How the U.S. Helped Create Saddam Hussein
By Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas
Newsweek | MSNBC.com Week of
September 23,
2002
America helped make a
monster. What to do with him-and what
happens
after he's gone-has haunted us for a quarter
century.
The
last time Donald Rumsfeld saw Saddam Hussein, he gave him a cordial handshake.
The date was almost 20 years ago, Dec.
20, 1983; an official Iraqi
television crew recorded the historic moment.
The
once and future Defense secretary, at the time a private citizen, had been sent
by President Ronald Reagan to Baghdad as a special envoy.
Saddam Hussein, armed with a pistol on his hip, seemed "vigorous and confident,"
according to a now declassified State Department cable obtained by NEWSWEEK.
Rumsfeld "conveyed the President's greetings and expressed his pleasure at being
in Baghdad," wrote the
notetaker. Then the two men got down to business, talking about the need to
improve relations between their two countries.
Like
most foreign-policy insiders, Rumsfeld was aware that Saddam was a murderous
thug who supported terrorists and was trying to build a nuclear weapon. (The
Israelis had already bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at
Osirak.) But at the time, America's big worry was
Iran, not
Iraq. The Reagan
administration feared that the Iranian revolutionaries who had overthrown the
shah (and taken hostage American diplomats for 444 days in 1979-81) would
overrun the Middle
East and its vital
oilfields. On the-theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the Reaganites
were seeking to support Iraq in a long and bloody
war against Iran. The meeting between
Rumsfeld and Saddam was consequential: for the next five years, until
Iran finally capitulated,
the United
States backed Saddam's
armies with military intelligence, economic aid and covert supplies of
munitions.
FORMER
ALLIES
Rumsfeld
is not the first American diplomat to wish for the demise of a former ally.
After all, before the cold war, the Soviet
Union was
America's partner against
Hitler in World War II. In the real world, as the saying goes, nations have no
permanent friends, just permanent interests. Nonetheless, Rumsfeld's long-ago
interlude with Saddam is a reminder that today's friend can be tomorrow's mortal
threat. As President George W. Bush and his war cabinet ponder Saddam's
successor's regime, they would do well to contemplate how and why the last three
presidents allowed the Butcher of Baghdad to stay in power so long.
The
history of America's relations with
Saddam is one of the sorrier tales in American foreign policy. Time and again,
America turned a blind eye to
Saddam's predations, saw him as the lesser evil or flinched at the chance to
unseat him. No single policymaker or administration deserves blame for creating,
or at least tolerating, a monster; many of their decisions seemed reasonable at
the time. Even so, there are moments in this clumsy dance with the Devil that
make one cringe. It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s,
America knowingly permitted
the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission to import bacterial cultures that might be
used to build biological weapons. But it happened.
America's past stumbles,
while embarrassing, are not an argument for inaction in the future. Saddam
probably is the "grave and gathering danger" described by President Bush in his
speech to the United Nations last week. It may also be true that "whoever
replaces Saddam is not going to be worse," as a senior administration official
put it to NEWSWEEK. But the story of how
America helped create a
Frankenstein monster it now wishes to strangle is sobering. It illustrates the
power of wishful thinking, as well as the iron law of unintended consequences.
TRANSFIXED
BY SADDAM
America did not put Saddam in
power. He emerged after two decades of turmoil in the '60s and '70s, as various
strongmen tried to gain control of a nation that had been concocted by British
imperialists in the 1920s out of three distinct and rival factions, the Sunnis,
Shiites and the Kurds. But during the cold war,
America competed with the
Soviets for Saddam's attention and welcomed his war with the religious fanatics
of Iran. Having cozied up to
Saddam,
Washington found it hard to
break away-even after going to war with him in 1991. Through years of both tacit
and overt support, the West helped create the Saddam of today, giving him time
to build deadly arsenals and dominate his people. Successive administrations
always worried that if Saddam fell, chaos would follow, rippling through the
region and possibly igniting another Middle
East war. At times it
seemed that Washington was transfixed by
Saddam.
The
Bush administration wants to finally break the spell. If the administration's
true believers are right, Baghdad after Saddam falls
will look something like Paris after the Germans
fled in August 1944. American troops will be cheered as liberators, and
democracy will spread forth and push Middle Eastern despotism back into the
shadows. Yet if the gloomy predictions of the administration's many critics come
true, the Arab street, inflamed by Yankee imperialism, will rise up and replace
the shaky but friendly autocrats in the region with Islamic fanatics.
