For the record

I think the UK government should be included in your note — isn’t that how Robin Cook made his name?

I remember finding room space for Kurdish activists to meet in LA who were organising to protest the genocide at the US Federal building, and joining a couple of the protests. Just a bunch of lefties as far as I remember, but maybe the local Republican elite were there in disguise.

Maybe somebody can reconcile this:

The Pell bill died at the end of the congressional session in 1988, in spite of heroic efforts by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts to force it through by holding up a raft of administration nominations.

with this.

As far as I can tell from Jet’s link, a watered-down version was passed in the House, then the bill died in conference committee.

The details on that point, of course, don’t alter in the slightest the main point about how pro-Saddam Reagan and Bush were literally until the eve of the Kuwait invasion, despite the atrocities for which Saddam was already known to be responsible.

You have to figure that at least some of Bush 41’s “moral clarity” regarding the Kuwait invasion had the object of obscuring this prior relationship; see also Noriega, Manuel.

Yeah, but Iraq at this moment is worse off than it was under Saddam. It truly escapes me how anyone can even admit they were pro-war in the past, let alone in the present, without hiding their head in shame.

Extenuating circumstances? Well, one could begin by noting that the rationale for the policy is … the same one so many Democrats urge us to adopt as the basis for our foreign policy now. It’s the old Kissinger/Scowcroft plan, isn’t it? Not something I’d throw someone in the dock for, largely because I think it’s terribly important that we not criminalize the new Democratic platform.

One might also note that the Iraq-Iraq war did not begin during the Reagan administration, but during the Carter administration. Wikipedia claims that the Iran-Iraq war began after Iraq received “secret encouragement by the US administration (Jimmy Carter, conveyed through Saudi Arabia) which was embroiled in a dispute with the new regime in Iran.” (Carter into the dock? Well, maybe you’re on to something, JohnQ.)

I have no problem criticizing the Reagan administration for their error here. Absolutely they were wrong in continuing the Carter administration’s policies.

The more interesting question is when you think Galbraith went wrong. (Galbraith, for those who don’t know, was an original neocon. He was a prominent supporter of the invasion in 2003, and is now a prominent supporter of a partition of Iraq.)

Samantha Power’s book, A Problem From Hell also references the doubling by Pappy Bush of the Commodity Credit Corp. credits for Saddam.

Neil: You’re thinking of the father from Arrested Development, not Jacques Chirac.

‘I’m happy to except those Republicans who supported the Bill. And I think the bill should have been passed which obviously would have made extending credit to Saddam a crime (as it was when AWB busted the sanctions later on).’

Well fantastic. You think folks who violated a law that was never actually passed should be in the dock.

But you very generously don’t think folks who opposed a laws that was never actually passed should be imprisoned for not violating a non existent law. Very very generous of you.

‘As for the rest, I’ll throw it back at you. You’re unwilling either to endorse aid to Saddam or to criticise the Bushies so you resort to dishonest rhetorical questions. Right?’

WTF? Some very basic questions, not rhetorical, I actually want the answers you refuse to provide, designed to highlight the ridiculous nature of your rhetoric.

How we should treat regimes that fall far short of the liberal ideal is a serious question.

If you answered it seriously it would expose the ridiculous nature of your rhetoric.

Absolutely the continued extension of assistance to the Baathists after 1988 was reprehensible. The only remotely “extenuating” circumstance that I can think of is the judgment that Iran was still the greater overall danger, and Iraq a bulwark against it, but history has hardly been kind to that misjudgment.

The Congressional Record citation that Jet linked, however, does raise some questions that are not answered in Galbraith’s piece.

1) The bill passed the Senate by voice vote one day after it was introduced by bipartisan sponsorship. I’m not an expert in Congressional procedure, but to me this suggests that the measure was not meaningfully opposed (and may even have been generally supported) by Senate Republicans. It may be that the Administration opposed the bill, but it’s hard to see where that opposition manifested itself at the Senate level.

2) Following the links, one sees that the House then passed HR 552, which “expresse[d] the opinion of the House of Representatives that S. 2763, which imposes sanctions and calls for United Nations action against Iraq, contravenes the U.S. Constitution and is an infringement of the privileges of the House.” To me, this sounds like the House killing the bill. It may be that this was done as a result of Administration pressure, but why would the Democratically-controlled House give in to the Republican White House in this way, especially in an election year? At the least, this seems to extend culpability to the Democratic party as well as the Republicans.

3) In light of the above, what is the explanation for Sen. Kennedy’s “heroic efforts”? The bill passed the Senate without noticeable opposition; there does not appear to have been any filibuster or hold. Would he have imposed confirmation delays as a means of putting pressure on the House to pass the bill? That strikes me as very unusual. What was he trying to “force it through”? I have to wonder whether Galbraith is inadvertently conflating some action by Kennedy on a different bill with the history of this one. And if that’s so, are there other inaccuracies in his account?

