India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 01 :: Jan. 02 - 15, 1999

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COVER STORY

The 'terror bombing' of Iraq

Since 1991, U.S. policy on Iraq has swung from one of disarmament with the ostensible aim of destroying weapons of mass destruction to one of outright dismemberment of the country.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

IN the annals of aerial warfare, the name of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris is justly famous. As chief of Bombing Command in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War, he contributed the phrase "terror bombing" to the vocabulary of warfare. Not content with terminological innovation, Harris fleshed out the concept through destructive incendiary air raids on civilian populations in Germany. It was an example that the United States emulated with great success in Japan, until finally closing out the argument at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Harris had learnt his craft on the training grounds of Britain's colonial possessions. As a young Squadron Leader in the RAF, he provided a memorable description of an air campaign in Iraq in 1924: "The Arab and Kurd... now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village (vide attached photos) can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines." To maximise the salutary yield of aerial bombing, said the man who was to be known in later life as "Bomber" Harris, it was essential that casualties should be of sufficient scale to produce "a real as opposed to a purely moral effect".

A colleague of Harris' in the Iraq operations of the 1920s had a rather more benign account of his experiences: "Air control is a marvellous means of bringing these wild mountain tribes to heel. It is swift, economic and humane, as we always drop warning messages some hours before we start to 'lay eggs' on their villages, so that they can clear out... An eastern mind forgets quickly, and if he is not punished for his misdeeds straight away, he has forgotten all about them, and feels his punishment is not merited if delayed."

THE ways of imperialism have changed over the years. By modern canons of political correctness, which even the leaders of the imperial nations have to abide by, it is simply impermissible to stigmatise an entire people in the manner of the air power enthusiasts of the 1920s. The substitute rationale is the demonisation of an individual: Gamal Abdel Nasser and then Yasser Arafat; then briefly Muammar al-Gaddafi, before Saddam Hussein presented himself as the arch-villain.

U.S. NAVY / GAMMA
In September 1996, a cruise missile attack on Iraq, launched from a U.S. fleet in the Gulf. The repeated and brutal application of "mechanical and conventional power" on Iraq by the U.S. has failed to influence political events on the ground in the way the U.S. expected it to.

As Edward Said, the distinguished Palestinian scholar and political analyst, has pointed out, "a morbid, obsessional fear and hatred of the Arabs has been a constant theme in U.S. foreign policy since World War II." This melds with another uniquely American sensibility: an obsessive morality and a "puritanical zeal" which decrees "the sternest possible attitude towards anyone deemed to be an unregenerate sinner". Saddam Hussein, to recapitulate some of the rhetoric emerging from Washington and London during the recent air strikes, had proven himself "a serial breaker of promises", "a threat to his people, the region and the world", and "an enemy of civilisation". The only language he understood was "the language of force" applied in a "devastating and sustained" manner.

The didactic qualities of air power are of course an old theme in America's civilising mission. Conservative columnist George F. Will had put the point well as the first bombs began falling on Baghdad during the Gulf war of 1991. More than a punitive mission, the bombs, said Will, embodied a civilisational mission, which invited the Arab peoples to participate in the potential rewards of a civilisation that was capable of such awesome technological prowess.

Iraq has now suffered a second visitation of that technological prowess. But the underlying sensibilities were perhaps best expressed by the coarsened U.S. sailor who daubed a "Happy Ramadan" message on the side of a cruise missile just as it was loaded onto a bomber aircraft. It was a gesture that revealed the hollowness of all the official protestations, that the bombing of an Arab nation was being carried out in a manner that was "sensitive to Islam".

JEROME DELAY / AP
On board the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Enterprise in the Gulf, laser-guided bombs being readied for loading onto jet fighters on December 19.

Stirring at the basis of the new regime of "air control" in Iraq is the notion that explosive force applied from the air can influence political events on the ground. It was a doctrine that came a cropper in the Vietnam operations, when "interdiction" bombing to choke off the corridors of guerilla operation resulted in a large number of civilian casualties, and "saturation bombing" proved completely ineffective. In 1967, U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara summed up the lessons learnt from the application of the various bombing doctrines: "As to breaking their will, I have seen no evidence in any of the many intelligence reports that would lead me to believe that a less selective bombing campaign would change the resolve of the North Vietnamese leaders or deprive them of the support of the North Vietnamese people."

