NEW DELHI, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- Since the greatest man of peace, India's Mahatma Gandhi, was never even short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize, it comes as no great surprise that the Nobel panel should have sunk so below its own pathetic standards as to award this year's prize to the Frankenstein who created the monster known as Saddam Hussein. For the president of Iraq was just another dictator among many when Jimmy Carter became president of the United States. It was when Carter picked him to do in Ayatollah Ruholah Khomeini of Iran that Saddam discovered what a good boy he was.
Cast your mind back to Feb. 7, 1979. The Shah of Iran, puppet emperor propped up by Western oil interests after the Western-engineered overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq for his gall in suggesting that Iranian oil revenues might be used for the welfare of the Iranian people, was toppled and sent into comfortable exile at Swiss ski resorts and U.S. hospitals.
The United States was infuriated. So was Saddam. For nothing terrified Iraq more than the prospect of Iran's Shiite Muslims making common cause with Iraq's Shiite majority to do unto Saddam's brutal rule with his Baath Party and army officers drawn from the country's Sunni Muslim minority what the Ayatollah had just done to the Shah. On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian students instigated by the Ayatollah's inflamed clerics -- although, it would appear, not by the formal government in Tehran -- seized the "Embassy of Satan" and held hostage all the U.S. diplomats within. It was the most blatant and prolonged violation of diplomatic privilege since mediaeval monarchs chopped off the heads of enemy emissaries.
For months the United States stood by wringing its hands in despair. Then Carter hit upon the idea of imitating the Israelis in their 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue raid. But the mission went hopelessly awry, leaving the U.S. armed forces almost stranded like the Keystone Kops in the middle of the Iranian desert.
An armed invasion to counter a diplomatic outrage is not quite what is envisaged in the U.N. Charter. But no one, other than the original sinner, condemned Carter for his invasion -- except, of course, the American people who blamed him not for launching it but botching it. Saddam then saw his opportunity to play the U.S. surrogate.
On Sept. 22, 1980, just in time for Carter's re-election bid, Saddam invaded the Khuzistan province of Iran on the left bank of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. Khuzistan, with its headquarters at Khorramshahr, is ethnically Arab rather than Persian and as Sunni as Saddam himself. Nevertheless, Khuzistan is also indubitably in Iran, not Iraq. The Iraqi invasion was a blatant violation of the sovereignty of a founding member state of the United Nations. It was an act of aggression deserving of exactly the same condemnation as was visited on Saddam when he invaded Kuwait a decade later.
The difference was that in crossing the Shatt al-Arab at the most delicate point of the Iranian Achilles heel and heading straight for Tehran, Saddam was not only fulfilling his personal and national ambitions, he was also serving the American interest very well, thank you very much. And, therefore, Carter's envoy at the United Nations decided that silence is golden.
Not one word of condemnation escaped the pursed lips of the Carter administration. Not the least leaf moved to stop Saddam in his tracks. Indeed, the Western media lauded Saddam as the Great Liberator. Their applause echoed what they gave during World War II, when they had hailed another psychopathic mass murderer, Soviet Marshall Josef Stalin, or "Uncle Joe" as he was called throughout the British and American media at the time.
Clearly the mighty United States, with its warships prowling the Persian, or Arabian Gulf and its surveillance satellites and aircraft photographing every Iraqi soldier foregathering for the invasion, could not but have known what was going on. In any case, once Iraq was on the other side of the Shatt, even a village half-wit knew Saddam was where Saddam had no business to be.
There was a howl at U.N. headquarters in New York. However, the Carter administration adamantly refused to let the United Nations intervene. Stalling a resolution in the Security Council, stalling even a formal convening of the Council, the United States allowed only the president of the Council to issue next day -- Sept. 23 -- a mealy-mouthed statement about the "informal consultations" among Security Council members at which "the extremely serious situation prevailing between Iran and Iraq" had been discussed. But not the teeniest reference to who had caused it!
With the Security Council rendered impotent at the instance of Carter and his lot, the Council president pathetically told the media, "The members of the Council have asked me to appeal on their behalf to the Governments of Iran and Iraq." The fact that 'n' comes before 'q' enabled Iran to be placed before Iraq in that sentence, thus alphabetically transferring the responsibility for being invaded on to the country invaded!
Sir Anthony Parsons, the British permanent representative to the United Nations at the time, has graphically recounted how the Carter administration did everything it could to prevent the United Nations acting till Saddam accomplished the U.S. goal of sweeping into Tehran, it was erroneously believed, within a week at most.
For the next three days, fighting raged in Khuzistan but nothing went the Carter-Saddam way. Therefore, on Sept. 26, after four days of US-enforced impotence, Iraq, but not Iran, was allowed a hearing in the Security Council. And it was only after the whole world knew that even the Sunni Arab province of Khuzistan stood by the Ayatollah's revolution and that Saddam would have difficulty getting back to Baghdad let alone ever getting to Tehran that our Nobel Peace Prize winner allowed the Security Council on Sept. 28 to adopt its Resolution 479.
The resolution was a masterpiece of humbug and hypocrisy. It reminded Member States of their Charter obligation "to settle their international disputes by peaceful means" (that is the Charter obligation W. is now busily repudiating); reminded them also that "all Member States (that includes the United States) are obliged to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force (is that George W. Bush I hear giggling in the distance?) against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State" (in which case, why not name the aggressor?); and then called upon both "Iran and Iraq to refrain immediately from any further use of force" --- thus enabling Saddam to get his troops back across the Shatt scot-free.
Contrast Carter's exculpation of Saddam with the U.N. Security Council's damning opening clause of Resolution 660 of Aug. 2, 1990, on the Iraqi president's invasion of Kuwait --- and that too on the day itself, not a week later, as in Carter's case:
"Condemns the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait." Straightforward. Clear. Unambiguous.
And "Demands that Iraq withdraw immediately and unconditionally all its forces to the position in which they were located on 1st August 1990."
There was nothing the Carter administration permitted in the UN Security Council Resolution of Sept. 28, 1980 about Iraq withdrawing its forces to the position in which they were located on Sept. 21, 1980, the eve of the Iraqi invasion of Iran.
President Carter's shilly-shallying over Saddam in 1980 led to Western coffers being enriched by a $1,000 billion of Iranian/Iraqi arms purchases and uncounted millions of Iranian and Iraqi dead; fuelling Saddam's conviction that he could get away with invading Kuwait as he had got away with invading Iran; U.N. sanctions at U.S. insistence that have killed close to a million Iraqi children to avenge Saddam's capture of Kuwait, though that invasion ended more than a decade ago; and the impending destruction of a civilization where Hammurabi first taught humankind the Rule of Law. And this is the man now honored by a Nobel peace prize. O tempora! O mores!
(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a member of the Indian Parliament representing the Congress Party. His column is published weekly.)
