A friend told me I
was crazy to fly this September 11. "Blame Jim Abourezk," I
said.
Abourezk had asked
me to accompany him and Representative Nick Rahall, Democrat
of West Virginia, on a humanitarian mission to Iraq. Abourezk,
the seventy-one-year-old former South Dakota Democratic
Senator (1973-79), dropped out of his Sioux Falls law practice
for a week "to do what I can to try to stop the war," he told
me.
Neither Abourezk nor
Rahall was sure that the Iraqis would listen to political
logic.
"What lessons has
Saddam learned from the Gulf War?" I asked
Abourezk.
"We'll see, but I'm
not optimistic," he said. "We have to talk Iraqi officials
into doing something they don't want to do: Readmit the U.N.
weapons inspectors Clinton ordered to leave in 1998.
Otherwise, Bush'll bomb the shit out of the
Iraqis."
W e met up in
Amsterdam en route to Iraq, and we laughed about his first
experience as an emissary in a collision-course situation. In
1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM) had claimed to have
taken hostages on the Wounded Knee Reservation, and AIM
leaders asked for Abourezk to negotiate with them.
"South Dakota is my
state," Abourezk said back then, "and I chair the Indian
Affairs Subcommittee, so I'll be there." Along with South
Dakota's senior Senator, George McGovern, Abourezk flew in an
Air Force helicopter to Pine Ridge, where the FBI agent in
charge met them. "It was not that far from the little village
of Wood on the Sioux reservation where my father, a Lebanese
peddler, had opened a general store," Abourezk recalls. He
conferred with AIM leader Russell Means and advised him to
give it up before someone got hurt. Means agreed to do so on
the condition that the government stipulate what the charges
would be, but the Nixon Administration would not oblige, and
so the standoff lasted seventy more days. Later, a federal
prosecutor called Abourezk to testify against AIM. "I told him
what I had told the FBI, that the Indians had a just cause,
and he said, 'Forget it, we don't need your testimony.'
"
Abourezk got into
more controversy after his first trip to the Middle East in
1973, when he criticized U.S.-Israel policy and defended
Palestinian rights. "People I thought were friends became
instant enemies," he says. "Guys who worked on my campaign
stopped speaking to me. Worse, they started spreading rumors
about me being anti-Semitic. Wolf Blitzer [who then wrote
articles for a journal published by AIPAC, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee] said vicious stuff about me 'selling
out to the Arabs,' because I spoke about Israel withdrawing to
the pre-1967 borders in exchange for the Arab governments
signing a peace agreement with Israel, which they told me they
would do."
In 1980, Abourezk
founded the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. It
became the first organization to bring together Arab Americans
from all regions of the country, not only to deal with
grievances, but to stand up for Palestinian rights, as
well.
Abourezk and Rahall,
also of Lebanese descent, have known each for a long time. And
when Rahall asked him to join the delegation to Baghdad,
Abourezk felt he had an obligation to go.
It takes one hour
for Gulf Falcon Air to make the Damascus-Baghdad hop. Wadah
Kasimi, the Iraqi official in charge of our visit, looks
disappointed when Abourezk and Rahall tell him to cancel the
visit to alleged sites of weapons of mass destruction because,
says Abourezk, "we wouldn't know a Vaseline-making plant from
an anthrax factory, so why bother?"
At the Al Rasheed
hotel, I step on the inlaid mosaic tile face entitled "George
Bush War Criminal," which covers the entrance to the hotel
lobby. On the first day, we're spirited to the offices of Dr.
Omed Mubarak, a cardiologist, now minister of health. He
explains how the U.S. and British delegates that sit on the
U.N. committee overseeing the sanctions "destroy the integrity
of our health system by vetoing our access to crucial parts of
chemotherapy cocktails and surgical equipment" because they
"might have military use." To dramatize his lecture, he sends
us to a nearby pediatric hospital where we observe a Kurdish
girl clinging to her desperate-looking mother. The little girl
has blood oozing from her mouth. The doctors explain that they
have no medicines to treat her leukemia.
Even though we know
the Iraqi government wants to shock us, it is still hard not
to be affected.
"I have a daughter
about her age," Abourezk says, trying to hide his tears. Dr.
