Gulf Wars

Gulf Wars

Introduction

As it stands today, United States foreign policy is hopelessly caught up in trying to secure the land, water, and resources of Southwest Asia, a geographic swath stretching from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean all the way to Pakistan, India, and the Chinese border.  Nearly 150,000 American and American-led allied soldiers are currently escalating one war in Afghanistan, while just under 100,000 soldiers are winding down another war in Iraq.  Last month, Lt. General William G. Webster, Third Army Commander, spoke about the difficulties in pulling off these simultaneous operations. “Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now.”[1]  As of 2006, General John Abizaid, in charge of Central Command, the military bureaucracy responsible for this breadth of territory, estimated that 200,000 American soldiers were currently deployed in his area of responsibility.  However, this is only a fraction of the 1.5 million soldiers that have cycled through since September 11^th, 31,000 of whom have returned home wounded, and 3,000 of whom have returned home in a flag-draped coffin.[2]  Just prior to September 11^th, there were only 28,638 U.S. personnel in the region, according to the calculations of Chalmers Johnson.[3]  In the middle of Southwest Asia lies the Persian Gulf, perhaps the world’s most crucial waterway, around which 65% of the world’s proven oil reserves are buried.  Here too there is a massive U.S. military presence, with six major airbases, one major Army base, and the 5^th fleet of the U.S. Navy all located in the area, spread out over Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.  And this certainly does not count the numerous U.S. military facilities built in Iraq after 2003.

While these statistics may read as outlandishly banal, another generic excess of the American way of life, only forty years ago they would have nearly all read zero.  Before 1971, the Navy had only four ships patrolling the entirety of the Gulf, and the Air Force had one major airfield, at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.  In terms of casualties, the United States had none until 1982, when 256 Marines had their barracks blown up by a truck bomb in Beirut.  This was because for the previous century, Great Britain had served as the dominant imperial power in the region, even after World War Two, when the United States was on the rise and Great Britain was in a decline. However, in 1968 London announced that within five years she would pull back all military forces from east of the Suez Canal, leaving Southwest Asia free of imperial control for the first time in recent memory.

   What follows below is a history of how and why the United States assumed the position vacated by the British Empire, such that it is the dominant force in the region today.  Part one will detail three key states—Bahrain, Oman, and Diego Garcia—examining how they fell into the Pentagon’s orbit during the 1970’s and the effect of the American military on their way of life.  Part two will look at Saudi Arabia in the context of the bureaucratic planning that took place during the Carter and Reagan Administration.  Part three will consider Washington’s conduct during the Iran-Iraq war, as the first case study of the new Pentagon paradigm developed under Carter.  Finally, in conclusion, the lead up to the 1991 Gulf War will be considered from a number of angles, in an attempt to deduce the interests driving the American path to war. 

Although this study does not have the space to examine today’s U.S. Foreign Policy in Southwest Asia, it is the author’s belief that many of the decisions and deliberations made today in Washington D.C. have deep roots in contemporary history, as much of the personnel, let alone the polices, are actually the same.  As an example, current defense secretary Robert Gates, who has now kept his cabinet post across party lines, a rare achievement, served in the 1980’s as the head of clandestine service to CIA Director William Casey, when Casey was flagrantly pursing a globe spanning project of covert operations.  In southwest Asia alone, the CIA illegally armed both Iraq and Iran, as well as the Arab mujahedeen army fighting in Afghanistan, and in the process set up an extensive black market procurement network involving nearly every other state in the region.  The Gates was promoted to Director of CIA by President George H.W. Bush, himself another former CIA chief.  In 2006 Gates was chosen by Dick Cheney to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, a position he has held through fifteen months of the Obama presidency, in charge of two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As such, Gates has been intimately involved in creating and now combating Islamic terrorist networks across all of Southwest Asia.

In a recent interview, Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND analyst who leaked the 7,000-page classified internal history of the Vietnam War known as the “Pentagon Papers,” was asked what convinced him that the war was immoral and thus worth exposing:

Reading the earliest part of the Pentagon papers going back to 1945, a period that many people didn’t imagine as being part of U.S. decision making on Vietnam, was crucial to me seeing the war as being unjustified.  From the beginning it was an effort to help the French reconquer a former colony that had declared its independence. [4] 

In the same vein, today’s American presence in Southwest Asia can only be understood through the history of its creation.

I. The Trucial Coast Redux

In 1968, the British Empire formally declared that within five years it would withdraw its military presence from east of the Suez Canal, leaving the Gulf and its western coastal kingdoms lacking an international patron to provide support.  Since, the 19^th century, Britain had ruled these lands with a direct colonial mandate, referring to them as the “trucial coast” because of the treaties that existed between London and the tiny kingdoms, allowing matters of trade and foreign affairs to be set to be decided in London’s colonial office. 

