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Free people are free to make
mistakes
and commit crimes and do bad things.
- Donald Rumsfeld
During February of 1991, ex-U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark along with four brave colleagues spent a week travelling through war-torn Iraq. While the U.S. was staging 3,000 bombing sorties each day, Clark witnessed and documented the massive death and destruction that was being inflicted upon a once-prosperous nation. Upon returning to the United States, he helped initiate the Commission of Enquiry for an International War Crimes Tribunal. Evidence gathered by the Commission is described in his 1992 book, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf. This book portrays important details of what really happened in Iraq: details that were overlooked by the mainstream media, making the book a strong indictment of the Gulf War.
Reading The Fire This Time, I was astonished at the
extent to which America and its allies targeted the entire
population of Iraq during this war, with much of the
country’s civilian infrastructure intentionally shattered.
This was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention and the
United Nations’ ban on targeting civilians.
Before the Gulf War, Iraq is describes as having been
“modern and growing.”1 Adult literacy was
reportedly 95 per cent; 92 per cent of the population had access
to safe water and 93 per cent lived in catchment areas served by
modern health facilities, which offered first-rate, free health
care.2 Yet the war sent it back to a
“pre-industrial state.” Some of the damage committed by
the Allies is as follows:
Clark describes the state of Iraq when he visited in February 1992:
[P]otable water was delivered by trucks in Basra. Sewage and sanitation systems were ruined. Many communications systems remained inoperable. Transportation was limited. Airports were still closed. Health care facilities were dysfunctional, with hospitals able to operate at only 25 percent capacity.4
In March 1991 a mission led by the UN Under Secretary General, Martti Ahtisaari, went to Iraq and reported on the extent of damage they witnessed:
[N]othing we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous.5
The huge extent of the damage shows that this destruction of the civilian infrastructure must have been intentional. The Pentagon did in fact admit that it massively targeted civilian structures, so as to “demoralise the populace.”6 According to the Washington Post:
[D]amage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as “collateral” and unintended, was sometimes neither. The worst civilian suffering, senior officers say, has resulted not from bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed – at electrical plants, oil refineries and transportation networks. Among the justifications offered is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless. A senior air force officer said, “They do live there…”7
The supposed purpose of the Gulf War was to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. But if this was so then the relentless destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure – apart from being inhuman and criminal – was also unnecessary and pointless. So why did we do it?
I believe that in order to answer this question we need to consider the possibility of unconscious psychological causes and the influence of childhood. Once we do this, a quite obvious purpose emerges for the cruel destruction: It was to turn Iraq into a baby. By severely reducing Iraq’s capacity to survive and function independently, we rendered it weak, helpless, needy and dependent – just like a baby. And we became like its parent, with its well being at our mercy. Brigadier-General William Looney, a director of the continuing bombing operations in Iraq after the Gulf War, described the nature of this relationship we created with the people of Iraq: “They know we own their country. We own their airspace...We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now.” 8
We can actually single out how particular acts of destruction by allied forces served the purpose of giving Iraq specific baby-like characteristics. For example:
Furthermore, the destruction of Iraq’s military capacities was enormous and excessive for the supposed purpose of simply removing Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Ramsey Clark estimates that between 125,000 and 150,000 of their soldiers were killed.10 Here again we were making Iraq like a baby, by rendering it relatively defenseless.
And as Lloyd deMause has pointed out, “Children were the real emotional focus of the Gulf War from the very start.”11 As I will show later in this article, children have been particularly badly affected in our campaign against Iraq. As deMause estimates, over a half a million Iraqi children were killed as a result of the Gulf War plus the UN embargo. 12
A mere four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, on 6th August 1990 – allowing virtually no time for a diplomatic solution to the crisis – the UN Security Council passed Resolution 661, which imposed comprehensive sanctions against Iraq. These banned all trade, banned international flights, froze government assets abroad and barred financial transactions with Iraq. Despite Iraq’s forced withdrawal from Kuwait in March 1991 and the subsequent ceasefire, UN Resolution 687 – passed on 3rd April 1991 – ensured the continuance of these crippling sanctions until certain new conditions were met. For example, Iraq now had to destroy chemical, nuclear and biological weapons, as well as all missiles with a range greater than 150 km. Sanctions would persist until the Security Council was satisfied that Iraq no longer possessed any of these weapons nor had any plans to develop them.
