The recent history of Iraq/America relations starts with the severing of diplomatic relations with Iraq in 1967, after the Six Day War.
Into the Eighties, Iraq was on the list of countries that were supporting terrorism, thus blocking any possibility of foreign aid. That was changed, as the ripples from the 1979 Khomeni lead revolution in Iran (and the embassy hostage crisis) caused American politicians to review Iraq's place in that new area of concern.
Washington's supportive policy toward Iraq began in 1982. Hussein was in the second year of his war with Iran and the conflict was not going well for Baghdad. The Reagan Administration, while officially neutral, decided to help Iraq as a means of containing the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The State Department responded by removing Iraq from the terrorism list in February, 1982, an action opposed by some within the Administration. Four former officials said in interviews that there was no evidence that Iraq's support of terrorists had waned.
"All the intelligence I saw indicated that the Iraqis continued to support terrorism to much the same degree as they had in the past," said Noel Koch, then in charge of the Pentagon's counterterrorism program. "We took Iraq off the list and shouldn't have. . . . We did it for political reasons."
The assertion was supported by a secret 1988 memo in which Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead wrote, "Even though it was removed from the terrorism list six years ago, (Iraq) had provided sanctuary to known terrorists, including Abul Abbas of Achille Lauro fame."
http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg00776.html
And so the die was cast, which leads us to todays headlines.
What followed was massive support to a well known tyrant. The leading supporter of Saddam's rise to power in the era was the father of the current President. Cheney, Baker, and others were also in key positions.
Almost immediately after Iraq was dropped from the list, Washington provided loan guarantees to enable it to buy such American commodities as rice and wheat through the Agriculture Department's Commodity Credit Corp.
Two years later in 1984, Bush personally pressed the federal Export-Import Bank to guarantee $500 million in loans so that Iraq could build a controversial oil pipeline, according to classified government documents.
And throughout much of the period from 1982 to the end of the Reagan Administration, efforts were made to funnel arms as well as economic aid to Baghdad -- sometimes through the Pentagon and sometimes through U.S. allies in the Middle East. Some of the specific arms plans failed to work but government sources said that significant quantities of arms did reach Baghdad as a result of U.S. efforts.
At one point in 1982, for example, a proposal was put forward to trade four American-made howitzers to Iraq for a Soviet T-72 tank, according to classified documents. The T-72 was of particular importance according to a secret July, 1982, report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, because it was protected by a new type of armor, which might prove invulnerable to American firepower. A second plan in 1983 would have allowed Iraq to buy $45 million worth of 175-millimeter long-range
guns and ammunition in exchange for turning over a Soviet tank.
Pentagon officials also reported to then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger "that Iraqi officials said it might be possible to exchange a (Soviet Hind) helicopter for permission to buy 100 Hughes helicopters" equipped with TOW missiles, according to a secret Pentagon memo.
For various reasons, each of these deals fell through. The helicopter transaction was scrapped after the late Richard Stillwell, a retired general who was then deputy undersecretary of defense, objected to working with an Iraqi-sponsored arms trafficker with a reputation for questionable
dealings.
"While I fully recognize the value to the U.S.A. of obtaining an MI-24 HIND, I recommend against pursuing this particular deal because . . . the potential for causing embarrassment to the U.S. government is too great," Stillwell wrote in a top-secret memo for Weinberger in 1983.
In a recent interview, Weinberger refused to discuss any of the proposed exchanges. Although low-level Pentagon operatives saw the arms swaps or sales to Iraq as a means to obtain Soviet technology, two officials say that Weinbeger saw it as a pretext to begin covert and direct arms shipments to Iraq. But Weinberger did acknowledge being part of a faction in the Reagan Administration that favored Iraq over Iran. "Many of us thought it would be better if Iraq won," said Weinberger, now a lawyer in private practice.
