If you think you've heard it all in terms of U.S. imperialist hypocrisy,
lies, manipulation, and mass slaughter-wait. There's more.
Today the U.S. government is beating the drums for a preemptive war on
Iraq. President Bush casually-dressed on his month-long Texas vacation,
talks casually of "regime change" in Baghdad--a euphemism for a U.S.
military assault that could cost tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.
The pros and cons of various battle plans--like an "inside-out" blitzkrieg
on Baghdad with 50,000 to 100,000 U.S. troops and massive airstrikes-are
publicly, and shamelessly, discussed in the media. And The New York Times
reported (August 19) "the first tangible signs of a logistical buildup
around Iraq."
No evidence has been produced that Iraq can militarily threaten the U.S.,
or had anything to do with September 11. Yet those ruling the U.S. empire
still demand Saddam's head. Why? Because, they claim, the Hussein regime is
trying to acquire "weapons of mass destruction"-- and has shown a
willingness to use them. Bush officials have repeatedly cited Iraq's use of
poisonous gas in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War as proof -- and justification
for an attack.
Now the Times has revealed that when Iraq's government did use chemical
weapons against Iranian forces and its own Kurdish population, the U.S.
government was there - aiding and abetting!
The Times ("Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas,"
8/18/02) reported that, according to senior military officers with direct
knowledge of the secret program, U.S. officials "provided Iraq with critical
battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies
knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the
decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war."
It's long been known that the U.S. gave Iraq satellite intelligence and
other military support to prevent an Iranian victory. What's new in the
Times story is the extent of U.S. involvement: "More than 60 officers of the
Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] were secretly providing detailed
information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for
airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq."
This Pentagon program continued even when it became clear that the Iraqi
military "had integrated chemical weapons throughout their arsenal and were
adding them to strike plans that American advisers either prepared or
suggested." The obvious implication -- not drawn by the Times -- is that
U.S. plans were shaped by the knowledge that Iraq would use chemical
weapons. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward reported as much (12/15/86):
in1984 the CIA began giving Iraq intelligence which it used to "calibrate"
its mustard gas attacks against Iranian troops. An estimated 50,000 Iranians
were killed by Iraqi gas warfare. (Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like
These - Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982-1990, p. 77)
One DIA officer told the Times that the Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by
Iraq's use of gas. It was just another way of killing people -- whether with
a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference." Another U.S.
intelligence officer said, "The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis
was not a matter of deep strategic concern." The Times continues, "What Mr.
Reagan's aides were concerned about, he said, was that Iran not break
through to the Fao Peninsula and spread the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia."
In other words, the U.S. rulers have no problem with chemical weapons and
mass slaughter--so long as it serves their strategic interests.
The Times' Revelations - Scratching the Surface
The Times' revelations may be shocking, but they only scratch the surface
of the enormously cynical, manipulative, and murderous actions taken by the
U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war. An equally sordid story could have been how
the U.S. may well have helped start the war in the first place.
In early 1979, the Shah of Iran, the U.S.'s loyal Persian Gulf gendarme,
was overthrown. The U.S. Embassy in Teheran was seized by militant students
in November, and a month later, on Christmas eve, the Soviet Union invaded
neighboring Afghanistan.
These developments shocked the U.S. establishment. They threatened to
undermine its grip on the oil-rich Gulf, and possibly hand their Soviet
rivals a major geopolitical gain. The U.S. counter-attacked, and one front
(and there were many) seems to have been encouraging Iraq to invade Iran.
The goals: weakening Iran and limiting its ability to undermine U.S. clients
in the Gulf, while creating opportunities for increased American leverage in
both countries and building up the U.S.'s direct military presence in the
region.
Not surprisingly, Carter administration officials deny they gave Iraq a
"green light" for its September 22, 1980 invasion. Yet there is evidence
that they did just that. On April 14, 1980, five months before Iraq's
invasion, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor,
signaled the U.S.'s willingness to work with Iraq: "We see no fundamental
incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq...we do not
feel that American- Iraqi relations need to be frozen in antagonisms." In
June, Iranian students revealed a secret memo from Brzezinski to
then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance recommending the "destabilization" of
Iran's Islamic Republic via its neighbors.
According to Iran's president at the time, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr,
Brzezinski met directly with Saddam Hussein in Jordan two months before the
Iraqi assault. Bani-Sadr wrote, "Brzezinski had assured Saddam Hussein that
the United States would not oppose the separation of Khuzestan (in southwest
Iran) from Iran." Journalist Robert Parry reports (Consortiumnews.com,
1/31/96) that in a secret 1981 memo summing up a trip to the Middle East,
then-Secretary of State Al Haig noted, "It was also interesting to confirm
that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war
against Iran through [then Prince, later King] Fahd."
London's Financial Times reported that the U.S. passed satellite
intelligence to the Hussein regime via third countries, leading Iraq to
believe Iranian forces would quickly collapse if attacked (they didn't). So,
while the U.S. media talks long and loud about Saddam Hussein the "brutal
aggressor," the U.S. most likely helped push Iraq into a long, bloody war.
