By Norm Dixon
On September 3 the United States launched the latest salvo in its five-year war against Iraq. The US military's cruise missile attacks on Iraq, like its mammoth six-week display of high-tech butchery in 1991, has nothing to do with defending the Kurds from repression by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Washington's tacit endorsement of Turkey's brutal war against the Kurdish people just across the border exposes as blatant hypocrisy the Clinton administration's claims that its intervention is to defend the Kurds.
The excuse Clinton seized upon to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles against targets in southern Iraq was the September 1 attack on the northern Iraqi city of Arbil by Iraqi armed forces aligned with the militia of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). With hundreds of tanks, artillery and tens of thousands of Iraqi troops, control of Arbil — the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan — was transferred to the KDP from the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had ruled the city for almost two years.
Arbil is within the "no-fly zone" above the 36th parallel imposed by the US after 1991. Within this zone, where there is no large-scale Iraqi troop presence and a total ban on Iraqi military air activity is enforced by US warplanes based in Turkey, the US supervised the creation of a shaky alliance between the KDP and PUK to deny Baghdad control of the region.
The fragile alliance between the two conservative nationalist groups broke down in December 1994 over the division of informal tariffs and taxes on trade crossing into Turkey. Angry at the KDP's control over the lucrative Habur border crossing, the PUK seized Arbil. US attempts to mediate failed.
The PUK turned to Iran for backing and, in response, the KDP turned to Baghdad. On July 28, 5000 Iranian troops "aided" the PUK attack on a KDP camp some 100 kilometres inside Iraq, where Kurds fighting oppression in Iran were based. Iranian troops again entered Iraq in mid-August. In response, the KDP asked Saddam — no friend of the Kurdish people — for help to oust the PUK from Arbil.
No friend
The US has never supported the Kurdish people's right to national self-determination. To the contrary: Washington has tacitly supported the Ankara regime's brutal war against the Kurds in southern Turkey and, according to a report in the September 5 Australian, the "State Department reiterated yesterday that the US recognised Baghdad's sovereignty over Kurd-dominated northern Iraq".
Following the end of the US-led war on Iraq in 1991, the Kurds in the north (and the Shiites of the south) rose up against Saddam. Baghdad brutally suppressed the uprisings, using massive aerial bombardment. US President George Bush described Saddam's savagery as an "internal matter". It was only after Saddam had completely defeated the Kurds, and scenes of terrible suffering were broadcast around the world, that US troops set up "safe areas" in the north. At the same time, the Pentagon imposed no-fly zones in the north and south.
In the northern "safe" zone, the Turkish government has regularly bombed Kurds without the US lifting a finger. Turkish and Iranian troops have entered Iraq with impunity to suppress Kurds fighting for their national rights. The US has refused to use its enormous influence to end the growing military cooperation between Turkey and Israel, the direct aim of which is to crush the Kurdish national movement.
In early 1995, Turkey attacked Kurdish bases inside Iraq with 35,000 troops, using US-supplied weapons, warplanes and tanks. The Turkish military operation was its largest ever, eclipsing the 1974 invasion of Cyprus. US officials justified the Turkish massacre of Kurds within the "safe area" as "self-defence", saying that neither the invasion nor Turkey's use of US-supplied arms was a violation of international law.
There are about 30 million Kurds spread through the region — 15 million in Turkey, 6 million in Iran, 4 million in Iraq, with others in Syria and the former Soviet Union. They have a long history of oppression by these governments. Their cause is just.
The Kurds in Turkey, led by the left-wing Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), have been fighting a 10-year war for national self-determination, during which 2000 villages have been razed by the Turkish military and thousands of civilians killed.
Mizgen Sen, of the London-based Kurdish Information Centre, told ABC TV's Lateline on September 3 that there seemed "no limit" to US hypocrisy. "They claim their objective is to protect the Kurds, but the US and its Western allies did not say anything, and did nothing, when Turkish forces invaded Iraq. Political and economic interests lie behind every move [the US] has made so far ...
"What the US has done will not help the Kurds in any way. The Kurds are very angry with the KDP and PUK, and at the hypocrisy and double standards of the west and the US. The Kurdish issue is not just in northern Iraq: there are over 15 million Kurds living in Turkey — the largest number of Kurds — and the repression and harassment there are perhaps 10 times greater than that of Saddam Hussein."
