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CounterPunch
December
3, 2002
The Iraq Ploy and Resemblances
to the Start of the Cold War
by SAUL LANDAU
"If you're going to go in and try
to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've
got Baghdad, it's not clear what you will do with it. It's not
clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one
that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime,
a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward
the Ba'athists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists.
How much credibility is that government going to have if it's
set up by the United States military when it's there? How long
does the United States military have to stay to protect the people
that sign on for the government, and what happens to it once
we leave?"
-- Dick Cheney, April 13, 1991 New York
Times interview (explaining why the Bush (41) administration
did not pursue "regime change" during the Gulf War.)
I feel as if I'm witnessing a scenario similar
to the onset of the Cold War. In 1946-47, British and American
leaders invented an imminent Soviet threat to invade Western
Europe. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the "Iron
Curtain" notion and President Harry Truman and his coterie
transformed Uncle Joe into Stalin the Butcher.
In 2002, George W. Bush and his mountebank
advisers invented the imminent Iraq peril. Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein had alleged links to Al Qaeda terrorists and would launch
weapons of mass destruction he had secretly accumulated. Bush
charged that Saddam had violated the sacred resolutions of the
worthless United Nations!
However zany such speculations may have
seemed to the factually enlightened, Bush's 2002 "axis of
evil" speech nevertheless set the tone and context for future
political discussion. Within months, the prestige media and political
elite had accepted W's Baptist sermon language that had emanated
from a speech writer's imagination and converted it into an axiom
of policy. The issue was not whether Iraq might conceivably threaten
U.S. interests in the distant future, but whether to take unilateral
or multilateral action to combat it now.
In the post World War II years, U.S.
leaders repeated implausible charges that the Soviet Union constituted
a "clear and present danger." Poised to attack Western
Europe, the Soviets also aimed to subvert democracy everywhere.
These statements became the "factual" basis for the
Cold War. The incessant propaganda campaign contained no reference
to the USSR having just lost more than 20 million dead and 20
million more wounded; nothing about the 200 hundred cities demolished
or the acute food shortage that gripped the Soviet people. Moreover,
no mention was made that Soviet troops had no boots and that
Stalin had made sure that Soviet railroad tracks did not coincide
in width with those of eastern Europe, thus making nearly impossible
to think of supplying an invading army.
Yet, within months, the publicity machinery
transmuted the false claims into truisms that in turn became
the foundations of military alliances like NATO, SEATO and CENTO.
SAC bombers flew round the clock missions with nuclear payloads
and, from this demonstrably false premise, hundreds of institutions
developed to fight Soviet communism and win the Cold War. This
legacy lives on. Indeed, NATO has expanded and the numerous national
security agencies created for the unique purpose of combating
the Red Menace thrive as well. Ironically, Russia now plays an
important role in the joint NATO-Russia Council, the very organ
created to combat the Russian menace.
The Cold War origins should serve as
a warning for the present pre-war situation with Iraq. The Bushies
have repeated ad hominum arguments against Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein who, because he committed horrendous crimes in the recent
past, like gassing his own people in the 1980s, must by now have
accumulated weapons of mass destruction and forged links with
terrorists. This demonization of Saddam even includes claims
that he tried to assassinate the elder Bush on a trip to the
Persian Gulf in 1993. Like Stalin, Saddam is a genuine black
hat. That does not, however, mean we must go to war against Iraq.
The missing links in the Administration's
argument are facts. The Bushies apparently feel loathe to support
their claims with facts, perhaps, because they have none. They
also count on temporal atrophy to prevail in the public mind,
and obedience to authority to reign in the press corps.
The media occasionally raises issues
from the past that contradict today's moralistic assertions and
certitudes, but most of the past statements and activities of
officials who scream for war against the Saddam monster remain
entombed.
We do not hear the press asking the President
and his advisers why U.S. policy changed from being pro-Saddam
in the 1980s, to anti-Saddam in the 1990s. Declassified State
Department cables and court records indicate that President Ronald
Reagan and Vice President George Bush the elder endorsed Iraq's
use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops in the 1980s,
which is today considered an unspeakable crime.
In 1983, Reagan selected the perfect
right wing Republican as his emissary to Iraq to explain to Saddam
that while the United States could not openly condone Iraq's
use of poison gas, it would look the other way because Washington
wanted to prevent an Iranian victory. So, Donald Rumsfeld provided
Iraq with military assistance in Reagan's name.