A number of classified State Department cables also describe proposals in 1982 and 1983 by William Eagleton, the senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad, to funnel arms to Iraq through allies in the Middle East. "We can selectively lift restrictions on third-party transfers of U.S.-license military equipment to Iraq," he said in an October, 1983, cable.
Although initially rejected, other documents and interviews with former U.S. officials indicate that the policy was pursued on a covert basis with Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait and that arms were transferred to Iraq.
"There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship U.S. arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact," said Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the National Security Council in the Reagan Administration. "It was a policy of nods and winks."
While the American rationale was that Hussein was a buffer against Iran, classified records show U.S. support for his regime continued unabated after the official cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War was signed in August, 1988, and after Iraq's chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish villages on July 19, 1988.
In fact, in August, 1988, Deputy Secretary of State Whitehead recommended in a secret policy memo that "there should be no radical policy changes now regarding Iraq."
The pro-Iraq strategy was embraced by Bush when he became President. His Administration continued to encourage the transfer of U.S.-supplied arms to Iraq from Arab allies, according to interviews
and classified documents.
In NSD 26, he said, "Access to the (Persian) Gulf and the key friendly states in the area is vital to U.S. national security." Included among those states was Iraq, and Bush ordered federal agencies to expand political and economic ties with Baghdad.
NSD 26 came at the height of attempts by the Agriculture Department and other agencies to slash the largest U.S. aid program to Iraq -- the commodity loan guarantees.
Set up to help U.S. farmers increase exports, the program guarantees repayment of bank loans to foreign governments for purchases of American commodities. If the foreign government defaults on the loan, U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab.
Regulations require the Agriculture Department to allocate guarantees on the basis of the receiving country's agricultural needs, its market potential and the likelihood that the loans will be repaid. Classified documents show, however, that foreign-policy considerations played a decisive role in allocating credits to Iraq.
The Iraqis themselves raised the idea of U.S. guarantees for food aid in 1983, a time when U.S. officials feared that Hussein might be overthrown because of food shortages caused by the Iran-Iraq War.
Before the year was out, the first $402 million in Agriculture Department loan guarantees was approved for Iraq. In 1984, the amount rose to $513 million and it eventually reached $1.1 billion in 1988.
As the guarantees increased, so did concerns. The primary forum for airing these anxieties was a little-known, interagency organization called the National Advisory Council.
Advisory Council documents show that beginning in 1985, a number of members representing the Federal Reserve Board, Treasury Department and the Export-Import Bank counseled or voted at different times against increases of aid to Iraq. They feared that Iraq was not credit-worthy and would not be able to repay the billions owed.
Their concerns intensified when on Aug. 4, 1989, FBI and Customs Service agents raided the Atlanta branch of an Italian bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, and uncovered $4 billion in unauthorized loans to Iraq, including $900 million guaranteed by the Agriculture Department program.
Nevertheless, top Bush Administration officials, including Secretary of State Baker, discounted the protests in the interagency group and sought another $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq in the fall of 1989, to be given in two installments.
- Ibid
There's James Baker again, a close family friend and fixer of the Bush family, front and center when Iraq needed aid. By this point the Iran/Iraq war was over, yet the push to support Hussein continued unabated.
Saddam was, without any doubt, as brutal a leader then as he was in 2003.
The gassing of the Kurds had occurred from 1987-1989. Pictures of the Halabja massacre were already headline items.
Strangely enough, concerning Halabja, US military intelligence had discounted Iraq as being the source of those gas attacks.
...immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
Pelletiere, "A War Crime, or an Act of War?" The New York Times, January 31, 2003
The official U.S. government reaction to Halabja? At first the government downplayed the reports, which were coming from Iranian sources. Once the media had confirmed the story and pictures of the dead villagers had been shown on television, the U.S. denounced the use of gas. Marlin Fitzwater told reporters, "Everyone in the administration saw the same reports you saw last night. They were horrible, outrageous, disgusting and should serve as a reminder to all countries of why chemical warfare should be banned." But as Power observes, "The United States issued no threats or demands." The government's objection was that Saddam had used gas to kill his own citizens, not that he had killed them. Indeed, subsequently State Department officials indicated that both sides--Iraq and Iran--were responsible perhaps for the gassing of civilian Kurds.
