Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

During the 1970s, Britain’s departure from the region threatened to leave the area without imperialist supervision, a growing concern of the United States. Kuwait had been independent since 1961; Bahrain and Qatar both gained their independence in 1971. On December 2, 1971, one day after the British officially withdrew from the area, the six remaining sheikdoms, including the two richest, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, created a sovereign confederation known as the United Arab Emirates. Britain delayed its withdrawal from Oman until 1977 because of serious internal disunity there. The United States now had to deal with these new entities on its own and without the century and a half of experience of the British. It did not attempt to acquire American bases from any of them until the Gulf War provided a splendid opportunity.

Before that happened, however, the placid world of the Persian Gulf changed radically in 1979, a year almost as momentous for American foreign policy as 1949, when the Communists came to power in China, the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb, and the NATO alliance was formed. In 1979, one of the twin pillars of American policy collapsed. In January, a popular revolution against the shah’s repressive rule forced him into exile and brought to power a fundamentalist Islamic regime under the Ayatollah Khomeini; in November, the revolutionaries seized the American embassy, taking all its employees hostage and holding them until January 1981. Complicating things even further, in December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Iran’s neighbor, Afghanistan, in an attempt to protect a leftist regime there. This elicited a huge CIA operation in Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world to recruit and arm Muslim “freedom fighters” to join the anti-Soviet guerrilla resistance.

In this context, in October 1979, the Carter administration set up what it called a Rapid Deployment Force to protect American interests in the Persian Gulf. Having no bases in the area, it located the force’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. On January 23, 1980, just before leaving office, President Carter proclaimed the Carter Doctrine: “Any attempts by any outside force to gain control of the Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” This was at the time far easier to say than to do, and the United States set out to find a replacement for the Iranian pillar. On January 1, 1983, the Reagan administration converted the Rapid Deployment Force (still based in Florida) into the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the first regional command created in thirty-five years.

In July 1979, Iraq also acquired a new leader, Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti of the Ba’ath Party. Slightly more than twenty years earlier, in 1958, Iraqi military officers, inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolt in 1952 against the British-backed monarchy in Egypt, had seized power and taken the country in a Soviet-leaning direction. The leader of the coup, General Abdel-Karim Kassem, proclaimed a republic, withdrew from the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact, legalized the Communist Party, decreed wide-ranging land reform, and even granted autonomy to the Kurds in the north. These shifts, coming at the height of the Cold War, were too much for the United States—CIA director Allan Dulles publicly called Iraq “the most dangerous spot in the world”—and in 1963, the CIA supported the anti-Communist Ba’ath Party’s efforts to bring Kassem’s republic to an end. Ba’ath activists, including a youthful Saddam Hussein, gunned down Kassem and many others on a list the CIA supplied. The plotters were able, however, only to create a coalition government. In 1968, the CIA again fomented a palace revolt in which the Ba’athists eliminated their coalition partners and assumed direct control. According to Roger Morris, a staff member of the National Security Council during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, “It was a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States and the CIA’s involvement there was really primary.” 8In July 1979, the same year as the anti-American revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein replaced his mentor, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, as president, a position he held until 2003. He was, like many other famous beneficiaries of American political intrigue before and since, a CIA “asset.”

In September 1980, Saddam, fearing Iranian influence among Iraq’s majority Shi’ites, invaded Iran. When, in early 1982, Iranian forces gained the upper hand on the battlefield, the United States launched another covert operation to arm and aid Saddam. NSDD (National Security Decision Directive) 114 of November 26,1983, is one of the few important Reagan-era foreign policy decisions that still remain classified. The only line from the text that has ever been leaked said that the United States would do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq from losing the war. The Reagan administration soon abandoned its scruples about what was legal. 9It began clandestinely to supply Saddam with satellite intelligence on Iran’s deployments. As much as $5.5 billion in fraudulent loans to help Iraq buy arms was channeled through the Atlanta branch of an Italian Bank (Banca Nazionale del Lavoro), all of it guaranteed by the Commodity Credit Corporation “to promote American farm exports.” Weapons were also sent via CIA fronts in Chile and Saudi Arabia directly to Baghdad. Between 1986 and 1989, some seventy-three transactions took place that included bacterial cultures to make weapons-grade anthrax, advanced computers, and equipment to repair jet engines and rockets. In December 2002, when Iraq was forced to deliver to the U.N. Security Council an 11,800-page dossier on the history of its weapons programs in accordance with resolution 1441, officials of the Bush administration hurried to New York to take possession of it before any other member could have a look. They then excised and suppressed 8,000 pages that detailed the weapons and dual-use technologies American and other Western companies had sold to Iraq prior to 1991. The American companies included Honeywell, Unisys, Rockwell, Sperry, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, and many others. 10

The United States had not had diplomatic relations with Iraq since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In December 1983, however, President Reagan sent his personal envoy, former secretary of defense in the Ford administration Donald Rumsfeld, to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld returned to Iraq in March 1984, precisely when both Iran and the United Nations were accusing Saddam’s regime of using chemical weapons in an increasingly brutal war. Rumsfeld, however, made no reference to the Iraqi gas attacks. Instead, he declared that “the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be contrary to U.S. interests.” 11In November 1984, Washington restored full diplomatic relations with Baghdad and stepped up the sales to Saddam of a range of munitions, including helicopters used in subsequent gas attacks. One of these assaults was the March 1988 gassing of Kurds in the village of Halabja that killed some 5,000 people. The United States maintained friendly relations with Iraq right up until the moment that Saddam revived Iraq’s old territorial claims on Kuwait and on August 2, 1990, carried out his surprise attack against that country. It was barely two years since the end of Iraq’s bloody war with Iran.

In response, the United States at first seemed indecisive. President Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain were attending a conference in Colorado shortly after the attack. According to those in attendance, Bush muttered something like, “It’s all right going in, but how are we going to get out?” and commented that most Americans couldn’t find Kuwait on the map. At this point, Thatcher allegedly took the microphone and said, “Look, George, this is no time to go wobbly. We can’t fall at the first fence.” Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the administration allowed Saddam to invade and then rebuffed all efforts by other Middle Eastern nations and the United Nations to resolve the issue peacefully. Bush contended that it was his responsibility to maintain human rights in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Middle East, despite the fact that Kuwait’s record on human rights is hardly admirable.