly try to recruit foreign students in the United States to act as agents for them when they returned home. During this period, at least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA), Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the United States and later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit, Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the United States “are either CIA trained or indoctrinated. Some are cabinet level people.”{29} It has been reported that in 1963 Amin became head of the ASA, but this has not been corroborated.{30} However, it is known that the ASA received part of its funding from the Asia Foundation, the CIA’s principal front in Asia for many years, and that at one time Amin was associated with this organization.{31}

In September 1979, the month that Amin took power, the American chargé d’affaires in Kabul, Bruce Amstutz, began to hold friendly meetings with him to reassure him that he need not worry about his unhappy Soviet allies as long as the US maintained a strong presence in Afghanistan. The strategy may have worked, for later in the month, Amin made a special appeal to Amstutz for improved relations with the United States. Two days later in New York, the Afghan Foreign Minister quietly expressed the same sentiments to State Department officials. And at the end of October, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that Amin was “painfully aware of the exiled leadership the Soviets [were] keeping on the shelf” (a reference to Karmal who was living in Czechoslovakia).{32} Under normal circumstances, the Amin-US meetings might be regarded as routine and innocent diplomatic contact, but these were hardly normal circumstances — the Afghan government was engaged in a civil war, and the United States was supporting the other side.

Moreover, it can be said that Amin, by his ruthlessness, was doing just what an American agent would be expected to do: discrediting the People’s Democratic Party, the party’s reforms, the idea of socialism or communism, and the Soviet Union, all associated in one package. Amin also conducted purges in the army officer corps which seriously undermined the army’s combat capabilities.

But why would Amin, if he were actually plotting with the Americans, request Soviet military forces on several occasions? The main reason appears to be that he was being pressed to do so by high levels of the PDP and he had to comply for the sake of appearances. Babrak Karmal has suggested other, more Machiavellian, scenarios.{33}

The Carter administration jumped on the issue of the Soviet “invasion” and soon launched a campaign of righteous indignation, imposing what President Carter called “penalties” — from halting the delivery of grain to the Soviet Union to keeping the US team out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

The Russians countered that the US was enraged by the intervention because Washington had been plotting to turn the country into an American base to replace the loss of Iran.{34}

Unsurprisingly, on this seemingly clear-cut anti-communist issue, the American public and media easily fell in line with the president. The Wall Street Journal called for a “military” reaction, the establishment of US bases in the Middle East, “reinstatement of draft registration”, development of a new missile, and giving the CIA more leeway, adding: “Clearly we ought to keep open the chance of covert aid to Afghan rebels.”{35} The last, whether the newspaper knew it or not, had actually been going on for some time.

For some period prior to the Soviet invasion, the CIA had been beaming radio propaganda into Afghanistan and cultivating alliances with exiled Afghan guerrilla leaders by donating medicine and communications equipment.{36}

US foreign service officers had been meeting with Moujahedeen leaders to determine their needs at least as early as April 1979.{37}

And in July, President Carter had signed a “finding” to aid the rebels covertly, which led to the United States providing them with cash, weapons, equipment and supplies, and engaging in propaganda and other psychological operations in Afghanistan on their behalf. {38}

Intervention in the Afghan civil war by the United States, Iran, Pakistan, China and others gave the Russians grave concern about who was going to wield power next door. They consistently cited these “aggressive imperialist forces” to rationalize their own intervention into Afghanistan, which was the first time Soviet ground troops had engaged in military action anywhere in the world outside its post-World War II Eastern European borders. The potential establishment of an anti-communist Islamic state on the borders of the Soviet Union’s own republics in Soviet Central Asia that were home to some 40 million Muslims could not be regarded with equanimity by the Kremlin any more than Washington could be unruffled about a communist takeover in Mexico.

As we have seen repeatedly, the United States did not limit its defense perimeter to its immediate neighbors, or even to Western Europe, but to the entire globe. President Carter declared that the Persian Gulf area was “now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan”, that this area was synonymous with US interests, and that the United States would “defend” it against any threat by all means necessary. He called the Soviet action “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War”, a statement that required overlooking a great deal of post-war history. But 1980 was an election year.

Brezhnev, on the other hand, declared that “the national interests or security of the United States of America and other states are in no way affected by the events in Afghanistan. All attempts to portray matters otherwise are sheer nonsense.”{39}

The Carter administration was equally dismissive of Soviet concerns. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski later stated that “the issue was not what might have been Brezhnev’s subjective motives in going into Afghanistan but the objective consequences of a Soviet military presence so much closer to the Persian Gulf.”{40}

The stage was now set for 12 long years of the most horrific kind of warfare, a daily atrocity for the vast majority of the Afghan people who never asked for or wanted this war. But the Soviet Union was determined that its borders must be unthreatening. The Afghan government was committed to its goal of a secular, reformed Afghanistan. And the United States was intent upon making this the Soviets’ Vietnam, slowly bleeding as the Americans had.