Yet in 1995 Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected. He claimed he had run Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear missile programs for ten years. He was interrogated separately by the CIA, MI6 and a trio from the United Nations led by Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish head of UNSCOM, the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq. During his interrogation by Ekeus, as is well known, Kamel disclosed details of the extent of Iraq’s prior biological and chemical weapons programs. However, he also stated that after the Gulf War, “All weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.” Yet after this revelation there were no suggestions that the sanctions could be lifted. Instead Kamel’s claim was suppressed, supposedly because Saddam Hussein did not know how much Kamel had told his interrogators and it was hoped he could be bluffed into disclosing still more. 13
In fact, it was not until almost thirteen years after their imposition that the sanctions were finally lifted when, on 22nd May 2003, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1483. However, trade in arms and “related materiel” still remained barred.
The imposition of devastating sanctions against a country that illegally invades another, though, is far from being standard international practice. For example, just eight months prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the United States had similarly invaded Panama with the supposed objective of arresting its leader, General Noriega, for international drug trafficking. On December 29th 1989, the United Nations General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to condemn this invasion as “a flagrant violation of international law.” And whereas an estimated 300 to 600 Kuwaitis died during Iraq’s invasion of their country,14 according to the journalist Martha Gellhorn, at least 8,000 Panamanians were killed during the U.S. invasion.15 In other words, the U.S. invasion of Panama was just as illegal as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and maybe over 13 times as deadly. Yet, whilst no action was taken against the United States, Iraq was punished with the most severe sanctions in history.
After the Gulf War, because sanctions prevented Iraq from selling its oil internationally, it lacked the foreign exchange it needed to buy machinery, spare parts for existing machinery needing repair and other agricultural inputs. This meant that Iraq was unable to repair the massive destruction it suffered during the war, hence keeping it in its “pre-industrial state.” The problem was worsened because Iraq needed to obtain the approval of a UN sanctions committee for most items and this was no straightforward task. For example, as the peace organisation Voices in the Wilderness has written: “The UN sanctions committee, based in New York, continues to deny Iraq billions of dollars worth of computer equipment, spare parts, medical equipment and medicines, books and periodicals, all necessary elements to sustaining human life and society.” 16
In December 1996, the UN Security Council-implemented ‘oil-for-food’ program came into operation, supposedly to help provide for the humanitarian needs of the people of Iraq. Iraq was now allowed to sell a fixed amount of oil so as to pay for imports of food and other essential supplies. However, the damage caused by sanctions continued. According to Voices in the Wilderness: “Iraq cannot afford to rebuild its infrastructure under the oil-for-food program or under the new provisions of so-called smart sanctions. Water sanitation facilities, electrical grids, communication lines, and educational resources will remain permanently degraded until the sanctions are lifted.” 17
It seems to me that what was really achieved by sanctions was to prevent Iraq from rebuilding so as to keep it weak, helpless and dependent. Just like the needless destruction of the civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War, the true purpose of these appalling sanctions was psychological: To make Iraq even more like a baby, and to make sure it stayed that way and did not ‘grow up.’
For example, as a result of sanctions, unemployment in Iraq soared to over 60 per cent.18 As the former Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq Hans von Sponeck wrote, this unemployment, combined with sanctions regulations forbidding the use of oil revenue for local investment, “fostered within the Iraqi population a hand-out mentality.”19 To help them cope with the effects of sanctions, most Iraqis received a monthly food entitlement from their government, providing each person with 2,200 kilocalories per day. In 2002 it was said that 14 to16 million Iraqis (about two-thirds of the population) were solely dependent on these rations for their survival. Thus we can see here more evidence of how sanctions made the people of Iraq needy and dependent, like babies: Unable to work and – like babies – unable even to feed themselves, having to rely upon food handouts from a parent-like government.
As well as the destruction of their transport systems during the Gulf War, Iraqis’ movement was further restricted after the war by the imposition of ‘no fly zones.’ These two zones – one in the north and one in the south – were imposed unilaterally by Britain, America and France in 1991 and 1992. They covered more than 60 per cent of the country and banned Iraq from using any aircraft, including helicopters, in these areas. The official justification for the zones was supposedly to protect Shi’a Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north from Saddam Hussein’s forces. However, that their real purpose was not “humanitarian” is proven by the fact that Turkish forces were permitted to violate the northern zone in order to attack Kurds there. As the renowned investigative journalist John Pilger has written:
In March 2001, RAF pilots patrolling the northern no fly zone publicly protested for the first time about their role in the bombing of Iraq. Far from performing the ‘vital humanitarian task’ described by Tony Blair, they complained that they were frequently ordered to return to their Turkish base to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the Kurds in Iraq, the very people they were meant to be ‘protecting’.