Sen said the US must stop using "south Kurdistan [northern Iraq] as a tool ... against Iraq, or against Iran or Syria. If they want a long-term solution, then they have to solve the Kurdish solution, meaning their own home rule."
Oil
The US does not support the creation of an independent Kurdistan. US leaders have explicitly stated they would prefer the Iraqi military to remain in control of Kurdish-inhabited northern Iraq. What the US rulers want is an Iraq governed by a more pliant pro-US regime.
The creation of the "no-fly" zones and "safe areas" in Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with defending the people living within them. Their role was to keep Iraq militarily and economically weak after its 1991 defeat and to allow US warplanes unrestricted access to Iraqi targets. The facts that Clinton's latest attacks were directed at Iraqi air defences in the south, and that the southern "no-fly" zone was extended to within 30 kilometres of Baghdad, highlight this.
US policy in the Middle East is aimed at ensuring that no country, especially one that attempts to determine its own course or rally anti-imperialist opposition, is strong enough to challenge US dominance of the region or threaten Washington's closest allies, most importantly Israel and the dictatorial sheikdoms of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia.
The reason is simple. As General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the US Congress in 1990: "Middle East oil is the west's lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world's proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry." US oil companies have a huge stake in the region. It is estimated that oil accounts for 25% of all US profits from the Third World. Governments that the US cannot control are a danger to its oil supply as well as oil company profits.
Saddam Hussein was not always seen by the US as a threat. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war initiated by an Iraqi invasion of Iran, the US urged its allies to supply Iraq with money and weapons. Kuwait, for example, loaned Baghdad more than US$10 billion. The US actively opposed the Iranian blockade of shipments of Iraqi oil, to the extent of providing military protection for oil tankers. The US turned a blind eye to Saddam's human rights violations, including several horrible chemical attacks on the Kurdish people in 1988. This was because the US saw the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the brutal pro-US shah as the greater threat to its interests.
It was only when Saddam invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia that the US turned on Iraq. The 1991 US-led blitzkrieg was devastating. Close to 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and 150,000 civilians died. Iraq's industry and infrastructure were smashed. Sanctions on Iraq have cost the lives of 600,000 people due to lack of medicines and food.
The US used the opportunity of the 1991 war to vastly increase its military presence. According to the August 16 Middle East International, 35 US warships are permanently stationed in the gulf, including an aircraft carrier battle group with about 100 fighters, a Marine amphibious ready group carrying 10,000 marines and navy personnel, one or two nuclear submarines and more than 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles. In Saudi Arabia, there are 8000 troops and more than 170 aircraft. The US has prepositioned enough materiel in the region to allow it to increase its troop numbers to 100,000 within a week.
Little support
Unlike 1991, the US has little international support for its latest attack on Iraq. Only the governments of Britain, Japan, Germany — which share US imperialism's interests in the region — and the US's most craven allies such as the governments of Israel, Kuwait, New Zealand and, of course, Australia (together with Labor leader Kim Beazley) have openly backed Clinton.
France and Spain have withheld support (although French warplanes are enforcing the enlarged southern no-fly zone), while Russia and China opposed the action.
By and large, the Arab world has either opposed the attack or remained silent. The Arab League denounced the attack as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. No country neighbouring Iraq was prepared to allow the US to launch its attacks from its territory or airspace, forcing Washington to launch its missiles from the Persian Gulf.
This reluctance to support the US reflects the blatantly illegal nature of the attack and a growing divergence of interests within the coalition that crushed Iraq in 1991. Iraq's move on Arbil did not violate any of the UN resolutions — highly questionable as they were — passed after 1991. The US launched its attack despite clear evidence that Iraqi forces had begun to withdraw from the north.
France's expression of concern reflects its own economic interests in the Middle East. France has recently played an independent diplomatic role in the region, most recently in bringing the Israeli "Grapes of Wrath" offensive against southern Lebanon to an end. Western European governments are uneasy at US laws that penalise companies from third countries which ignore US-imposed embargoes or sanctions. Iran, Libya and Sudan are subject to such sanctions and several European, notably French, oil companies are likely to suffer.
The cool reaction of the Arab countries — including Saudi Arabia — reflects mounting concern at the complete disregard for national sovereignty the US has displayed in Iraq. Middle Eastern governments also fear the reaction of their own people if they are seen to aid US attacks on Iraq and its people, who have suffered terribly through war and sanctions.