At the same time, American policymakers could not fail to understand — though they dared not say it publicly and explicitly — that support of the Moujahedeen (many of whom carried pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini with them) could lead to a fundamentalist Islamic state being established in Afghanistan every bit as repressive as in next-door Iran, which in the 1980s was Public Enemy Number One in America. Neither could the word “terrorist” cross the lips of Washington officials in speaking of their new allies/clients, though these same people shot down civilian airliners and planted bombs at the airport. In 1986, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose emotional invectives against “terrorists” were second to none, welcomed Abdul Haq, an Afghan rebel leader who admitted that he had ordered the planting of a bomb at Kabul airport in 1984 which killed at least 28 people. Such, then, were the scruples of cold-war anti-communists in late 20th century. As Anastasio Somoza had been “our son of a bitch”, the Moujahedeen were now “our fanatic terrorists”.

At the beginning there had been some thought given to the morality of the policy. “The question here,” a senior official in the Carter administration said, “was whether it was morally acceptable that, in order to keep the Soviets off balance, which was the reason for the operation, it was permissible to use other lives for our geopolitical interests.”{42}

But such sentiments could not survive. Afghanistan was a cold-warrior’s dream: The CIA and the Pentagon, finally, had one of their proxy armies in direct confrontation with the forces of the Evil Empire. There was no price too high to pay for this Super Nintendo game, neither the hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, nor the destruction of Afghan society, nor three billion (sic) dollars of American taxpayer money poured into a bottomless hole, much of it going only to make a few Afghans and Pakistanis rich. Congress was equally enthused — without even the moral uncertainty that made them cautious about arming the Nicaraguan contras — and became a veritable bipartisan horn of plenty as it allocated more and more money for the effort each year. Rep. Charles Wilson of Texas expressed a not-atypical sentiment of official Washington when he declared:

 

There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam and we owe the Russians one …

I have a slight obsession with it, because of Vietnam. I thought

the Soviets ought to get a dose of it … I’ve been of the opinion

that this money was better spent to hurt our adversaries than other

money in the Defense Department budget.{43}

 

The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan — with whom recent American relations had been very poor — to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistani Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation.{44} Military and economic aid which had been cut off would be restored, Pakistan was told by the United States, if they would join the great crusade. Only a month before the Soviet intervention, anti-American mobs had burned and ransacked the US embassy in Islamabad and American cultural centers in two other Pakistani cities.{45}

The American ambassador in Libya reported that Muammar Qaddafi was sending the rebels $250,000 as well, but this, presumably, w as not at the request of the CIA.{46}

Washington left it to the Pakistanis to decide which of the various Afghan guerrilla groups should be the beneficiaries of much of this largesse. As one observer put it: “According to conventional wisdom at the time, the United States would not repeat the mistake of Vietnam — micro-managing a war in a culture it did not understand.”{47}

Not everyone in Pakistan was bought out. The independent Islamabad daily newspaper, The Muslim, more than once accused the United States of being ready to “fight to the last Afghan” … “We are not flattered to be termed a `frontline state’ by Washington.” … “Washington does not seem to be in any mood to seek an early settlement of a war whose benefits it is reaping at no cost of American manpower.”{48}

It’s not actually clear whether there was any loss of American lives in the war. On several occasions in the late ’80s, the Kabul government announced that Americans had been killed in the fighting,{49} and in 1985 a London newspaper reported that some two dozen American Black Muslims were in Afghanistan, fighting alongside the Moujahedeen in a jihad that a fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran says all believers in Islam must do at least once in their lives.{50} Several of the Black Muslims returned to the United States after being wounded.

 

 

Soviet aggression … Soviet invasion … Soviet swallowing up another innocent state as part of their plan to conquer the world, or at least the Middle East … this was the predominant and lasting lesson taught by Washington official pronouncements and the mainstream US media about the war, and the sum total of knowledge for the average American, although Afghanistan had retained its independence during 60 years of living in peace next door to the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski, albeit unrelentingly anti-Soviet, repeatedly speaks of the fact of Afghanistan’s “neutrality” in his memoirs.{51} The country had been neutral even during the Second World War.

One would have to look long and hard at the information and rhetoric offered to the American public following the Soviet intervention to derive even a hint that the civil war was essentially a struggle over deep-seated social reform; while an actual discussion of the issue was virtually non-existent. Prior to the intervention, one could get a taste of this, such as the following from the New York Times:

 

Land reform attempts undermined their village chiefs. Portraits of

Lenin threatened their religious leaders. But it was the Kabul

revolutionary Government’s granting of new rights to women that

pushed orthodox Moslem men in the Pashtoon villages of eastern

Afghanistan into picking up their guns. … “The government said our

women had to attend meetings and our children had to go to schools.

