- On August 18, the New York Times carried a front-page
story headlined, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of
gas". Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the
NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administration of US President
Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical battle planning assistance
at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ
chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war".
The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.
-
- While the August 18 NYT article added new details about
the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect
of the scandal: not only did Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein
regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and
Iraq's Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological
and nuclear weapons programs.
-
- Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy
of the current US administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities
- which were disregarded at the time by Washington - and those same weapons
programs - which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed
in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War - to justify a massive new war
against the people of Iraq.
-
- A reader of the NYT article (or the tens of thousands
of other articles written after the latest war drive against Iraq began
in earnest soon after September 11) would have looked in vain for the fact
that many of the US politicians and ruling class pundits demanding war
against Hussein today - in particular, the most bellicose of the Bush administration's
"hawks", defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld - were up to their
ears in Washington's efforts to cultivate, promote and excuse Hussein in
the past.
-
- The NYT article read as though Washington's casual disregard
about the use of chemical weapons by Hussein's dictatorship throughout
the 1980s had never been reported before. However, it was not the first
time that "Iraqgate" - as the scandal of US military and political
support for Hussein in the '80s has been dubbed - has raised its embarrassing
head in the corporate media, only to be quickly buried again.
-
- One of the more comprehensive and damning accounts of
Iraqgate was written by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas and published in
the February 23, 1992, Los Angeles Times. Headlined, "Bush secret
effort helped Iraq build its war machine", the article reported that
"classified documents obtained by the LA Times show a long-secret
pattern of personal efforts by [George Bush senior] - both as president
and vice president - to support and placate the Iraqi dictator."
-
- Even William Safire, the right-wing, war-mongering NYT
columnist, on December 7, 1992, felt compelled to write that, "Iraqgate
is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by
misguided leaders of three democratic nations [the US, Britain and Italy]
to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator".
-
- The background to Iraqgate was the January 1979 popular
uprising that overthrew the cravenly pro-US Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution
threatened US imperialism's domination of the strategic oil-rich region.
Other than Israel, Iran had long been Washington's key ally in the Middle
East.
-
- Washington immediately began to "cast about for
ways to undermine or overthrow the Iranian revolution, or make up for the
loss of the Shah. Hussein's regime put up its hand. On September 22, 1980,
Iraq launched an invasion of Iran. Throughout the bloody eight-year-long
war - which cost at least 1 million lives - Washington backed Iraq.
-
- As a 1990 report prepared for the Pentagon by the Strategic
Studies Institute of the US War College admitted: "Throughout the
[Iran-Iraq] war the United States practised a fairly benign policy toward
Iraq [Washington and Baghdad] wanted to restore the status quo ante that
prevailed before [the 1979 Iranian revolution] began threatening the regional
balance of power. Khomeini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both
Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him. United by
a common interest the [US] began to actively assist Iraq."
-
- At first, as Iraqi forces seemed headed for victory over
Iran, official US policy was neutrality in the conflict. Not only was Hussein
doing Washington's dirty work in the war with Iran, but the US rulers believed
that Iraq could be lured away from its close economic and military relationship
with the Soviet Union - just as Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had done
in the 1970s.
-
- In March 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig excitedly
told the Senate foreign relations committee that Iraq was concerned by
"the behaviour of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern region".
The Soviet government had refused to deliver arms to Iraq as long as Baghdad
continued its military offensive against Iran. Moscow was also unhappy
with the Hussein's vicious repression of the Iraqi Communist Party.
-
- Washington's support (innocuously referred to as a "tilt"
at the time) for Iraq became more open after Iran succeeded in driving
Iraqi forces from its territory in May 1982; in June, Iran went on the
offensive against Iraq. The US scrambled to stem Iraq's military setbacks.
Washington and its conservative Arab allies suddenly feared Iran might
even defeat Iraq, or at least cause the collapse of Hussein's regime.
