UN-Truth

An OP-ED in Saturday’s New York Times says, according to its author, that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was an abominable authoritarian state, guilty of many crimes, mostly toward its own people. However, one should note the strange but key fact that, when the United States representatives and the Iraqi prosecutors were enumerating his evil deeds, they systematically omitted what was undoubtedly his greatest crime in terms of human suffering and of violating international justice: his invasion of Iran. Why? Because the United States and the majority of foreign states were actively helping Iraq in this aggression.   And now the United States is continuing, through other means, this greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the Iranian government…” Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of ‘The Parallax View.’  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/opinion/05zizek.html

The UN played no small role in all this.  In the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that sent the U.S.-allied Shah of Iran into exile, and then seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran (holding American diplomats and military guards hostage for 444 days — until the day that it was announced that Ronald Reagan had been elected as U.S. president), the U.S. was very, very angry with Iran, and had support from most of the world.  After all, by its seizure of diplomatic premises and holding of diplomatic personnel as hostages, the Islamic Republic had very seriously violated the Vienna Conventions.  

When Saddam invaded Iran, the U.S. was still very, very angry.  It gave tacit and apparently also covert support to Iraq — as did many other countries.  This was expressed in the UN by the inaction or very partial actions of the UN Security Council, and also in the UN General Assembly (the late Ismat Kittani — an Iraqi though also a Kurd, and a former UN staff member as well as Iraqi diplomat — was even elected President of the UNGA in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war). 

The UN Security Council could not, in its first pronouncments on the issue, even agree to admit that Iraq had used chemical weapons against its own people — something that U.S. officials mention on a daily basis nowadays. 

A contemporary account in the New York Times (written by Patrick Tyler), based on a CIA report that was apparently a very partial attempt at disinformation, even said that Iran should also be accused, as it had used chemican and nerve weapons, too. 

As it is impossible to really retract something once it is published, traces of this CIA report, and this NY Times article, and other pieces derived from it, are still floating around today.

At the time, all Iran wanted, to agree to stop fighting, was a clear condemnation by the international community of the “aggressor” in what Iranian officials called “the imposed war” with Iraq.

They have never gotten this from the UN. 

(Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on behalf of President Bill Clinton, and then President George W. Bush, however, have since named Iraq as the agressor — many long years later.  But. U.S. officials still do not like to think of the effect that this war had on Iran, and on the region.) 

Filed under: Chemical Weapons, Iran, Iraq, UN General Assembly, UN Security Council