This threatens our religion. We had to fight” … “The government

imposed various ordinances allowing women freedom to marry anyone

they chose without their parents’ consent.”{52}

 

Throughout the 1980s, the Karmal, and then the Najibullah regimes, despite the exigencies of the war, pursued a program of modernization and broadening of their base: bringing electricity to villages, along with health clinics, a measure of land reform, and literacy; releasing numerous prisoners unlawfully incarcerated by Amin; bringing mullahs and other non-party people into the government; trying to carry it all out with moderation and sensitivity instead of confronting the traditional structures head on; reiterating its commitment to Islam, rebuilding and constructing mosques, exempting land owned by religious dignitaries and their institutions from land reform; trying, in short, to avoid the gross mistakes of the Amin government with its rush to force changes down people’s throats.{53} Selig Harrison, writing in 1988, stated:

 

The Afghan Communists see themselves as nationalists and modernizers …

They rationalize their collaboration with the Russians as the only way

available to consolidate their revolution in the face of foreign

“interference”. … the commitment of the Communists to rapid

modernization enables them to win a grudging tolerance from many

members of the modern-minded middle class, who feel trapped between

two fires: the Russians and fanatic Muslims opposed to social reforms.{54}

 

The program of the Kabul government eventually encouraged many volunteers to take up arms in its name. But it was a decidedly uphill fight, for it was relatively easy for the native anti-reformists and their foreign backers to convince large numbers of ordinary peasants that the government had ill intentions by blurring the distinction between the present government and its detested and dogmatic predecessor, particularly since the government was fond of stressing the continuity of the April 1978 revolution.{55} One thing the peasants, as well as the anti-reformists, were undoubtedly not told of was the US connection to the selfsame detested predecessor, Hafizullah Amin.

Another problem faced by the Kabul government in winning the hearts and minds of the people was of course the continuing Soviet armed presence, although it must be remembered that Islamic opposition to the leftist government began well before the Soviet forces arrived; indeed, the most militant of the Moujahedeen leaders, Hekmatyar, had led a serious uprising against the previous (non-leftist) government as well, in 1975, declaring that a “godless, communist-dominated regime” ruled in Kabul.{56}

As long as Soviet troops remained, the conflict in Afghanistan could be presented to the American mind as little more than a battle between Russian invaders and Afghanistan resistance/freedom fighters; as if the Afghanistan army and government didn’t exist, or certainly not with a large following of people who favored reforms and didn’t want to live under a fundamentalist Islamic government, probably a majority of the population.

“Maybe the people really don’t like us, either,” said Mohammed Hakim, Mayor of Kabul, a general in the Afghan army who was trained in the 1970s at military bases in the United States, and who thought that America was “the best country”, “but they like us better than the extremists. This is what the Western countries do not understand. We only hope that Mr. Bush and the people of the United States take a good look at us. They think we are very fanatic Communists, that we are not human beings. We are not fanatics. We are not even Communists.”{57}

They were in the American media. Any official of the Afghan government, or the government as a whole, was typically referred to, a priori, as “Communist”, or “Marxist”, or “pro-Communist”, or “pro-Marxist”, etc., without explanation or definition. Najibullah, who took over when Karmal stepped down in 1986, was confirmed in his position in 1987 under a new Islamized constitution that was stripped of all socialist rhetoric and brimming with references to Islam and the holy Koran. “This is not a socialist revolutionary country,” he said in his acceptance speech. “We do not want to build a Communist society.”{58}

Could the United States see beyond cold war ideology and consider the needs of the Afghan people? In August 1979, three months before the Soviet intervention, a classified State Department Report stated:

 

the United States’s larger interests … would be served by the

demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this

might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.

… the overthrow of the D.R.A. [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]

would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that

the Soviets’ view of the socialist course of history as being

inevitable is not accurate.{59}

 

Repeatedly, in the 1980s, as earlier, the Soviet Union contended that no solution to the conflict could be found until the United States and other nations ceased their support of the Moujahedeen. The United States, in turn, insisted that the Soviets must first withdraw their troops from Afghanistan.

Finally, after several years of UN-supported negotiations, an accord was signed in Geneva on 14 April 1988, under which the Kremlin committed itself to begin pulling out its estimated 115,000 troops on 15 May, and to complete the process by 15 February of the next year. Afghanistan, said Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, had become “a bleeding wound”.

In February, after the last Soviet forces had left Afghanistan, Gorbachev urged the United States to support an embargo on arms shipments into Afghanistan and a cease-fire between the two warring sides. Both proposals were turned down by the new Bush administration, which claimed that the Afghan government had been left with a massive stockpile of military equipment. It is unclear why Washington felt that the rebels who had fought the government to a standstill despite the powerful presence of the Soviet armed forces with all their equipment, would now be at a dangerous disadvantage with the Russians gone. The key to the American response may lie in the State Department statement of the prior week that the United States believed that the Kabul government on its own would not last more than six months.{60}

By raising the question of an arms gap (whether it was for real or not), Washington was assuring the continuation of the arms race in Afghanistan — a microcosm of the cold war. At the same time, the Bush administration called upon the Soviets to support “an independent, nonaligned Afghanistan”, although this was precisely what the United States had worked for decades to thwart.