 The power vacuum, however, would not last long.  When key states in the region were granted their independence over the following decade, they quickly took it with a grain of pax- Americana salt.  During the 1970’s two key islands formerly under British control--Bahrain, just north of the peninsula of Qatar, and Diego Garcia, between the Maldives and Seychelles Island chains—came under the dominion of the Pentagon.  From these two strategic locations, situated in the center of Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean respectively, Washington would be able to pursue a region spanning project of military infrastructure, stretching across the Indian Ocean and up the Gulf to Kuwait and Iraq, eventually becoming the sole protector of the ultra strategic waterway as the British had between the World Wars.

Bahrain

The tiny island of Bahrain, under the control of the al-Khalifah family, was granted its independence in December 1971. Following World War II, the Bahraini rulers had allowed the British to maintain its large Naval fleet at the 100-acre Jufair base, just outside the capital of Manama, who themselves leased space to the U.S. Navy.  From 1945 through the British withdrawal, the four-boat Middle East Force, distinctly painted all white to dampen the heat, was the only American presence in the Gulf.

Upon being granted independence, it took the Bahraini rulers just one week to sign an agreement with Washington allowing continued American access to Jufair, at a cost of $4 million per year. [5]   For the al-Kalifah family, this was motivated by a fear of Iran, which had tried to claim sovereignty over Bahrain only one year earlier.  Due to the seemingly ever-present need to protect their tiny island from Tehran’s ambition, Bahrain’s leaders hinted at the time that they had no objection to Washington’s fleet growing larger, “provided it could be done quietly, at a politically realistic time, and in such a way not to force the Government of Bahrain to make a choice between the US and the Arab world.”[6]

However, outside of the al-Kalifah family and the Navy Admirals, there were many parties opposed to the military presence.  In a spirited Congressional debate, a number of Senators would only approve the basing agreement on the promise that it established no political or military commitments from Washington to Bahrain.  For Arab nationalists throughout the region, the deal was seen as a new form of Western colonialism. Even Shah Pahlavi of Tehran, a close friend of Washington, remarked at a press conference: “we declared long ago that we should not like to see a foreign power in the Persian Gulf.  Whether that power be Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union or China our policy has not changed.”[7]  In fact, two years later, following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the al-Kalifah family themselves became embarrassed by their newly visible ties to the U.S. military, so blatantly the suppliers of Israel’s army.  They threatened to end Washington’s lease on the naval base, but in a manner that has been repeated endless times since, the threat was negotiated down in a manner that kept the base under Pentagon control.[8]

Diego Garcia

Although colonial powers have many black marks on their names, none may be as dark as the Anglo-American treatment of Diego Garcia and its Chagos population.  The award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger has written and produced a documentary about their plight:

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world… During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitize" the islands: the words used in American documents… The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls."… Under the heading "Maintaining the fiction," another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along."[9]

In December 1966, with the population “swept” and “sanitized,” Washington and London signed an executive agreement authorizing the U.S. military to construct a communications facility on Diego Garcia, which was expanded into a modest base two years later.[10]  For the U.S. this was ostensibly a fifty-year, rent-free territorial loan from London, although it was understood that in return $14 million in payments for Polaris Submarines heading to England would be waved.[11]  However, before he left, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the colonial British governor, had one last brutality up his sleeve.  The island’s population of nearly 1,000 pets, mostly dogs, were rounded up and gassed, using fumes from the newly arrived American military vehicles, after which the corpses were thrown into a furnace.[12]  Any remaining islanders took this as a sign to leave.  In 1974, its territory free of inhabitants, Washington expanded the Diego Garcia communications facility into a full fledged Naval base, extending the airport runway to 12,000 feet, deepening the lagoon to accommodate a carrier task force, and storing a thirty-day supply of food there for ships and aircraft.[13]

Oman

For Oman, the switch from the Pax-Brittanica to a Pax-Americana took place gradually throughout the 1970’s, and in reality the British never really left.  In the first year of the decade, London arranged for a “palace coup” in Muscat, with Crown Prince Qabas, a graduate of Britain’s Sandhurst Military Academy, overthrowing his father, Sultan Said ibn Taimur. [14]   In his four decades of rule, Sultan Taimur ­­­­­­­­had refused to spend from the Omani treasury to build public institutions.  Before 1970, Oman, about the size of Kansas, had only sixteen schools, and all ten of their modern doctors worked abroad, because the Sultan distrusted modern medicine.[15]  Newly anointed Sultan Qabas was to change all this.   He was armed with significant oil revenue, which for Oman increased from $100 million in 1970 to over $1 billion by 1978, and had a strategic coastline that made him well placed to receive technological largesse from the West.