-
- Using its allies in the Middle East, Washington funnelled
huge supplies of arms to Iraq. Classified State Department cables uncovered
by Frantz and Waas described covert transfers of howitzers, helicopters,
bombs and other weapons to Baghdad in 1982-83 from Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan and Kuwait.
-
- Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the
US National Security Council during the Reagan administration, told the
February 23, 1992, LA Times: "There was a conscious effort to encourage
third countries to ship US arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact.
It was a policy of nods and winks."
-
- According to Mark Phythian's 1997 book Arming Iraq: How
the US and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine (Northeastern University
Press), in 1983 Reagan asked Italy's Prime Minister Guilo Andreotti to
channel arms to Iraq.
-
- The January 1, 1984 Washington Post reported that the
US had "informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of
Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be 'contrary to US interests'
and has made several moves to prevent that result".
-
- Central to these "moves" was the cementing
of a military and political alliance with Saddam Hussein's repressive regime,
so as to build up Iraq as a military counterweight to Iran. In 1982, the
Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department's list of
countries that allegedly supported terrorism. On December 19-20, 1983,
Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy - none other than Donald Rumsfeld
- to Baghdad with a hand-written offer of a resumption of diplomatic relations,
which had been severed during the 1967 Arab-Israel war. On March 24, 1984,
Rumsfeld was again in Baghdad.
-
- On that same day, the UPI wire service reported from
the UN: "Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian
soldiers a team of UN experts has concluded Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital
of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign
minister Tariq Aziz."
-
- The day before, Iran had accused Iraq of poisoning 600
of its soldiers with mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas.
-
- There is no doubt that the US government knew Iraq was
using chemical weapons. On March 5, 1984, the State Department had stated
that "available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical
weapons". The March 30, 1984, NYT reported that US intelligence officials
has "what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has
used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites
for mass producing the lethal chemical warfare agent".
-
- However, consistent with the pattern throughout the Iran-Iraq
war and after, the use of these internationally outlawed weapons was not
considered important enough by Rumsfeld and his political superiors to
halt Washington's blossoming love affair with Hussein.
-
- The March 29, 1984, NYT, reporting on the aftermath of
Rumsfeld's talks in Baghdad, stated that US officials had pronounced "themselves
satisfied with relations between Iraq and the US and suggest that normal
diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name". In November 1984,
the US and Iraq officially restored diplomatic relations.
-
- According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward,
in a December 15, 1986 article, the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with
intelligence in 1984 that was used to "calibrate" mustard gas
attacks on Iranian troops. Beginning in early 1985, the CIA provided Iraq
with "data from sensitive US satellite reconnaissance photography
to assist Iraqi bombing raids".
-
- Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranian troops - and US assistance
to Iraq - continued throughout the Iran-Iraq war. In a parallel program,
the US defence department also provided intelligence and battle-planning
assistance to Iraq.
-
- The August 17, 2002 NYT reported that, according to "senior
military officers with direct knowledge of the program", even though
"senior officials of the Reagan administration publicly condemned
Iraq's employment of mustard gas, sarin, VX and other poisonous agents
President Reagan, vice president George Bush [senior] and senior national
security aides never withdrew their support for the highly classified program
in which more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical
planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb-damage assessments
for Iraq."
-
- Retired DIA officer Rick Francona told the NYT that Iraq's
chemical weapons were used in the war's final battle in early 1988, in
which Iraqi forces retook the Fao Peninsula from the Iranian army.
-
- Another retired DIA officer, Walter Lang, told the NYT
that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter
of deep strategic concern". What concerned the DIA, CIA and the Reagan
administration was that Iran not break through the Fao Peninsula and spread
the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
-
- Iraq's 1982 removal from Washington's official list of
states that support terrorism meant that the Hussein regime was now eligible
for US economic and military aid, and was able to purchase advanced US
technology that could also be used for military purposes.
-
- Conventional military sales resumed in December 1982.
In 1983, the Reagan administration approved the sale of 60 Hughes helicopters
to Iraq in 1983 "for civilian use". However, as Phythian pointed
out, these aircraft could be "weaponised" within hours of delivery.