According to MSNBC, November 17, evidence
of this agreement emerged from depositions taken in a January,
1995, court case in which Howard Teicher, a National Security
Counsel official, who traveled with Rumsfeld to Iraq, states
that both Reagan and Vice President Bush "personally delivered
military advice to Saddam Hussein, both directly and through
intermediaries."
In his affidavit, Teicher writes that
"CIA Director [William] Casey personally spearheaded the
effort to ensure that Iraq had sufficient military weapons, ammunition
and vehicles to avoid losing the Iran-Iraq war." The United
States supplied "the Iraqis with billions of dollars of
credits," claims Teicher, and offered "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."
Teicher says the military advice to the
Iraqis was relayed "to Saddam from the highest levels of
the U.S. government, from President Reagan and then-Vice President
Bush." In 1986, according to Teicher, "President Reagan
sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq
should step up its air war and bombing of Iran. This message
was delivered by Vice President Bush." At this time, Reagan
and Bush knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons and cluster
bombs and acquiesced "in order to stave off the Iranian
attacks." The U.S. also assisted in facilitating sales of
such weapons to Iraq, says Teicher.
Today, Rumsfeld's apparent amnesia about
his 1980s mission as Reagan's conciliator allows him to convert
into appalling crimes the very acts that he encouraged Saddam
to commit. "Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering
danger," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on
September 19, 2002. "It is a danger to its neighbors, to
the United States, to the Middle East and to international peace
and stability. It is a danger we do not have the option to ignore.
The world has acquiesced in Saddam Hussein's aggression, abuses
and defiance for more than a decade."
What a change from Rumsfeld 15 years
earlier, dealing with the same man and the same regime. He more
than acquiesced in Saddam's aggression. In 1984, he delivered
an encouraging message to Saddam that said: "The [United
States government] recognizes Iraq's current disadvantage in
a war of attrition since Iran has access to the Gulf while Iraq
does not. We would regard any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes
as strategic defeat for the west." In other words, the United
States would support Iraq. Rumsfeld also discussed lifting sanctions
to allow Iraq to buy military equipment.
Rummy knew that Iraq had used poison
gas against Iranian troops a few months before and that Iraq
had begun building a chemical weapons infrastructure. He knew
that Iraq planned to drop these chemical weapons on Iranian targets.
In the August 18, 2002, New York Times, Patrick Tyler reported
that in the 1980s, Reagan, Bush (the elder) and their top advisers
had indeed provided logistical and intelligence information to
Iraq. Tyler underlined that a U.S. official had stated explicitly
after touring the battlefield area in 1988 that "The use
of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep
strategic concern." But the Administration ignored the story
and so did the majority in the press corps.
Likewise, little has been done with Rumsfeld's
letter to Secretary of State George Shultz. "I said I thought
we had areas of common interest, particularly the security and
stability in the Gulf, which had been jeopardized as a result
of the Iranian revolution," wrote Rummy in the 1980s. "I
added that the U.S. had no interest in an Iranian victory; to
the contrary. We would not want Iran's influence expanded at
the expense of Iraq."
In his 1993 memoirs, Shultz affirmed
that reports of Iraq using chemical weapons began "drifting
in" by December 1983. In March, 1984, the State Department
confirmed that Iraq had used "lethal chemical weapons"
against Iranian combatants. UPI cited a team of United Nations
experts saying that "mustard gas laced with a nerve agent
has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf
War between Iran and Iraq".
Amnesia when used in diplomacy can get
tricky. In 1990, after meeting with US Ambassador April Glaspie,
Saddam, not adroit in discerning nuance, assumed he had a U.S.
green light to invade Kuwait. Perhaps Ms. Glaspie believed that
Saddam intended to recapture only the northeastern tip of Kuwait,
which Iraq had historically claimed - and with good precedent.
But Saddam took the whole enchilada and so the modern demonization
campaign began. Saddam gained himself the "disobedient"
label.
When the U.S. government decides to punish
a disobedient former friend or client, it starts a campaign to
turn a white hat into a black hat to get public backing. Recall
the 1989 campaign in CIA and DEA agent, General Manuel Noriega
of Panama, apparently refused to help the United States sufficiently
in its Contra War against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Within weeks, the media had stopped treating this former agent
with respect and instead began to list his devilish activities.