A good indicator of this was the upgrade to Oman’s air travel infrastructure, both military and civilian.  In 1975, Qabas contracted out a modernization project on the Seeb airport to Pan American Airways, as part of a “Gulf Air Consortium” that included modern airport upgrades in Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE.   The following year, Oman signed a $50 million contract with the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) to set up an integrated air defense system, based on radar, Jaguar fighter jets, and Rapier missiles, also built by BAC.   This was all part of a remarkable $844 million Oman spent on weaponry in 1976, nearly 40% of its gross national product. [16] 

The Pentagon began to negotiate basing agreements with Oman in 1977, pursuant to Carter’s Presidential Directive 18 discussed below.  When these negotiations leaked out in the European press, it caused a small scandal, as it smacked of what it was—another wealthy Arab autocrat, formerly under the protection of London, signing a military deal with a new Western superpower.  As Radio Moscow put it, Oman would be the newest link “in a chain of American bases running from Japan through the Philippines to Diego Garcia.” [17]  In December of 1979, a group of Pentagon and State Department officials visited Oman to try and acquire basing agreements, also stopping in Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Kenya. In January of 1980, Washington and Muscat signed an extensive agreement, which allowed for Pentagon use of military “facilities,” including airfields and ports at Masira Island and al-Khasab (Goat Island), located at the tip of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as storage and stockpile dumps at Seeb and Thumrait airfields.  Over the next three years Congress approved nearly $100 million dollars to build and upgrade these facilities. [18]  In fact, Oman had such close ties to the West that they turned down an offer for $1.2 billion in aid from the other Gulf States, led by Kuwait, if Oman canceled their military agreement with the United States.[19]

II. Saudi Arabia and the Arc of Crisis

In 1977, when Jimmy Carter took the White House, he was a leader confused on what role America was meant to play in the world.  Carter was the first President since Dwight Eisenhower to assume office without a crisis in South Vietnam, the two-decade anomaly that had ceased to exist only two years earlier.  Congressional committees had just exposed and cracked down on a swath of covert activities, including the COINTELPRO program conducted within the United States against leftist leaders.  To any observer, it seemed clear that the American desire to support foreign interventions had drowned along with the helicopters pushed off the boats as America fled the South China Sea.

James Carroll writes that Carter came to power “as the United States approached the great post-Vietnam crossroads,” representing “a grace period in which the illusions of warmaking power had been dramatically laid bare.”[20]  Pursuant to this feeling, the Carter campaign and administration made early efforts to stress human rights and crack down on the powerful warmongers.  In his inaugural address, Carter stated “When my time as your president has ended… I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we built a lasting peace, built not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values.”[21] 

But it is evident that the national security bureaucracy did not share this platform, as right from the beginning of Carter’s term the Pentagon was actively planning to increase the American military presence in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.  And as most Presidents do, Carter acquiesced to the Pentagon demands.  In his first summer in office, Carter signed Presidential Review Memorandum 10, identifying “the Persian Gulf as a vulnerable and vital region, to which greater military concern ought to be given.”[22]  By the end of the summer, Carter had signed Presidential Directive 18, ordering the creation of a “deployment force of light divisions with strategic mobility for global contingencies, particularly in the Persian Gulf Region and Korea.”[23] 

By 1978, Carter had broken on his inaugural dream of a world “built not on weapons of war.”  In February, he authorized the transfer of two hundred advanced combat aircraft to three countries in the Middle East—-sixty F-15s to Saudi Arabia, fifty F-5Es to Egypt, and a combination of ninety F-15s and F-16s to Israel. Six months later he gave preliminary approval to the sale of another $12 billion worth of high-tech weaponry to Iran.[24]  By September, PD18 had worked its way up the Pentagon bureaucracy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who signed on to a planning document titled “Review of U.S. Strategy Related to the Middle East and Persian Gulf.”  The review gave three main interests in garrisoning a military presence in the region: to assure continuous access to petroleum resources; to prevent an inimical power or combination of powers from establishing hegemony; and to assure the survival of Israel as an independent state in a stable relationship with contiguous Arab states.[25]  To pursue these interests, the review advocated for an expansion of basing facilities in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti, as well as the possibility of creating a numbered Naval fleet—the 5^th fleet—to be based in the Indian Ocean.[26]  Zbignew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor at the time, characterized this entire effort as an attempt at securing control over what he called an “Arc of Crisis,” stretching from the Horn of Africa across the Persian Gulf to Pakistan, India, and the Chinese border.[27]  These developments conclusively led to the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force, upgraded in 1983 to a Central Command.  As such, the thrust of American foreign policy today, driven by Central Command’s attempt to manage two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has its roots in Jimmy Carter’s four years in office.

