Iraq and Selective Amnesia

I have often been at odds with Michael Kinsley of late but he has a good commentary in The Washington Post today, An Essential in Iraq: The Ability to Forget.

The United States marched into Baghdad two years ago terribly excited to start a process known as "de-Baathification," which sounds like a 10-year-old boy's fantasy but which meant purging representatives of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from the government and other seats of power. But as the country sank into chaos, the occupiers came to realize that it's hard to run a country without all the people who ran it last week. So forget about that. Baathists, except for those at the very top, are welcome to resume where they left off.

There is one person who is still demanding that the Baathists all be purged.

And who is this anti-American troublemaker? It's Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi spent decades in exile, meddling a bit from afar but devoting most of his energies to financial chicanery. For a few months in 2003 we forgot Chalabi's little foibles and promoted him as the Nelson Mandela of Iraq. Why? Because the Bush administration liked what he was saying about how the weapons of mass destruction covered the streets of Baghdad like manna from heaven. That turned into an embarrassment, and it's been "Ahmed Who?" ever since.

So the guy who is as much responsible for the debacle in Iraq as anyone is still causing trouble.

He then goes on to point out the hypocrisy of the Bush administrations outrage over the charges against Saddam.

The charges against Hussein that Juhi is hearing concern the slaughter of 150 men and boys in a town called Dujail. This is supposed to be a warm-up for the prosecution of Hussein and others for the notorious Anfal campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq in the late 1980s, where poison gas was used and the usual number given for deaths is 150,000.

I say "notorious" because Anfal -- and especially the use of poison gas against civilians in a town called Halabja in 1988 -- became crucial parts of the Bush administration's defense of the war after the initial justifications (such as all those weapons of mass destruction) collapsed. But the notoriety is recent.

Two decades ago, we knew all about these events, yet we did nothing and said almost nothing. In 1983, as Iraq was starting to use mustard gas against Iranian soldiers, Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad for President Ronald Reagan and apparently made one veiled reference to this amidst a lot of suck-uppery sending the larger message that we were tilting in Iraq's favor in the Iran-Iraq war. After Halabja, the State Department worked actively to convince the world that Saddam Hussein was not responsible.