Jeffrey Goldberg discusses Iraq’s Kurds, who in the late 80s were attacked with chemical — and, possibly, biological — weapons by the Baghdad government under Saddam Hussein.
Your account of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks on Kurdish towns and villages in 1988 is horrifying, both because of what happened and because, fourteen years later, the full story is not well known. Why has the genocide of the Kurds not made a greater impression on the West?
I think the answer is simple: the man who committed the genocide is still in power, fourteen years after the fact, and the world is still dealing with him. It is estimated that as many as two hundred thousand Kurds were killed, including five thousand in a single gas attack on the city of Halabja. Dozens of other towns and villages were also struck by chemical weapons. If the world were to fully acknowledge the crime that took place, wouldn’t it be a moral necessity to remove Saddam Hussein from power? Imagine if Hitler remained in power into the early nineteen-sixties. I doubt we’d have heard as much about the Holocaust.