Ultimate Insiders
The New York Times
April 14, 2003
By BOB HERBERT
Let's go back some 20 years. Ronald Reagan was president.
George Shultz was secretary of state. Lebanon was in turmoil. And Iraq and Iran were
locked in a vicious war that had sharply curtailed the flow of oil out of Iraq.
In December 1983 Donald Rumsfeld was sent to the Middle East
as a special envoy in an effort to jump-start the peace process in Lebanon and
advance a presidential initiative for peace between Arabs and Israelis.
One of his stops was Baghdad, where he met with Saddam Hussein.
That was unusual. Mr. Rumsfeld was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit
Iraq since 1967, when Iraq and other Arab nations severed relations
with the U.S., which they blamed for Israel's victory in the Six-Day War.
The primary goal of Mr. Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad
was to improve relations with Iraq.
But another matter was also quietly discussed. The powerful
Bechtel Group in San Francisco,
of which Secretary Shultz had been president before
joining the Reagan administration, wanted to build an oil
pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, near the Red Sea.
It was a billion-dollar project and the U.S. government
wanted Saddam to sign off on it.
This remains, two decades later, a touchy subject.
When I brought the matter up last week with James Placke, who in 1983 was a deputy assistant
secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, he said,
"My memory on that is kind of foggy."
But at the mention of Bechtel, he said: "Ahh, now you've said the magic word.
Now I remember. Bechtel was promoting it."
Bechtel was promoting it and the Middle East peace envoy,
Donald Rumsfeld, was pushing it with top Iraqi officials.
A previously classified State
Department memo that is contained in a report on the pipeline by
the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington described
how Mr. Rumsfeld broached the subject during a private
meeting with Iraq's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz.
The memo, from Mr. Rumsfeld, said: "I raised the question
of a pipeline through Jordan. He said he was familiar with the proposal. It apparently was
a U.S. company's proposal. However, he was concerned about
the proximity to Israel as the pipeline would enter the Gulf of Aqaba."
The Iraqis were afraid the Israelis might destroy the pipeline. "I said
I could understand that there would need to be some sort of arrangement that
would give those involved confidence that it would not be easily
vulnerable," Mr. Rumsfeld wrote in the memo. He added, parenthetically: "This may
be an issue to raise with Israel at the appropriate time."
It was known by the fall of 1983 that Iraq had used chemical
weapons against Iran. That did not prevent the U.S.
from pursuing improved relations
with Saddam, or curb the enthusiasm for the Aqaba
pipeline - a project promoted by a company that
had given the Reagan administration not just
its secretary of state, but also its secretary of
defense, Caspar Weinberger, who had been
Bechtel's general counsel.
No one seemed concerned about weaving these obvious
conflicts of interest into the peace process in the most volatile region of the world.
Mr. Shultz said he recused himself from anything having to do with the pipeline.
But it was his State Department that had joined with Bechtel to
push the project, and everyone knew that Mr. Shultz had run Bechtel.
Saddam ultimately gave a thumbs down to the pipeline proposal.
"It didn't seem to make very good commercial sense," said Mr. Placke, "and
ultimately I think it failed on those grounds."
The efforts to promote peace in the Middle East also failed.
Now, 20 years later, Mr. Shultz (who is currently on the board of Bechtel) and Mr.
Rumsfeld are among the fiercest of the war hawks.
They wanted war with Iraq and they got it.
Their philosophical flights in favor of the war would seem
more graceful, and much less unsavory, if they
weren't flying with the baggage of Bechtel
and other large commercial interests that have so much to gain from the war.
This unilateral war and the ouster of Saddam have given
the hawks and their commercial allies carte blanche in Iraq. And the company with
perhaps the sleekest and most effective of all the inside tracks,
a company that is fairly panting with anticipation over oil and reconstruction
contracts worth scores of billions of dollars, is of course the
Bechtel Group of San Francisco.
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