With Saddam, to convince the public of
his malevolence, God provided the elder Bush with a public relations
firm that discovered a Kuwaiti princess who testified before
Congress that Iraqis tossed Kuwaiti babies out of incubators.
The media dutifully reported these horrors. Neither Congress
nor the media questioned her bona fides until well after the
story had become major headline news. Of course, she never saw
the events she swore that she had witnessed. Indeed, they did
not occur.
To deal with the Devil also requires
the use of the angelic U.S. military. Generals with good bedside
manners assure us that our military does everything to avoid
civilian casualties. Indeed, we use smart bombs so that no civilians
will die or suffer injury. We liberate civilians from ogres.
A Noriega or a Saddam must assume responsibility for damage done
to people and civilian infrastructure.
The U.S. mass media infrequently refers
to the number of casualties in the Gulf war or to the hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died because of the
12 year old sanctions imposed by the United States under the
auspices of the UN.
In a September trip to Iraq, I heard
doctors describe increases in rates of child mortality. Indeed,
former Secretary of State Madeline Albright affirmed that her
willingness to pay the price of 500,000 dead Iraqi children attributed
to the sanctions in order to punish Saddam. But why did this
really cost her?
In order to deliver punishment, the U.S.
government also must show that the Devil threatens us and his
immediate neighbors. So, amnesia resurfaces. The CIA had praised
Noriega shortly before Bush I sent an invasion force to Panama
to capture him. So too with Saddam, the very authors of the current
policy have to erase former statements and hide dirty deeds.
According to Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus,
an UNSCOM inspector, the Americans used members of the inspection
team as spies to track Saddam's movements in order, presumably,
to assassinate him.
In addition, the Administration orchestrated
the media to change key facts about the past to make Saddam look
more evil. In 2002, for example, the prestige media said that
Saddam had kicked out the UNSCOM inspectors in 1998. The very
same media in 1998 reported that the UN ordered them to leave,
because the U.S. government had warned them that they intended
to bomb and did not want to kill UN inspectors.
We have yet to see a fact to prove that
Saddam has actually accumulated mass destruction weapons, or
has ties to Al Qaeda. On terrorist links, the facts seem to indicate
the opposite. Former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter declared that
Saddam's "large-scale weapons of mass destruction programs...had
been fundamentally destroyed or dismantled by the weapons inspectors
as early as 1996, so by 1998 we had under control the situation
on the ground."
Since 1998, Saddam may have accumulated
some weapons of dubious potency, but by placing spies in the
inspection team who gave coordinates of targets to the U.S. Air
Force for bomb delivery, the U.S. government discredited the
inspection team - at least in the eyes of the Iraqis. When the
New York Times reported this, the story appeared and disappeared
without causing a major ripple.
The inspectors have now arrived again.
Their access to Saddam's underwear has become the focus of U.S.
concern rather than the damage caused by a decade of bombing
Iraq and imposing draconian sanctions on its medical system.
Are these the non-violent equivalents of smart bombs? I met desperate
doctors who cannot get key ingredients for chemo therapy cocktails
or crucial parts for surgical procedures. And I saw the kids
dying of cancer from exposure, presumably to depleted uranium
from U.S. weapons. Not only do Iraqis have a monster for a leader
who involved them in his adventures in Iran and Kuwait that cost
perhaps a million Iraqi lives, but the cruel and insensitive
policies of the United States and Great Britain with which to
contend.
"Regardless of whether we say so
publicly," said Anthony H. Cordesman, at Washington's Center
for Strategic and International Studies, "we will go to
war, because Saddam sits at the center of a region with more
than 60 percent of all the world's oil reserves."
Does it all boil down to terrorism and
weapons of mass destruction acting as facades for grabbing a
"strategic resource?" Pretty greasy, if you ask me.
But for precedent, look at the origins of the Cold War. Hey,
that only lasted for 45 years!
Remember what Senator Wayne Morse said
after the Senate passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, "We're
going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest
threat to the peace of the world. It's an ugly reality, and we
Americans don't like to face up to it. I hate to think of the
chapter of American history that's going to be written in the
future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia."
Saul Landau's
new film is IRAQ: VOICES FROM THE STREET (November 2002) available
from The Cinema Guild in New York City. He teaches at Cal Poly
Pomona and is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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