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Blog PostsForty-Three Months -- and Counting
By David Peterson at Oct 19, 2006 |
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On this 43rd-month anniversary of Operation Iraq Freedom, a couple of questions for everyone.
First, to what extent do you suppose the now 43-month-old American military seizure of Iraq falls within one or more of the following sets of principles (or principles very close to them—fee free to name your own favorites: presumably, they won't be might makes right), as codified by a couple of instruments that, like it or not, we cannot simply dismiss for their triviality?
Article 51, Chapter VII, Charter of the United Nations, June 26, 1945
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.
2005 World Summit Outcome (A/RES/60/1), UN General Assembly, September 16, 2005
138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.
139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.
Look at it like this: Given the scale of deaths alleged by the research of Gilbert Burnham et al. (i.e., some 655,000 “excess” or war-related Iraqi deaths since the start of the American invasion, some 601,000 of which (or 92 percent) died violently), how long ago do you suppose we all should have begun talking in terms of intolerable minimums? Hard-trigger mechanisms? Thresholds that no civilized people would ever permit themselves to cross? And words to this effect?
Sounds to my ear like questions worth asking.
2005 World Summit, United Nations, September, 2005The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-06, Gilbert Burnham et al., October, 2006 (as posted by the Center for International Studies, MIT)
"Updated Iraq Survey Affirms Earlier Mortality Estimates," Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, October 11, 2006"Mortality After the March 2003 U.S. Military Invasion of Iraq," ZNet, October 11, 2006
Mark Curtis, "Unpeople" (Vintage, 2004)
By Kissenger, Clark at Nov 06, 2006 17:08 PM
Thanks for the excerpts.—Here are a few more short ones from Mark Curtis' equally fine book, Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses (Vintage, 2004). Specifically, its Ch. 5, “Massacres in Iraq: The Secret History,” pp. 80 – 97.
The nature of the threats posed by the Iraqi regime of Abdul Karim Qasim (1958 – 1963), Curtis writes, “were abruptly summed up by a British member of the Iraq Petroleum Corporation, which controlled Iraq's oil, in a memo to the Foreign Office just months before the regime was overthrown” (p. 82).
Qasim, the Foreign Office memo explained (“The political situation in Iraq,” November 25, 1962):
The first U.S. – U.K. instigated coup that led to what one American official referred to as a “regime of Baathist complexion” came in February, 1963, under General Abul Arif and General Abdul al-Bakr, and lasted until November of the same year, when it was removed by a successor, though non-Baathist, coup. (It wasn't until 1968 that a second Baathist coup, also led by al-Bakr, finally seized control and did not lose it until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in March, 2003.)
Among its first and principal actions, the short-lived Arif – al-Bakr regime embarked on a policy of cleansing Iraq of “Communists,” including massacres and assassinations, working from lists of “Communists” provided by the U.S. Government. As always in such circumstances, we must take the term 'Communist' to mean anybody the regime and its sponsors didn't want around. (Ditto for the term 'terrorist' in the present day.)
“[A] letter from the Iraq Petroleum Corporation to the Foreign Office referred to ‘the hunt for communists' and that ‘it remains to be seen how far they will be physically destroyed',” Curtis reports. “Writing six weeks after the coup, a Foreign Office official refers to a ‘bloodbath' and ‘we should not wish to be seen publicly t advocate such methods of suppressing communism'. ‘Such harshness', the official noted, ‘may well have been necessary as a short term expedient'” (pp. 85-86).
Other British memos affirm that “The communist menace was tackled with determination,” and that the hits were occurring at “a time when there is no indication of a Communist threat or of any effective opposition to the new government” (p. 86). “Thus officials noted that they should ‘examine all possible means of profiting from the present anti-communist climate in Iraq' and to make ‘a major effort to establish links with the new rulers'” (p. 87).
Throughout, the chief British objection to these and even more aggressive policies against Iraq's “Kurdish problem” was the fear of negative P.R.—How would it look were it to become known that the world's dominate English-language powers supported bloodshed so fervently?
I guess I should add that I find this last concern to be particularly baffling.
David Peterson
Chicago, USA
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