During this review, the Pentagon also for the first time came up with contingency plans for a situation wherein Iraq would serve as a belligerent, invading Kuwait or Saudi Arabia to the south.  For the military, this was strange thinking—the Cold War dictated that the battle would surely come against the Soviet Union, who would have to invade through the Caucuses up to the Zhagros Mountains of Iran.  The Contingency study was written by Paul Wolfowitz, then a low level Pentagon bureaucrat in the Office of Regional Programs, with the help of Geoffrey Kemp and Dennis Ross.  Wolfowitz came to the conclusion that “the emerging Iraqi threat” had two dimensions.  One was purely strategic, that a powerful Iraqi army may turn towards the oil rich lands to the south.  However, the other dimension to Wolfowitz’s perceived threat was much more insidious.  As a rising power, Baghdad had the economic resources to lead and direct the other Arab states through soft power, causing the “moderate local powers to accommodate themselves to Iraq without being overtly coerced.”  The proposed solution perfectly captures the effect of bureaucratic planning in the national security state: 

The latter problem suggests that we must not only be able to defend the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and ourselves against an Iraqi invasion or show of force, we should also make manifest our capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq’s power—and this may require an increased visibility for U.S. power (author’s emphasis).[28]

Once a geographic region fell within the view of the Pentagon, as the Persian Gulf did during the Carter administration, officials throughout the policy world were institutionalized to begin to see “emerging threats” to American power looming on the horizon.  This is the nature of the beast that is the security bureaucracy.  As former State Department official Richard Barnet wrote in 1972, “in the game of international politics practitioners must be fiercely partisan.  The United States is the client, and the task of the manager is to increase her power and influence in the world, whatever the cost.  Raison d’état, the historic principle asserted by sovereign nations that they are above all law, is a daily operating rule in the national security bureaucracy.”[29] 

Beginning in this period, a whole generation of American policy-makers operated on the premise that Washington had a military role to play in Southwest Asia.  For the next twenty years, names like Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle would move up through the bureaucratic ranks based on their ability to best manage and increase this military power, not on a reasoned analysis of whether it was worth projecting in the first place. While the Vietnam Syndrome moved the populous and a large scope of the political sphere to the left, within the government there was also the fomentation of a reactive right, focused on the new geography of an “Arc of Crisis,” and planning for an “increased visibility for U.S. power.”  This would become the historic legacy of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. “Having pointed the way to ultimate peace, he punished those who refused to take it by pushing them more than ever back towards ultimate war,” writes James Carroll.  “He began by telling the Pentagon men that their twilight time had come; he ended with the Pentagon men celebrating, more than anyone else, morning in America.”[30]     

*****

For Washington, the physical ability to project power into the region depended entirely on one country, Saudi Arabia.  With by far the largest territory and proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia was both rolling in petrodollars and guiding OPEC policy on oil production.  If the Pentagon was to expand their military presence, they certainly needed the acquiescence, and pocketbook, of the House of Saud.  In simple terms, a quid pro quo had to be worked out.  Washington would upgrade the 1945 Bitter Lake agreement, and allow Saudi Arabia to purchase high-level military equipment, the same being used by NATO.  In return, Saudi Arabia would build up a massive network of air, naval, and command facilities, far larger than needed for their own military forces, such that they could sustain U.S. combat brigades in a scenario of regional warfare. 

As part of the 1978 Middle East arms dump previously mentioned, Saudi Arabia purchased 60 F-15 Eagle fighter planes, 200 AH-1S attack helicopters, and 250 M-60A1 tanks.  Three years later, in what was at the time the largest arms sale in American history, Saudi Arabia spent $8.5 billion on 5 AWAC command and control systems, 7 KC-135 tanker aircraft, 660 sidewinder air-to-air missiles, and 22 ground radar installations.[31]  Accompanying this slew of advanced technology were thousands of American “advisors,” there to train pilots, assist with operational problems, and make sure that Washington stayed abreast of all relevant intelligence.   Additionally, in 1975, Saudi Arabia signed a $76 million contract with the Vinnell Corporation to train the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), a paramilitary force used to police the Saudi population.  Vinnell, a subsidiary of defense giant Northrop Grumman, sent 700 personnel to the Gulf—the first time that American private contractors were employed to train a foreign army.[32]   

During this time, Saudi Arabia was also instrumental in setting up and funding a pan-Arab military-industrial complex, the “Arab Industrialization Organization” (AOI), combining Gulf petrodollars with Egyptian labor and industrial capacity.  In 1975, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and the UAE launched the AOI with a $1 billion fund, much of which initially spent on acquiring British and French weapon systems.  By 1978, it was reported that the AOI had reached the point where it could start its own weapon-production factories, based mainly in Egypt.  Western firms moved in to outsource their production, with American Motors producing 12,000 trucks a year, and Britain's Westland firm building 20 lynx helicopters.[33]  During the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. government harnessed the AOI to produce military equipment for Iraq, as will be discussed below.