…In October 2000, the Washington Post reported: ‘On more than one occasion [US pilots who fly in tandem with the British] have received a radio message that “there is a TSM inbound”: that is, a “Turkish Special Mission” heading into Iraq. Following standard orders, the Americans turned their planes around and flew back to Turkey. “You’d see Turkish F-14s and F-16s inbound, loaded to the gills with munitions,” [pilot Mike Horn] said. “Then they’d come out half an hour later with their munitions expended.” When the Americans flew back into Iraqi air space, he recalled, they would see “burning villages, lots of smoke and fire”.’ 20
The supposed “humanitarian” aim of the southern zone was similarly dubious. Max Rodenbeck writes:
In the Shiite south, the resentment turns to anger when they recall that the No-Fly Zone, resulting in a trickle of dead, was always described as having been established to protect civilians from the regime. This was despite the fact that it was imposed after the regime had finished slaughtering tens of thousands of them, crushing the 1991 uprising while the first President Bush abandoned the Shiites to their fate. 21
Therefore, since the alleged humanitarian purpose of the no fly zones was obviously untrue, I would suggest that their real purpose was again psychological. Like the destruction of Iraq’s transport systems, their purpose was to restrict Iraqis’ ability to move around in order to make them more like babies.
I wonder if our unconscious ‘need’ to keep Iraq as a symbolic baby also accounts for the recent failure of British and American troops to prevent the theft and acts of destruction that occurred against Iraq’s heritage in the chaos following our 2003 invasion. For example, the National Library containing 12 million books was burned to the ground, as was the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment; looters similarly destroyed Basra University library, which held volumes dating back as far as 1015; major sculptures in the ancient cities of Hatra, Nineveh and Nimrud were taken by looters and 15 to 20 large archaeological sites in southern Iraq were pillaged by armed gangs. 22
Yet art experts had been warning the Pentagon repeatedly of the danger to Iraq’s antiquities months before the invasion. For example, a small group of archaeologists and art curators met with five Pentagon officials on 24th January 2003 and discussed with them how the U.S. military could protect cultural and archaeological sites during the impending war. Among these Pentagon officials was Joseph Collins, who reports directly to the Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.23 Previously, an Op-Ed had been specially written for the Washington Post of 29th November 2002 that warned: “Measures should be taken to ensure absolute respect for the integrity of Iraq’s sites and monuments, and to prevent looting of any kind.”
In others words, because of this forewarning, much of the destruction and looting of Iraq’s heritage should have been prevented. What we really achieved through our failure to do so was, yet again, to make Iraq more like a baby. By allowing the destruction of its history we were making it like a newborn, with no past behind it. As Robert Fisk described the situation, “for Iraq, this is Year Zero.” 24
Our need to keep Iraq as a baby would also explain why, in the aftermath of the invasion, contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq were not even offered to Iraqis. Instead, the initial contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded, behind closed doors, exclusively to American firms. For example, San Francisco firm Bechtel was hired to rebuild the electrical, water and sewage systems, whilst the Kellogg, Brown & Root unit of Halliburton was awarded control of Iraq’s oilfields. 25
In his column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman explained what happened when non-American firms tried to establish mobile phone services in Iraq:
[I]n July two enterprising Middle Eastern firms started offering cellphone service in Baghdad, setting up jury-rigged systems compatible with those of neighboring countries. Since the collapse of Baghdad’s phone system has been a major source of postwar problems, coalition authorities should have been pleased.
