A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja

JOOST R. HILTERMANN, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007). Pp. 314. $29.00 cloth.
REVIEWED BY CHRIS TOENSING, Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP),
Washington, D.C.; e-mail: ctoensing@merip.org
doi:10.1017/S0020743809091223
It is painful to recall, amidst the horrors of the present Iraq War, that the 2003 U.S. invasion
was sold partly as a remedy for the horrors of Iraqi wars past. The Bush administration's
refrain that Saddam Hussein “gassed his own people“ was a scare tactic, to be sure—imagine
what he might do to people not “his own“—as well as a call for belated redress of the coldblooded
murder of some 5,000 Kurds with chemical weapons at Halabja on 16 March 1988.
Halabja, as Joost Hiltermann writes in A Poisonous Affair, is a word akin to Srebrenica or
Dresden (p. xii): it stands alone in evoking what happened at the place it names, and it also
stands in for a sequence of atrocities, in this case the genocidal Anfal campaign meant to
crush the Kurdish rebellion during the Iran–Iraq war.
Hiltermann has written a masterly account of the Halabja tragedy, one part investigative history
and one part indictment of the U.S. and international silence that greeted Iraq's systematic
use of poison gas at the time. In snappy, unsentimental prose, he reconstructs the full historical
context of the lethal assault and explains why it continues to have deleterious consequences
for international peace and security today. Crucially, and in marked contrast to those who cited
Anfal as justification for an ex post facto humanitarian intervention, Hiltermann locates Anfal
and Halabja within the pattern of Iraqi chemical attacks upon Iranian soldiers. Halabja might
not have occurred, one is compelled to conclude, had the U.N. Security Council bestirred itself
to condemn Saddam's chemical warfare on the Iranian front with the appropriate alacrity and
severity.
The investigative history is based heavily on Hiltermann's personal experience as researcher
of Halabja and Anfal for Human Rights Watch in the early 1990s. In the course of his research,
he reviewed captured Iraqi mukhabar¯at files and interviewed Kurdish survivors of the Anfal
gassing and deportations. Later, he filled out the brief for the book with study of U.S. and
U.N. documents and interviews with Iraqi and Iranian veterans, Iranian battlefield doctors,
State Department and U.S. intelligence officials, and many others. There is a very helpful
roster of interviewees, replete with titles and statements of relevant knowledge or expertise,
at the back of the volume. The overall picture would seem to be the most complete possible
given Hiltermann's facility in Arabic but not in Kurdish or Persian. A Poisonous Affair's
scholarly mien is blemished only by the occasional incorrect transliteration (“human wave
attacks,“ for instance, is rendered “amwaj bashiriya,“ p. 25).
As a historian, Hiltermann is meticulous and eminently fair. He gives a thorough hearing to
contrary views, enhancing the power of his case against U.S. and international inaction. For
example, he devotes an entire chapter to evaluating the claim, in State Department “talking
490 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 41 (2009)
points“ circulated in April 1988, that “both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons in the
fighting around Halabja“ (p. 126). This assertion was of a piece with the long-standing State
Department reluctance to name Iraq as the perpetrator of gas attacks on the Iranian front,
which was dictated by the U.S. “tilt“ toward Iraq throughout the 1980–88 fighting. The “tilt,“
in turn, led Washington to lobby for limp U.N. statements as the reports of illicit armaments
mounted, culminating in the 9 May 1988 Security Council resolution mourning Halabja but
fecklessly calling on “both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons.“
From Hiltermann's sifting of the evidence, three points of particular interest emerge, here
in ascending order. First, “there is no convincing evidence“ (p. 157) that Iran ever used
chemical weapons during the war, although “the jury is still out“ (p. 164) on allegations
by Iranian Kurds that Iran dropped mustard gas on them. Second, the likely source of the
“Iran did Halabja“ rumor is Col. Walter “Pat“ Lang, the former Defense Intelligence Agency
official who famously coined the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid“ to describe the grip of the
neoconservatives' cherry-picked intelligence on Iraq within the national security state. In an
interview with Hiltermann in 2000, Lang not only stuck to his guns but also offered a window
into U.S. policy calculations with this query: “On the battlefield, why is it [chemical weapons
use] worse than other weapons?“ (p. 203). Third, earnest U.S. remonstrations with Baghdad
over gas attacks were repeatedly undercut, not only by revelations of dealings with Tehran, as
in the Iran-Contra episode, but also by high-level telegraphing of the “tilt.“ As David Newton,
ambassador to Iraq from 1984–1998, put it, “We had an interest in preventing the use and
spread of these weapons. But it obviously was a futile exercise. Their attitude was, ’You want
us to win the war, so. . . .“' (p. 74).
A Poisonous Affair is required reading for students of the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi history,
Kurdish history, and U.S. Middle East policy. It is provocative reading for students of international
relations, given its larger thesis, sure to be derided as softheaded in some quarters,
that U.S. and U.N. failure to condemn Iraqi chemical weapons use undermined the strategic
interest of the West as well as aspired-to human-rights norms. With regard to strategic interest,
Hiltermann is most convincing when he argues that Iran was driven to its own chemical and
(possibly) nuclear weapons research by the free pass given Saddam's chemical bombardiers.
And the damage to human rights and human beings? The thousands of graves of Kurds and
Iranian soldiers are of course the most powerful testimony, followed closely by the hacking
coughs of the hundreds still dying protracted deaths from mustard gas inhalation today. However,
listen also to the Halabjan who asked in 2002 about the pending U.S. invasion of Iraq:
“In 1988 they closed their eyes to Halabja because Saddam was the enemy of Iran. But now
he's the enemy, and they are using my town as an excuse. We feel bitter, used, sickened“
(p. 183). Indeed.