History

One platitudinous quotation we all know is “He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it”. But what are we forgetting exactly? For example, we all “remember” Saddam gassing Kurdish civilians in 1988. British Foreign Secretary, and earnest critic of Saddam, Jack Straw doesn’t want us to forget it for sure. Yet an army of intrepid journalists in London have failed to tell the public that the records for the contemporary parliamentary protests against this appalling crime do not include the name of the same Jack Straw. (Blair is also missing from the list). It took a comedian, Mark Thomas, to reveal this. Funny that.

On Human Rights Day this year, the Straw man published the famous dossier detailing Saddam’s crimes. This is told to us by Chomsky in his shocking report on his visit to Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, the semi-official capital of the Kurdish region. Earlier in the week, Chomsky had spoken in St Paul’s Cathedral, commemorating the same Human Rights Day. With the Kurdish aspect in mind, he writes of what the dossier ignores, namely “the US-backed terrorist campaigns of the Turkish state that rank among the most terrible crimes of the grisly 1990s leaving tens of thousands dead and millions driven from the devastated countryside, with every imaginable form of barbaric torture.” Turkey is, by the way, the largest recipient of US arms in Europe.

Chomsky does not criticise the dossier. It is, he says, “authentic” as it is “drawn mostly from reports of human rights organizations on Saddam’s horrendous atrocities through the 1980s.” However, he adds: “Unmentioned, as usual, was the fact that these shocking crimes were of no concern [at the time] to the US or UK, which continued to provide their friend Saddam with aid, including means to develop WMD at a time when he was vastly more dangerous than today.”

Proof of a kind can be seen in this photograph of Donald Rumsfeld telling Saddam himself how disgusted he is at his regime’s human rights abuses.

Awolbush.com ask: when was this photo taken? Jeremy Scahill gives us some options: “Rumsfled’s December 1983 visit to Baghdad made him the highest-ranking US official to visit Iraq in six years � Twelve days after the meeting, the US, in a shift in policy, informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be contrary to the US’ interests and has made several moves to prevent that result.” Could these moves include supplying certain substances?

Well, Scahill continues, “in March of 1984, with the Iran-Iraq war growing more brutal by the day, Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad for meetings with then-Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. On the day of his visit, March 24th, UPI reported from the UN: Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq, a team of UN experts has concluded… Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with Aziz on the Gulf war before leaving for an unspecified destination. The day before, the Iranian news agency alleged that Iraq launched another chemical weapons assault on the southern battlefront, injuring 600 Iranian soldiers.”

Scahill concludes: �Extensive research uncovered no public statements by Donald Rumsfeld publicly expressing even remote concern about Iraq’s use or possession of chemical weapons until the week Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, when he appeared on an ABC news special. Eight years later, Donald Rumsfeld signed on to an ‘open letter’ to President Clinton, calling on him to eliminate ‘the threat posed by Saddam.’ It urged Clinton to ‘provide the leadership necessary to save ourselves and the world from the scourge of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish.’ In 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was in a position to draw the world’s attention to Saddam’s chemical threat. He was in Baghdad as the UN concluded that chemical weapons had been used against Iran. He was armed with a fresh communication from the State Department that it had ‘available evidence’ Iraq was using chemical weapons. But Rumsfeld said nothing.”