IRAQ/US: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was once such a valued US ally - a strategic partner in Washington's bid to quell Iranian Islamic extremism - that the US itself supplied him with poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, writes Michael Dobbs
High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, his nuclear and biological programmes, and his contacts with international terrorists. What US officials rarely acknowledge is that these offences date back to a period when Saddam was seen in Washington as a valued ally.
Among the people instrumental in tilting US policy towards Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now Defence Secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Saddam as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalisation of US-Iraqi relations.
Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld travelled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of US involvement with Saddam in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait - an involvement which included large-scale intelligence-sharing, a supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors - is a topical example of the underside of US foreign policy.
It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations are sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Throughout the 1980s, Saddam's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. In a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in south-east Asia, US officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism - and against the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan.
That was enough to turn Saddam into a strategic partner and for US diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys", in contrast to the Iranian "bad guys".
A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that US intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defences against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush authorised the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.
Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pro-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction.
"It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now," says Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of The Threatening Storm, which makes the case for war with Iraq. "My fellow analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."
David Newton, a former US ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Saddam radio station in Prague, argues: "Fundamentally, the policy was justified. We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible."
What makes present-day Saddam different from the Saddam of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy.
In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, US policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
US shifts in Iran-Iraq war
WHEN the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the United States was a bystander. Washington had no diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. US officials had almost as little sympathy for Saddam's dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.
By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. US intelligence information suggested that the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilising Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening US oil supplies.
"You have to understand the geo-strategic context, which was very different from where we are now," says Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, who worked on Iraqi policy during the Reagan administration. "Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."
To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop build-ups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The US tilt towards Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114, of November 26th, 1983, one of the few important Reagan-era foreign policy decisions that still remain classified. According to former US officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.
The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. However, US condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.
Thus, on November 1st, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told then secretary of state George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to "almost daily use of CW" (chemical weapons) against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld.
Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West". When Rumsfeld finally met with Saddam on December 20th, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described themselves as "extremely pleased" with the Rumsfeld visit, which had "elevated US-Iraqi relations to a new level".
In a September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he had "cautioned" Saddam about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader. A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the issue not with Saddam, but with the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz.
The State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as one of several matters that "inhibited" US efforts to assist Iraq.Rumsfeld has also said that he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former US officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq - he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy - the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to closer US-Iraqi co-operation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Saddam insisted on delaying such a step until the following year.
As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been "impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating" to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq - along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen - was one of four countries originally on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.
Some former US officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Saddam to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the 80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an elderly American tourist.
Iraq lobbies for arms
WHILE Rumsfeld was talking to Saddam and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms-buying spree. In Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi chargé d'affaires, Nizar Hamdoon, a fluent English-speaker who impressed Reagan administration officials as one of the most skilful lobbyists in town.
"He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the Mafia," recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan White House. "Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He was particularly effective with the American Jewish community."
One of Hamdoon's favourite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was decorated with a map of the Middle East, showing a series of arrows pointing towards Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to "parade the scarf" to conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory over Iraq would result in "Israel becoming a victim along with the Arabs".
According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required". Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA director, William Casey, used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian "human wave" attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit. At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran, under "Operation Staunch". Those efforts were largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world.
Although US arms manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of "dual use" items such as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost US exports and acquire political leverage over Saddam.
When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers, including such household names as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military purposes.
A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.
The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide."
Chemicals used on Kurds
IN late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, which were part of a "scorched earth" strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged - but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.
"The US-Iraqi relationship is ... important to our long-term political and economic objectives," assistant secretary of state, Richard W. Murphy, wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical weapons question. "We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis."
Bush administration spokesmen have cited Saddam's use of chemical weapons "against his own people" - and particularly the March 1988 attack on the Kurdish village of Halabjah - to bolster their argument that his regime presents a "grave and gathering danger" to the United States.
The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A US air force intelligence officer, Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988, after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote against Iraqi nerve gas attacks.
Far from declining, the supply of US military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988, according to a 1999 book by Francona, Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace. Informed sources said much of the battlefield intelligence was channelled to the Iraqis by the CIA office in Baghdad.
Although US export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite US government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death "from asphyxiation".
The US policy of cultivating Saddam as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then US ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Saddam on July 25th, 1990 - a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait - she assured him that Bush "wanted better and deeper relations", according to an Iraqi transcript of the conversation. "President Bush is an intelligent man," the ambassador told Saddam, referring to the father of the current president. "He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq."
"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the US embassy in Baghdad, and the last US official to meet Saddam.
"Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behaviour. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."
(Washington Post Service)