At the time, the mainstream American newspapers actually scrutinized these military deals, in a manner they have ceased to reproduce today.  In 1978, the Washington Post ran a front page story, “Reclaiming Petrodollars; U.S. Army Helps Oil Lands Build,” detailing how the Army Corp of Engineers, “could end up managing $25 billion in construction” for Saudi Arabia, dwarfing “any of [the corps] previous work abroad and representing a large foothold for the United States in the country with the world’s biggest supply of oil.”[34]  Three years later, another front-page story, “Saudis’ AWACS Just the Beginning of New Strategy,” reported that “a secret oral understanding,” had been reached between Maj. Gen. Charles L. Donnely, chief of the U.S military group in Saudi Arabia, and Col. Fahd Abdullah, the head of the Saudi Air Force, striking a deal that “if America will sell the Saudis an integrated package of top-of-the line military technology, Saudi Arabia will build a massive network of command, naval and air defense facilities large enough to sustain U.S. forces in intensive regional combat involving the Soviet Union.”[35]  By the end of the 1980’s the reports of Saudi Arabia’s impending buildup were proven correct. Joe Stork and Martha Wegner, editors for the Washington based Middle East Report, detail this expansion:

Over the course of the decade, Saudi Arabia poured nearly $50 billion into building a Gulf-wide air defense system to U.S. and NATO specifications, and ready for U.S. forces to use in a crisis.  By 1988, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had designed and constructed a $14 billion network of military facilities across Saudi Arabia, including military cantonments at Khamis Mushayat, Tabuk and King Khalid Military City, port facilities at Ras al-Mishab, Jidda and Jubayl, three military schools, headquarters complexes for the air force, the ministry of defense and aviation and the navy, support facilities for F-15 and F-16 fighter planes, and training facilities for the Saudi National Guard.[36]

Within Washington, the only major opposition to the heightened ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia came from the Israel Lobby and their Congressional supporters.  As an example, within days of Reagan announcing the 1981 arms package, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a powerful umbrella group, immediately issued a statement of sober opposition to the deal.  As a result of the lobby campaign that stemmed from this statement, the House of Representatives voted against allowing the sale to go through, and only an 11^th hour plea from the White House to the Senate allowed the Saudi’s to buy their weapons.  As such, examining the Conference’s statement in depth illustrates a number of contradictions in Washington’s policy of expanding its military presence in the Gulf, both in relation to Israel and the larger context of foreign affairs.  Today, these contradictions have only intensified, in light of the expansive American military buildup in the Gulf that accompanied the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Israel’s unceasing colonization of Palestinian land following the 1993 Oslo Agreement and the fraudulent “peace process” instituted after Yithzak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995:

1.) American secrets could fall into Soviet hands.  The parallels with Iran—where sophisticated U.S. weapons were compromised after Khomeini seized power—are frightening.  Saudi Arabia is unstable and unreliable.  Corruption is rampant, discontent growing, religious fanaticism mounting…

In one sense, this is largely correct.  Saudi Arabia was corrupt, and governed on a system of fundamentalist sharia religious law, leading to a fringe madrassa culture that fed on economic inequity and injustice.  Conservative Islamic leaders, armed with the substantial wealth of the Mosque till, had the power to both provide for and indoctrinate young men left out of the corrupt petrodollar game being played above by the royal family.  And by and large, the Conservative leaders blamed Israel, the United States, and their own monarchy for all problems in the region. But missing here is the inconvenient truth that Washington benefited from the corruption as much as Riyadh did.  If the House of Saud was supported by the populous, they would not need a protection deal with the United States, and vise-versa, Washington would not protect the House of Saud if they redistributed their oil wealth more equitably among the domestic and international population.  Both America and Saudi Arabia depend on each other to keep their respective excess’s possible.      

2.) America needs strong bases—and allies committed to Middle East stability—to halt Soviet expansionism in the Middle East.  Saudi Arabia bitterly opposes our country’s efforts to achieve peace in the region.  The Saudis have refused to permit U.S. forces to be stationed on its own soil or anywhere in the Persian Gulf area. 

While on the one hand, Israel is Washington’s greatest historical ally in the region, in terms of sustaining a large U.S. forward military presence it provides little geographic opportunity.  The first words above—“America needs strong bases”—show that the Israel Lobby understood this contradiction, however it seems they did not foresee that Saudi Arabia could be convinced to host these bases.

