US media, government scramble to obscure criminal dealings with Hussein

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/huss-d24.shtml

By Joseph Kay and Alex Lefebvre

24 December 2003

Despite the orgy of self-congratulation that greeted the capture of Saddam
Hussein, this is yet another “victory” that is proving to have unforeseen
and bitter consequences for the Bush administration.

As reports begin to seep into the press of the history of dirty dealings
between the former Iraqi president and the administrations of Reagan and
Bush senior, one must suspect that the present occupant of the White House,
not to mention his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, regret that the
military forces that located Hussein did not shoot him on the spot rather
than take him into custody.

Now the administration confronts the danger that a trial of Hussein—
especially one held under international auspices that affords the ex-
president the opportunity to mount a genuine legal defense—will expose the
direct and deep involvement of the United States government in the most
serious crimes of which Hussein stands accused, particularly the use of
chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Recently declassified national security documents draw a devastating
portrait of Washington’s use of Hussein in pursuit of its geopolitical
interests in the Middle East. Even as it became aware that Iraq was using
chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish insurgents, the
US government continued shifting its policy to provide critical political,
military and economic support to Hussein’s regime.

This history exposes the administration’s rationale for invading and
occupying Iraq and placing Hussein on trial as utterly false and
hypocritical. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, alongside its alleged
possession of other so-called weapons of mass destruction, was a principal
justification for the war. The documents establish irrefutably that key
figures in the Reagan and Bush administrations were Hussein’s enablers and
accomplices in his crimes.

Hussein himself is clearly aware of the potentially explosive character of
the history of his relations with the US government. When captured, his
first words were: “My name is Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq
and I want to negotiate.” On what basis can Hussein, whose army had been
defeated months ago, seek to negotiate? His only leverage over the US
government is his ability to expose its ruthless maneuvering in the Middle
East over the past quarter century.


What the documents show

The declassified documents (publicly available at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv) provide insights into the nature of the
Baathist regime’s ties with the American government during the 1980s.

What is particularly troubling for ruling circles in the US is that many of
the principals involved in those relations on Washington’s side—Rumsfeld,
Vice President Cheney, the elder Bush and a number of others—either occupy
leading positions in the current administration or are intimately connected
to it. Any attempt to brush aside US-Iraqi relations in an earlier period
as the bygone policy of a previous government is plainly untenable.

Official disquiet over these ties found expression in the New York Times’s
publication of a nervous article—buried on page 10 of the newspaper—calling
attention to the national security documents and recounting Rumsfeld’s
diplomatic missions to Baghdad 20 years ago.

The relations between the US and Hussein began fairly early in the latter’s
career in the Baath Party. Hussein, fiercely anticommunist, was viewed by
British and American officials as a person with whom they could deal.
However, up until the early 1980s the two countries had no official
diplomatic ties. Iraq had terminated all official diplomatic relations with
the US after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

This changed with the onset of the Iran-Iraq war, particularly after the
Islamic fundamentalist regime of Iran began to achieve victories against
Iraq in 1982. The increasingly desperate position of the Iraqi army also
prompted Hussein to begin using poison gas. Iran charged Iraq with
violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons use—to which
Iraq was a signatory. The documents indicate that the US was well aware of
Iraq’s use of the weapons by 1983, at the latest.

It was in this year that momentum began to build in Iraq and the US for
resuming official diplomatic ties. On the US side, the issue of Hussein’s
chemical weapons use was viewed as a public relations problem that would
give Iran political ammunition against Iraq and make it harder to conduct
US-Iraqi relations in the open.

A State Department directive from Under Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger, then the number three man in the State Department, to US
personnel in Baghdad dated November 21, 1983, reads: “We are considering
how to respond to development of the [chemical weapon] issue in the UN. We
do not wish to play into Iran’s hands by fueling its propaganda against
Iraq.”

The directive instructed US envoys to make sure that in bringing up the
issue of Iraqi chemical weapons use, no lasting damage was done to US-Iraqi
relations: “We raise the issue [of chemical weapons] now neither to enter
into a confrontational exchange with you, nor to lend support to the views
of others; but, rather, because it is a long-standing policy of the US to
oppose use of lethal CW [chemical weapons].”

