Canada Marks a Grim Military Anniversary
On February 25th, we Canadians marked the 30th anniversary of a military massacre committed in our names that many in the West are completely unaware of – with critical details buried by the press at the time and little to no media or political attention since. The assault, launched by combined US, Canadian, French and British forces, resulted in the deaths of at least 1,000 retreating Iraqi soldiers over a mostly twelve-hour night-time period on February 25th/26th, 1991. The images captured by international press-pool photographers on the morning of February 26th, 1991 of the destruction wrought on Highway 80 that prior evening – which was and remains the only major transportation link between the nations of Kuwait and Iraq – were so severe and so shocking that some were explicitly censored in the Western press. In the years following, the images that have since been released to the public have played a major influence in the massacre being colloquially coined the “Highway of Death.”
The depravity and inhumanity of the massacre on Highway 80, and the geopolitical context of why and how it happened, provide a uniquely apt case-study on the long-term repercussions of military adventurism and international interference. See, the conflict did not begin on the evening of February 25th, 1991; nor did it begin with Iraq’s illegal invasion of Kuwait on August 2nd of 1990 – which sparked the Gulf War. Rather, one can trace the roots of the conflict all the way back to 1953 with the Western-backed coup of the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and his government.
Prime Minister Mosaddegh was seeking to audit the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (whose parent company is now known as BP, or British Petroleum) due to widespread corruption and the alleged outright theft of Iranian oil and wealth. When the British-controlled company refused the audit outright, offended that the Iranian government – perceived in the West at the time as a quasi-colony for Western interests – had the audacity to even suggest an audit, the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company included. This, in the West, was seen as unacceptable, provided Western strategic economic and military reliance on Middle Eastern oil in the 1950’s, and thus a joint American-British military and intelligence operation was launched which would overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, and re-install the Iranian Shah (King of Iran/Persia) as a ruling Monarch, and an almost explicit and transparent puppet of the West.
The Shah would rule Iran for over twenty years, until he was ultimately overthrown during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The result of the revolution was the West’s worst nightmare and exactly what was feared in 1953 – an Iran, and its strategically immensely important oil reserves, under the control of a regime hostile to the West. Even worse, the regime that would take control in Iran – radical religious theocrats – would be severe and brutal to the Iranian people themselves, and would oppose the West not only on economic and geo-strategic grounds, but also ideologically. In response, the United States, with most of the rest of the West in tow, immediately and strongly opposed the theocratic leaders of the newly-formed Islamic Republic of Iran. As part of this opposition, the West funded and supported a floundering regional rival of Iran’s. That rival nation was Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Iraq.
Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein and his struggling government, suddenly flush with Western-supplied money and cutting-edge US military equipment, invaded Iran on September 22, 1980. The resultant Iraq-Iran war would last nearly a decade, kill over a million people on both sides, and cost over $1 trillion dollars. When the war finally became too embarrassing for the West – their support for the invading Iraqi forces and their government transparent to the world – the United Nations brokered a cease-fire, and the end of the war, in August of 1988. The war ended in a stalemate, and with virtually no strategic gains achieved on either side. As such, the Ba’athist Iraqi regime and its Dictator found themselves with no war left to fight, yet a military stuffed to the cheeks with US military equipment, and still on a war-footing.
As one would expect, when you leave a Dictator with the largest and most advanced military in its geopolitical neighbourhood, very bad things tend to happen. And a very bad thing did happen, almost two years exactly to the end of the Iraq-Iran war, when Saddam Hussein decided to try his chops at another invasion of a regional rival – this time, Western-allied Kuwait in 1990. Iraq, with an overwhelming military advantage, easily marched into Kuwait – via Highway 80 – and occupied the small Gulf state for the next seven months. Iraqi forces raped and pillaged Kuwait City, overthrew the Kuwaiti government, and installed a supportive puppet regime – in a disturbing mirror of some of what Western-backed forces had done in Iran in 1953. Ultimately, as you the reader are perhaps familiar, the West responded strongly and definitively in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; launching an international military intervention which would liberate the Kuwaiti people and remove their Iraqi occupiers in the early months of 1991.
And this brings us to February 25th of 1991, and the massacre on Highway 80. After unified Western military forces (including significant involvement from the Canadian Armed Forces) entered Kuwait from their staging bases in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, they made quick work of Iraq’s military. The Iraqi soldiers soon found themselves on retreat, a retreat which quickly became more desperate and more rushed as it became plainly obvious that they were immensely overmatched. As Highway 80 was the only major route out of Kuwait and into Iraq, the road became congested with retreating Iraqi soldiers and military equipment, and created an unprecedented military traffic jam, stretching miles, in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert. The West was now faced with a dilemma. While our forces were far stronger than Iraq’s, Iraq’s forces were still far stronger than their regional opponents, including Kuwait, as long as they continued to own and control US-supplied military equipment.
So, the decision was made to attack and destroy the retreating Iraqi forces, contrary to all understood laws and norms of warfare. While the stated objective was and is reasonable – the destruction of Iraq’s military equipment as to prevent any further potential invasions of their neighbours – the actual effect, and the context, is of historic despicableness. For twelve hours, Western aircraft and artillery hammered relentlessly the retreating Iraqi forces, causing devastation unlike anything seen in contemporary warfare. Miles and miles of highway littered with destroyed military equipment and the charred dead bodies of the soldiers operating them. Bodies were found on the side of the highway, and in the surrounding desert – apparently attempting to escape. At least a thousand Iraqis were killed by the end of the assault and thousands of pieces of military equipment destroyed. The West, in contrast, had absolutely zero losses, injuries, or deaths.
The context is equally as disturbing as the massacre itself – an imperative to destroy military equipment, itself supplied by the West. This was military equipment and support that in part caused and facilitated the deaths of over one million people in the Iraq-Iran war and provided Iraq the means to invade, pillage and rape Kuwait for more than half a year. This was military equipment supplied to Iraq to attack Iran and the Iranian people for overthrowing their leader who was installed by the West after overthrowing the elected Iranian government in 1953.
Yet, we should not condemn our Armed Forces. They followed their orders, and they accomplished the objective with brutal effectiveness. They did what was asked of them by their government. Ba’athist Iraq, due to the massacre on Highway 80, was militarily crippled and would not continue to be a serious threat to their neighbours. We should, however, condemn the politicians and the politics that allowed this nightmare to unfold in the first place: the politicians in the West who meddled in Iranian affairs for four decades, the politicians in Iraq who sent their own people to slaughter in Iran and then Kuwait, the politicians in Iran who did the same in the service of ideology and theology, and the politicians who maintain these sorts of interventionist policies and politics currently in the West.