On August 20, 1988 Iran and Iraq ended their war. Within days Iraq again gassed the Kurds. A front-page story in the New York Times summed up the purpose of the latest assault: "Iraq has begun a major offensive [meant to] crush the 40-year-long insurgency once and for all." After a delay of weeks Secretary of State George Shultz condemned the assaults. But the United States again failed to act, even as hundreds of thousands of Kurds were being uprooted from their homes and forced into the mountains, tens of thousands killed. By 1989, says Powers, 4,049 Kurdish villages had been destroyed.
Why had the United States not acted? That was what William Safire and a few other columnists in the media wanted to know. Years later James Baker explained:
Diplomacy--as well as the American psyche--is fundamentally biased toward "improving relations." Shifting a policy away from cooperation toward confrontation is always a more difficult proposition--particularly when support for existing policy is as firmly embedded among various constituencies and bureaucratic interests as was the policy toward Iraq."
Domestic special interests had a stake in the survival of Saddam. Exports to Iraq of American agricultural products were large: 23 percent of U.S. rice exports went to Iraq; a million tons of wheat. When members of Congress threatened to pass a sanctions bill against Iraq, the White House opposed the measure.
http://hnn.us/articles/862.html
U.S. intelligence was worried about his potential as a regional threat.
Rumsfeld shook his hand.
By early 1990, Iraq had used the first $500 million and was asking for the second installment. The NSC and the State Department pressed to have the aid released.
Again there was resistance. Iraqi officials had been implicated more deeply in the growing Banca Nazionale affair and government analysts were more skeptical about Iraq's ability to repay its growing foreign debt because it was spending so much on arms.
"In the worst-case scenario, investigators would find a direct link to financing Iraqi military expenditures, particularly the Condor missile," Paul****rson, head of the Agriculture Department program that aided the Iraqis, wrote in a Feb. 23, 1990, memo to his superior.
Condor was an Iraqi effort to develop an intercontinental missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. While****rson later told a congressional committee that he was only speculating about the Condor, his warning reflected growing evidence that the Agriculture aid had gone for military
uses.
Then on March 27, 1990, the U.S. Customs Service thwarted an effort by Iraq to obtain American-made triggers for nuclear weapons. And in a speech that same month, Hussein issued his threat to "burn half of Israel." Publicly, at least, President Bush promised a crackdown on exports to Iraq, saying that "nuclear proliferation . . . continues to pose serious threats to U.S. interests, as well as the interests of our friends in the region."
Pretty strong stuff. Long range missiles, nuclear triggers, "burning Israel"....
At the same time, there was an economic benefit to certain US industries, which seems to have been the overriding concern.
In 1989 President George Herbert Walker Bush took power and ordered a review of United States policy toward Iraq. According to Power:
The study ... deemed Iraq a potentially helpful ally in containing Iran and nudging the Middle East peace process ahead. The "Guidelines for U.S.-Iraq Policy" swiped at proponents of sanctions on Capital Hill and a few human rights advocates who had begun lobbying within the State Department. The guidelines noted that despite support from the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and State Departments for a profitable, stable U.S.-Iraq relationship, "parts of Congress and the Department would scuttle even the most benign and beneficial areas of the relationship, such as agricultural exports." The Bush administration would not shift to a policy of dual containment of both Iraq and Iran. Vocal American businesses were adamant that Iraq was a source of opportunity, not enmity. The White House did all it could to create an opening for these companies"Had we attempted to isolate Iraq," Secretary of State James Baker wrote later, "we would have also isolated American businesses, particularly agricultural interests, from significant commercial opportunities."
http://hnn.us/articles/862.html
Dollars, and the the corporations, were the source of the push towards enabling Saddam and Iraq.
