December 31, 2002	Tuesday	Shawwal 26, 1423

WASHINGTON: High on the Bush administration’s list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programmes, and his contacts with international terrorists. What US officials rarely acknowledge is that these offences date back to a period when Saddam was seen in Washington as a valued ally.

Among those instrumental in tilting US policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war was Donald Rumsfeld, now defence secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Saddam as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of US- Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld travelled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an “almost daily” basis in defiance of international conventions.

The story of America’s involvement with Saddam in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait — which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq’s acquisition of chemical and biological precursors — is a topical example of the underside of US foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Throughout the 1980s, Saddam’s Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. US officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shia extremism and the fall of pro-American states like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan — a Middle East version of the Communist “domino theory.” That was enough to turn Saddam into a strategic partner and for US diplomats in Baghdad to refer routinely to Iraqi forces as “the good guys,” in contrast to the Iranians, depicted as “the bad guys.”

A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that US intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defences against the “human wave” attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.

Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to have stopped the flow of technology for building weapons of mass destruction to Baghdad.

“It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now,” says Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of “The Threatening Storm,” which makes the case for war with Iraq. “My fellow (CIA) analysts and I were warning at the time that Saddam was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department.”

“Fundamentally, the policy was justified,” argues David Newton, a former US ambassador to Baghdad who runs an anti-Saddam radio station in Prague, Czech Republic.

What makes present-day Saddam different from the Saddam of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy.

In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, US policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

When the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, the United States was a bystander with no diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. US officials had almost as little sympathy for Saddam’s dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the fundamentalism espoused by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.

By summer 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq’s second largest city. US intelligence information suggested the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing Kuwait, the Gulf states and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening US oil supplies.

To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes via third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The US tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in the National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan-era foreign policy decisions that remains classified. According to former US officials, the directive said the United States would do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.

The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington strongly opposed chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, US condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared to the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.

Thus on Nov 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan Howe, told Secretary of State George Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to “almost daily use of CW” against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by Rumsfeld, the president’s recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East.

Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard “any major reversal of Iraq’s fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West.” When Rumsfeld met with Saddam on Dec 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders described themselves as “extremely pleased” with the Rumsfeld visit, which had “elevated US-Iraqi relations to a new level.”

As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration in February 1982 removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list, despite heated objections from Congress.

Some former US officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Saddam to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the ‘80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front.

According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States “actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required.”

Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA Director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit.

At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran under “Operation Staunch.” These efforts was largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world.

A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare programme.

The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran.

In late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, part of a “scorched earth” strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capital Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged — but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.

“Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam,” said Joe Wilson, Glaspie’s former deputy in Baghdad, and the last US official to meet with Saddam. “Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behaviour. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation.”—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.