While
the Middle
East is unlikely to become
a democratic nirvana, the worst-case scenarios, always a staple of the press,
are probably also wrong or exaggerated. Assuming that a cornered and doomed
Saddam does not kill thousands of Americans in some kind of horrific
Gotterdmmerung-a scary possibility, one that deeply worries administration
officials-the greatest risk of his fall is that one strongman may simply be
replaced by another. Saddam's successor may not be a paranoid sadist. But there
is no assurance that he will be America's friend or forswear
the development of weapons of mass destruction.
A
TASTE FOR NASTY WEAPONS
American
officials have known that Saddam was a psychopath ever since he became the
country's de facto ruler in the early 1970s. One of Saddam's early acts after he
took the title of president in 1979 was to videotape a session of his party's
congress, during which he personally ordered several members executed on the
spot. The message, carefully conveyed to the Arab press, was not that these men
were executed for plotting against Saddam, but rather for thinking about
plotting against him. From the beginning,
U.S. officials worried
about Saddam's taste for nasty weaponry; indeed, at their meeting in 1983,
Rumsfeld warned that Saddam's use of chemical weapons might "inhibit" American
assistance. But top officials in the Reagan administration saw Saddam as a
useful surrogate. By going to war with
Iran, he could bleed the
radical mullahs who had seized control of
Iran from the pro-American
shah. Some Reagan officials even saw Saddam as another Anwar Sadat, capable of
making Iraq into a modern secular
state, just as Sadat had tried to lift up
Egypt before his
assassination in 1981.
But
Saddam had to be rescued first. The war against
Iran was going badly by
1982. Iran's "human wave
attacks" threatened to overrun Saddam's armies.
Washington decided to give
Iraq a helping hand. After
Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad in 1983,
U.S. intelligence began
supplying the Iraqi dictator with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments.
Official documents suggest that America may also have
secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to
Iraq in a swap
deal-American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to
Iraq. Over the protest of
some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to
buy a wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from American
suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export-control
documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the shopping list included a computerized
database for Saddam's Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of
political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television
cameras for "video surveillance applications"; chemical-analysis equipment for
the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous
shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the IAEC. According to former
officials, the bacteria cultures could be used to make biological weapons,
including anthrax. The State Department also approved the shipment of 1.5
million atropine injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons, but
the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some American officials later
surmised, were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds.
'WHO
IS GOING TO SAY ANYTHING?'
The
United
States almost certainly knew
from its own satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons against
Iranian troops. When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal
cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration
first blamed Iran, before
acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats, that the culprits
were Saddam's own forces. There was only token official protest at the time.
Saddam's men were unfazed. An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds,
records Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid (known as Ali Chemical) talking to
his fellow officers about gassing the Kurds. "Who is going to say anything?" he
asks. "The international community? F-k them!"
The
United
States was much more
concerned with protecting Iraqi oil from attacks by
Iran as it was shipped
through the Persian
Gulf. In 1987, an Iraqi
Exocet missile hit an American destroyer, the USS Stark, in the
Persian
Gulf, killing 37 crewmen.
Incredibly, the United
States excused
Iraq for making an
unintentional mistake and instead used the incident to accuse
Iran of escalating the war
in the gulf. The American tilt to Iraq became more
pronounced. U.S. commandos began
blowing up Iranian oil platforms and attacking Iranian patrol boats. In 1988, an
American warship in the gulf accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus, killing
290 civilians. Within a few weeks, Iran, exhausted and
fearing American intervention, gave up its war with
Iraq.
Saddam
was feeling cocky. With the support of the West, he had defeated the Islamic
revolutionaries in Iran.
America favored him as a
regional pillar; European and American corporations were vying for contracts
with Iraq. He was visited by
congressional delegations led by Sens. Bob Dole of
Kansas and Alan Simpson of
Wyoming, who were eager to
promote American farm and business interests. But Saddam's megalomania was on
the rise, and he overplayed his hand. In 1990, a U.S. Customs sting operation
snared several Iraqi agents who were trying to buy electronic equipment used to
make triggers for nuclear bombs. Not long after, Saddam gained the world's
attention by threatening "to burn Israel to the ground." At
the Pentagon, analysts began to warn that Saddam was a growing menace,
especially after he tried to buy some American-made high-tech furnaces useful
for making nuclear-bomb parts. Yet other officials in Congress and in the Bush
administration continued to see him as a useful, if distasteful, regional
strongman. The State Department was equivocating with Saddam right up to the
moment he invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
AMBIVALENT
ABOUT SADDAM'S FATE
Some
American diplomats suggest that Saddam might have gotten away with invading
Kuwait if he had not been
quite so greedy. "If he had pulled back to the Mutla Ridge [overlooking
Kuwait
City], he'd still be there
today," one ex-ambassador told NEWSWEEK. And even though President George H.W.
