1991 massacre of thousands of fleeing Iraqi troops was part of U.S. 'total war' alt politics usa
http://www.themilitant.com
"It was like going down an American highway--people were all mixed up
in cars in trucks. People got out of their cars and ran away. We shot
them.... The Iraqis were getting massacred."--Pfc. Charles
Sheehan-Miles, describing March 2, 1991, assault on retreating Iraqi
column at Rumaila, Iraq, two days after cease-fire in Gulf War.
"We've blown away a busload of kids."--Unidentified platoon sergeant
during March 2 assault.
"We're yelling on the radio, 'They're firing at the prisoners! They're
firing at the prisoners!'"--Specialist 4 Edward Walker, describing
February 27, 1991, incident during ground invasion of Iraq.
"It's murder."--Unidentified U.S. soldier during February 27 attack.
BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Washington's assault on Iraq was one of the biggest slaughters in
modern history. The six-week bombardment that began in mid-January 1991
and the 100-hour ground invasion unleashed on February 24 killed an
estimated 150,000 people. Millions were homeless and exposed to hunger
and disease, as large sections of the country were left in ruins. The
murderous effects of that war are still felt today, reinforced by the
ongoing economic embargo and continued bombing attacks against Iraq.
Despite attempts by the U.S. government to lie and cover up the truth
about its massacre, some of the facts have come out over the years.
An extensive article in the May 22 issue of the New Yorker magazine by
journalist Seymour Hersh has exposed more facts about Washington's
slaughter in the Arab-Persian Gulf.
Washington seized on Baghdad's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 to
launch a war aimed at overthrowing the Iraqi government and installing
a regime subservient to U.S. imperialism. In pursuing these goals the
U.S. capitalist class sought to gain an edge over its imperialist
rivals in Europe and Japan, bolster its domination in the Middle East,
and gain greater control over the oil reserves in the Gulf. The U.S.
rulers also used the war to tighten their military encirclement of the
workers state in Russia.
Washington, however, did not achieve its political aims in the region.
They failed to overthrow the Iraqi government. They have proven unable
to crush the Palestinian struggle for a homeland. Instead, there is
more volatility and instability in the region and today the Israeli
government, its junior imperialist partner in the region, has been
forced out of Lebanon.
The February 1991 U.S.-led ground invasion of Iraq was a one-sided
slaughter, not a war. The capitalist regime in Iraq, headed by Saddam
Hussein, did not organize a fight but simply tried to maneuver with
Washington. Baghdad abandoned the mass of workers and peasants in
Iraq's army on the battlefield of Kuwait and southern Iraq. As these
ex-soldiers tried to flee back home, the U.S. military machine simply
massacred tens of thousands of human beings. The U.S. invading forces
suffered barely a handful of casualties, mostly from "friendly fire."
Hersh is a liberal journalist who gained a reputation for his
investigative reporting on the 1968 My Lai massacre of Vietnamese by
the U.S. military. For the New Yorker article, more than 300 interviews
were conducted with U.S. army officers in the Gulf war and army
investigators.
Hersh focuses mainly on events after the cease-fire announced by U.S.
president George Bush on Feb. 28, 1991, in particular the operations
directed by one of the top commanders of the Gulf War, Gen. Barry
McCaffrey. The article quotes U.S. army officers and soldiers who
describe several instances of Iraqis being killed as they tried to flee
or surrender or even after they had given themselves up as prisoners to
the U.S. forces.
Hersh views these massacres simply as an "excess" of war. He doesn't
challenge the premise of Washington's bipartisan assault on the Iraqi
people, and so doesn't dwell much on the brutality unleashed by
Washington before the February 28 cease-fire, which Bush proclaimed
because he believed that by then the U.S. forces were on the verge of
achieving their goals.
Nonetheless, even the limited facts presented in this article are an
indictment of Washington and shed light on the character of its
assault.
McCaffrey, who commanded 26,000 troops of the 24th Infantry Division,
drove his forces more than 200 miles into Iraq to block the retreat of
Iraqi soldiers from the war zone in Kuwait. Abandoned by their military
leadership, they offered no resistance.
Killing of hundreds of fleeing soldiers
"We met the enemy," recalled 1st Lt. Greg Downey, describing an
encounter on February 25, the second day of the ground war. "They were
a sad sight with absolutely no fight left in them." Referring to the
fact their leadership had stranded them, he added, "The hate I had for
any Iraqi dissipated."
After the cease-fire was declared, the retreating Iraqis had been
assured safe passage. Many had thrown away their weapons. Tanks were
loaded on trucks with their cannons aimed to the rear. "Some of the
tanks were in travel formation, and their guns were not in any engaged
position," said Sgt. Stuart Hirstein of the 124th Military Intelligence
Battalion.
On March 2, deep inside Iraq, a five-mile-long retreating column of
Iraqis approached the causeway across Lake Hammar, near the Rumaila oil
field west of Basra. They ran into the U.S. forces McCaffrey had
deployed right across the line of retreat. McCaffrey ordered a
devastating attack. The U.S. military forces sealed off the causeway
with Apache attack helicopters and artillery fire, pinned the Iraqi
column on the road, and pounded them for five hours with wave after
wave of bomb, tank, artillery, and missile attacks.