As I said, I don’t have much knowledge in this area, and it’s entirely possible that I’m misreading the record. Moreover, the fact that I’m questioning aspects of Galbraith’s account of events shouldn’t obscure my full agreement with John Q’s overall point that the continuation of aid was a terrible mistake.

By the way, Wikipedia (as of today) gets the history of this bill wrong; it says that the bill passed. Someone might want to fix that.

I’m just curious about how it’s the Republicans, who did gave Saddam a small measure of support – along with the Dems – but who eventually got rid of Saddam, get all the oprobrium, but the countries that were far more actively invloved in supporting Saddam – France, Russia, China (who just so happen to have oppsosed getting rid of him, funny that), are hardly ever held to account. I presume it’s because they opposed the war. Which is a rather strange judgement – consistancy wins out over changing one’s mind about Saddam?

JohnQ, as your post and responses indicate, anyone who wants to take your line must work very hard at not thinking clearly.

Why would using the crimes in which one was supposedly complicit as a “pretext” for the war be worse than, say, continuing in the appeasement?

Because some of us think that launching a war of aggression is a uniquely awful crime, Thomas. I realize that this needs to be pointed out repeatedly, because it’s a fact that tends to evaporate into thin air, but the pretext for the invasion of Iraq was not the gassing of the Kurds or other human rights violation, but its possession of nonexistent weapons.

A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting “aggressive” wars – Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime,” the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York.

Source

But hell, I’m sure Ferencz is just a rabid partisan Democrat, desperate to whitewash the bloody crimes of the monstrous Jimmy Carter.

…it’s facile to assume that any one party or ideology is going to be more moral than another on the international relations front.

Well, up to a point. I think that great powers are always “realists” of one sort or another; they all follow the maxim that necessity knows no law. But there are huge differences: in 19th century Britain or 20th century America, before some heinous action was undertaken, a case had to be made that it really was necessary. Not so in most autocratic regimes.

Galbraith ducks that issue when he says:

The Reagan and first Bush administrations believed that Hussein could be a strategic partner to the United States, a counterweight to Iran, a force for moderation in the region, and possibly help in the Arab-Israel peace process. That was, of course, an illusion. A ruthless dictator who launched an attack on his neighbor, Iran, who used chemical weapons, and who committed genocide against his own Kurds was never likely to be a reliable American ally.

Who’s he kidding? Stalin did far worse things, but when it mattered most he was the perfect ally: the guy who is prepared to shed his own troops’ blood to ensure the victory of the alliance.

To put it bluntly: Saddam could have remained an ally of the West if he had been properly managed after the Iran-Iraq war. The smart thing would have been to go on supporting him, but with the proviso that he behave at least as well as his counterparts in Egypt and Jordan. I suppose that’s what Pell & Co. had in mind. It stinks a bit, but a lot less than what the Administration did.

John Q, I agree that it’s unproductive to be defending one party or another here, but that shouldn’t exempt Galbraith from scrutiny. Your post is titled “For the Record,” and my point in #19 is that the legislative record does not support Galbraith’s assertion that the Pell bill was strongly opposed by the Bush Administration. Which makes me wonder as well about the accuracy of his other assertion that the Bush Administration also “vociferously opposed” the 1990 bill. There are plenty of robust bases on which to criticize US policy toward Iraq, but Galbraith’s recollection may not be one of them.

Dr. Quiggin,
The Democrats held 60% of the House and only needed 26 of the 177 Republicans to go along with them to overturn a veto. If the Democrats would have even half-way wanted this bill, they could have had it (as it had passed with a unanimous vote in the Senate). Saying that Reagan strong armed the noble Democrat underdogs is silly. If Reagan was against this bill, he obviously had plenty of Democrat support.

Dr. Quiggin, I should have expanded on what I meant. The implication here is that we have seen no proof of Reagan’s complicity. Google, Technorati, and Wikipedia appear useless as Galbraith’s article has clogged most avenues of easy information. But the Congressional record shows that this could possibly be laid at someone else’s feet besides Reagan.

I haven’t much interest in defending Reagan as he made some nasty deals with the devil in the name of stopping Communism. But this article looks like a mid-term hit piece on the Republicans.

And if you are looking for inconsistencies between Republican stances then and now, read some of Bush’s speeches about how maintaining the status quo was important then, but promoting Democracy is important now. The fall of the Berlin wall changed everything, it just took until 9/11 for the US government to realize it (clever eh? I just thought that line up with only this bottle of Jameson as help)