Blood for Oil

By Kathy Kelly
March 9, 2021

Amid the ongoing horror, it’s important to find ways to atone for
war crimes - including reparations

Thirty years ago, when the United States launched Operation Desert Storm against
Iraq, I was a member of the Gulf Peace Team. We were 73 people from fifteen different
countries, aged 22 to 76, living in a tent camp close to Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia,
along the road to Mecca.

We aimed to nonviolently interpose ourselves between the warring parties. Soldiers are
called upon to risk their lives for a cause they may not know much about. Why not ask
peace activists to take risks on behalf of preventing and opposing wars?

So we witnessed the dismal onset of the air war at 3:00 a.m. on January 17, 1991,
huddled under blankets, hearing distant explosions and watching anxiously as war
planes flew overhead. With so many fighter jets crossing the skies, we wondered if
there would be anything left of Baghdad.

Ten days later, Iraqi authorities told us we must pack up, readying for a morning
departure to Baghdad. Not all of us could agree on how to respond. Adhering to basic
principles, twelve peace team members resolved to sit in a circle, holding signs saying
“We choose to stay.”

Buses arrived the next morning, along with two Iraqi civilians and two soldiers. Tarak, a
civilian, was in charge, under orders to follow a timetable for the evacuation. Looking at
the circle of twelve, Tarak seemed a bit baffled. He walked over to where I stood.
“Excuse me, Ms. Kathy,” he asked, “but what am I to do?”

“No one in that circle means you any harm,” I assured him. “And no one wishes to
disrespect you, but they won’t be able board the bus on their own. It’s a matter of
conscience.”

Tarak nodded and then motioned to the other Iraqis who followed him as he
approached Jeremy Hartigan, the tallest person sitting in the circle. Jeremy, an elderly
UK lawyer and also a Buddhist, was chanting a prayer as he sat with his sign.
Tarak bent over Jeremy, kissed him on the forehead, and said, ”Baghdad!” Then he
pointed to the bus.

Next, he, the other civilian and two Iraqi soldiers carefully hoisted Jeremy, still in his
cross-legged position, and carried him to the top step of the bus. Gently placing him
down, Tarak then asked, “Mister, you okay?!” And in this manner they proceeded to
evacuate the remaining eleven people in the circle.

Another evacuation was happening as Iraqi forces, many of them young conscripts,
hungry, disheveled and unarmed, poured out of Kuwait along a major highway, later
called “the Highway of Death.”

Boxed in by U.S. forces, many Iraqis abandoned their vehicles and ran away from what
had become a huge and very dangerous traffic jam. Iraqis attempting to surrender were
stuck in a long line of Iraqi military vehicles. They were systematically slaughtered.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one U.S. pilot of the air attack. Another called
it “a turkey shoot.”

Days earlier, on February 24th, the United States Army forces buried scores of living
Iraqi soldiers in trenches. According to The New York Times, Army officials said “the
Iraqi soldiers who died remained in their trenches as plow-equipped tanks dumped tons
of earth and sand onto them, filling the trenches to ensure that they could not be used
as cover from which to fire on allied units that were poised to pour through the gaps.”

Shortly after viewing photos of gruesome carnage caused by the ground and air attacks,
President George H.W. Bush called for a cessation of hostilities on February 27th,
1991. An official cease fire was signed on March 4.

It’s ironic that in October of 1990, Bush had asserted that the U.S. would never stand by
and let a larger country swallow a smaller country. His country had just invaded
Grenada and Panama, and as President Bush spoke, the U.S. military pre-positioned at
three Saudi ports hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft, and millions of tons of
equipment and fuel in preparation to invade Iraq.

Noam Chomsky notes that there were diplomatic alternatives to the bloodletting and
destruction visited upon Iraq by Operation Desert Storm. Iraqi diplomats had submitted
an alternative plan which was suppressed in the mainstream media and flatly rejected
by the U.S.
The U.S. State Department, along with Margaret Thatcher’s government in the United
Kingdom, were hell-bent on moving ahead with their war plans. “This was no time to go
wobbly,” U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously warned Bush.

The resolve to attack and punish Iraqis never ceased.

After the “success” of Operation Desert Storm, the bombing war turned into an
economic war, which lasted through 2003. As early as 1995, United Nations documents
clarified that the economic war, waged through continued imposition of U.N. economic
sanctions against Iraq, was far more brutal than even the worst of the 1991 aerial and
ground war attacks.

In 1995, two Food and Agriculture Organization scientists estimated that more than half
a million Iraqi children under age five had likely died due to economic sanctions.

In February, 1998, while visiting a hospital in Baghdad, I watched two friends from the
United Kingdom trying to absorb the horror of seeing children being starved to death
because of policy decisions made by governments in the UK and the U.S. Martin
Thomas, himself a nurse, looked at mothers sitting cross legged, holding their limp and
dying infants, in a ward where helpless doctors and nurses tried to treat many dozens of
children.

“I think I understand,” said Thomas. “It’s a death row for infants.” Milan Rai, now editor
of Peace News and then the coordinator of a U.K. campaign to defy the economic
sanctions, knelt next to one of the mothers. Rai’s own child was close in age to the
toddler the mother cradled. “I’m sorry,” Rai murmured. “I’m so very sorry.”

Those six words whispered by Milan Rai, are, I believe, incalculably important.

If only people in the U.S. and the UK could take those words to heart, undertaking to
finally pressure their governments to echo these words and themselves say, “We’re
sorry. We’re so very sorry.”

We’re sorry for coldly viewing your land as a “target rich environment” and then
systematically destroying your electrical facilities, sewage and sanitation plants, roads,
bridges, infrastructure, health care, education, and livelihood. We’re sorry for believing
we somehow had a right to the oil in your land, and we’re sorry many of us lived so well
because we were consuming your precious and irreplaceable resources at cut rate
prices.
We’re sorry for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of your children through economic
sanctions and then expecting you to thank us for liberating you. We’re sorry for
wrongfully accusing you of harboring weapons of mass destruction while we looked the
other way as Israel acquired thermonuclear weapons.

We’re sorry for again traumatizing your children through the 2003 Shock and Awe
bombing, filling your broken down hospitals with maimed and bereaved survivors of the
vicious bombing and then causing enormous wreckage through our inept and criminal
occupation of your land.

We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry. And we want to pay reparations.

From March 5 – 8, Pope Francis will visit Iraq. Security concerns are high, and I won’t
begin to second guess the itinerary that has been developed. But knowing of his
eloquent and authentic plea to end wars and stop the pernicious weapons trade, I wish
he could kneel and kiss the ground at the Ameriyah shelter in Baghdad.

There, on February 13, 1991, two 2,000 lb. U.S. laser guided missiles killed 400
civilians, mostly women and children. Another 200 were severely wounded. I wish
President Joe Biden could meet the Pope there and ask him to hear his confession.

I wish people around the world could be represented by the Pope as a symbol of unity
expressing collective sorrow for making war after hideous war, in Iraq, against people
who meant us no harm.

A version of this article first appeared at The Progressive.org

https://progressive.org/dispatches/remembering-first-gulf-war-kelly-210302/
Kathy Kelly, (Kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is a peace activist whose effort have at times led
her into war zones and U.S. prisons.