At least 400 Iraqis were killed. Some 700 Iraqi tanks, armored cars,
and trucks were destroyed. Among them was a bus with civilians and
children that was hit by a rocket. No shots were fired at the U.S.
forces, and there were no serious U.S. combat casualties.
No reporters were allowed in the area at the time. During the Gulf War
no media representatives were permitted on the battlefields without
military escorts.
The massacre of unresisting Iraqis and the deaths of children deeply
disturbed many U.S. soldiers. One platoon sergeant remarked, "We've
blown away a busload of kids."
An officer in the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion said a captured
Iraqi tank commander asked his U.S. interrogators several times, "Why
are you killing us? All we were doing was going home."
U.S. slaughter of Iraqi prisoners
On February 27, the fourth day of the U.S. ground invasion, a large
group of Iraqi soldiers had surrendered to a platoon in the 2-7
Battalion of the 24th Infantry Division. One of the first vehicles to
pull up was a bus filled with wounded Iraqi soldiers. The bus was
marked with a crescent--the Arab equivalent of the Red Cross sign.
Doctors and male nurses were among the approximately 380 prisoners.
Specialist 4 Edward Walker was ordered to blow up weapons confiscated
from the Iraqi soldiers. Shortly after destroying a truck holding these
weapons, the platoon was abruptly ordered to move on. The U.S. GIs,
greatly outnumbered by the Iraqis, left after giving them surrender
leaflets printed in Arabic. The papers promised that those who gave up
would live to see their families again. Lt. Kirk Allen, the platoon
commander, notified the battalion's operations headquarters of the
exact location of the Iraqi hospital bus.
As the confiscated weapons were destroyed in a massive explosion,
according to Walker, several U.S. Bradley vehicles, armed with
chain-driven machine guns capable of firing up to a thousand rounds a
minute, rolled onto the scene. The high-intensity weapons opened up.
'They knew there were prisoners there'
Walker, who was convinced all the prisoners were mowed down, said the
Bradleys also fired on him and the other GIs who were in a marked
Humvee. "They knew there were prisoners there. They knew they were
unarmed," said Walker. "They knew the hospital bus was there, and they
knew we were blowing the truck up."
Walker left the military in 1991, not permitted by the authorities at
Fort Leonard Wood to reenlist after spilling the beans on the killing.
Another military engagement involving McCaffrey's troops from the 124th
Military Intelligence Battalion occurred one day after the cease-fire.
A ground-radar surveillance team joined a platoon of scouts who
discovered a cache of Iraqi weapons at a deserted schoolhouse near
Highway 8.
Steven Larimore, a sergeant who headed a brigade assigned to the
platoon, said his men noticed a group of villagers walking in the area.
"One guy had a white bedsheet on a stick," Larimore stated. "Out of the
blue sky, some guy from where we're sitting begins shooting" at the
Iraqis. Other machine guns opened fire. In less than three or four
minutes some 20 Iraqi civilians were mowed down.
Liberal reporter Hersh denounces the U.S.-organized atrocities carried
out after the cease-fire under McCaffrey's command, but says little
about the brutal bombing campaign and the final ground assault by the
U.S. forces until then--a war that was completely bipartisan.
But the events of March 2 were a continuation of the "total war"
approach unleashed by the imperialist rulers on the Iraqi people,
culminating with the annihilation of tens of thousands fleeing on the
highway from Kuwait City to Basra.
During this onslaught, described by pilots as a "turkey shoot," U.S.
military forces bombed the front and back of Iraqi convoys, trapping
thousands of vehicles in a "killing box." A reporter for the London
Independent who visited the scene of the carnage wrote, "I lost count
of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smouldering wreckage or slumped
face down in the sand."
Far from being a rogue officer, McCaffrey simply carried out the
"Powell doctrine"--named for Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff at the time--of using maximum force at the outset of a war to
minimize U.S. casualties.
"Do we understand that when we use military force decisively, we are
actually killing people and breaking up their equipment?" McCaffrey
insisted in an interview published in the May 29 issue of Newsweek. "Do
you understand that when you actually apply power, you don't want a
fair fight?"
One fact Hersh does not report is that during the murderous Desert
Storm assault, the U.S. army literally buried alive thousands of Iraqi
soldiers in their trenches.
On February 24-25, 1991, three U.S. army brigades used tanks equipped
with plows to fill in with sand 70 miles of six-foot-deep trenches
defended by more than 8,000 Iraqi soldiers on the Saudi-Iraq border.
McCaffrey came under investigation after the war when an officer in his
unit filed a complaint about his post-cease-fire operations. Military
investigators filed a secret report and exonerated McCaffrey in 1991.
McCaffrey was promoted to four-star general in 1994 and served as
commander of the U.S. military forces in Latin America. President
William Clinton named him White House "drug czar" two years later.
Today he is directly involved in Washington's escalating military
intervention in Colombia, which is being waged under the banner of
fighting drug traffickers intertwined with the "fight against
terrorism."
The U.S.-organized massacre in Iraq was not an aberration or an excess.
It was the product of the drive by the U.S. ruling families to defend
their declining capitalist world order. The Gulf War announced
subsequent military assaults like the U.S.-led war against Yugoslavia.
One of the best explanations of these developments can be found in New
International no. 7, which features the article "Opening Guns of World
War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq," by Jack Barnes (see
http://www.pathfinderpress.com).
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