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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (56275)	11/8/2002 6:50:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Nadine Carroll; Re my quote: "There have been no uses of nuclear weapons other than the two bombs, and there has been no offensive* use of gas at all." The difference between us here is probably about the meaning of the word "defensive" as opposed to "offensive". As far as I'm concerned, what you do on your own territory is generally "defensive", what you do on the other guy's territory is generally "offensive". (By the way, I don't care to get into an argument concerning whether or not my use of these words is standard, so if you reply in that vein I'm going to ignore you.) None of your examples are offensive uses of gas: (1) The Yemeni campaign was a civil war in Yemen. Like the US civil war, both sides were therefore operating in the "defensive" mode [that is, on their "own" territory and in protection of their own land]. (2) The Iraqi Anfal campaign against the Kurds was in Iraq, and therefore conclusively defensive. (3) The Iraqi use of gas against Iranian troops in the Iran-Iraq war was mostly in Iraqi territory, rather than Iranian, and therefore that part was defensive. At the time, Iran had publicly sworn to end the war with Iraq only with a "regime change". In addition, Iran had ignored Iraqi peace feelers, and was occupying increasing amounts of Iraqi territory. So I'd classify that gas use also as defensive. Note that Saddam did not use gas in the early part of the war, when he was invading Iran territory.* That was the "offensive" part of the war, from the Iraqi standpoint. Surely there are some other examples of poison gas use in war. -- Carl