WASHINGTON, Dec 19: Documents declassified on Friday show that Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad in March 1984 to tell Saddam Hussein that America’s public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons against its own people would not hurt bilateral relations.

Mr Rumsfeld, who went President Ronald Reagan’s special Middle East envoy, was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the US statement on chemical weapons, “was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating chemical weapons, wherever it occurs,” says a cable Mr Rumsfeld received from then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

In an earlier trip to Baghdad, in December 1983, Mr Rumsfeld persuaded Iraq to resume diplomatic ties with the US. An explicit purpose of his return trip in March 1984 was to ease the strain created by a US condemnation of chemical weapons, the documents show.

The declassified documents also show the hope of another senior diplomat, the British ambassador to Iraq.

Shortly after Saddam became deputy to the president in 1969, then-British Ambassador H.G. Balfour Paul cabled back his impressions after a first meeting: “I should judge him, young as he is, to be a formidable, single-minded and hard-headed member of the Baathist hierarchy, but one with whom, if only one could see more of him, it would be possible to do business.”