In December 1983, Rumsfeld (the current secretary of defense who was at the
time the CEO of a large pharmaceutical firm, G.D. Searle) visited Iraq as a
personal envoy of President Ronald Reagan. Included in the points to be
discussed by Rumsfeld in the 1983 meeting is the statement that the US
government “recognizes Iraq’s current disadvantage in a war of attrition
since Iran has access to the Gulf while Iraq does not and would regard any
major reversal of Iraq’s fortunes as a strategic defeat for the west.”

Rumsfeld later told King Hussein of Jordan—who was a principal collaborator
in US-Iraqi relations—that the US was worried Iraq’s defeat could seriously
endanger other countries in the region, particularly the US client state
Saudi Arabia. This could entirely cut off US access to Persian Gulf oil.

Rumsfeld met with Iraqi minister Tariq Aziz and Saddam Hussein. According
to detailed notes of his meeting with Saddam Hussein, he did not mention
chemical weapons. He and his Iraqi counterparts did, however, discuss steps
to move Iraq closer to the US and further from the USSR, the political
climate in the Middle East, and the construction of an oil pipeline to the
Mediterranean port of Aqaba, which would be out of the range of Iranian
strikes. Bechtel, the politically well-connected engineering firm that is
currently cashing in on the “reconstruction” of Iraq, was to build the
pipeline.

In March 1984, Iraq’s battlefield use of chemical weapons became so obvious
that the US government felt obliged to issue a statement condemning it. The
statement denouncing the chemical weapons use contains the following
extraordinary passage: “The United States strongly condemns the prohibited
use of chemical weapons wherever it occurs.... [However,] the United States
finds the present Iranian regime’s intransigent refusal to deviate from its
avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring
Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations
and the moral and religious basis which it claims.”

Apparently, the US has since overcome its moral qualms with “eliminating
the legitimate government” of Iraq.

Iraq reacted strongly against the statement, despite repeated American
attempts to assure the government in Baghdad that the statement was issued
solely for purposes of public consumption and did not indicate a change in
US commitments to improve relations with Iraq. Rumsfeld was hurriedly sent
back to Baghdad (in March of 1983) to deliver this message. At that time,
Secretary of State George Shultz told Rumsfeld to assure his hosts
that “our interests in (1) preventing an Iranian victory and (2) continuing
to improve bilateral relations with Iraq, at a pace of Iraq’s choosing,
remain undiminished,” despite Iraq’s illegal use of chemical weapons.

The US continued to minimize the issue of Iraqi chemical weapons use
throughout the conflict. When, in 1988, the northern Kurdish town of
Halabja was gassed and the Iraqi regime widely blamed, the US government
moved to provide cover for Iraq. A State Department document notes that, in
dealing with Congressional proposals to formally condemn the use of
chemical weapons, “we should oppose legislation that uses inaccurate terms
like genocide, and should try to keep the maximum amount of flexibility for
the Administration in handling the issue.”

The attitude of the US government to Iraqi use of chemical weapons was part
of a strategic orientation to aid Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. To this end,
the US provided intelligence information and ensured that Iraq had
sufficient supplies of weapons.

The Reagan administration pushed for US government financing of Iraq
through the Export-Import Bank and other US institutions. As was revealed
in the so-called Iraqgate scandal that emerged in the early 1990s, the US
government looked the other way as Iraq used loans from American official
and private institutions to fund purchases of arms. All of this was
contrary to the government’s stated policy of neutrality in the Iran-Iraq
war.

This policy of support for the Hussein regime continued up until the day
Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. To the complete surprise of Hussein—who
was led to believe that the US was neutral in the conflict—the first Bush
administration organized an air and ground war against Iraq. The turn
against the Iraqi regime was completed by the second Bush administration,
with the consequence that Hussein, instead of being supported by the US,
now finds himself on the verge of execution for war crimes.

