Tom Gorman: the Hitchens Doctrine

Tom Gorman: the Hitchens Doctrine

No one denies that there have been horrible acts of mass murder committed by Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party; as with all propaganda, though, Hitchens tells us just half of the story (it is actually more like a quarter of the truth). In the debate with Galloway, Hitchens cites the gas attack against the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988 as evidence of Hussein's treachery. Though there has been some speculation that it was actually Iran that carried out this attack during the war with Iraq (CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere has written that a study by the US Army confirmed that the gas used at Halabja was cyanide-based, which Iran used, but Iraq did not), Hussein is certainly guilty of massacres against Shiites in southern Iraq, as well as the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops. Indeed, the Bush Administration cited these atrocities in its ramp up to war. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, though, citations of these atrocities always leave out three crucial words: "with our support." The US assisted Saddam in his destruction of the breakaway Kurdish north by granting him agricultural credits. The chemical attacks in northern Iraq, that nation's breadbasket, had the unwanted side effect of disrupting food production; with US money, though, Saddam was able to buy food abroad and continue his brutal ethnic cleansing of the Kurds.

When we consider Hussein's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield with Iran, we must remember, as stated above, that Iraq's attack on Iran was supported by the US. In fact, the US gave Iraq technical support on the battlefield when they knew Hussein was using chemical weapons. As for Hussein's massacres of Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq, large portions of this atrocity occurred when Hussein was the favored ally of the US before the first Gulf War and, in the immediate aftermath of that war, the US allowed Iraqi Army helicopters to operate in the southern no-fly zone so as to suppress the Shiite uprising that had at first been encouraged by the elder President Bush.

Fourth in the Hitchens Doctrine is Iraq having played host to "international gangsters, nihilists, terrorists, and jihadists." Given that these terms are all open to interpretation, it is reasonable that the characterizations are accurate for many friends of the Hussein regime. However, the "terrorists" that the US is most concerned with are undoubtedly al Qaeda, which unfortunately, puts the US on the same side of the "War on Terror" as Saddam Hussein. Hussein's secularist regime was anathema to the fundamentalist ideology of Osama bin Laden; indeed, given that Hussein purports to be Muslim, and is therefore seen as a traitor to the "true faith," al Qaeda likely hates him more than it hates the US.