Supplying and Manipulating Both Sides
The New York Times could also have delved into how the U.S. helped arm
both Iran and Iraq, and then manipulated them in order to make sure neither
won a decisive victory. In 1983, one U.S. official declared, "We don't give
a damn as long as the Iran-Iraq carnage does not affect our allies or alter
the balance of power." (Dilip Hiro, The Longest War, p. 121)
By 1982, the war's momentum had shifted to Iran, which was threatening
Basra, Iraq's second largest city. According to a 1995 affidavit by Reagan
National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher (which the U.S. government
demanded the court seal for "national security" reasons), "In the Spring of
1982, Iraq teetered on the brink of losing its war with Iran.... In June,
1982, President Reagan decided that the United States...would do whatever
was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran."
(RealHistoryArchives.com)
Teicher states that after Reagan signed a secret National Security
Directive in June 1982, "The United States actively supported the Iraqi war
effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by
providing U.S. military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by
closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq
had the military weaponry required."
Anti-personnel cluster bombs were a U.S. favorite. "CIA Director [William]
Casey was adamant that cluster bombs were a perfect `force multiplier,' for
Iraq," Teicher states, and "the CIA authorized, approved and assisted
Cardoen [the supplier] in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and
other munitions to Iraq."
Over an 8-year period, the U.S. gave Iraq some $5 billion in economic aid,
and encouraged its allies to provide Iraq billions worth of arms. The
British sold Iraq tanks, missile parts, and artillery; the French provided
howitzers, Exocet missiles, and Mirage jet fighters; and the West Germans
supplied technology used in Iraqi plants that reportedly produced nerve and
mustard gas.
The U.S. also directly supplied Iraq with biological weapons. Author
William Blum writes that according to a 1994 Senate Committee Report, "From
1985, if not earlier, through 1989, a veritable witch's brew of biological
materials were exported to Iraq by private American suppliers pursuant to
application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce."
(Counterpunch, 8/20/02)
The deadly mix included anthrax, botulism, and E. coli bacteria. Blum adds
that the Senate Report stated, "these microorganisms exported by the United
States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and
removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program."
A Cynical Strategy of Tilts
During the Iran-Iraq War, the U.S. cynically tilted to one side, then the
other, to advance its overall agenda--which included trying to regain
influence in Iran. A May 1985 CIA memo to Director Casey said, "Our tilt to
Iraq was timely when Iraq was against the ropes and the Islamic revolution
was on a roll. The time may now have to come to tilt back...."
The U.S. secretly encouraged Israel to ship Iran arms in the early 1980s,
and then began directly supplying weapons to the Islamic Republic in 1985 as
part of the infamous Iran-Contra affair. In September 1986, Reagan official
Oliver North even promised Iran the U.S. could "bring our influence to bear
with certain friendly Arab nations" to oust the Hussein regime.
Earlier, in February 1986, while these secret discussions were taking
place, Iran scored a major victory by capturing Iraq's Fao Peninsula. The
New York Times (1/19/87) reported that Iraqi officials believed that their
defeat at Fao "was due to faulty U.S. intelligence." Iraq detected Iranian
troop movements, the Iraqi official said, but the U.S. "kept on telling us
that the Iranian attack was not aimed against Fao."
In fact, "American intelligence agencies provided Iran and Iraq with
deliberately distorted or inaccurate intelligence data in recent years," the
Times reported (1/12/87). The motive, captured in the Times headline:
"Keeping Either Side From Winning." Or, as Henry Kissinger coldly put it,
"too bad they can't both lose."
In his book Veil - The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, Woodward sums up
the results of this U.S. double-dealing: "Doling out tactical data to both
sides put the agency in the position of engineering a stalemate. This was no
mere abstraction. The war was a bloody one....almost a million had been
killed, wounded or captured on both sides. This was not a game in an
operations center. It was slaughter." (p. 507)
Tilting Back Toward Baghdad
Fears of an Iraqi defeat and the collapse of the U.S.'s backroom dealings
with Iran led the U.S. to tilt back toward Iraq. Woodward writes that in
late 1986 "Casey had met with senior Iraqis to...encourage more attacks on
Iran, especially against economic targets." Teicher states that, "In 1986,
President Reagan sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that
Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran..." This took place
during the "war of the cities," when many Iraqi bombing raids were directed
against economic and civilian targets.
In 1988, after an Iraqi poison gas attack that killed some 5,000 Kurds at
Halabja in northern Iraq, U.S. aid to Iraq actually increased. According to
the Los Angeles Times (2/13/91), U.S. intelligence reported that American-
supplied helicopters had been used in such chemical attacks on Iraq's Kurds.
*****
President Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has recently
been on the stump arguing that the U.S. has a "moral case" for war on Iraq.
One only need examine the cesspool of deceit, manipulation and complicity
in mass carnage that comprises the record of U.S. actions in the Iran-Iraq
war to catch the stench of the "morality" guiding Rice and the rest of the
U.S. ruling class. These imperialists thought nothing of encouraging and
aiding a gruesome slaughter which, by most accounts, led to the killing or
wounding of over a million Iranians and Iraqis.
The war the U.S. now threatens on Iraq would be equally criminal,
enormously destructive, and motivated, as before, solely by concerns of
empire and global domination. It must be opposed now, before it begins.
********
Larry Everest is a correspondent for the Revolutionary Worker newspaper
and author of Behind the Poison Cloud: Union Carbide's Bhopal Massacre. He
traveled to Iraq in 1991 and shot the video Iraq: War Against the People. He
can be reached at larryeverest@hotmail.com and his articles found at
www.rwor.org.
Start Date: 2002-09-13 01:00:00-04
End Date: 2002-10-13 01:00:00-04
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