But no: the authorities promptly shut down the services. Cell service, they said, could be offered only by the winners in a bidding process – one whose rules, revealed on July 31, seemed carefully designed to shut out any non-American companies. 26
Considering the massive unemployment in Iraq, along with the claim spoken to the Iraqi people on 30th April by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that “The coalition is committed to helping you as you take control of your country and make the transition from tyranny to freedom and self-government,” it would seem sensible that Iraqis should have been allowed the job of rebuilding their own country. Evidence in fact suggests that they would have been more than able to undertake such a task. For example, according to Ansari, a civil engineer in Iraq: “We have experience…The damage was much greater in 1991. More than 150 bridges in Iraq were destroyed in that war, and we rebuilt them all in one year…But in this war, theft and burning caused more destruction than the bombing. We can put the pieces together again, in less time than 1991. We are ready to start.” 27
Writing in The Guardian, Ghazi Sabir-Ali described how Iraqis had demonstrated their reconstruction skills after the Gulf War, in spite of the limitations caused by UN sanctions:
[In 1991] I was chief executive of Iraq’s North Oil Company, as the Iraq Petroleum company was called after nationalisation in 1972. In the six weeks that the offensive lasted, and in the chaos that followed, the oil installations were extensively bombed and looted.
…On April 2 1991, I received a hastily scribbled note from the minister of oil in Baghdad. NOC had to produce, by April 15, 200,000 barrels a day of crude oil and pump it to Baiji refinery in order to supply petrol to the Iraqi people to celebrate Saddam’s birthday on April 28. 28
Ali describes how he and his co-workers, through a series of innovative practices combined with a dedicated, enthusiastic work force, managed to quickly restore oil production. He writes: “On day 14 we started pumping; within three months we were producing 75% of pre-war capacity.” Ali concludes:
Many of those men, and many others like them, are still in Iraq. They remain capable, as they were in 1991, of planning and executing the necessary repairs to our battered country, if they are given a free hand. There is no need for foreign companies to take control. Iraqi oil revenue should go to Iraqis, who should then be left in peace to set their country to rights. 29
Yet, with the task of rebuilding in the hands of American contractors, “Iraq…is now importing petrol for the first time in 60 years…Nearly four months after the war ended, services are appalling. The electricity supply is intermittent, and there is a serious water shortage.” 30
Thus, even with Saddam Hussein deposed from power and UN sanctions lifted, we are still treating Iraq like a helpless baby that is unable to look after itself, by denying its people the opportunity to rebuild their country. In an interview with the Socialist Worker, Medea Benjamin of the Occupation Watch Center in Baghdad described life in Iraq under the U.S.-run military occupation:
On the one hand, you have a lifting of all tariffs so goods can flood into the country from anywhere and undercut Iraqi production. Secondly, you have the productive capacity being gutted by what is now large-scale organized looting.
And third, you have the U.S. giving money to large corporations to go in to do the job of “reconstruction.” 31
Benjamin concludes: “there is what seems to be a very orchestrated campaign to destroy the ability of Iraqis to produce for themselves.” In other words, the management of Iraq under our occupation has served the purpose of preventing Iraqis from becoming independent of us, so that instead they remain like a baby. As political scientist March Lynch has pointed out in an assessment of the reasons for anti-American feeling in the Arab world: Arabs and Muslims “are angered at being treated like children.” 33
The question now arises as to why we should want to turn another country, symbolically, into a baby and then use measures like sanctions in order to keep it that way. I believe the answer is that by making Iraq into a baby, we were defending ourselves from an unbearable truth: That, unconsciously, we ourselves feel like helpless, dependent, needy little babies. For us to acknowledge and become conscious of this truth would be unbearably painful. We therefore have to disown our babyish feelings and project them into something outside of us. Turning Iraq into a baby was thus a defense mechanism that allowed us to feel stronger, more grown-up and more independent in ourselves.
Why though would so many of us still feel, albeit unconsciously, like needy babies? The answer is that when we were babies our needs were not adequately met. Because the neglect we suffered would have been too emotionally painful for us to integrate at the time, we had to repress the experiences and the accompanying feelings. These repressed feelings thus remain into adulthood as an invisible force that has a great hold over us.
To understand this process better, let us look in more detail at the needs of the infant. In his book Prisoners of Pain, Arthur Janov gives a clear description of the needs of infancy and childhood. I have summarised below the needs he describes:
Unfortunately, for many of us, these early needs will not have been adequately met. In Why You Get Sick, How You Get Well, Janov explains what happens when this is the case:
If [the infant’s] needs go unfulfilled, either he will suffer continuous pain until his parents satisfy him, or he will shut off the pain by shutting off his need. If his pain is drastic enough, death may intervene, as shown in studies of some institutional babies.
