I am reposting a piece done in April 2004 in five parts. While it does not cover the events that have happened since, it does help to prevent PRHS (perishable recent history syndrome), the tendency to suggest that the past, even the recent past, should be forgotten and that we should all just “accept reality,” and learn to love nuclear weapons or global warming or military quagmires. It also takes us back before some key events, especially the Nazi-like destruction of Fallujah and recovers the context, which has been buried by our national criminal clique as surely as bodies are buried by the mafia. To fill in the blanks, I will again remind people that aside from being a great anitwar web-stie, www.bringthemhomenow.org has also archived daily news from the war for the last two years, and so presents its own chronology in the form of diverse news articles gelaned each day from the national, international, and alternative press.

TIME LINE: PATH TO PANDEMONIUM

By Stan Goff

It is always important to ask why we start history when.

For example, most commentators start the history of Iraq with the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. There is also an occasional reference to the chemical attacks at Halabja, in Iraqi Kurdistan on March 16, 1988 (now condensed to “Saddam used weapons of mass destruction against his own people”). The latter has to be boiled down considerably, because the chemical attacks were part of a massive and pitched battle with Iranians, which becomes a mitigating factor, and more importantly because the US had actively and materially supported the development and deployment of these weapons just a couple of years earlier, when none other than Donald Rumsfeld was Ronald Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East.

See what happens when you go back and start history just a wee bit earlier? Things take on a brand new aspect.

In 1979, the Carter administration encouraged Iraq to attack Iran because they had just undergone the shock of the Iranian Islamist Revolution, and almost the whole US Embassy in Tehran was taken hostage for over a year.

The virtuous Kuwaitis who were so ruthlessly attacked by the demon hordes of Iraq, by the way, were acting as US/UK surrogates in the region ever since Kuwait was invented by Great Britain in 1961. The US, alarmed at the development of Iraq and its growing prestige among other Arab nations, used Kuwait to undermine Iraq economically beginning in the mid-1980s, even as the US was continuing to encourage the perpetuation of the Iran-Iraq War. Kuwaitis not only illegally annexed 900 square miles of prime Iraqi oil land, they hooked up with the Santa Fe Drilling Company, who specialized in “slant drilling,” running drills across the Iraqi border to pump billions of dollars of Iraqi oil, as they dumped cheap oil onto the market – with encouragement from the CIA – to cut the Iraqis’ development revenues.

The American public, however, had their history lesson start with the invasion of Kuwait, complete with taxpayer-financed fabrications about Iraqi soldiers dumping little Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators (for the record, this story was utter bullshit). The United States had its villain and its passion play, and off went Bush the Elder to crush Arab nationalism in the guise of Ba’athist Iraq.

History is interesting, isn’t it?

Now the United States is faced with a furious rebellion against the military occupation of Iraq, and Bush the Junior seems determined to make sure that this rebellion succeeds, even as he makes yet more manly noises from the White House about how “we remain tough” in Iraq.

We.

The Bush staff wants to start history now with the April 5-6 armed operations by Muqtadi Sadr’s Mahdi militia, and with the ambush of four American mercenaries in Fallujah on March 31st.

But let’s go back to 1991 and work our way forward.

22 January 1991

Defense Intelligence Agency document, entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” is published. It details how sanctions combined with destruction of potable water infrastructure can be used against the Iraqi people as a war measure, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Warfare.

Here is an excerpt:

“Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline… With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations Sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease… The quality of untreated water generally is poor, [and drinking it] could result in diarrhea… [Iraq’s rivers] contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur. [Chlorine] has been embargoed [by sanctions]… Recent reports indicate the chlorine supply is critically low… Food processing, electronic, and, particularly, pharmaceutical plants require extremely pure water that is free from biological contaminants… Iraq conceivably could truck water from the mountain reservoirs to urban areas. But the capability to gain significant quantities is extremely limited… The amount of pipe on hand and the lack of pumping stations would limit laying pipelines to these reservoirs. Moreover, without chlorine purification, the water still would contain biological pollutants. Some affluent Iraqis could obtain their own minimally adequate supply of good quality water from Northern Iraqi sources. If boiled, the water could be safely consumed. Poorer Iraqis and industries requiring large quantities of pure water would not be able to meet their needs… Precipitation occurs in Iraq during the winter and spring, but it falls primarily in the northern mountains… Sporadic rains, sometimes heavy, fall over the lower plains. But Iraq could not rely on rain to provide adequate pure water… Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons… It probably also is attempting to purchase supplies by using some sympathetic countries as fronts. If such attempts fail, Iraqi alternatives are not adequate for their national requirements… Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable unless the population were careful to boil water… Iraq’s overall water treatment capability will suffer a slow decline, rather than a precipitous halt… Although Iraq is already experiencing a loss of water treatment capability, it probably will take at least six months [to June 1991] before the system is fully degraded.”

This was one among many attacks leveled at civilian essential infrastructure during the war and as a component of sanctions. These sanctions and regular bombing from 1991 until the 2003 destroyed much of Iraqi infrastructure, and with it Iraq’s comparatively high living standards, as well as Iraq’s renowned social services. That social disruption amplified crime and sectarian violence, triggering harsher measures from the government to contain the increasing social disorder. The official story now is that Saddam Hussein destroyed the Iraqi economy.

While no one is disputing that Saddam’s rule was in many respects both harsh and venal, the fact is that Iraq as a whole was in many ways the most advanced, and even the most progressive (especially with regard to women’s legal status) regime in the region. Honesty demands that we look at this whole picture.

Sanctions alone are believed to have been responsible for the premature deaths of almost 1.5 million Iraqis in a 12 year period – a third of them children – from malnutrition, medical neglect, and disease.

As we go forward with this time line, it is important to understand that kinship bonds in Iraq are multi-lateral and extensive. The killing, maiming, abuse, or humiliation of any one Iraqi ripples over many relatives.

27 February 1991

380 Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered to US forces were given food by one US Army unit that then left, whereupon another Army mechanized platoon appeared on the scene and machine-gunned the unarmed and clearly marked POWs to death.

Does anyone think that this incident was forgotten 12 years later, or that the kin of these murdered troops were looking forward to being likewise liberated?

2 March 1991

The Army’s 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, commanded by General Barry McCaffrey, who would later go on to become Bill Clinton’s “drug tsar,” violated a declared cease fire and moved his division forward of the cease fire line south of Basra.

400 Iraqi supply trucks and 187 Iraqi tanks – with guns locked to the rear and therefore not prepared to fire – were in the process of retreating north in accordance with the agreement that accompanied the cease fire. Many of the Iraqi soldiers in this retreating column had family members and other civilians accompanying them on this northward retreat. They thought they were protected by the Law of Land Warfare, which prohibits attacking a retreating column during a declared cease fire.

They were wrong.

McCaffrey ordered a full scale attack on the column that employed ground and air forces.

In what was later referred to by participants as a “turkey shoot,” the Iraqis were annihilated. Among the thousands of Iraqis killed was a school bus full of children accompanying the column.

If 5,000 Iraqis (a conservative estimate) were killed at McCaffrey’s “turkey shoot,” how many relatives surviving them would welcome the 2003 “liberation”?

This is the pre-time line. Now let’s look at what has happened in the more immediate past, where the massive expansion of Iraqi armed resistance has triggered a political crisis in the Bush administration, the extension of troop tours in Iraq, the anticipation of more troops being deployed to Iraq, the employment of yet more mercenaries to augment the 20,000 or so that are already in Iraq – making private armies the second largest occupying contingent there – and a certain return to Congress for additional funds.