Around a hundred years ago, theorists of war imagined that armed conflict would be transformed by the use of chemical weapons, poisonous gases, toxins and self-reproducing biological agents, dropped from the sky not only on soldiers but also on vast, unprotected civilian populations. Many strategists believed that the first systematic use of industrialized chemical weapons in the First World War was an indication of the way conflicts would be conducted in future. It did not turn out like that. Nuclear weapons seized the strategic and popular imagination alike as the bearer of apocalypse, annihilation and death from the skies. Chemical weapons on the battlefield turned out to be both tricky to use, strategically and even tactically indecisive. Subject to the vagaries of wind and weather, they were highly unpredictable. A wave of revulsion against such weapons came about after 1918; one result was the 1925 Geneva protocol against poison gas weapons – perhaps the only successful laws-of-war treaty of that era of lamentably overreaching agreements that included the Kellogg–Briand Pact (purporting to outlaw war altogether) and the League of Nations.

Perhaps because of Adolf Hitler’s personal distaste for chemical weapons – he had been injured by mustard gas in the First World War – the Second World War did not see the widescale use of chemical weapons in the European theatre, although Churchill said he was prepared to use them if German forces reached Britain. Japan made use of them against non-Western forces in China, from whom (it did not go unobserved) it did not fear reprisal in kind. Although many parties undertook research, and created chemical corps with weaponized chemical agents, a remarkable but fragile moratorium on the actual use of chemicals largely, although not completely, held until the 1980s.

Despite their limitations, chemical weapons are eminently suited to another purpose – spreading terror among civilian populations. Iraq broke the moratorium early in the Iran–Iraq war that began in 1980, but chemical weapons gained their most notorious use as a weapon against civilians in the later 1980s, when Saddam Hussein turned them against his own Kurdish population in the infamous 1988 Anfal campaign. The veteran human rights campaigner Joost R. Hiltermann has written an indispensable book on the use of chemical weapons by the Saddam regime, and the reactions and responses of the international community, focusing on the largest and most lethal of the attacks in Kurdistan, the gassing of the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988. This is far more than simply the twenty-year-old history of yet another atrocity. The death sentence pronounced in September 2007 by an Iraqi court on one of the principal architects of the Anfal campaign, so-called Chemical Ali, is evidence of that. And the larger political repercussions of chemical weapons use by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s are still palpably with us today – as a monumentally mistaken ground for the US invasion in 2003, as an ongoing anxiety of governments fearful of terrorist use of chemicals, as a test of international law and its ability to make good on prohibitions on their use by states or other parties. And it is finally, as Hiltermann makes central to this book, a marker of the gap between American foreign policy realism and idealism, between the accommodation of dictators in conflict with other dictators, America in the 1980sbetween the regime of Saddam Hussein, on the one hand, and the Islamist regime of the Iranian mullahs, on the other – all in the midst of one of the most brutal, long-running and yet largely ignored, conventional state-to-state wars of the latter half of the twentieth century.

As a former senior staffer of Human Rights Watch, which did much of the early research, Hiltermann is well positioned to present the story of Halabja and the rest of the Anfal chemical campaign (Hiltermann is currently with the International Crisis Group). But his extraordinarily extensive interviews – with Iraqis following the US invasion, with Iranians, with US government staff current and past, with UN officials and many others – have produced a seamless record of what transpired, far beyond the research of the early 1990s. As someone who had a minor role in all this – I preceded Hiltermann as the director of the Human Rights Watch Arms Division and co-directed some of the early field research into chemical weapons attacks in Iraq in 1992 – I can say that this is the best-researched and documented account of events in 1988. And it brings to bear the best judgement available on vexed collateral questions – did the Iranians, for example, use gas weapons in the war? Perhaps future historians, with access to insider Iranian government files, will say something different; but Hiltermann’s conclusion, “not impossible, but unlikely”, is likely to remain the correct answer.

Several thousand people perished in the Halabja attack; the exact number, Hiltermann says, remains unknown. How they died, recounted through interviews with survivors, is unsparing and yet never sentimental or overwrought. It recalled to me my own interviews with survivors who watched their loved ones die from nerve toxin exposure, spasms resembling, one said, cockroaches doused with bug spray. But the larger question that Hiltermann seeks to answer is the response of the international community. His conclusion is that the world turned aside and ignored the particular crimes as well as the breach in international law and the dangerous precedent laid for the future.

And yet one must be careful here in drawing conclusions about what even great powers were – whether they were prepared to or not – realistically able to do. On this point, A Poisonous Affair moves from a practically impregnable arraignment of facts to a more conventional – and contestable – analysis of foreign policy. The US and its allies had twin objectives in the 1980s: to “block Iranian expansionism and, at the same time, to prevent the emergence of a victorious but undependable Iraq . . . dual containment, in other words”. This is fair enough, but Hiltermann asserts that Washington had knowledge and leverage to affect Iraq’s behaviour in 1983, when it was still experimenting with gas. Clearly the Reagan administration had the knowledge; whether it had the leverage is possible but by no means certain. More broadly, the book carries a certain lingering sense that the United States can always ultimately do something, and in that sense, it can always be blamed. But is that really so, except as an a priori principle of analytic convenience in the human rights community? The US was, after all, still in the midst of the Cold War, a time of two superpowers; Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, in that oft-cited 1983 encounter, can be adduced as evidence as much of weakness as of strength.

Hiltermann is scrupulous in adding that the rest of the international community, and the UN in particular – the International Committee of the Red Cross being a notable exception – were likewise nowhere in force on the battlements in defence of international law: far from it. But these were, for United States policy, the glory days of James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, and the younger, still realist Condoleezza Rice; theirs were hard-headed strategies of containment and accommodation, even of poison-gas attacks launched on civilians by a dictator formerly supported by the Soviet Union, with thousands dead. They were denounced by human rights advocates and American liberals at the time. Today, however, has seen a curious inversion and the advocacy, this time in American liberal dress, of a “new liberal realism” that draws personally on Baker – he of the Iraq Study Group – and endorses anew calls for containment and accommodation. Whether this is precisely the lesson that Joost Hiltermann intends, one should doubt, but A Poisonous Affair perhaps ought to give this new liberal realism a certain moral and practical pause.

Joost R. Hiltermann
A POISONOUS AFFAIR
America, Iraq, and the gassing of Halabja
346pp. Cambridge University Press. £19.99 (US $29).
978 0 521 87686 5

Kenneth Anderson teaches law at American University, Washington DC. He is a research fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a member of its task force on national security and law.

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