Because the infant cannot address the sensation of hunger (that is, he cannot go to the refrigerator) or find substitute affection, he must separate his sensations (hunger, wanting to be held) from consciousness. 35
In other words, when an infant does not have his needs met he will experience an overload of pain, more than his immature system can fully integrate. Consequently his needs and the pain of not having them met will be repressed. However, this repression is no perfect solution. It may save us as children but as adults it is more of a hindrance to us, and a barrier separating us from our ‘real selves.’ As Janov explains:
This separation of oneself from one’s needs and feelings is an instinctive maneuver to shut off excessive pain…This does not mean that unfulfilled needs disappear, however. On the contrary, they continue through life, exerting a persistent, unconscious force toward the satisfaction of those needs. 36
Therefore, if we are not cared for adequately when we are babies, the damage will remain throughout our lives. Without effective therapy though, it would be too painful for us to become conscious of our early traumas, so we need to defend against them in order to keep the pain at bay.
In my opinion, our violent and destructive transformation of Iraq into a ‘needy baby’ was committed because we need to defend against our own repressed needs and pain from infancy. By creating a ‘baby’ outside of ourselves, we are better able to disown and deny the baby inside of us.
I would also suggest that the way we have neglected the needs of Iraqi children these past 13 years is a further consequence of our not having our own needs met in early childhood. The effects of this neglect upon children in Iraq have been devastating. For example, as a result of the sanctions that we imposed and maintained, the nutritional needs of Iraq’s children were not met. According to a 1998 UNICEF report:
Malnutrition was not a public health problem in Iraq prior to the embargo. Its extent became apparent during 1991 and the prevalence has increased greatly since then (18% in 1991 to 31% in 1996 of under fives with chronic malnutrition). By 1997, it was estimated that about one million children under five were malnourished. 37
When in October 1996 UNICEF appealed for governments to help the people of Iraq, saying that “over 50 per cent of women and children are receiving less than half their calorific needs,” only the Government of the Netherlands made a contribution. 38
Iraqi children’s needs for medical care also went unmet due to the effects of sanctions. As one crass example of this, just before Christmas of 1999 the British department of trade and industry blocked a shipment of vaccines that were to protect Iraqi children from yellow fever and diphtheria. The under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, Dr Kim Howells, explained to parliament that the reason these vaccines were banned was because “they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.” 39
Because of the embargo there was a massive increase in deaths of children from diseases that would have in many cases been preventable beforehand, such as diarrhea (leading to death from dehydration) and acute respiratory infections (ARI). According to UNICEF:
In 1999, the case fatality rate due to diarrhea in children under five years stood at 2.4%, while the rate of case fatality due to ARI for the same age group was 1.4%. This is a tenfold increase over the past decade…The child suffers as an average 14.4 diarrhea spells which represents an increase of about three times the 1990 average of 3.8. 40
Iraq’s schools were badly affected due to war and sanctions. This again constituted a form of neglect of Iraqi children. Whereas in the 1988-89 school year Iraq spent about 6.7 per cent of its budget ($230 million) on education,41 under the oil-for-food program, which came into operation at the end of 1996, just $23 million per year was earmarked for education. In April 1999 a delegation of teachers, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), went to Iraq to assess the impact of sanctions upon the educational system there. In a typical school they visited, they found that classrooms had no desks or chairs, so pupils had to sit either on their copy books or on bent scraps of metal; most windows were broken and the walls were bare; the school had no computers, books, rulers or stationery. The salary of teachers had fallen from about $450 per month prior to sanctions to an average of $3 per month.42 Notoriously, even sales of pencils to Iraq, that school children badly needed, were banned under sanctions. The supposed reason was that the graphite might be used for military purposes.