Bush compared Saddam to Hitler and sent a half-million-man Army to drive him
from Kuwait,
Washington remained ambivalent
about Saddam's fate. It was widely assumed by policymakers that Saddam would
collapse after his defeat in Desert Storm, done in by his humiliated officer
corps or overthrown by the revolt of a restive minority population. But
Washington did not want to push
very hard to topple Saddam. The gulf war, Bush I administration officials
pointed out, had been fought to liberate
Kuwait, not oust Saddam. "I
am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been
like the dinosaur in the tar pit-we would still be there," wrote the American
commander in Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, in his memoirs.
America's allies in the
region, most prominently Saudi
Arabia, feared that a
post-Saddam Iraq would splinter and
destabilize the region. The Shiites in the south might bond with their fellow
religionists in Iran, strengthening the
Shiite mullahs, and threatening the Saudi border. In the north, the Kurds were
agitating to break off parts of Iraq and
Turkey to create a
Kurdistan. So Saddam was
allowed to keep his tanks and helicopters-which he used to crush both Shiite and
Kurdish rebellions.
The
Bush administration played down Saddam's darkness after the gulf war. Pentagon
bureaucrats compiled dossiers to support a war-crimes prosecution of Saddam,
especially for his sordid treatment of POWs. They documented police stations and
"sports facilities" where Saddam's henchmen used acid baths and electric drills
on their victims. One document suggested that torture should be "artistic." But
top Defense Department officials stamped the report secret. One Bush
administration official subsequently told The Washington Post, "Some people were
concerned that if we released it during the [1992 presidential] campaign, people
would say, 'Why don't you bring this guy to justice?' " (Defense Department
aides say politics played no part in the report.)
The
Clinton administration was no
more aggressive toward Saddam. In 1993, Saddam apparently hired some Kuwaiti
liquor smugglers to try to assassinate former president Bush as he took a
victory lap through the region. According to one former
U.S. ambassador, the new
administration was less than eager to see an open-and-shut case against Saddam,
for fear that it would demand aggressive retaliation. When American intelligence
continued to point to Saddam's role, the Clintonites lobbed a few cruise
missiles into Baghdad. The attack
reportedly killed one of Saddam's mistresses, but left the dictator defiant.
CLINTON-ERA
COVERT ACTIONS
The
American intelligence community, under orders from President Bill Clinton, did
mount covert actions aimed at toppling Saddam in the 1990s, but by most accounts
they were badly organized and halfhearted. In the north, CIA operatives
supported a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam in 1995. According to the CIA's man
on the scene, former case officer Robert Baer, Clinton administration
officials back in Washington "pulled the plug" on
the operation just as it was gathering momentum. The reasons have long remained
murky, but according to Baer,
Washington was never sure that
Saddam's successor would be an improvement, or that
Iraq wouldn't simply
collapse into chaos.
"The
question we could never answer," Baer told NEWSWEEK, "was, 'After Saddam goes,
then what?' " A coup attempt by Iraqi Army officers fizzled the next year.
Saddam brutally rolled up the plotters. The CIA operatives pulled out, rescuing
everyone they could, and sending them to Guam.
Meanwhile,
Saddam was playing cat-and-mouse with weapons of mass destruction. As part of
the settlement imposed by America and its allies at the
end of the gulf war, Saddam was supposed to get rid of his existing stockpiles
of chem-bio weapons, and to allow in inspectors to make sure none were being
hidden or secretly manufactured. The U.N. inspectors did shut down his efforts
to build a nuclear weapon. But Saddam continued to secretly work on his germ-
and chemical-warfare program. When the inspectors first suspected what Saddam
was trying to hide in 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, suddenly fled
Iraq to
Jordan. Kamel had overseen
Saddam's chem-bio program, and his defection forced the revelation of some of
the secret locations of Saddam's deadly labs. That evidence is the heart of the
"white paper" used last week by President Bush to support his argument that
Iraq has been defying U.N.
resolutions for the past decade. (Kamel had the bad judgment to return to
Iraq, where he was
promptly executed, along with various family members.)