Sir Robert Thompson, a veteran of Britain's colonial wars of the 1950s, developed upon this assessment. The single most important feature of guerilla warfare in a predominantly rural setting, he pronounced, "is its immunity to the direct application of mechanical and conventional power". The political theorist Samuel Huntington thought it necessary to add an important qualification to this appraisal: "If 'the direct application of mechanical and conventional' power takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the doctrine of revolutionary war no longer operate. The Maoist inspired rural revolution is undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution."

THIS was the doctrine and the sensibility that underwrote the U.S.' massive campaign of chemical warfare in Vietnam. Agent Orange was the key to stripping the Vietnamese jungles of its foliage and exposing the population to the application of "mechanical and conventional power". On the ground, "an accelerated pacification programme" was to complement this operation. Entire villages were to be cleared and their residents herded into urban centres under U.S. supervision. "Forced-draft urbanisation and modernisation", said Huntington in the exultation of discovery, would rapidly bring the country "out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power."

By these standards, the mission of air power in Iraq is relatively uncomplicated. Unlike Vietnam then, Iraq is a highly urbanised and industrialised society. Civilian infrastructure is vulnerable to the application of "mechanical and conventional power" in a manner that rural hamlets are not. The 1991 bombing campaigns by the U.S. and its allies did a comprehensive job of demolishing the country's civilian infrastructure. But the political events that have followed this application of mechanical power have not conformed to American expectations. The regime remains in place, still able to summon up the residual defiance to beat back the crude efforts of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) to penetrate its innermost recesses.

At the same time, the alliance that sustained the U.S. delusion of a "new world order" arising around the ruins of Iraq is tottering. Friendly governments in the region have been undermined by a rising tide of resentment at their acquiescence in the U.S. assault on an Arab nation. The resentment is only likely to rise with sharpening Israeli intransigence, as evidenced by the recent shredding up of the Wye River memorandum on withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian land. Since Israeli well-being is the fixed and immutable basis of U.S. policy in the region, there seem few options for the U.S. but to bring the full force of military coercion to bear upon all recalcitrant states. The attack on Iraq is, in this sense, the precursor to a policy of increasing engagement in the region, in which the U.S. will only have the non-Arab states of Israel and Turkey to perform the role of first-order proxies.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt showed the aptitude to graduate to these ranks in the years following the Gulf war, but have today receded to the status of second-order proxies because of the prospect of internal political dissensions. Among the Arab nations, Egypt is the largest recipient of U.S. aid and a significant part of this comes in the shape of military supplies. Saudi Arabia, similarly, spent an estimated $36 billion between 1994 and 1997 in arms purchases from the U.S. alone. Saudi Arabia is also known to have directly benefited to the extent of $100 billion from the global embargo on Iraqi oil imposed in 1990.

KEVIN COOMBS / REUTERS
U.S. fighter aircraft stand by on board USS Enterprise. The attack on Iraq is, in a sense, the precursor to a policy of increasing U.S. engagement in the West Asian region.

WHERE Iraq itself is concerned, U.S. policy remains deeply divided by the geopolitical realities of a region where intimate allies (Israel, Jordan and Turkey) and bitter adversaries (Syria, Lebanon and Iran) exist in close proximity. The intent to effect a change of regime in Iraq remains as strong as ever, although the U.S. is aware that the momentum of this operation could soon escape its control - a collapse of the regime induced from outside could spark off a violent conflagration in a country of enormous ethnic complexities, and these would rapidly spill over into the territories of adjoining states.

It was necessary as part of U.S. strategy to sustain the fragile coalition of Arab states, to keep policies on Israel and Iraq in hermetic isolation. Rolf Ekeus, the first Chairman of UNSCOM, authorised certain clandestine breaches in this policy; however, under Richard Butler, the present incumbent, there has not even been the pretence of subtlety. It is now public knowledge that UNSCOM had begun drawing freely on Israeli expertise from at least 1995. The inputs that were received and the use to which they were put clearly went beyond the mandate of disarmament, towards probing the innermost perimeters of security surrounding the Iraqi leadership. Scott Ritter, the U.S. intelligence operative who served till recently as leader of one of the UNSCOM inspection teams in Iraq, explained the understanding behind this nexus in a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz: "One reason why I went to Israel and started working with the Israelis is because I believe that the methodology that Israel uses to hunt down terrorists are the same methodologies we needed to use to go after the weapons of mass destruction."

