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Rumsfeld and his 'old friend' Saddam
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
At last in United States 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 US 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 Tehran, 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. "You have
to understand the geostrategic context, which was very
different from where we 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 Saddam in their first meeting
of December 20, 1983, even though the administration
knew about it. (After long insisting that he did raise
the issue with Saddam, 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 received 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 General Manuel Antonio Noriega
might say in open court about his long and intimate
connections to US intelligence agencies when he
surrendered to the US 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 Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) 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 in 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
General 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 cosy 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 attache, 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
US 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 November
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 US$1.5 billion
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 received 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 non-combatants 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 that 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's certain that he remembered
Rumsfeld's trip at that time, and it seems likely that
he may reflect on it again on Saturday. Rumsfeld,
however, may not be so inclined.
(Inter Press
Service)
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