Then US Secretary of State George Schultz and commerce secretary George
Baldridge also lobbied for the delivery of Bell helicopters equipped for
"crop spraying". It is believed that US-supplied choppers were
used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which
killed 5000 people.
-
- With the Reagan administration's connivance, Baghdad
immediately embarked on a massive militarisation drive. This US-endorsed
military spending spree began even before Iraq was delisted as a terrorist
state, when the US commerce department approved the sale of Italian gas
turbine engines for Iraq's naval frigates.
-
- Soon after, the US agriculture department's Commodity
Credit Corporation (CCC) guaranteed to repay loans - in the event of defaults
by Baghdad - banks had made to Iraq to buy US-grown commodities such as
wheat and rice. Under this scheme, Iraq had three years to repay the loans,
and if it could not the US taxpayers would have to cough up.
-
- Washington offered this aid initially to prevent Hussein's
overthrow as the Iraqi people began to complain about the food shortages
caused by the massive diversion of hard currency for the purchase of weapons
and ammunition. The loan guarantees amounted to a massive US subsidy that
allowed Hussein to launch his overt and covert arms buildup, one result
being that the Iran-Iraq war entered a bloody five-year stalemate.
-
- By the end of 1983, US$402 million in agriculture department
loan guarantees for Iraq were approved. In 1984, this increased to $503
million and reached $1.1 billion in 1988. Between 1983 and 1990, CCC loan
guarantees freed up more than $5 billion. Some $2 billion in bad loans,
plus interest, ended up having to be covered by US taxpayers.
-
- A similar taxpayer-funded, though smaller scale, scam
operated under the auspices of the federal Export-Import Bank. In 1984,
vice-president George Bush senior personally intervened to ensure that
the bank guaranteed loans to Iraq of $500 million to build an oil pipeline.
Export-Import Bank loan guarantees grew from $35 million in 1985 to $267
million by 1990.
-
- According to William Blum, writing in the August 1998
issue of the Progressive, Sam Gejdenson, chairperson of a Congressional
subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, disclosed that from 1985
until 1990 "the US government approved 771 licenses [only 39 were
rejected] for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents
and high-tech equipment with military application
-
- "The US spent virtually an entire decade making
sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted US export control
policy was directed by US foreign policy as formulated by the State Department,
and it was US foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein."
-
- A 1994 US Senate report revealed that US companies were
licenced by the commerce department to export a "witch's brew"
of biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis (which
causes anthrax) and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism). The
American Type Culture Collection made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and
other pathogenic agents.
-
- The report also noted that US exports to Iraq included
the precursors to chemical warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological
warfare facilities and chemical warhead filling equipment. US firms supplied
advanced and specialised computers, lasers, testing and analysing equipment.
Among the better-known companies were Hewlett Packard, Unisys, Data General
and Honeywell.
-
- Billions of dollars worth of raw materials, machinery
and equipment, missile technology and other "dual-use" items
were also supplied by West German, French, Italian, British, Swiss and
Austrian corporations, with the approval of their governments (German firms
even sold Iraq entire factories capable of mass-producing poison gas).
Much of this was purchased with funds freed by the US CCC credits.
-
- The destination of much of this equipment was Saad 16,
near Mosul in northern Iraq. Western intelligence agencies had long known
that the sprawling complex was Iraq's main ballistic missile development
centre.
-
- Blum reported that Washington was fully aware of the
likely use of this material. In 1992, a US Senate committee learned that
the commerce department had deleted references to military end-use from
information it sent to Congress about 68 export licences, worth more than
$1 billion.
-
- In 1986, the US defence department's deputy undersecretary
for trade security, Stephen Bryen, had objected to the export of an advanced
computer, similar to those used in the US missile program, to Saad 16 because
"of the high likelihood of military end use". The state and commerce
departments approved the sale without conditions.
