Abstract
Beyond the Bush administration's distortions and half-truths about Iraq lurks the “Big Lie,” the Orwellian memory hole that political leaders rely on to expunge the historical roots of present-day disasters.
As the reasons for war with Iraq have evaporated–Saddam Hussein's supposed connections with international terrorists and his missing weapons of mass destruction (now fatuously relabeled “weapons of mass destruction program-related activities”)–the justification for war on another sovereign state has shifted back to the Iraqi regime's mass killings and the March 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja.
In his State of the Union address, the president said that without the U.S. invasion, “the killing fields of Iraq … would still be known only to the killers.” But most of the mass graves date from the 1980s, when both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were deeply involved in helping Saddam's poison-gas-wielding military to target Iranian forces, and from the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, when U.S. forces commanded by the senior Bush, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell, stood by only miles away as Saddam's henchmen slaughtered thousands of Iraqi Shiites to insure against expansion of the despised Islamic revolution in Iran.
Some of the very Republican officials who now loudly thump the lectern about Saddam's atrocities actually knew a lot about the killings at the time, yet continued to arrange secret weapons shipments, financing, and intelligence support for Saddam's reign of terror. Declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University reveal that nearly five years before the attack on Halabja, the State Department had information confirming “Iraq's almost daily use” of chemical weapons.
Ronald Reagan's special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, utterly failed to confront the Iraqi leader regarding his use of chemical weapons. Reagan administration officials lobbied successfully against adoption of a Security Council resolution condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons. When full U.S. diplomatic relations were reestablished in November 1984, billions of dollars in U.S. loans and export credit guarantees went to Iraq.
Saddam got 45 U.S.-made Bell Textron helicopters, provided in a 1985 deal worth $200 million, ostensibly for “civilian transport.” They were transferred to the uniformed Iraqi military, painted in military colors, and stationed at airfields in northern Iraq. Reagan-Bush officials took the absurd position that Saddam had not violated the conditions of sale or U.S. law because there was no “evidence” that the helicopters had been “used in combat.” Powell was assistant to the president for national security affairs from December 1987 to January 1989, when Saddam intensively used chemical weapons against both the Kurds in the north and the Iranian forces in the southern Fao Peninsula. According to a little-noted New York Times report of August 17, 2002, “American military officers said President Reagan, Vice President Bush, and senior national security aides [including Powell] never withdrew their support for the highly classified program in which more than 60 officers of the [DIA] were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for airstrikes, and bomb damage assessments for Iraq,” which “shared its battle plans with the Americans.” One veteran of the program said 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.”
The nasty truth of the matter is that in 1983-1988, Saddam's regime was dependent on U.S. aid and intelligence. The Reagan administration had the leverage to stop Saddam's use of chemical weapons against his own citizens, if not against the “human waves” of Iranian teenagers sent by the Ayatollah Khomeini to topple him. But no effort was made. Reagan-Bush officials confined themselves to sporadic rhetorical condemnations, and opposed congressional efforts to impose economic sanctions. In 1989, then-Secretary of State James Baker, now President George W. Bush's special envoy for reducing Iraq's foreign debt, doubled the Commodity Credit Guarantee program for the Saddam regime to more than $1 billion annually.
Without the support of the United States and its Gulf State clients, Saddam's regime would have succumbed to Iranian counterattack in the early 1980s or at least lost its sway over much of Iraq's national territory in the north, south, and east, and many of the worst atrocities could have been averted.