Mubarak describes how children have developed leukemia after
playing with shrapnel from depleted uranium bombs dropped by
U.S. planes. Bush rightly condemns Iraq for using chemical
weapons, but he fails to own up to the extensive use by the
United States of shells tipped with depleted uranium. There
has been a plethora of deformed births in southern Iraq, where
most of the depleted uranium ordnance was dropped--children
born with no heads, with enlarged heads, with other killing
birth defects.
It's more than 100
degrees outside as our Mercedes limousines push their way
through chaotic Baghdad traffic. Exhaust fumes mix with the
dusty air at a turbulent souk (bazaar), in which
peddlers offer local crafts, canned and fresh--well, sort
of--food, plastic toys, electronic gadgets, CDs, video
cassettes of X-rated movies and regular Hollywood fare. About
half the men sport the dishdashas, long white robes,
with or without the kaffiyeh on their heads. Others
wear slacks and shirts. Women in black robes with shawls
stride alongside those in skirts and even tight slacks; some
wear only hijabs to cover their heads. Loud and
rhythmic music blares, the smell of cooking lamb and chicken
emanates from some of the stalls.
Harold Samhat, a
retired Arab American businessman on the delegation, begins
negotiating a price for an imported Iranian silk rug with a
merchant who looks about thirty. I ask the handsome peddler in
well-fitting slacks and clean sport shirt about his political
take. His smiling face undergoes a metamorphosis, and so does
his English, which seemed fluent when dealing with
prices.
"Why you want war?
What good from war? We have plenty of war. We know bombs. We
know destruction. What we do to you? You bomb. We die. Bush
say he care about Iraqi people. Why he bomb us?"
The young man
becomes self-conscious, stops the sermon, offers us tea, and
resumes his bargaining. Harold buys the rug, and we're in the
cars again.
"It doesn't look
like they're preparing for war," I remark to Knight Ridder
correspondent Warren Strobel, as I observe the chaotic bustle
of midday in Baghdad.
"Yeah, but then
again, how do you prepare for the Leviathan?" he asks as our
cars pull up at the imposing office building (designed in a
neofascist desert style) of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq
Aziz.
Abourezk knew Aziz
back in the 1980s, and while he and Rahall meet with Aziz
privately, the rest of us contemplate several Saddam portraits
adorning the waiting room walls. These icons of Saddam, in
prayer, in derby with rifle, in uniform saluting, are
ubiquitous.
The Congressman and
former Senator reemerge from Aziz's office with the
owlish-looking Iraqi official behind them, dressed in his
canned spinach green uniform, belt drawn tightly around his
belly. Now in his seventies, Aziz belongs to the dwindling
fraternity of original Ba'ath Party members who made the
revolution in 1979 and survived Saddam Hussein's ruthless
whim.
"Jim, the Iraqi
people need peace," Aziz asserts. "But the Bush Administration
wants no talk, no dialogue about any matter. It threatens to
attack and then invade and our regime should be changed. What
are the pretexts? If, for instance, W.M.D. [weapons of mass
destruction] are a genuine concern, I have said repeatedly
that it could be resolved. I don't understand why the American
Congress didn't respond positively to our fact-finding
mission. We allowed them to bring any experts, any equipment
they needed. It's not that difficult a job to trace such
activities. In UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission,
which sent weapons inspection teams to Iraq], they have the
instruments to detect any biological or chemical weapon or
nuclear activity. It's not going to take years for the
Congress to be assured that there is no activity--maybe only
days."
Abourezk presses
Aziz. "Is there a reason for not allowing the weapons
inspectors to come back?"
"If the inspectors
return," he says, "there is no guarantee it will prevent war.
They could be used to create a crisis with the Iraqi
government and then be used as a pretext to
attack."
Abourezk insists
that some Bush Administration people have serious reservations
about making war unilaterally and that "your acceptance of
inspectors might help this coalition of Bush opponents make a
stronger case against U.S. military action."
Aziz doesn't buy it.
"Bush has said the U.S. will attack with or without the
inspectors," he says. "So we're doomed if we do, doomed if we
don't. If we can't prevent war, why expose ourselves to
inspectors who will visit military barracks and then expose
facts on how many tanks, anti-aircraft, etc. we have? If
you're doomed if you do and doomed if you don't, you better
don't."
