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THE SCOOP for September 11, 1996
Operation Desert Sneeze
The Whole Story of Clinton's Latest Iraq Attack (C)1996 Bob Harris
The spectrum of respectable opinion concerning Bill Clinton's recent attacks on Saddam Hussein's air defenses has ranged all the way from "whooee, we blowed him up real good" to "yeehah, let's blow him up again."
[This Week With David Brinkley] is much more fun to watch when you think of it as children's television.
For adults, the situation is slightly more complex:
At least 20 million Kurds live in an area roughly the size of California. They're the largest ethnic group without a nation, and they've been trying to establish one for over 100 years.
Unfortunately, European colonists had bigger guns, so they got to draw the maps. The Kurds got screwed: their land was divied up between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. (And folks complain about the Browns moving to Baltimore.)
Everybody treats their own Kurds [really] badly -- kidnappings, torture, that sort of thing -- but they're always willing to arm the other guys' Kurds in any conflict. Split six ways, the Kurds never have a chance.
No one gives a damn, including us.
>From 1992-94, as the U.S. occupied oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan -- ostensibly to
help the Kurds -- oil-poor Armenian Kurds were getting wiped bigtime. The White House did nothing.
Turkey, from which some of our recent attacks on Iraq were launched, just seized a chunk of Iraq in order to attack the local Kurds. Clinton approved.
This is nothing new.
In 1972, the Shah of Iran and the CIA decided Iraq was too strong, so we armed the Iraqi Kurds and whipped up a neat little unwinnable civil war. Iraq got weaker. Three years and thousands of lives later, the Shah suddenly decided to make nice, so we dropped the Kurds cold. The Iraqis got revenge. The betrayed Kurdish leader begged Henry Kisssinger for help, writing that his people were "being destroyed in an unbelieveable way." Kissinger didn't even respond, telling his evil henchmen that "covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
Later on, the Shah kicked, the Ayatollah took over, and Iraq tried to grab some land in the confusion. Thus began the Iran-Iraq war. Despite our declared neutrality, U.S. intelligence armed and financed the weaker Iraqi army in an attempt to bleed both countries.
When the war ended, American money didn't. The Bush administration provided Iraq $4 billion that the CIA knew was being used to buy more weapons. Saddam was mostly killing more Kurds. Fine by us.
Bob Dole even went to Iraq and met Saddam personally, hoping to cut deals for Bob Dole's oil puppeteers. Bob Dole came home praising Saddam -- killer of over 100,000 of his own people -- as "a leader to whom the United States can talk."
A few months later, the U.S. Ambassador green-lighted Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which we promptly used as a pretext for stabilizing U.S. control over "our" Saudi oil fields. The desperate Kuwaiti royal family paid for the domestic propaganda campaign, and contracts to clean up the mess somehow would up in the hands of Bush family properties.
"Our" oil looked secure. For a while.
But with Iraq weak and occupied, Iran has been getting ready to rumble again. Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, was taken by a pro-Iranian Kurdish group in 1994.
The anti-Iranian Kurds asked the U.S. for help. We said no.
The CIA, missing the point entirely, did recruit a few Kurds for a $20 million covert attempt to kill Saddam. Last June, Saddam broke up the plot and killed the Kurds involved.
With no sign of further U.S. assistance, the anti-Iranian Kurds finally asked Saddam to lend artillery support so they could retake their capital. He agreed, forcing the pro-Iranian Kurds to literally head for the hills.
And that was Bill Clinton's pretext for bombing Saddam's air defenses in the south, hundreds of miles from the Kurds.
The attacks weren't really meant to do much damage. Tomahawk missiles usually miss their targets by 50 feet or so -- and they're only $1.2 million each! -- so we obviously didn't really care what we blew up. In truth, Clinton will probably concede Irbil to Baghdad as a counterbalance to Iran. Bombing the south just lets Saddam know that's all we're conceding.
Trouble is, warning shots are almost always misunderstood. And even if things calm down, not a single Gulf Arab state supported our attacks -- not even Kuwait. Which means Clinton just made us a few million more enemies.
The only long-term solution doesn't involve bombs. A sane energy policy which aggressively pursues renewable solar, wind, and fusion power would make this endless parade of tyrants and killings completely unnecessary.
Of course, [that's] not a respectable opinion on Sunday morning talk shows financed by arms manufacturers and oil companies.
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Bob Harris is a political comedian who has spoken at over 250 colleges nationwide.
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