Two days later, President Najibullah criticized the American rejection of Gorbachev’s proposal, offering to return the Soviet weapons if the rebels agreed to lay down their weapons and negotiate. There was no reported response to this offer from the US, or from the rebels, who in the past had refused such offers.

It would appear that Washington was thinking longer term than cease-fires and negotiations. On the same day as Najibullah’s offer, the United States announced that it had delivered 500,000 made-in-America textbooks to Afghanistan which were being used to teach Grades one through four. The books, which “critics say bordered on propaganda”, told of the rebels’ fight against the Soviet Union and contained drawings of guerrillas killing Russian soldiers.{61} Since the beginning of the war, the Moujahedeen had reserved its worst treatment for Russians. Washington possessed confirmed reports that the rebels had drugged and tortured 50 to 200 Soviet prisoners and imprisoned them like animals in cages, “living lives of indescribable horror”.{62} Another account, by a reporter from the conservative Far Eastern Economic Review, relates that:

 

One [Soviet] group was killed, skinned and hung up in a butcher’s

shop. One captive found himself the centre of attraction in a game of

buzkashi, that rough and tumble form of Afghan polo in which a

headless goat is usually the ball. The captive was used instead.

Alive. He was literally torn to pieces.{63}

 

Meanwhile, much to the surprise of the United States and everyone else, the Kabul government showed no sign of collapsing. The good news for Washington was that since the Soviet troops were gone (though some military advisers remained), the “cost-benefit ratio” had improved,{64} the cost being measured entirely in non-American deaths and suffering, as the rebels regularly exploded car bombs and sent rockets smashing into residential areas of Kabul, and destroyed government-built schools and clinics and murdered literacy teachers (just as the US-backed Nicaraguan contras had been doing on the other side of the world, and for the same reason: these were symbols of governmental benevolence).

The death and destruction caused by the Soviets and their Afghan allies was also extensive, such as the many bombings of villages. But individual atrocity stories must be approached with caution, for, as we have seen repeatedly, the propensity and the ability of the CIA to disseminate anti-communist disinformation — often of the most far-fetched variety — was virtually unlimited. With the Soviet Union the direct adversary, the creativity lamp must have burning all night at Langley.

Amnesty International, with its usual careful collection methods, reported in the mid-’80s on the frequent use of torture and arbitrary detention by the authorities in Kabul.{65} But what are we to make, for example, of the report, without attribution, by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson — who had ties to the American Afghan lobby — that Soviet troops often marched into unfriendly villages in Afghanistan and “massacred every man, woman and child”?{66} Or the New York Times recounting a story told them by an Afghan citizen of how Afghan soldiers had intentionally blinded five children with pieces of metal and then strangled them, as a government supporter he was with just laughed. To the newspaper’s credit, it added that “There is no way of confirming this story. It is possible that the man who told it was acting and trying to discredit the regime here. His eyes, however, looked like they had seen horror.”{67} Or a US congressman’s charge in 1985 that the Soviets had used booby-trapped toys to maim Afghan children,{68} the identical story told before about leftists elsewhere in the world during the cold war, and repeated again in 1987 by CBS News, with pictures. The New York Post later reported the claim of a BBC producer that the bomb-toy had been created for the CBS cameraman.{69}

Then there was the Afghan Mercy Fund, ostensibly a relief agency, but primarily in the propaganda business, which reported that the Soviets had burned a baby alive, that they were disguising mines as candy bars and leaving other mines disguised as butterflies to also attract children. The butterfly mines, it turned out, were copies of a US-designed mine used in the Vietnam war.{70}

There was also the shooting down of a Pakistan fighter plane over Afghanistan in May 1987 that was reported by Pakistan and Washington — knowing with certainty that their claim was untrue — to be the result of a Soviet-made missile. It turned out that the plane had been shot down by a companion Pakistani plane in error.{71}

Throughout the early and mid-’80s, the Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan — the so-called “yellow rain” — and had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information). Secretary of State Alexander Haig was a prime dispenser of such stories, and President Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches.{72} The “yellow rain”, it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead. Then, in 1987, it was disclosed that the Reagan administration had made its accusations even though government scientists at the time had been unable to confirm any of them, and considered the evidence to be flimsy and misleading.{73} Even more suspicious: the major scientific studies that later examined Washington’s claims spoke only of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand; no mention at all was made of Afghanistan. It was as if the administration — perhaps honestly mistaken at first about Indochina — had added Afghanistan to the list with full knowledge of the falsity of its allegation.