What changed? How did Hussein go from being a friend of the US to a pariah?
The documents give clear proof that his use of chemical weapons and the
like had nothing to do with it. Rather, the US made a strategic shift in
the early 1990s. The growing strains within the Soviet Union—which would
lead to its complete disintegration—meant that new vistas were opening up
for American imperialism.

A dominant section of the American ruling elite—including as a prominent
member Donald Rumsfeld—saw the decline of the Soviet Union as an
opportunity for American imperialism to advance its interests without
constraint. Whereas it once felt obliged to deal with people like Hussein
in order to project its interests internationally, the US is now determined
to assert these interests directly. Hence the drive for the direct military
occupation of Iraq, a policy unthinkable for the US only two decades ago.


The US ruling elite fears a Hussein trial

It is no surprise, therefore, that the US ruling elite is so wary of a
Hussein trial. This fear was expressed in a December 18 editorial in the
Wall Street Journal entitled “Judicial Colonialism.”

The Journal begins by arguing against an international tribunal for
Hussein. “The fear seems to be,” write the editors, referring to those who
support an international trial, “that Saddam might not be able to get a
fair trial in Iraq, as if there’s some global suspense about his guilt.
Worse, Iraqis might be so barbaric as to impose the same death penalty on
Saddam that he imposed on so many thousands of his own people.”

Instead of an international tribunal, the Journal advocates a trial in
Iraq, which, under the current circumstances, can only mean a trial staged
by the Iraqi stooge regime under the supervision of the American military
occupation. The newspaper’s editors praise members of the Iraqi Governing
Council for declaring that the trial will be public and televised. “In a
public trial that includes fulsome testimony, [Bush, Blair and the Iraqi
Governing Council] have the chance to educate the people of Iraq about the
scope and detail of Saddam’s reign of terror.”

The Journal’s sarcastic comment about the “global suspense about [Saddam
Hussein’s] guilt” makes clear that what it wants is a show trial, a public
exhibition of Hussein for propaganda purposes, in which only evidence
contributing to a predetermined guilty verdict and execution will be
admitted. Any serious examination of the history of Hussein’s regime and
role of the US government would be excluded from the trial envisioned by
the Journal. The last thing that the Journal—and the ruling circles for
which it speaks—wants is for the trial to raise uncomfortable issues, as is
clear when the editors turn to their rationale for opposing an
international tribunal.

“Exhibit No. 1,” the editorial states, “is the trial of former Serbian
strongman Slobodan Milosevic, currently going on at the Hague....
Proceedings are being broadcast back home, and Milosevic, who is
representing himself, is making the most of it.... This week he inserted
himself into the US elections, trying to discredit Wesley Clark, who was
appearing as a witness.... Giving Saddam Hussein a similar platform could
be a disaster for Iraq’s reconstruction, emboldening the Baathist remnants
and suggesting to ordinary Iraqis that Saddam still might return to
power...”

The Wall Street Journal is furious that Milosevic—who, like Hussein, is a
right-wing bourgeois nationalist—has been given an opportunity in the trial
to challenge the accusation that he is guilty of war crimes and genocide
while president of Yugoslavia. His defense has rested, in part, on
denouncing the role of the United States in fostering the breakup of the
Yugoslav federation and launching a war against Serbia.

Nor are these sentiments unique to the Wall Street Journal. The New York
Times voiced a similar view in a December 21 article by Jeffrey Rosen,
entitled “Pursuing Justice: Perils of the Past.” Also citing the example of
Milosevic, Rosen writes: “There is certainly a risk of embarrassment when
the degree of American support for Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s
is aired. The details revealed could even undermine Washington’s
credibility.”

Recognizing the hypocrisy of the American government’s handling of Hussein
does not imply any sympathy for the man himself. Hussein should be tried
and held accountable for his crimes, but not by the Bush administration and
its servants in the Iraqi Governing Council. Such a trial would be a
mockery of international law, in which Hussein’s former accomplices now
assume the role of his prosecutors.

See Also:
Saddam Hussein’s capture will not resolve Iraqi quagmire:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/sadd-d15.shtml
[15 December 2003]

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