3.) America’s friends—and enemies—must know we keep our commitments.  Three years ago Secretary of Defense Harold Brown promised the U.S. Senate, then debating the sale of F-15 jets to Saudi Arabia, that these planes would never be equipped with offensive capabilities that could be used to attack Israel.  President Carter publicly repeated that pledge last October.  Nothing has changed to warrant breaking that promise.  Is America’s word no longer its bond?[37]

This is the perhaps the most revealing of the critiques.  In short, it gets to the heart of the fundamental contradiction in policy—America does not keep its commitments, and its word is not its bond.  While Israel may receive numerous verbal pledges of eternal protection from Washington, the reality of economics dictated that the Arab states opposed to the very existence of Israel also received this protection.  Longtime policy scholar Michael T. Klare considers this the main lesson to be drawn from the weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, as “it exposed the flip side of American dependence on Saudi oil: American acquiescence to Saudi demands.  In seeking to modernize their military forces, the Saudis demanded the most advanced weapons in the American arsenal and thus caused embarrassment to President Reagan, who felt obligated to submit to their extravagant demands.”[38]

II Iraq in a “Hundred Year War” 

From the first few months of 1979, when Shah Pahlavi fled Iran amid mass unrest and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arrived to lead the new Islamic Republic, it should have been apparent that an Iran-Iraq conflict was brewing.  In response to the revolution, Saddam Hussein seized absolute control of Baghdad’s ruling Ba’ath party, cracking down against the threat of the Islamic revolution crossing the Shatt al-Arab waterway that formed the border between the two states.  Iraq’s population was two-thirds Shiites, coreligionists of Iran, but the seat of power in Baghdad had been held since the colonial years by the Sunni minority, resulting in widespread discontent among the oppressed Shia.  Fully aware of this discrepancy, Saddam moved to brutally repress the Shia al-Dawa party and its religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, who had declared a public holiday when Khomeini, his religious peer, returned to Iran.  Saddam had al-Sadr put under house arrest and detained 4,000-5,000 of his supporters, executing over 200 of them.[39]  Then, after a series of bombings against Ba’ath officials, one of which went off during the funeral procession for victims of the previous bombing, Saddam arrested both al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda, tortured them, and finally hung them on April 8^th, 1980, giving Baqir al-Sadr the distinction of being the only Grand Ayatollah ever to be executed, or as his followers prefer, martyred.

Following this heinous crime, Saddam systematically escalated the conflict with Iran.  He deported over 25,000 Iraqi Shia of supposed Iranian origin, confiscating their land, homes, and businesses, and began to refer to Ayatollah Khomeini as “a shah in a turban.[40]  In April of 1980, on the same day that al-Sadr was executed, a Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency official based in Baghdad sent a memo back to Washington, stating  “there is a 50% chance that Iraq will attack Iran.  Iraq has moved large numbers of military personnel and equipment to the Iraq-Iran border in anticipation of such an invasion.”  The official concluded that Iraq believes “the Iranian military is weak and can be easily defeated.”[41]  After exchanging artillery fire over the summer, the Iraqi army finally invaded Iran on September 22^nd, 1980. Saddam had three concrete demands for Tehran, all concerned with opening Iraq’s access to the Gulf—return of the disputed portion of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, return to Sharjah of the three islands in the Gulf seized by the Shah; and a plebiscite to determine the status of the largely Arab population of Khuzistan.[42]

When the Iraqi army crossed the Shatt al-Arab waterway and entered Iran, relations between Baghdad and Washington were stuck in a strange hole.  Officially, there was no formal diplomatic relationship between the two states, ties having been severed after Israel’s six-day war in 1967.  Moreover, on December 29^th, 1979, President Carter had named Iraq as one of four states that “sponsored terror,” the others being Libya, Southern Yemen, and Syria.  This designation made any exports to Iraq subject to extra government scrutiny, under the Export Control Act of 1976-1977. 

However, trade relations with Iraq had been blossoming over the past decade.  Eager to suck up the massive supply of petrodollars Baghdad was receiving after the 1973 oil shock, Western firms were bidding on large infrastructure improvement being undertaken by Iraq. A 1972 balance of $26 million in exchanged goods and services increased tenfold to $300 million in 1975, and by 1980 reached $700 million.[43]  One of the top projects for Baghdad was upgrading its national air carrier, Iraq Airways, a job they outsourced to Seattle’s Boeing Corporation.  Besides delivering 11 jets to the airline between 1973-1980, for a total cost of $233.4 million, Boeing also signed a $20 million contract that provided 152 American personnel to Iraq Airways, to assist the carrier with technical management.[44]      

In the months before Iraq was to invade Iran, another Boeing shipment was at the center of an odd trade spat between Washington and Baghdad.  Iraq was set on two major purchases—eight General Electric engines, destined for Italian built warships, and five Boeing Jets—but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee strongly protested.  As Iraq had been declared a “terrorist sponsoring state” less than a year ago, they pushed President Carter to forbid the sales on National Security grounds.  Despite protest from the Commerce and State Department, who approved Iraq’s purchases, Carter stopped both deals on September 26^th, four days after Saddam’s invasion. [45] 