Such disinformation campaigns are often designed to serve a domestic political need. Consider Senator Robert Dole’s contribution to the discussion when he spoke in 1980 on the floor of Congress of “convincing evidence” he had been provided “that the Soviets had developed a chemical capability that extends far beyond our greatest fears … [a gas that] is unaffected by … our gas masks and leaves our military defenseless.” He then added: “To even suggest a leveling off of defense spending for our nation by the Carter administration at such a critical time in our history is unfathomable.”{74} And in March 1982, when the Reagan administration made its claim about the 3,042 Afghan deaths, the New York Times noted that: “President Reagan has just decided that the United States will resume production of chemical weapons and has asked for a substantial increase in the military budget for such weapons.”{75}

The money needed to extend American propaganda campaigns internationally flowed from the congressional horn of plenty as smoothly as for military desires — $500,000 in one moment’s flow to train Afghan journalists to use television, radio and newspapers to advance their cause.{76}

It should be noted that in June 1980, before any of the “yellow rain” charges had been made against the Soviet Union, the Kabul government had accused the rebels and their foreign backers of employing poison gas, citing an incident in which 500 pupils and teachers at several secondary schools had been poisoned with noxious gases; none were reported to have died.{77}

 

 

One reason victory continued to elude the Moujahedeen was that they were terribly split by centuries-old ethnic and tribal divisions, as well as the relatively recent rise of Islamic fundamentalism in conflict with more traditional, but still orthodox, Islam. The differences often led to violence. In one incident, in 1989, seven top Moujahedeen commanders and more than 20 other rebels were murdered by a rival guerrilla group. This was neither the first nor the last of such occurrences.{78} By April 1990, 14 months after the Soviet withdrawal, the Los Angeles Times described the state of the rebels thusly:

 

they have in recent weeks killed more of their own than the enemy. …

Rival resistance commanders have been gunned down gangland-style here

in the border town of Peshawar [Pakistan], the staging area for the

war. There are persistent reports of large- scale political killings

in the refugee camps … A recent execution … had as much to do

with drugs as with politics. … Other commanders, in Afghanistan and

in the border camps, are simply refusing to fight. They say privately

that they prefer [Afghan President] Najibullah to the hard-line

Moujahedeen fundamentalists led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.{79}

 

The rebel cause was also corrupted by the huge amounts of arms flooding in. Investigative reporter Tim Weiner reported the following:

 

The CIA’s pipeline leaked. It leaked badly. It spilled huge quantities

of weapons all over one of the world’s most anarchic areas. First the

Pakistani armed forces took what they wanted from the weapons shipments.

Then corrupt Afghan guerrilla leaders stole and sold hundreds of millions

of dollars’ worth of anti-aircraft guns, missiles, rocket-propelled

grenades, AK-47 automatic rifles, ammunition and mines from the CIA’s

arsenal. Some of the weapons fell into the hands of criminal gangs,

heroin kingpins and the most radical faction of the Iranian military. …

While their troops eked out hard lives in Afghanistan’s mountains and

deserts, the guerrillas’ political leaders maintained fine villas in

Peshawar and fleets of vehicles at their command. The CIA kept silent as

the Afghan politicos converted the Agency’s weapons into cash.{80}

 

Amongst the weapons the Moujahedeen sold to the Iranians were highly sophisticated Stinger heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles, with which the rebels had shot down many hundreds of Soviet military aircraft, as well as at least eight passenger planes. On 8 October 1987, Revolutionary Guards on an Iranian gunboat fired one of the Stingers at American helicopters patrolling the Persian Gulf, but missed their target.{81}

Earlier the same year, the CIA told Congress that at least 20 percent of its military aid to the Moujahedeen had been skimmed off by the rebels and Pakistani officials. Columnist Jack Anderson stated at the same time that his conservative estimate was that the diversion was around 60 percent, while one rebel leader told Anderson’s assistant on his visit to the border that he doubted that even 25 percent of the arms got through. By other accounts, as little as 20 percent was making it the intended recipients. If indeed there was a deficiency of arms available to the Moujahedeen compared to the government forces, as George Bush implied, this was clearly a major reason for it. Yet the CIA and other administration officials simply looked upon it as part of doing business in that part of the world.{82}

Like many other CIA clients, the rebels were financed as well through drug trafficking, and the Agency was apparently as little concerned about it as ever as long as it kept their boys happy Moujahedeen commanders inside Afghanistan personally controlled huge fields of opium poppies, the raw material from which heroin is refined. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport some of the opium to the numerous laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border, whence many tons of heroin were processed with the cooperation of the Pakistani military. The output provided an estimated one-third to one-half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against t he drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies.{83} In 1993, an official of the US Drug Enforcement Administration called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.{84}

 

 

The war, with all its torment, continued until the spring of 1992, three years after the last Soviet troops had gone. An agreement on ending the arms supply, which had been reached between the United States and the Soviet Union, was now in effect. The two superpowers had abandoned the war. The Soviet Union no longer existed. And the Afghan people could count more than a million dead, three million disabled, and five million made refugees, in total about half the population.

