Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 1988, Page 51

Media Watch

Iraq & Iran: Rush to Judgment

"It is time for a decisive geopolitical tilt toward Iran." Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Sept. 16, 1988.

The media are Arab bashing again. The clubs this time are allegations that after the shooting war with Iran stopped, the Iraqi army used poison gas to mop up Kurdish militias that had sided with the Iranians.

The US government at first said it had no evidence. Then, it said two members of the US Embassy staff in Ankara had seen "8 or 10" people with serious skin rashes and had talked to refugees who had heard from other refugees that poison gas had been dropped from aircraft.

Turkish physicians treating the sick and injured among 80,000 Kurds who streamed across the Iraqi border said they had not seen a single victim. They attributed skin rashes to malnutrition and poor sanitation. George Shultz's State Department then said it had "other evidence," presumably intercepted military communications, that the Iraqis had used gas. The case began to smell like exhumed Middle Eastern red herring from 1967 or 1970 when "other sources" turned out to be Israel, which has a proven track record in manufacturing false electronic traffic which Western powers or the Soviets then mistakenly attribute to Arab states.

At this writing there is no incontrovertible evidence either that Iraq did or did not use poison gas after the cease-fire with Iran. Iraq denies the charges. Türkiye backs up Iraq. American and other journalists in both countries have not found a single Kurdish victim nor any physical evidence. Yet knee-jerk pro-Israel New York Times columnist William Safire demands that the US take firm measures against Iraq. And Charles Krauthammer, who regularly expresses public loathing for all Middle Easterners who don't happen to be Israelis, demands in the Washington Post "a decisive geopolitical tilt toward Iran" in the interest of "realpolitik." Why Iran should be rewarded for Iraq's unproven sin isn't clear, since even Krauthammer admits that, of what he calls the "two evils in question, only Iran's is for export." In Congress, pro-Israel California Congressman Tom Lantos calls for sanctions against Iraq.

Before America follows the advice of its pro-Israel claque and starts "tilting" either way, however, a review is in order. During their eight year-long war Iraq, outnumbered three-to-one, introduced poison gas and Iran retaliated in kind. The world condemned Iraq. Iran then claimed Iraq was planning to mount poison gas warheads on missiles aimed both at troops at the front and at Iranian cities.

The propaganda backfired dramatically. Iranian troops deserted and two million civilians fled in panic from Tehran. As his war front and home front collapsed, the Ayatollah Khomeini swallowed his "poison pill" of agreement to the cease-fire Iraq had accepted a year earlier.

Not long before Khomeini threw in the towel, the world had been horrified at photos of dead civilians in the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja. Kurds said Iraqis had dropped the gas canister or canisters that killed the civilians from an airplane. The Iraqis said it was an Iranian plane. Whoever you believe, and most observers believe the Iranians because it was they who brought in the journalists, the poison gas was dropped on the same day or the day after the village was wrested from Iraqi troops by Iranian troops. It's possible, in fact likely, that whoever dropped the poison gas believed he was hitting enemy troop concentrations in a deserted village. Whatever the motive, it's indisputable that the gas was used at Halabja well before the war was over and while the village was literally in the front lines.

There are now some 20 million Kurds in the world, half of them in Türkiye, large numbers in Iran and Iraq, and small numbers in the Soviet Union, Syria, and—as recent urban migrants—in Lebanon as well. Although Iraqi governments and their Kurdish citizens have been fighting off and on for 40 years, and Iraq has been resettling rebellious Kurdish mountaineers in the plains for many of them, in fact the Kurds enjoy more autonomy in Iraq than in the other countries. In northern Iraq, Kurdish children can study in Kurdish schools, using the Kurdish language and Kurdish textbooks. A major issue between the Iraqi government and two groups of Kurdish leaders, however, has been whether or not the city of Kirkuk and its major oil fields are to be inside or outside the area where such Kurdish educational and cultural autonomy exists.

These leaders, Jalal Talabani and the sons of the late, long-time Kurdish rebel leader, Mullah Mustapha Barzani, threw in their lot with Iran in the second year of the Iran-Iraq war. Now that Iranian troops have been pushed out of Kurdistan and a cease-fire is in place, the Iraqi army has moved with a vengeance against the followers of those leaders.

There is no doubt that those followers think the Iraqis are using, or might use, poison gas against them. There is no doubt that the resulting panic has contributed to the sudden influx of Kurdish refugees into Türkiye. But there's no proof, so far.

Although we'll soon read, correctly, that mustard gas vanishes after use, its victims don't. Troops gassed in World War I suffered permanent lung damage. They coughed rackingly for the rest of their lives. Let's not rush to judgment until after we meet some victims with seared lungs.

Meanwhile, it's instructive to see what's happened since the cease-fire in Iran. We almost chose a different photo for this page. It shows four young Iranians hanging from ropes tied to girders in a construction site high above onlookers in the western Iranian city of Kermanshah. The photo wasn't smuggled out of Iran. It and others like it from other Iranian cities have been printed on the front pages of major Tehran newspapers.

The young people were accused of welcoming the Iranian rebel "People's Mujaheddin" forces, who fought alongside Iraqi troops through the last year of the war, and whose armored vehicles were making a lunge across western Iran in hopes of reaching Tehran when the war ended. They withdrew, but hundreds or perhaps thousands of Iranians were arrested on suspicion of supporting them. They are being hung in public squares throughout western Iran "by the tens," to use the words of the mullahs. These aren't rumors. These and reports of other mass executions inside Iranian prisons are real events that the crowds of Iranians pictured on this page are protesting.

Seventy-seven members of Congress, led by Mervyn Dymally of California, have at this writing protested the well-documented actions of the Khomeini government against its own people. This is being ignored by Israel's media friends. Is it because they hope to revive, with non-Arab Iran, a US-Israeli-Iranian entente against Israel's Arab neighbors—like Iraq?

If so, shouldn't the US just say no to tilts?

—Richard Curtiss