Another oddity of the period was uncovered by journalist and historian Robert Parry, who broke much of the Iran-Contra Scandal while working at the Associated Press.   In a spare Capitol Hill office, Parry found a classified document that claims the existence of a “green light” given by Jimmy Carter to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran.  The document in question is notes for a briefing to President Reagan, prepared in April 1981 by Secretary of State Alexander Haig following his first diplomatic trip to the Middle East.  Haig writes that he picked up “bits of useful intelligence” from meetings with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Fahd. One of these “bits” included a somewhat extraordinary statement: “It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch a war against Iran through Fahd.”[46]  When Parry took his information to Haig and Carter, they refused to comment, and it has been officially denied that any such “green light” ever existed.  However, if Haig’s notes (or Prince Fahd’s allegations) are correct, it would mean that in the waning months of his Presidency, Jimmy Carter colluded with Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, then holding 53 Americans hostage in their former embassy.  But like much of the history in this tumultuous period, the record is still murky at best, and it in unclear who or where decisions were actually being made. 

Regardless of the previous murkiness, when the Reagan Administration took over the White House in January 1981, they made it clear that they were backing Iraq economically, if not yet militarily in its war against Iran.  In April, when Secretary Haig was taking his “bits of useful intelligence” diplomatic tour, the foreign service officers staffing Baghdad’s U.S. Interests section, located in the Belgian Embassy, were brimming with excitement. “The atmosphere here is excellent,” wrote William L. Eagleton, an experienced diplomat just brought over from Qadaffi’s Libya.  “Following our decision not to sell arms to Iran, the increased Iraqi commerce and contacts with the U.S., mutual upgrading of diplomatic staffs and, most recently, the go ahead on five Boeing aircraft for Iraq, we now have a greater convergence of interests with Iraq than at any time since the revolution of 1958.”[47]  Two months later, Eagleton was even more optimistic after meeting on May 28^th with Tariq Aziz, a powerful and intelligent Christian Baathist and the right hand man to Saddam.  “This is the highest level in the Iraqi government our Baghdad Mission has met with since the 1967 break in relations.  Tariq Aziz has considerably more clout within Iraq’s leadership than Foreign Minister Hammadi and is the highest level spokesman on Foreign Policy after Saddam Hussein.”[48]  

During this period, Iraq also began to receive significant assistance from its fellow Arab governments, directly and indirectly supporting its war effort.  According to a report in the Washington Post, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states were making up for Iraq’s lost oil shipments, blockaded by the Iranian Navy, by selling their own oil in its place.  This reached a pace of nearly 1 million barrels a day, and provided payments to Baghdad as “war relief” loans to be paid back when the war was over.  According to one diplomat, these loans totaled over $6 billion in only the first six months of the war.[49]  By 1988, when the war ended, Saddam owed Saudi Arabia $25.7 billion, Kuwait, $10 billion, and a further $40 billion to the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the industrial world.[50]

Egypt contributed directly to Iraq’s war effort, agreeing to supply thousands of pieces of Soviet weaponry and equipment to Saddam on April 1st. Egypt also began a program of manufacturing replacement Soviet parts in their newly developed AIO weapon factories, to repair Iraqi’s Soviet-style armaments as they broke down. Howard Teicher, an official on the National Security Council at the time, claims that the CIA adopted Egypt’s program as one of its own, euphemistically calling it “Bear Spares.” “Egypt manufactured weapons and spare parts from Soviet designs and provided these weapons to the Iraqis and other countries,” Teicher wrote in a sworn affidavit delivered to a Florida court in 1995, adding that the U.S. “approved, assisted, and encouraged,” both the manufacturing and delivery of the Soviet weapons.[51] 

In all their glory, Washington’s national security bureaucracy actually managed to arm both Iraq and Iran during the war.  Iran’s arming was brought into the light in the “Iran-Contra” spectacle of the mid 1980’s, and for brevity’s sake will not be touched on here.  Congress briefly investigated the arming of Iraq in the “Iraqgate” scandal shortly following the 1991 Gulf War, and since then the media has dug into the case extensively.  Now, after fighting two wars and enforcing a genocidal economic regime on Iraq, all on the pretense that Iraq maintained the industrial capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, it is a widely known but embarrassing secret for Americans that Washington assisted in acquiring that industrial capability in the first place.  As the late comedian Bill Hicks put it following the first Gulf War, “you know during the Persian Gulf War those intelligence reports would come: ‘Iraq: incredible weapons – incredible weapons.’  How do you know that?  ‘Uh, well…we looked at the receipts.  What time do the banks open, nine?  We’re going in at ten.’  ”