At the same time, a UN-brokered truce was to transfer power to a transitional coalition government pending elections. But this was not to be. The Kabul government, amidst food riots and army revolts, virtually disintegrated, and the guerrillas stormed into t he capital and established the first Islamic regime in Afghanistan since it had become a separate and independent country in the mid-18th century.

A key event in the downfall of the government was the eleventh-hour defection to the guerrillas of General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Dostum, who previously had been referred to in the US media as a “Communist general”, now metamorphosed into an “ex-Communist general”

The Moujahedeen had won. Now they turned against each other with all their fury. Rockets and artillery shells wiped out entire neighborhoods in Kabul. By August at least 1,500 people had been killed or wounded, mostly civilians. (By 1994, the body count in this second civil war would reach 10,000.) Of all the rebel leaders, none was less compromising or more insistent upon a military solution than Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Robert Neumann, a former US ambassador to Afghanistan, observed at this time:

 

Hekmatyar is a nut, an extremist and a very violent man. He was built

up by the Pakistanis. Unfortunately, our government went along with

the Pakistanis. We were supplying the money and the weapons but they

[Pakistani officials] were making the policy.

 

Washington was now very concerned that Hekmatyar would take power. Ironically, they were afraid that if he did, his brand of extremism would spread to and destabilize the former Soviet republics of large Moslem populations, the same fear which had been one of the motivations behind the Soviets intervening in the civil war in the first place.{85} It was to the forces of Hekmatyar that the “Communist general” Dostum eventually aligned himself.

Suleiman Layeq, a leftist and a poet, and the fallen regime’s “ideologue”, watched from his window as the Moujahedeen swarmed through the city, claiming building after building. “Without exception,” he said of them, “they follow the way of the fundamentalist aims and goals of Islam. And it is not Islam. It is a kind of theory against civilization — against modern civilization.”{86}

Even before taking power, the Moujahedeen had banned all non-Muslim groups. Now more of the new law was laid down: All alcohol was banned in the Islamic republic; women could not venture out in the streets without veils, and violations would be punished by floggings, amputations and public executions. And this from the more “moderate” Islamics, not Hekmatyar. By September, the first public hangings were carried out. Before a cheering crowd of 10,000 people, three men were hung. They had been tried behind closed doors, and no one would say what crimes they had committed.{87}

In February 1993, a group of Middle Easterners blew up the World Trade Center in New York City. Most of them were veterans of the Moujahedeen. Other veterans were carrying out assassinations in Cairo, bombings in Bombay, and bloody uprisings in the mountains of Kashmir.

This, then, was the power and the glory of President Reagan’s “freedom fighters”, who had become yet more anti-American in recent years, many of them backing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91. Surely even Ronald Reagan and George Bush would have preferred the company of “communist” reformers like President Noor Mohammed Taraki, Mayor Mohammed Hakim or poet Suleiman Layeq.

But the Soviet Union had bled. They had bled profusely. For the United States it had also been a holy war.

 

NOTES

 

1. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (Warner Books, New York, 1990), p. 149.

 

2. Ibid., pp. 149-50.

 

3. a) Selig Harrison, “The Shah, Not the Kremlin, Touched off Afghan Coup”, Washington Post, 13 May 1979, p. C1; contains other examples of the Shah/US campaign.

b) Hannah Negaran, “Afghanistan: A Marxist Regime in a Muslim Society”, Current History (Philadelphia), April 1979, p. 173.

c) New York Times, 3 February 1975, p. 4.

d) For a brief summary, from the Soviet point of view, of the West’s attempts to lure Afghanistan into its fold during the 1950s and 60s, see The Truth About Afghanistan: Documents, Facts, Eyewitness Reports (Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1981, second edition) pp. 60-65.

e) Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (New York, 1965) pp. 493, 495, 498 discusses his concern about Soviet influence in Afghanistan.

 

4. Selig Harrison, op. cit.

 

5. New York Times, 4 May 1978, p. 11; Louis Dupree, “A Communist Label is Unjustified”, letter to New York Times, 20 May 1978, p. 18. Dupree had been an anthropologist who lived in Afghanistan for many years; he was also at one time a consultant to the U.S. National Security Council, and an activist, both in Pakistan and in the United States, against the leftist Afghan government, which declared him persona non grata in 1978.

 

6. New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978, p. 52 (prime minister’s quote).

 

7. New York Times, 18 May 1979, p. 29, article by Fred Halliday, a Fellow at the liberal Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, and author of several books on South Asia.

 

7a. US Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (Washington, DC, 1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 223, 232.

 

8. The Economist (London), 11 September 1979, p. 44.

 

9. New York Times, 13 April 1979, p. 8.

 

10. Newsweek, 16 April 1979, p. 64.

 

11. CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 31 December 1979, p. S-13, cited in CounterSpy magazine (Washington, DC), No. 4-2, Spring 1980, p. 36, article by Konrad Ege.

