Meanwhile, Saddam
Hussein had drawn on the country’s oil wealth to carry out a major military
build-up, with military expenditures swallowing 8.4 percent of GNP in 1979.
Starting in 1958 Iraq had become an increasingly important market for
sophisticated Soviet weapons, and was considered a member of the Soviet camp.
In 1972 Iraq signed a 15-year friendship, cooperation and military agreement
with the USSR. The Iraqi regime was striving to develop or acquire nuclear
weapons. The only army in the region to rival Iraq’s was Iran’s. But after
1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, much of the Iranian Army’s American
equipment became inoperable.
The Iraqi invasion of
Iran in 1980 (on the pretext of resolving border disputes) thus solved two
major problems for the US. Over the course of the following decade two of the
region’s leading military powers, neither of them hitherto friendly to the US,
were tied up in an exhausting conflict with each other. Such conflicts among
third world countries create a host of opportunities for imperialist powers to
seek new footholds, as happened also in this instance.
Despite its strong
ties to the USSR, Iraq turned to the west for support in the war with Iran.
This it received massively. As Saddam Hussein later revealed, the US and Iraq
decided to re-establish diplomatic relations - broken off after the 1967 war
with Israel - just before Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 (the actual
implementation was delayed for a few more years in order not to make the
linkage too explicit). Diplomatic relations between the US and Iraq were
formally restored in 1984 - well after the US knew, and a UN team confirmed,
that Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranian troops. (The emissary
sent by US President Reagan to negotiate the arrangements was none other than
the present US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.) In 1982, the US State
Department removed Iraq from its list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, and
fought off efforts by the US Congress to put it back on the list in 1985. Most
crucially, the US blocked condemnation of Iraq’s chemical attacks in the UN
Security Council. The US was the sole country to vote against a 1986 Security
Council statement condemning Iraq’s use of mustard gas against Iranian troops -
an atrocity in which it now emerges the US was directly implicated (as we shall
see below).
A brisk trade was
done in supplying Iraq. Britain joined France as a major source of weapons for
it. Iraq imported uranium from Portugal, France, and Italy, and began
constructing centrifuge enrichment facilities with German assistance. The US
arranged massive loans for Iraq’s burgeoning war expenditure from American
client states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The US administration provided
“crop-spraying” helicopters (to be used for chemical attacks in 1988), let Dow
Chemicals ship its chemicals for use on humans, seconded its air force officers
to work with their Iraqi counterparts (from 1986), approved technological
exports to Iraq’s missile procurement agency to extend the missiles’ range
(1988). In October 1987 and April 1988 US forces themselves attacked Iranian
ships and oil platforms.
Militarily, the US
not only provided to Iraq satellite data and information about Iranian military
movements but, as former US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officers have
recently revealed to the New York Times (18/8/02), prepared detailed battle
planning for Iraqi forces in this period - even as Iraq drew worldwide public
condemnation for its repeated use of chemical weapons against Iran. According
to a senior DIA official, “if Iraq had gone down it would have had a
catastrophic effect on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and the whole region might have
gone down (i.e., slipped from US control) - that was the backdrop of the
policy.”
One of the battles
for which the US provided battle planning packages was the Iraqi capture of the
strategic Fao peninsula in the Persian Gulf in 1988. Since Iraq eventually
relied heavily on mustard gas in the battle, it is clear the US battle plan
tacitly included the use of such weapons. DIA officers undertook a tour of
inspection of the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces successfully re-took it, and
they reported to their superiors on Iraq’s extensive use of chemical weapons,
but their superiors were not interested. Col. Walter P. Lang, senior DIA
officer at the time, says that “The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis
was not a matter of deep strategic concern”. The DIA, he claimed, “would have
never accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use
against military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for
survival.” (As we shall see below, chemical weapons were used extensively by
the Iraqi army against Kurdish civilians, but DIA officers deny they were
“involved in planning any of the military operations in which these assaults
occurred”.) In the words of another DIA officer, “They (the Iraqis) had gotten
better and better” and after a while, chemical weapons “were integrated into
their fire plan for any large operation”. A former participant in the program
told the New York Times that senior Reagan administration officials did nothing
to interfere with the continuation of the program. The Pentagon “wasn’t so
horrified by Iraq’s use of gas,” said one veteran of the program. “It was just
another way of killing people - whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn’t
make any difference,” he said. The re-capture of the Fao peninsula was a
turning-point in the conflict, bringing Iran to the negotiating table.
A US Senate inquiry
in 1995 accidentally revealed that during the Iran-Iraq war the US had sent
Iraq samples of all the strains of germs used by the latter to make biological
weapons. The strains were sent by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention [sic] and the American Type Culture Collection to the same sites in
Iraq that UN weapons inspectors later determined were part of Iraq’s biological
weapons program.
It is ironic to hear
the US today talk of Saddam Hussein’s attacks on the Kurds in 1988. These
attacks had full support from the US:
“As part of the Anfal
campaign against the Kurds (February to September 1988), the Iraqi regime used
chemical weapons extensively against its own civilian population. Between
50,000 and 186,000 Kurds were killed in these attacks, over 1,200 Kurdish
villages were destroyed, and 300,000 Kurds were displaced... The Anfal campaign
was carried out with the acquiescence of the West. Rather than condemn the
massacres of Kurds, the US escalated its support for Iraq. It joined in Iraq’s
attacks on Iranian facilities, blowing up two Iranian oil rigs and destroying
an Iranian frigate a month after the Halabja attack. Within two months, senior
US officials were encouraging corporate coordination through an Iraqi
state-sponsored forum. The US administration opposed, and eventually blocked, a
US Senate bill that cut off loans to Iraq. The US approved exports to Iraq of
items with dual civilian and military use at double the rate in the aftermath
of Halabja as it did before 1988. Iraqi written guarantees about civilian use
were accepted by the US commerce department, which did not request licenses and
reviews (as it did for many other countries). The Bush Administration approved
$695,000 worth of advanced data transmission devices the day before Iraq
invaded Kuwait.”
“As part of the Anfal campaign against the Kurds (February to September 1988), the Iraqi regime used chemical weapons extensively against its own civilian population. Between 50,000 and 186,000 Kurds were killed in these attacks, over 1,200 Kurdish villages were destroyed, and 300,000 Kurds were displaced...
The full extent of US complicity in Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” programs became clear in December 2002, when Iraq submitted an 11,800-page report on these programs to the UN Security Council. The US insisted on examining the report before anyone else, even before the weapons inspectors, and promptly insisted on removing 8,000 pages from it before allowing the non-permanent members of the Security Council to look at it. Iraq apparently leaked the list of American companies whose names appear in the report to a German daily, Die Tageszeitung. Apart from American companies, German firms were heavily implicated. (Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, like his suppression of internal opposition, has been continuously useful to US interests: condoned and abetted during periods of alliance between the two countries, it is routinely exploited for propaganda purposes during periods of tension and war.)
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