US TAKES CUSTODY OF ANOTHER WAYWARD CLIENT
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
December 16, 2003
antiwar.com
At last in U.S. military captivity, ousted former Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein will soon mark an important 20th
anniversary, the kind of anniversary that brings with it an
appreciation of the ironies of life, and politics.
His captor, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, might also
recall long-forgotten memories -- or memories best forgotten
-- of what he was doing exactly 20 years ago.
If so, he will remember that he was in Baghdad, as a special
envoy from then-president Ronald Reagan, assuring his host
that, to quote the secret National Security Decision
Directive (NSDD) that served as his talking points: the
United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's
fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West."
So began the effective resumption of close relations between
Baghdad and Washington that had been cut off by Iraq during
the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Within a year, Washington would
fully normalize ties with Saddam and even suggest that the
dictator had become a full-fledged "Arab moderate," ready to
make peace with Israel.
Of course, the reason for this rapprochement -- nay, avid
courtship -- was the bad turn that the war between Iraq and
Iran had taken for Baghdad. A victory by Teheran, which
seemed imminent, would pose a major threat to US interests
in the Gulf, such as access to the region's oil.
It was a question of the lesser of two evils, as explained
succinctly by Howard Teicher, who worked on Iraq as a member
of Reagan's National Security Council (NSC). "You have to
understand the geostrategic context, which was very
different from where are now," he told the Washington Post
earlier this year.
"Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation
from getting worse."
It was presumably realpolitik that also persuaded Rumsfeld
not to bring up Iraq's use of chemical weapons with Hussein
in their first meeting Dec. 20, 1983, even though the
administration knew about it.
(After long insisting that he did raise the issue with
Hussein, the recent release of State Department memoranda
obtained by the National Security Archive has forced
Rumsfeld to change his story. He did mention the issue,
among many others, when he met with then-foreign minister
Tariq Aziz separately.)
For the next five years, Washington would quietly ensure
that Saddam got all the military equipment he needed to
stave off defeat, even precursor chemicals that could be
used against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians.
Not that Washington supported the use of chemical weapons,
particularly against civilians. It was more that the Reagan
administration was very reluctant to condemn their use by
Iraq back then.
How much more of this intimate relationship Saddam will
recall when he gets a public forum is undoubtedly a concern
of many current and past administration figures.
The situation echoes the worries of former US president
George H.W. Bush over what Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel
Antonio Noriega might say in open court about his long and
intimate connections to US intelligence agencies when he
surrendered to the U.S. military after Washington's invasion
of Panama in 1989.
Of course, Noriega was recruited while he was still in the
military academy, and his rise to power was facilitated
tremendously by those ties.
He was a paid agent from the beginning, and, while a rogue
who did not hesitate to intimidate and occasionally knock
off a few dissidents to keep things quiet, he was never the
mass murderer and serial invader of his neighbors that
Saddam has been.
On the other hand, Saddam was also a beneficiary of the
CIA's help -- even if he did not get the kind of sustained
attention that Noriega received -- and long before
Rumsfeld's visit at that.
According to an investigative report by Richard Sale of
United Press International (UPI) published last April,
Saddam's first contacts date back to 1959, when the CIA
backed an assassination attempt in which he took part
against then Iraqi prime minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim,
the man who overthrew the western-backed monarchy the year
before.
At the time, Iraq -- as in 1982 -- was seen as a key
strategic asset, and Qasim's decision to withdraw from the
Baghdad Pact and subsequently get cozy with Moscow was seen
by Washington as a potentially disastrous setback.
Saddam, an aspiring young Ba'athist tough, was handled on
behalf of the CIA by a local agent and an Egyptian military
attaché, who set him up in an apartment opposite Qasim's
office, according to Adel Darwish, author of *Unholy
Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War*, in an account
backed up to UPI by U.S. officials.
The specific hit, however, was botched when Saddam "lost his
nerve," according to another UPI source.
When Qasim was finally overthrown in a Ba'ath Party coup --
whether the CIA supported it is a matter of dispute,
although the party's secretary-general at the time said, "We
came to power on a CIA train" -- Saddam was back as head of
the party's secret intelligence branch, and, according to
Darwish, was leading execution squads of Iraqi National
Guardsmen who were hunting down and killing suspected
communists included on lists provided by ... the CIA.
In the early 1970s, then-president Richard Nixon tilted
definitively toward the Shah of Iran as the main protector
of US interests in the Gulf. It was not until 1979, when
the Shah was overthrown and Saddam installed himself as
president of Iraq, that Washington once again began taking
an interest in Baghdad's internal affairs, although no
evidence of any link between Washington and Saddam's
elevation has come to light.
Washington's standoffishness changed when the incoming
Reagan administration realized by late 1981 that Baghdad
could lose the war with disastrous consequences for US
interests in the region.
In early 1982, it removed Iraq from the State Department's
list of state sponsors of terrorism, making Baghdad eligible
for billions of dollars in agricultural credits and sales of
"dual-use" equipment -- goods, such as chemical precursors,
sophisticated communications equipment and technology that
could be useful in weapons programs, with both civilian and
military uses.
As the Iranians continued to shift the strategic balance,
however, the situation became more urgent. On Nov. 26,
1983, NSDD 114, which remains classified, was signed by
Reagan, even as US intelligence had learned that Baghdad's
forces were using chemical weapons to stop the Iranian
offensive.
Rumsfeld was soon on his way to Baghdad in a trip that, by
1985, would result in Washington supplying Saddam with some
1.5 billion dollars worth of weapons equipment and
technology, including items applicable to Iraq's nuclear or
biological-weapons program, such as anthrax strains and
pesticides.
At the same time, the CIA was tasked to ensure that its
former charge not run short of either weapons or vitally
needed intelligence on the disposition of Iranian forces, a
task, according to a 1995 affidavit by Teicher, that then
CIA director William Casey took to with abandon.
Casey, for example, used a Chilean arms company, Cardoen, to
supply Iraq with cluster bombs that he thought would be
particularly effective against Iranian "human wave" tactics.
In addition to the credit, equipment and covert military
assistance, Saddam also got diplomatic help from Washington
at the United Nations and elsewhere in fending off
condemnations of his use of banned weapons during the war,
as well as efforts in Congress to cut off US help.
The CIA was still providing intelligence and other help when
Saddam used poison gas that killed some 5,000 Kurdish
noncombatants in Halabja in March 1988.
The attack was part of the infamous Anfal campaign, which
wiped out dozens of northern Kurdish villages and that is
certain to figure prominently, along with a number of other
particularly egregious atrocities known to Washington at the
time they were committed, in any eventual trial against the
former leader.
All US support for Iraq ended two and a half years later
when Saddam invaded Kuwait under circumstances that have
suggested to some observers -- including, perhaps, Saddam
himself -- that Washington might have encouraged him to do
so.
It is almost certain that at that moment he remembered
Rumsfeld's trip, and it seems likely he may reflect on it
again Saturday. Rumsfeld, however, might not have been so
inclined.
(Inter Press Service)
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