-
- In his book, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq,
Kenneth Timmerman points out that several US agencies were supposed to
review US exports that may be detrimental to US "national security".
However, the commerce department often did not submit exports to Hussein's
Iraq for review or approved them despite objections from other government
departments.
-
- On March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas
attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. While
that attack is today being touted by senior US officials as one of the
main reasons why Hussein must now be "taken out", at the time
Washington's response to the atrocity was much more relaxed.
-
- Just four months later, Washington stood by as the US
giant Bechtel corporation won the contract to build a huge petrochemical
plant that would give the Hussein regime the capacity to generate chemical
weapons.
-
- On September 8, 1988, the US Senate passed the Prevention
of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime.
Immediately, the Reagan administration announced its opposition to the
bill, calling it "premature". The White House used its influence
to stall the bill in the House of Representatives. When Congress did eventually
pass the bill, the White House did not implement it.
-
- Washington's political, military and economic sweetheart
deals with the Iraqi dictator came under even more stress when, in August
1989, FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Rome-based Banca Nazionale
del Lavoro (BNL) and uncovered massive fraud involving the CCC loan guarantee
scheme and billions of dollars worth of unauthorised "off-the-books"
loans to Iraq.
-
- BNL Atlanta manager Chris Drougal had used the CCC program
to underwrite programs that had nothing to do with agricultural exports.
Using this covert set-up, Hussein's regime tried to buy the most hard-to-get
components for its nuclear weapons and missile programs on the black market.
-
- Russ Baker, writing in the March/April 1993 Columbia
Journalism Review, noted: "Elements of the US government almost certainly
knew that Drougal was funnelling US-backed loans - into dual-use technology
and outright military technology. The British government was fully aware
of the operations of Matrix-Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch,
which was not only at the centre of the Iraqi procurement network but was
also funded by BNL Atlanta... It would be later alleged by bank executives
that the Italian government, long a close US ally as well as BNL's ultimate
owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions."
-
- Yet, even the public outrage generated by the Halabja
massacre and the widening BNL scandal did not cool Washington's ardour
towards Hussein's Iraq.
-
- On October 2, 1989, US President George Bush senior signed
the top-secret National Security Decision 26, which declared: "Normal
relations between the US and Iraq would serve our long-term interests and
promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East. The US should propose
economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behaviour and
increase our influence with Iraq... We should pursue, and seek to facilitate,
opportunities for US firms to participate in the reconstruction of the
Iraqi economy."
-
- As public and congressional pressure mounted on the US
Agriculture Department to end Iraq's access to CCC loan guarantees, Secretary
of State James Baker - armed with NSD 26 - personally insisted that agriculture
secretary Clayton Yeutter drop his opposition to their continuation.
-
- In November 1989, Bush senior approved $1 billion in
loan guarantees for Iraq in 1990. In April 1990, more revelations about
the BNL scandal had again pushed the department of agriculture to the verge
of halting Iraq's CCC loan guarantees. On May 18, national security adviser
Scowcroft personally intervened to ensure the delivery of the first $500
million tranche of the CCC subsidy for 1990.
-
- According to Frantz and Waas' February 23, 1992, LA Times
article, in July 1990 "officials at the National Security Council
and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second installment
of the $1 billion in loan guarantees, despite the looming crisis in the
region and evidence that Iraq had used the aid illegally to help finance
a secret arms procurement network to obtain technology for its nuclear
weapons and ballistic-missile program".
-
- >From July 18 to August 1, 1990, Bush senior's administration
approved $4.8 million in advanced technology sales to Iraq. The end-users
included Saad 16 and the Iraqi ministry of industry and military industrialisation.
On August 1, $695,000 worth of advanced data transmission devices were
approved.
-
- "Only on August 2, 1990, did the agriculture department
officially suspend the [CCC loan] guarantees to Iraq - the same day that
Hussein's tanks and troops swept into Kuwait", noted Frantz and Waas.
-
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- http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2002/506/506p12.htm
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