 

12. New York Times, 16 June 1978, p. 11

 

13. Robert Neumann, in Washington Review of Strategic and International Studies, July 1978, p. 117.

 

14. New York Times, 1 July 1978, p. 4.

 

15 San Francisco Chronicle, 4 August 1979, p. 9.

 

16. New York Times, 24 March 1979, p. 4; 13 April 1979, p. 8.

 

17. Washington Post, 11 May 1979, p. 23. U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that Islamic rebels killed Soviet male and female civilians and mutilated their bodies, New York Times, 13 April 1979, p. 8.

 

18. New York Times, 11 September 1979, p. 12.

 

19. Washington Post, 15 November 1992, p. 32, from the official minutes of the conversation, amongst declassified Politburo documents obtained by the newspaper.

 

20. Ibid., citing an article published in 1992 by the former KGB deputy station chief in Kabul.

 

21. Ibid., 23 December 1979, p. A8.

 

22. Selig Harrison, “Did Moscow Fear An Afghan Tito?”, New York Times, 13 January 1980, p. E23.

 

23. The Sunday Times (London), 6 January 1980, reporting the interview with Amin by the newspaper Al Sharq Al Awast (“The Middle East”) published in London and Mecca.

 

24. Washington Post, 15 November 1992, p. 32, citing a “recent” account in the Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

 

25. The Truth About Afghanistan, op. cit., p. 15, taken from Pravda, 13 January 1980.

 

26. The Times (London), 5 January 1980.

 

27. New York Times, 15 January 1980, p. 6. The newspaper stated that the CIA-accusations appeared to have been dropped by the Soviets at this time, perhaps because they were embarrassed by the incredulous reaction to it from around the world. But it was soon picked up again, conceivably in reaction to the Times’ story.

 

28. Phillip Bonosky, Washington’s Secret War Against Afghanistan (International Publishers, New York, 1985), pp. 33-4. The Washington Post, 23 December 1979, p. A8, also mentions Amin being a student at Columbia teachers college.

 

29. “How the CIA turns foreign students into traitors”, Ramparts magazine (San Francisco), April 1967, pp. 23-4. This was a month after the magazine printed its famous exposé of the extensive CIA connection to the National Student Association, the leading organization of American students.

 

30. Bonosky, p. 34. When I spoke to Mr. Bonosky in 1994 about this claim, he said that he couldn’t remember its source, but that it may have been something he was informed of in Afghanistan when he was there in 1981.

 

31. Charles G. Cogan, “Partners in Time: The CIA and Afghanistan since 1979″, World Policy Journal (New York), Summer 1993, p. 76. Cogan was chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (Clandestine Services) from 1979 to 1984. He refers to Amin’s connection to the Asia Foundation as “some sort of loose association”, and says nothing further about it, but given his past position, Cogan may well know more than he’s willing to reveal about a key point of the Afghanistan question, or else the article was censored by the CIA when Cogan submitted it for review, which he would have had to do.

 

32. Classified State Department cables, 11, 22, 23, 27, 29 September 1979, 28, 30 October 1979, among the documents found in the takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran on 4 November 1979 and gradually published in many volumes over the following years under the title: Documents from the Den of Espionage; hereafter referred to as “Embassy Documents”. The cables referred to in this note come from vol. 30. These embassy documents and those which follow are cited in Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 30, Summer 1988, article by Steve Galster, pp. 52-4. Except where quotations are used, the language summarizing the documents’ content is that of Galster. Amin’s party knew of these covert activities long before the documents were published. On 16 January 1980, a PDP spokesperson told the Afghan News Agency (Bakhtar): “In September 1979, Amin began preparing the ground for a rapprochement with the United States. He conducted confidential meetings with U.S. officials, sent emissaries to the United States, conveyed his personal oral messages to President Carter.” (cited in Bonosky, p. 52)

 

 

33. Interview with Karmal in World Marxist Review (Toronto), April 1980, p. 36.

 

34. New York Times, 2 January 1980, p. 1.

 

35. Wall Street Journal, 7 January 1980, p. 12.

 

36. Weiner, p.145

 

37. Amongst the “Embassy Documents”, op. cit., vol. 29, p. 99: Classified Department of State cable, 14 May 1979, refers to a previous meeting with a rebel leader in Islamabad on 23 April 1979.

 

38. Robert Gates (former CIA director), From the Shadows (NY, 1996) p.146

 

39. Truth About Afghanistan, op. cit., pp. 16-17.

 

40. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981 (New York, 1983) p. 430.

 

41. The Guardian (London), 5 March 1986.

 

42. Washington Post, 13 January 1985, p. A30. The unnamed official may have been CIA Director Stansfield Turner who is quoted as saying something very similar in Weiner pp. 146-7.

