Shouts from the desert

Alexander Downer is certainly no stranger to saying rather stupid things. Indeed if promotion based on merit formed any part of the machinery of the major parties in Australia, it would be impossible to imagine Downer getting preselected at all, let alone promoted to one of the most senior ministerial positions in the nation. In Downer's case he is in Parliament for two reasons. The first is that his father was a parliamentarian who served as Minister for Immigration under Menzies, and his grandfather was Premier of South Australia. Thus Downer turned up just to claim what amounted to an inheritance. The second is that he served in a diplomatic role that put him in close contact with serving politicians, including John Howard. But all this is a side point.

There are two kinds of stupid things politicians say - the unintentionally stupid, said by mistake or ignorance, and propaganda. Propaganda is stupid when it is easily proven false provided somebody takes the time to look a little closer. Such is the nature of the latest Downer stupidity. Overnight he claimed that Saddam Hussein is "the only leader in history who has used chemical weapons or any other sort of weapons of mass destruction against his own people." The use of the word "only" raised my suspicions, since it seemed unlikely that no other leaders have done this. So I went looking. A smarter person would have just said he gassed his own people and left it at that, without saying he was "the only leader" ever to do it.

As it turns out, the claim is even more wrong than I thought.

The gassing in Halabja in 1988 occurred in circumstances where it is sill not certain that it was Iraq, rather than Iran, that did it. Even if it were Iraq, it seems that town may have been in Iranian hands at the time, so that the attack was launched against Iranians, with any Kurdish casualties being collateral. There are more factors that make the claim entirely doubtful, and I would encourage you to read more.

Then there is the use of "own people". This is misleading since Iraq has never been very well unified - with infighting among several major ethnic groups such that a person in one may not consider the others part of their "own people". This is not to justify the conduct, but to say the Kurds were Saddam's "own people" makes sense only if you use the term in the sense of the people over whom he had primary care responsibility - the people of his territory.

Now I have no quibble with that use of the term "own people", but if we are going to use the term that way, then we must use it that way in the case of any Government within a territory. If we do so, it turns out that the British government, then governing what is now Iraq, was the first to use chemical weapons against the Kurds.

Believing Downer's statement as made thus becomes somewhat difficult, and he should have been more careful about going to extremes. Going to such extremes was unnecessary and counter-productive, inviting further investigation.