Something we seem to overlook when we attack another country is how traumatic the experience is for children there. When we relentlessly bombed Iraq in 1991 (and again in 2003) we were clearly neglecting the needs and feelings of Iraqi children, for whom it must have been a terrifying experience. Dr Ameed Hamid of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society described the following incident: “I have a son 5 years old. During the air raid he was shaking, shivering, saying ‘Bush is coming, Bush is coming.’”43 As a consequence of this psychological terror, those children who survived the Gulf War were found to be “the most traumatized children of war ever described”: 80 per cent of primary-school-age children who were interviewed by psychologists were found to live in daily fear of losing their families through death or separation and nearly two-thirds of them believed they would not make it to adulthood.44 The psychological harm continued due to the effects of the war and the embargo. According to a 1999 report commissioned by UNICEF, the number of children in Iraq up to the age of 6 receiving outpatient care for psychological disorders had risen by over 130 per cent since 1990 – up to 510,000 – due to the conditions there. 45
What we were really doing by neglecting the needs of these children with the Gulf War and sanctions was symbolically restaging the neglect that we suffered ourselves during early childhood. Only this time, instead of being the helpless children whose needs went unmet, we were now in the position of all-powerful grown-ups, denying Iraqi children what they needed. By restaging our own traumas in this way, with the roles reversed, we were able to experience a sense of power: something we did not feel when we were children. And with this newfound sense of power, we were defending ourselves against the utter powerlessness we experienced as children.
Because we had to repress the unbearable pain of our early neglect, we became insensitive to our own needs, feelings and childhood suffering. As adults we then display this same insensitivity towards other children, like those in Iraq. How else could we have allowed hundreds of thousands of them to die as a result of the UN sanctions? Madeline Albright summed up our insensitivity during a televised interview in 1996. When asked if she thought that the deaths of a half a million Iraqi children were “worth it,” despite the failure of the embargo to remove Saddam from power, she replied: “I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think the price is worth it.”46
In a long-term study of child rearing in 700 families in Nottingham, England, John and Elizabeth Newson found that in 1958, 62 per cent of mothers admitted to having used physical punishment against their one-year-old children. In 1985, they found no improvement in this statistic, with 63 per cent of mothers saying they smacked their one-year-olds.47 In the United States, a 1965 study in Los Angeles by Korsch et al. found that about a quarter of babies aged between one and six months were spanked and nearly half of all babies were spanked by the second half of their first year.48 A more recent study in the U.S. found that around a third of children were hit during their first year and around two-thirds of one-year-olds were hit.49 We can conclude then that the majority of today’s adults in Britain and America will have been hit by their parents from a very young age, beginning in the first one to two years of their lives.
It is therefore unsurprising that after turning Iraq into a ‘baby’ by means of the Gulf War, we continued to treat it as we ourselves were treated during our earliest childhoods, when we too were helpless and dependent: with violence. So, for example, to supposedly enforce the ‘no fly zones,’ we continued bombing Iraq on a regular basis from after the Gulf War right up to our 2003 invasion, making this the longest Anglo-American aerial campaign since the Second World War. According to Hans von Sponeck, co-ordinator of the UN Humanitarian Program in Iraq between 1998 and 2000, there were bombing incidents in Iraq approximately every three days during his time there. He said that in 1999 alone there were 132 bombings that caused civilian casualties, with 120 people killed and 442 injured. 50
On several occasions since October 2002, US planes dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets over parts of Southern Iraq. According to a translation, one of these leaflets included the warning: “Coalition Air Power can strike at will. Any time, any place.” Surely similar words could be said to warn a small child of its parents’ violent outbursts: that they might “strike at will. Any time, any place.”51 This clearly indicates how our continued bombardment of Iraq was in fact a symbolic restaging of the violent punishments we suffered in early childhood. As with the restaging of our own childhood neglect through sanctions, we were again acting out our own traumas with the roles reversed. By treating Iraq as the defenceless, abused child whilst we became the all-powerful, punishing parent, we were effectively defending ourselves against unconscious feelings of powerlessness and pain from the abuse we suffered.
In a newspaper article written by the former British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, about our 2003 invasion, he perceptively stated: “The truth is that the US chose to attack Iraq not because it posed a threat, but because they knew it was weak and expected its military to collapse.” 52 Therefore, because Iraq was “weak,” it was the ideal symbol of a defenseless baby or small child for us to violently punish, just as we were violently punished ourselves as children.