 

43. Ibid.

 

44. Amongst the “Embassy Documents”, op. cit.: Classified CIA Field Report, 30 October 1979, vol. 30.

 

45. New York Times, 22 November 1979, p. 1.

 

46. Weiner, p. 146

 

47. John Balbach, former staff director of the Congressional Task Force on Afghanistan, article in the Los Angeles Times, 22 August 1993.

 

48. Cited in The Guardian (London), 28 December 1983 and 16 January 1987, p. 19.

 

49. Los Angeles Times, 17 October 1988, 13 March 1989, 16 March 1989.

 

50. The Daily Telegraph (London), 5 August 1985.

 

51. Brzezinski, p. 356, mentioned three times on this one page alone.

 

52. New York Times, 9 February 1980, p. 3; though written after the Soviet invasion, the article refers to April 1979.

 

53. For a discussion of some of these and related matters, see Selig Harrison, “Afghanistan: Soviet Intervention, Afghan Resistance, and the American Role” in Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency, and Antiterrorism in the Eighties (Pantheon Books, New York, 1988) pp. 188-190.

 

54. Ibid., p. 188; the portion about the middle class was attributed by Harrison to an article by German journalist Andreas Kohlschutter of Die Zeit.

55. For a fuller discussion of these matters see the three articles in The Guardian of London by their chief foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele, 17-19 March 1986.

 

56. Lawrence Lifschultz, “The not-so-new rebellion”, Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong), 30 January 1981, p. 32.

 

57. Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1989, pp. 12-13.

 

58. Ibid., 1 December 1987, p. 8.

 

59. Amongst the “Embassy Documents”, op. cit., vol. 30 — Department of State Report, 16 August 1979.

 

60. Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1989, p. 8.

 

61. Najibullah, textbooks: Ibid., 18 February 1989, p. 18.

 

62. Washington Post, 13 January 1985, p. A30. The article speaks of 70 Russian prisoners “living lives of indescribable horror”; it appears, although it’s not certain, that they are included in the 50 to 200 figure given earlier in the article.

 

63. John Fullerton, The Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan (London, 1984).

 

64. Los Angeles Times, 28 July 1989.

 

65. Amnesty International, Torture in the Eighties (London, 1984), Afghanistan chapter.

 

66. Jack Anderson column, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 May 1987. For his, and many other persons’, ties to the Afghan lobby, see Sayid Khybar, “The Afghani Contra Lobby”, Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 30, Summer 1988, p. 65.

 

67. New York Times, 11 September 1979, p. 12.

 

68. Washington Post, 13 January 1985, p. A30.

 

69. Cited by Extra! (published by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, New York, October/November 1989), p. 1, referring to a series of articles in the New York Post beginning 27 September 1989.

 

70. Mary Williams Walsh, “Strained Mercy”, The Progressive magazine (Madison, Wisconsin) May 1990, pp. 23-6. Walsh, as the Wall Street Journal’s principal correspondent in South and Southeast Asia, had covered Afghanistan The Journal refused to print this article, which led to her resignation

 

71. San Francisco Chronicle, 20 July 1987.

 

72. New York Times, 9 March 1982, p. 1; 23 March 1982, pp. 1, 14; The Guardian (London) 3 November 1983, 29 March 1984; Washington Post, 30 May 1986.

 

73. Julian Robinson, et al, “Yellow Rain: The Story Collapses”, Foreign Policy magazine, Fall 1987, pp. 100-117; New York Times, 31 August 1987, p. 14.

 

74. Congressional Record, 6 June 1980, pp. S13582-3.

 

75. New York Times, 29 March 1982, p. 1.

 

76. San Francisco Chronicle, 16 September 1985, p. 9.

 

77. The Truth About Afghanistan, op. cit., pp. 85, 89, with a photo of the alleged victims lying on the ground and another photo of an American chemical grenade.

 

78. Los Angeles Times, 28 July 1989.

 

79. Ibid., 30 April 1990, pp. 1 and 9.

 

80. Weiner, pp. 150, 152.

 

81. Weiner, p. 151; Los Angeles Times, 26 May 1988. Shooting down passenger planes: New York Times, 26 September 1984, p. 9; 11 April 1988, p. 1.

 

82. San Francisco Chronicle, Jack Anderson’s columns: 29 April and 2 May 1987; 13 July 1987; Time magazine, 9 December 1985; Washington Post, 13 January 1985, p. A30.

 

83.Drugs, the Moujahedeen and the CIA:

a) Weiner, pp. 151-2;

b) New York Times, 18 June 1986;

c) William Vornberger, “Afghan Rebels and Drugs”, Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 28, Summer 1987, pp. 11-12;

d) Los Angeles Times, 4 November 1989, p. 14;

e) Washington Post, 13 May 1990, p. 1.

 

84. Los Angeles Times, 22 August 1993.

 

85. Hekmatyar, Neumann: Ibid., 21 April 1992.

 

86. Ibid., 24 May 1992.

 

87. Ibid., 4 January, 24 May, 8 September, 1992.