Abstract
In a book published in 2001, Stephen Pelletière, a former U.S. intelligence analyst responsible for monitoring the Iran-Iraq War, reiterated a claim he first made publicly in 1990 and, presumably, within the intelligence community shortly after the events in question: that in the chemical attack on the Iraqi town of Halabja in March 1988 in which thousands of Kurdish civilians perished, both Iran and Iraq had used gas, and that, “in all likelihood, Iranian gas killed the Kurds.”1
* I could not have written this essay without the invaluable research assistance, in 1999–2000, of Ranya Ghuma, then a superb graduate student at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies of Georgetown University. The brief discussion below of the role of the United Nations in the war relies on research done by another graduate student at CCAS, Julienne Gherardi, who enthusiastically took on a slice of my research project in 2000 and ran with it. I am very much indebted to both. Research for this essay was supported in part by a 1999 grant from the Individual Project Fellowships Program of the Open Society Institute in New York.
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Notes
Stephen C. Pelletière, Iraq and the International Oil System (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2001), p. 206. For the earlier, even more explicit, claim, see
Stephen C. Pelletière, Douglas V. Johnson, and Leif Rosenberger, Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 1990), p. 52;
Stephen C. Pelletière and Douglas V. Johnson, Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War, Volume I (Quantico, Va.: U.S. Marine Corps, 1990), p. 100;
Stephen Pelletière, The Iran-Iraq War: Chaos in a Vacuum (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1992), pp. 136–37.
On March 5, 1984, the Reagan administration formally accused Iraq of using “lethal chemical weapons.” George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 239.
International Crisis Group, Iran: The Struggle for the Revolution’s Soul (Brussels: 2002), pp. 27–28.
This aspect of the war has been particularly well documented. Useful sources include: Alan Friedman, Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq (New York: Bantam Books, 1993);
Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994);
Mark Phythian, Arming Iraq: How the U.S. and Britain Secretly Built Saddam’s War Machine (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
For example, the Iraqi attack on the USS Stark on May 17, 1987. See Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, vol. 2, The Iran-Iraq War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 549–58.
Its full name is the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (1925). For a useful commentary, see Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff, eds., Documents on the Laws of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 155–67.
The rift that existed between the Security Council and the office of the secretary-general on the issue of the Iran-Iraq War merits an essay by itself See Giandomenico Picco, Man Without a Gun (New York: Times Books, 1999), p. 61.
See also Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Pilgrimage for Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
Cameron R. Hume, The United Nations, Iran, and Iraq: How Peacemaking Changed (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1994).
For an argument about legal complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute and other instruments of international humanitarian law, see William A. Schabas, “Enforcing International Humanitarian Law: Catching the Accomplices,” in International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 83, no. 842 (June 2001), pp. 439–59.
See, e.g. Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 102–03 and 106. By comparison, there is absolutely no question that the use of chemical weapons against civilians, as indeed any direct attack targeting noncombatants, constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity.
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© 2004 Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick
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Hiltermann, J.R. (2004). Outsiders as Enablers: Consequences and Lessons from International Silence on Iraq’s Use of Chemical Weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. In: Potter, L.G., Sick, G.G. (eds) Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980427_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980427_8
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