- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "Evil
tyrant" or tactical ally?
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- Saddam Hussein has been both to the United States over
the past 20 years, depending on where it saw its interests.
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- In the 1980s, when the enemy was Iran's revolutionary
spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Iraq was at war with Iran,
Washington courted and bankrolled Saddam as a foil to Iranian expansionism.
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- Knowledge that Iraq was using chemical weapons, and suspicions
it was trying to build a nuclear bomb, did not stand in the way of a marriage
of convenience or billions of dollars in U.S. agricultural loan guarantees
and trade credits.
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- "Iraq was the lesser of two evils," said Raymond
Tanter, who served on the U.S. National Security Council staff from 1981
to 1982 and took the position at the time that Washington should not support
either side.
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- "Cozying up to Saddam Hussein was not such a brilliant
idea, but I understand why it happened," said Tanter, an Iran expert
at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
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- "Times have changed," he added. "You have
to adapt your policies to the nature of the threat."
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- Other scholars see the demonization of Saddam by President
Bush as something more fundamental.
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- Ted Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign
Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington and a critic of the
war on Iraq, argues that U.S. foreign policy needs to demonize erstwhile
allies who become adversaries.
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- Saddam, he said, has fit that mold since his invasion
of Kuwait in 1990 when he became a "client who got greedy."
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- "From that point on, as is typical with American
foreign policy, he had to become evil incarnate," Cato said.
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- "Whether it's Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic
or now Saddam, it's never a fight over U.S. interests," said Carpenter.
Instead, he said in a seeming dig at Bush's rhetoric, "it's always
a fight against Manichean evil."
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- Mani was a 3rd century Persian sage who regarded the
world as divided between the forces of light and darkness.
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- SHAKING HANDS
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- Bush went to war to topple Saddam under a new doctrine,
forged after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, that says
the United States has the right to stage a pre-emptive strike on any country
it deems a threat.
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- In Saddam's case, Bush has argued that Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction not only threaten the region but could also
end up in the hands of groups like al Qaeda and be turned on the United
States.
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- "These are sacrifices in a high calling -- the defense
of our nation and the peace of the world," Bush told U.S. Marines
in a speech on Thursday. "Overcoming evil is the noblest cause and
the hardest work."
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- It was not always that way with Iraq.
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- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for example, met Saddam
in Baghdad in December 1983 during the Iran-Iraq war when he served as
Middle East envoy for President Ronald Reagan.
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- Recently declassified U.S. documents show the State Department
knew at that time that Iraq was making "almost daily" use of
chemical weapons against Iranian forces and that the CIA suspected Saddam
would try to build a nuclear bomb.
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- Rumsfeld was filmed shaking Saddam's hand and, according
to a U.S. diplomatic cable, the Iraqi president drew "obvious pleasure"
from a letter Rumsfeld handed him from Reagan.
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- "Our initial assessment is that (the) meeting marked
(a) positive milestone in (the) development of U.S.-Iraqi relations,"
the cable concluded.
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- Within a year of that meeting, Iraq and the United States
had re-established diplomatic ties after a 17-year break.
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- TRADE CONSIDERATIONS
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- Critics of U.S. policy toward Iraq in the 1980s argue
that American money and technology, directly or indirectly, helped Saddam
pursue his weapons programs.
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- Until 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, hefty U.S. agricultural
loan guarantees and trade credits flowed to Iraq, despite strong evidence
of severe human rights abuses and non-conventional weapons programs.
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- President George Bush, father of the current president,
signed a waiver on grounds of national interest in January 1990 to override
a congressional block on trade credits to Iraq that lawmakers imposed after
Saddam used poison gas against Iraqi Kurds.
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- Bush senior had this comment in April 1990, after Saddam
threatened to use chemical weapons against Israel: "I don't think
it helps peace in the Middle East."
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- The rights group Middle East Watch, in a report on Iraq
that month, said that because of Iraq's oil wealth and the possibilities
for trade, Washington put "the nurturing of newly friendly relations
with Saddam Hussein's government well ahead of the violent and repressive
nature of his regime."
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- Rumsfeld has argued his main purpose in meeting Saddam
in 1983 was to ensure Iraq did not "make mischief" in the Middle
East after a truck bomb in Beirut killed 241 U.S. Marines.
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- He says he raised Iraq's use of chemical weapons against
Iranian forces in talks with Tareq Aziz, then Iraq's foreign minister.
And he denies the United States misjudged Saddam.
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- "No, not at all," Rumsfeld told NBC's "Meet
the Press" last month. "I mean, people are what they are."
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