On April 16, 1990, CIA Director Robert M. Gates, then deputy national security adviser, chaired an interagency meeting to discuss Iraqi policy. At that meeting, Commerce Undersecretary Dennis Kloske presented a variety of proposals to restrict licenses of high-tech technology with potential military uses to Iraq. The proposals were rejected.
On June 8, Kloske also sent a classified memo to Gates recommending a limited proposal to tighten up controls of exports to Iraq for technology with ballistic-missile applications. That proposal was rejected as well.
Hussein had also begun his campaign of overt threats against Kuwait, accusing his tiny neighbor of economic warfare and vowing to retaliate.
Yet as late as July 9, 1990, April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, assured Iraqi officials that the Bush Administration was still trying to get the second $500 million released, according to a classified cable.
Only on Aug. 2, 1990, did the Agriculture Department officially suspend the Agriculture Department guarantees to Iraq -- the same day that Hussein's tanks and troops swept into Kuwait.
- Ibid
What's strange is that there is no tactical need for Iraq in the region at this time. The war with Iran is over. All sorts of red lights are being seen as to Saddam's increasing desire to get WMD's , and delivery systems. The "Phantom of Saddam" (2006), was no comparison to the "Reality of Saddam (1990). Again, his brutality is by this point not only well known, it's a historical fact.
At the top levels of the US intelligence services, these signs are being interpreted properly. In the White House, under Bush Sr. and Cheney, political pressure is being applied to ignore the threats - and assist Iraq with billions of US dollars.
This is part of a long continuing process, started in the Reagan White House. One of it's strongest proponents was President George Bush Sr.
1984
* June: Vice President Bush telephones the president of the Export-Import Bank and helps persuade him to approve $500 million in loan guarantees so Iraq can build an oil pipeline.
1987
* Late February: Vice President Bush telephones the new president of the Export-Import Bank and successfully lobbies for Iraq to receive $200 million in new loan guarantees from the federal agency.
* March 2: Vice President Bush meets with Iraqi ambassador Nizar Hamdoon and tells him that two requests by Iraq for sensitive American technology had been approved over objections from the Defense Department.
1988
* Aug. 19: Iraq and Iran sign official cease-fire ending 8-year war.
1989
* Early October: President Bush signs a secret national security directive ordering U.S. agencies to expand political and economic ties with Iraq.
* Oct. 31: Secretary of State James A. Baker III telephones Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter and persuades him to reverse Agriculture's position and approve $1 billion in new loan guarantees to Iraq.
* Nov. 8: The $1 billion is approved despite concerns by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve about a growing scandal involving Iraq and the Agriculture credits.
1990
* April 19: White House National Security Council thwarts efforts by Commerce Department to stem the flow of U.S. technology to Iraq.
* July 9: April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, assures officials in Baghdad that the Bush Administration is still trying to obtain the release of the second $500 million of the $1 billion approved in November.
* Aug. 2: Iraq invades Kuwait and the Agriculture Department officially ends loan guarantees to Iraq that have amounted to $5 billion since 1983.
- Ibid
"Our administration's review of the previous Iraq policy was not immune from domestic economic considerations."
- James Baker
This seems to be the one constant in the history between Iraq and the USA.
So the next time an extreme right winger, or the President, points out how much the Democrats are against the country, or how Democrats are friends with the enemy, perhaps a review of history will remind all of us that the same group of people that assisted Saddam on the way up are still around. They were all Republicans.
Many of them are still in power, or were until recently. Over the course of the last twenty years or so, one can trace direct links to these people, and to American foreign and economic policy on Iraq. They are deeply intertwined, like a stubborn vine clinging to a chain link fence.
Bush Jr (the son of the elder that was Iraq's biggest supporter) , Cheney, Rumsfeld, Baker....
The same people that empowered him, for economic and political reasons, are still making money as he lies dead in that grave in Tikrit.
None of them were Democrats.
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