By
now aware of the scale of Saddam's efforts to deceive, the U.N. arms inspectors
were unable to certify that Saddam was no longer making weapons of mass
destruction. Without this guarantee, the United Nations was unwilling to lift
the economic sanctions imposed after the gulf war. Saddam continued to play
"cheat and retreat" with -the inspectors, forcing a showdown in December 1998.
The United Nations pulled out its inspectors, and the
United
States and
Britain launched Operation
Desert Fox, four days of bombing that was supposed to teach Saddam a lesson and
force his compliance.
Saddam
thumbed his nose. The United
States and its allies, in
effect, shrugged and walked away. While the U.N. sanctions regime gradually
eroded, allowing Saddam to trade easily on the black market, he was free to brew
all the chem-bio weapons he wanted. Making a nuclear weapon is harder, and
intelligence officials still believe he is a few years away from even regaining
the capacity to manufacture enriched uranium to build his own bomb. If he can
steal or buy ready-made fissile material, say from the Russian mafia, he could
probably make a nuclear weapon in a matter of months, though it would be so
large that delivery would pose a challenge.
LASHING
OUT?
As
the Bush administration prepares to oust Saddam, one way or another, senior
administration officials are very worried that Saddam will try to use his WMD
arsenal. Intelligence experts have warned that Saddam may be "flushing" his
small, easy-to-conceal biological agents, trying to get them out of the country
before an American invasion. A vial of bugs or toxins that could kill thousands
could fit in a suitcase-or a diplomatic pouch. There are any number of grim
end-game scenarios. Saddam could try blackmail, threatening to unleash smallpox
or some other grotesque virus in an American city if
U.S. forces invaded. Or,
like a cornered dog, he could lash out in a final spasm of violence, raining
chemical weapons down on U.S. troops, handing out
his bioweapons to terrorists. "That's the single biggest worry in all this,"
says a senior administration official. "We are spending a lot of time on this,"
said another top official.
Some
administration critics have said, in effect, let sleeping dogs lie. Don't
provoke Saddam by threatening his life; there is no evidence that he has the
capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction. Countered White House
national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, "Do we wait until he's better at
it?" Several administration officials indicated that an intense effort is
underway, covert as well as overt, to warn Saddam's lieutenants to save
themselves by breaking from the dictator before it's too late. "Don't be the
fool who follows the last order" is the way one senior administration official
puts it.
The
risk is that some will choose to go down with Saddam, knowing that they stand to
be hanged by an angry mob after the dictator falls. It is unclear what kind of
justice would follow his fall, aside from summary hangings from the nearest
lamppost.
POST-SADDAM
IRAQ
The
Bush administration is determined not to "overthrow one strongman only to
install another," a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK. This official
said that the president has made clear that he wants to press for democratic
institutions, government accountability and the rule of law in post-Saddam
Iraq. But no one really
knows how that can be achieved. Bush's advisers are counting on the Iraqis
themselves to resist a return to despotism. "People subject to horrible tyranny
have strong antibodies to anyone who wants to put them back under tyranny," says
a senior administration official. But as another official acknowledged, "a
substantial American commitment" to Iraq is inevitable.
At
what cost? And who pays? Will other nations chip in money and men? It is not
clear how many occupation troops will be required to maintain order, or for how
long. Much depends on the manner of Saddam's exit: whether the Iraqis drive him
out themselves, or rely heavily on U.S. power. Administration
officials shy away from timetables and specifics but say they have to be
prepared for all contingencies. "As General Eisenhower said, 'Every plan gets
thrown out on the first day of battle. Plans are useless. Planning is
everything'," said Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter)
Libby.
It
is far from clear that America will be able to
control the next leader of Iraq, even if he is not as
diabolical as Saddam. Any leader of Iraq will look around him
and see that Israel and
Pakistan have nuclear weapons
and that Iran may soon. Just as
England and
France opted to build their
own bombs in the cold war, and not depend on the
U.S. nuclear umbrella, the
next president of Iraq may want to have his
own bomb. "He may want to, but he can't be allowed to," says a Bush official.
But what is to guarantee that a newly rich Iraqi strongman won't buy one with
his nation's vast oil wealth? In some ways,
Iraq is to the
Middle
East as
Germany was to
Europe in the 20th century,
too large, too militaristic and too competent to coexist peaceably with
neighbors. It took two world wars and millions of lives to solve "the German
problem." Getting rid of Saddam may be essential to creating a stable,
democratic Iraq. But it may be only a
first step on a long and dangerous march.
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