Once we take into consideration the childhood punishments that most of us will have suffered, we can understand why many people felt our 2003 invasion of Iraq was an act of revenge – specifically, for the terrorist attacks against America on September 11th 2001. For example, around the beginning of our invasion one soldier interviewed by an “embedded” CNN correspondent said: “I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty. I wanna take revenge for 9/11.” 53 Another young U.S. soldier said: “There’s a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that…I don’t want to say payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.” 54
According to Marines, the flag draped over the face of a statue of Saddam Hussein by a U.S. soldier when the Americans entered Baghdad in April 2003 was the same flag that hung over the Pentagon when it was attacked on September 11th. Clearly, this act was intended to symbolise the successful ‘payback’ for the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, a poll taken in January 2003 found that half of Americans believed that one or more of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens. In fact, none of them were. 55
Even in the UK, there was evidence of this fantasy of invading Iraq as revenge for September 11th. On the Saturday before we invaded, the cover of the UK’s biggest selling daily tabloid, The Sun, showed British troops amassed in the desert ready for combat, with the large caption above them: “LET’S ROLL.” “Let’s roll” are the famous final words of one of the brave passengers who took on their hijackers on September 11th. Here then, the feeling was apparently that our troops were going to invade Iraq in order to kill al Qaeda terrorists involved in the 9/11 atrocities.
Being as there was never any link shown of Iraq and Saddam Hussein with the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on September 11th, why did people feel we were avenging these attacks by invading Iraq? The answer is simple, in my opinion. We were not actually getting revenge for September 11th: We were getting revenge for the punishments we suffered at the hands of our parents when we were children. As one soldier put it: “They hit us at home and, now, it’s our turn.” 56
There is evidence of a similar group fantasy prior to the 1991 Gulf War. For example, the New York Post (30th August 1990) had shown Saddam Hussein patting a boy on the head, with the large headline: “CHILD ABUSER.” And in October 1990, a story emerged where a 15-year-old girl claimed to have witnessed the invading Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait taking babies from their incubators and leaving them on the floor to die. The story was later thoroughly discredited. It turned out that the girl was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S.: a fact that had been known to the organizers of the Congressional hearing where she gave her false testimony. 59 However, the story had already served its purpose, with President Bush (Senior) making repeated references to it in the build-up to the Gulf War. What better way then for us to get revenge for our childhood suffering than by waging war on a nation ruled by a “child abuser” and killing soldiers who were ruthless towards babies? In his study of propaganda in the Gulf War, John R MacArthur concludes: “of all the accusations made against [Saddam Hussein], none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.” 58
On 29th February 1992, the International War Crimes Tribunal met in New York to give its final verdict on U.S. conduct in the Gulf War. This was the culmination of ten months of work since the setting up of the Commission of Enquiry by Ramsey Clark. The United States and its principle officers stood accused of 19 charges of war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. 22 judges from 18 different nations found them to be guilty on all counts.
Yet the Gulf War was only one of a long series of criminal acts against Iraq. According to a report written by the Belgian law professor, Marc Bossuyt – an authority on international law: “The sanctions regime against Iraq is unequivocally illegal under existing international humanitarian law and human rights law. Some would go as far as making a charge of genocide.” 59 According to Ramsey Clark, more than 1.5 million Iraqis have died as a result of these sanctions.
In 1992, Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General of the UN, said of the ‘no fly zones’ imposed by Britain, France and America: “They are illegal.” 60 Regarding our March 2003 invasion, Labour MP Tam Dalyell wrote: “The overwhelming majority of international lawyers…have concluded that military action in Iraq without proper UN security council authorisation is illegal under international law. The Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, resigned on precisely this point after 30 years’ service.” 61
Experts seem to agree that the treatment of Iraq by Western nations – particularly America and Britain – has been crime after crime after crime. John Pilger described the situation as “what will be seen, I have no doubt, as one of the great and enduring crimes of the late 20th century.” 62
Furthermore, little known to most people, on a number of occasions prior to the Gulf War, Iraq sought a negotiated solution to its disagreements with Kuwait that would include withdrawing its invading troops.63 For example, on 3rd January 1991 they put forward an offer that was, according to U.S. State Department sources, a “serious pre-negotiating offer” that “indicated the intention of Iraq to withdraw.”64 This would have been an ideal opportunity to resolve the crisis peacefully without further loss of life. Yet the offer was dismissed.
Imagine though that instead this offer had been accepted; Iraq had withdrawn its troops; there had been no Gulf War and the UN sanctions had been lifted immediately. Think of the hundreds of thousands of lives that would have been spared. Imagine all the misery and human suffering that would have been avoided. For peaceful solutions like this to be achieved in future, the people of Western nations like Britain and America will have to find ways of conducting our international affairs without perpetually restaging our own childhood traumas against weaker nations. This is what has been done to Iraq. We need to prevent it from ever happening again.
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