The search for weapons, in other words, was to be transformed into a hunt for individuals. It was a perilous course of overseas political adventurism under the cloak of a U.N. mandate. Till 1996, the U.S. administration was lukewarm in its support for Ritter. U.S. intelligence had its own operation under way to foment a coup against Saddam Hussein through the Iraqi National Accord, a body of dissident military personnel in the Jordanian capital of Amman. There was, at the same time, another policy line which contended for influence within U.S. intelligence quarters - that the U.S. should sponsor a military campaign from the northern region of Iraq, which had been detached from Baghdad's control shortly after the Gulf war concluded.

The U.S. clearly preferred a coup from within the higher levels of the Iraqi armed forces. A military campaign was accurately seen to entail enormous complications and unforeseeable consequences. Prior to August 1996, U.S. intelligence tended to view Ritter's parallel effort to penetrate the security ring around the Iraqi leadership as a distraction at best and a complication at worst.

Coup efforts made little headway, but the Iraqi National Congress (INC) - a coalition of dissident groups organised and funded by British and U.S. intelligence - was proceeding with its plan for a military offensive from the north. One such effort in March 1995 turned into a four-week fiasco with the main Kurd factions being unable to agree on strategies and objectives. Another planned offensive in August 1996 rapidly degenerated into a battle within the INC, following which the Kurdish faction under Massoud Barzani appealed for Saddam Hussein's intervention in the northern city of Arbil. The U.S. watched in a state of indecision as Iraqi troops marched into a city that had been placed under nominal American protection. It pulled out the intelligence operatives who had worked closely with the Kurdish factions since 1991 and then fired a retaliatory volley of cruise missiles from the safety of battleships parked in the Gulf.

Shortly afterwards, the Amman-based operation was discovered and crushed by Iraqi intelligence. Confronted with a dual failure, U.S. intelligence then cooked up a recipe for recurring crises between UNSCOM and the Iraqi Government. In Richard Butler, who assumed charge of UNSCOM in July 1997, it found just the operative for this mission.

UNSCOM was designated to perform the role of the cause for war, not as a direct instrument of penetrating the Iraqi regime. Frustrated by this ambivalence, Scott Ritter quit his position in pique in August 1998. He summed up his reasons in the Ha'aretz interview: "We had the problem solved and now we just need to go do the job... But the U.S. did not let us. Not only didn't they let us, they won't let us - because to go do it ratchets it up to the ultimate level of confrontation. Because there's no way Iraq will allow us to inspect the people who need to be inspected. We're talking about the people closest to Saddam Hussein. We're talking about the security forces, the personal security forces of Saddam, we're talking about the family of Saddam."

BRAD RICKERBY / REUTERS
Scott Ritter, the U.S. intelligence operative who resigned in August 1998 as leader of an UNSCOM inspection team in Iraq.

The U.S. has made no secret of its intent to see Saddam Hussein out of the way. But it has remained curiously reticent about utilising UNSCOM for the purpose. What has never been in doubt, though, is its ability to manipulate UNSCOM findings to serve its agenda. In June 1998, it claimed to have found traces of the deadly nerve agent VX on missile fragments recovered from Iraq. The evidence discovered by a U.S. military laboratory, said Butler, was "utterly unambiguous". Iraq insisted that the findings had been doctored by U.S. bias. And subsequent tests in Swiss and French laboratories proved conclusively that Butler was either fantasising or falsifying.

Oblivious by now to global public opinion, the U.S. again began preparations for war in October, augmenting forces in the Gulf and raising the temperature of its verbal rhetoric. A military strike was authorised by President Bill Clinton on November 14, only to be aborted at the last minute on assurances that Iraq would resume cooperation with UNSCOM. Yet, the writing on the wall was very clear when Butler set off on his mission to Iraq early in December, with the stated objective of carrying out a series of "challenge inspections". The UNSCOM manoeuvre was reaching its climax in a transparent effort to provoke the Iraqi Government into one final act of defiance.

AS the bombs fell in Baghdad and American breasts swelled in pride at the heroism of the servicemen in action over a defenceless nation, a parallel inquisition was approaching its climax on Capitol Hill. It was the same uniquely American sensibility at work again - an obsessive morality divorced from the ethical impulse towards reconciliation. The difference was that Bill Clinton was the Saddam Hussein of Capitol Hill - the man berated as the "serial liar", the man accused of repeatedly misleading the American people, his family, his staff and, above all, a federal grand jury. And as a President facing the prospect of a nasty trial in the U.S. Senate proclaims his intention to sustain the brutal regime of sanctions against Iraq, the world can only wonder how much longer it will be held in thrall by a nation that seems totally devoid of an ethical impulse to guide its technological prowess.