Abourezk then raises
the issue of Iraq's alleged ties with Al Qaeda.
"Lies," Aziz
declares. "When the Taliban came to power, the diplomat
representing the former government remained in Baghdad. We
didn't accept the new representative of the Taliban
government. In 1990, Bin Laden tried to convince Saudi
leadership to use him and his groups to fight Iraq. This is on
the record. How could we work with a person with those
intentions?"
Aziz looks tired.
His voice rings with the tones of fatalism. But he warns the
United States of untoward consequences if it
invades.
"There's a
difference between this war and the 1991 war," he says. "The
U.S. bombed and Iraq decided to withdraw from Kuwait. But the
U.S. idea of a change in regime will mean that U.S. forces
must come into each city and occupy them one by one. Imagine
the results, because Iraqis will defend their sovereignty.
Everybody in danger will fight."
Aziz also predicts
unrest throughout the Arab world. "Now, the United States is
more hated than anytime before in the region," he says. "You
find this hatred in the streets of the Arab and Muslim
countries, even those with good U.S. relations. If the U.S.
attacks Iraq, those sentiments in the Arab world will reach
their climax. It's not in interests of the American people to
have whole nations hating you. In history, all empires need
good attitudes towards them from countries under their
influence. If the U.S. decides it is all right to be the most
powerful empire in the world and also be hated, that's a bad
choice. This has to be weighed, by all those who will face
grave situations in their own countries--Syria, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Jordan."
When Abourezk and
Rahall come out of the session, they seem dejected.
"I understand their
arguments," Abourezk says, "but they just don't get American
politics."
Rahall agrees. "If
the American people knew what our weapons had done to innocent
people here." At a bomb shelter--now museum--that took two
smart bomb hits in the 1991 Gulf War, we see how our
intelligent weapons transformed 408 women and children from
flesh into ashes. Intesar, the museum guide, a beautiful and
bitter neighborhood woman in her mid-thirties, wears a
hijab. "The Pentagon discovered its mistake and four
days after killing the people huddled in the shelter it said
sorry," she says. "Too late!"
Inside, the photos
of many of the deceased line the walls. Wires and bent iron
rods that once reinforced the concrete dangle from the
ceiling. "This," Intesar says, "is what war does." She points
to what looks like the outline of a woman etched into the
wall. The bomb literally burned her into the side of the
shelter.
The day before we
leave, to Abourezk's surprise, Iraq announces it will readmit
the U.N. inspectors without conditions. The Iraqi foreign
ministry official tells us that our trip has been
successful.
Abourezk smiles and
says, "Yes, with a little help from Nelson Mandela, the Arab
League, and Kofi Annan." All of them had been strongly urging
Saddam Hussein to accept the inspectors.
British left
Laborite M.P. George Galloway, attending the Sixth Iraq
Solidarity Conference, rejoices over the news.
"The fox is shot, as
we say in Britain," he declares. "You must stop the hunt if
the fox is dead."
Abourezk is
delighted that the Iraqis have agreed to the inspectors. Now
he thinks, perhaps erroneously, Congress can show some
backbone.
Within two days he
finds out that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who once
worked for him as a Senate legislative aide, is likely to go
along with Bush's demand for sweeping military
powers.
"It's naked power,"
he says. "George Bush refuses to take yes for an
answer."
Once home, Abourezk
hits the talk show circuit, and Daschle, angered by Bush's
insinuation that the Democrats are traitors, makes an irate
denunciation of the President on the Senate floor. Even Al
Gore in his San Francisco speech manages to muster a challenge
to Bush's unilateralism. Ted Kennedy also decries the
President's rush to war.
For his part,
Abourezk remains realistic, unsure if the war against Iraq can
be stopped.
"We'll do what we
can," he says between radio and TV talk shows, "because we owe
it to the civilians who will die in the bombing and to the
American soldiers who will die in the ground-fighting. Hell,
that's what you have to do if democracy and citizenship are
going to mean anything."
Saul Landau is the
Digital Media Director at California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona, and a fellow at the Institute for Policy
Studies in Washington, D.C. He is currently completing a film
on Iraq.
