Michele Landsberg, genocide denier The

Michele Landsberg, genocide denier The radical feminist and professional America-hater has a column in Sunday's Toronto Star called "U.S. lies shouldn't be leading us into battle again", which argues that the Yanks are making up all of their charges against Saddam Hussein. She says there are plenty of historical precedents for the Americans using lies to intervene in foreign conflicts, and some of the incidents she mentions (Chile, Gulf of Tonkin) are, shamefully true. (I didn't know the Sandanistas were "elected," though. Thanks for the tip, Professor Landsberg.)

Much of her column, though, is patent nonsense. She outlines "Operation Mongoose," the now-infamous (and much talked-about on conpiracy-theory websites) CIA plan to fake terrorist attacks, blame them on the Cubans, and use them as an excuse to overthrow Castro. Shocking! Okay, now they never actually did any of this, but they talked about it! Guilt is proven! (Geez, Michelle, the Canadian Armed Forces had a contingency plan to burn St. John's to the ground if Newfoundland was invaded, but that doesn't mean it's gonna happen.)

She brings up the "incubator babies" incident from 1990, which was cooked up by a public-relations firm to convince Congress to authorize war with Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. The key words are "public-relations firm". Hill & Knowlton, to be exact. And they were hired by the Kuwaitis, not the Americans, most of whom were as fooled as the rest of us. (Lileks had an excellent Bleat about this a few months ago, which contained the classic line, "I’m more outraged by the incubator story than I was by the invasion itself, which seems the morally correct position to take.")

Speaking of which, Landsberg actually makes excuses for Saddam's blatant act of aggression:

They even believe that Saddam wilfully marched into Kuwait as some sort of unprovoked Hitlerian aggressor, despite the well-documented history of the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait that goes back at least to the time of World War I.

If Pakistan ever goes ahead and nukes India over the Kashmir dispute, I suppose Landsberg will write, "these stupid Yanks even believe that Pakistan blew up India as some sort of unprovoked Hitlerian aggressor, despite the well-documented history of the border dispute between the former Pakistan and the former India that goes back at least to 1948." Hey, he had a border dispute! These stupid Kuwaitis brought it on themselves! (I remember some of my lefty high-school teachers using this argument to justify the Iraqi invasion when I was in Grade 12. In retrospect, I'm disappointed in myself for not screaming, "Are you out of your fucking MIND?!?" The detention would have been worth it.)

All of this is bad enough, but here's where Landsberg crosses the line from mere inanity into outright genocide-denial:

[The evil Amerikkkan corporate media is] still repeating the mantra that "Saddam gassed his own people," even though the senior CIA political analyst in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war has recently written — in the New York Times, no less — that the Kurdish civilians who died in that attack were killed by a poison gas that only Iran had at that time.

Idiot, idiot, fucking idiot. The New Republic thoroughly debunked the "Iraq-didn't-gas-the-Kurds" lie just after the New York Times, desperate to turn public opinion against invading Iraq, ran Stephen Pelletiere's galling article denying Iraqi complicity in the deaths of thousands. (By the way, why is the "Paper of Record" running this sort of thing, if "the U.S. media have almost turned themselves into an arm of government propaganda"? Were Ashcroft's censors asleep or something?) Slate debunked the story even earlier, back in April, 2002.

From Spencer Ackerman's New Republic article:

First, interviews by international human rights groups with scores of Halabja survivors reveal no such confusion about who deployed the chemicals. Kurds who were outside their houses during the mid-morning attack "could see clearly that these were Iraqi, not Iranian aircraft, since they flew low enough for their markings to be legible," concluded Human Rights Watch in its 1993 report Genocide In Iraq. In any case, the argument for Iranian culpability neglects the logistics of the Halabja battle itself. The Iranians, who controlled the town on March 15, would have no reason to use chemical agents against the Iraqi counteroffensive on March 16, since the Iraqis retaliated with air strikes and placed no soldiers on the ground against whom such weapons could be used.

Second, even if the victims died of exposure to blood agents, this would be perfectly consistent with the claim of Iraqi responsibility. A 1991 DIA report, since declassified, concluded definitively, "Iraq is known to have employed ... a blood agent, hydrogen cyanide gas (HCN) ... against Iranian soldiers, civilians, and Iraqi Kurdish civilians." Nonetheless, it is far more likely, according to the standard accounts of the attack on Halabja, that mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin and tabun--and perhaps even VX and the biological agent aflatoxin, which the Iraqis were also known to possess--were the instruments of Kurdish murder. For example, Human Rights Watch noted that survivors excreted blood-streaked urine, "consistent with exposure to both mustard gas and a nerve agent such as Sarin."

Third, the 1988 DIA report Pelletiere cites to pin Halabja on the Iranians was not the end of the DIA's inquiry. The DIA's April 19, 1988 cable--a month after Halabja--took note of the fact that the Iraqis were already forcibly resettling "an estimated 1.5 million Kurdish nationals," including "an unknown but reportedly large number of Kurds [who] have been placed in 'concentration camps' located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders." This in mind, the far more plausible story is that Halabja was part of a concerted effort to settle the Kurdish problem "once and for all," in the words of an October 24, 1988 DIA report--by wiping out the Iraqi Kurdish population.

This brings us to the biggest problem with Pelletiere's argument: If the Kurds were legitimate battlefield casualties, why is it Saddam subsequently felt the need to slaughter nearly 100,000 more of them?

Why? Don't ask Landsberg. She has a far-left agenda to promote, and she'll be damned if she's going to let the facts get in the way. You can't make an omlette without smashing a few eggs, you know.

Disgusting. Between Landsberg and Antonia Zerbisias, I wonder whether we can believe anything in Canada's largest-circulation daily newspaper?

Posted by damian at February 17, 2003 07:52 PM