By the spring of 1982, when Iraq began to loose the war against its far more populated neighbor, the “receipts” show that Washington covertly stepped in and heavily aided and abetted Saddam’s war effort, breaking its neutral stance.  The first change was to remove Iraq from the State Department’s list of terrorist-sponsoring states, inclusion on which banned governments from receiving loans and “dual use war materials” from Washington under the Export Administration Act.  Although this did not officially affect the neutral stance—“we have no plans to establish a military supply relationship with Iraq,” as Secretary Haig put it—in reality the allowance of “duel-use” technology transfers made it easy for trucks and helicopters to be converted for military use, a practice virtually undetectable to Washington.[52]

  Then in June, the Iranian army spotted a hole in the Iraqi frontlines between Baghdad and Basra.  The Pentagon spy satellites also spotted this hole, and it was apparent to all involved that Iraq had reached a breaking point in its invasion.  On June 8th, the CIA issued a secret National Intelligence Estimate, the distilled opinion of all government intelligence agencies, concluding, “Iraq has essentially lost the war with Iran.  Baghdad’s main concern now is to prevent as Iranian invasion.  There is little the Iraqis can do, alone or in combination with other Arabs, to reverse the military situation.”[53]  Following this NIE, two officials on the National Security Council, the previously mentioned Teicher and Geoffrey Kemp, who had worked with Paul Wolfowitz on the Limited Contingency Study, drafted a directive for President Reagan that outlined the new direction American policy would take on Iraq.  “President Reagan decided that the United States would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.  President Reagan formalized 
this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive ("NSDD") to
 this effect in June 1982.”[54]

Officials in Washington, however, have a famously skewed definition of what is “legal” concerning foreign affairs.  Much of this has to do with the Central Intelligence Agency and its virtually unregulated trade in deception and intrigue, built into its founding doctrine, the National Security Act of 1947.  Under point four in section 104—Duties of the Director the CIA—a blanket caveat is present that sanctions all fashions of covert activity, from 1947 to today: “perform other such functions and duties related to intelligence gathering affecting the National Security, as the President of the Director of National Intelligence may direct [author’s emphasis].”[55]  The predication for the CIA to perform “other such functions and duties” was exacerbated in 1981, when Ronald Reagan appointed his former campaign manager, William Casey, to be director of the CIA.  Casey had served in the OSS, the World War Two precursor to the CIA, and then made his fortune as a Wall Street financier.  Closing in on his eightieth decade and having been present at its creation, Casey felt that it was his mandate to win the Cold War.  By all accounts, in executing this campaign he was ideological, devious, and prone to hiding the truth.  In his recently published CIA history Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner sums up Casey’s legacy, writing: “Like Reagan, Casey had big visions.  Like Nixon, he believed that if it’s secret, it’s legal.  Like Bush, he thought the CIA embodied the best American values.  And, like, the Soviets, he reserved the right to lie and cheat.”[56]

Concerning Iraq, “Casey personally spearheaded the effort to ensure 
that Iraq had sufficient military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to
 avoid losing the Iran-Iraq war.”[57]  In his affidavit, Teicher recounts “When I joined the NSC staff in early 1982, CIA Director Casey was adamant that cluster bombs were a perfect ‘force multiplier’ that would allow the Iraqis to defend against the ‘human waves’ of Iranian attackers.”[58]  Teicher sums up Washington’s stance by writing “Pursuant to the secret NSDD [of 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.”[59]

The following year, 1983, saw the beginning of the U.S. Government’s full-fledged support for Iraq’s war effort.  Now that Iraq was no longer a “terrorist-sponsoring state,” the Department of Agriculture was free to provide Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) loans, for the purchase of American agricultural products, which they granted to the tune of $5 billion over the next seven years.  In his up-to-date history, The Unmaking of the Middle East, Jeremy Salt writes “the legitimate use of these credits enabled Iraq to spend weaponry that would otherwise have been needed for food.”[60] Additionally, the financial path of the loans was murky, and “a subsequent Department of Agriculture Inquiry revealed that ‘the CCC had no idea whether the credits it had backed were used to purchase U.S. farm commodities that actually reached Iraq or were resold to third countries for hard currency.’”[61]  Henry Gonzalez, a Democratic representative from Texas and one of the leaders of the Congressional investigation into “Iraqgate,” concluded that the provision of food to Iraq through the CCC was only the public layer of a policy.  There was also a secret layer, “and that aspect was to allow Saddam Hussein to operate a clandestine military procurement network in this country.”[62]

In December of 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then President Reagan’s “personal envoy” to the Middle East, made the first of his two trips to Baghdad.  It was on this trip that a Mexican television station famously filmed him shaking hands with Saddam, a clip endlessly replayed since the 2003 invasion, when Rumsfeld was a charismatic and belligerent Secretary of Defense.  Although many of the regional leaders found Rumsfeld condescending and uninformed, in Baghdad he was highly praised, as Tariq Aziz found him to be “a good listener,” and liked him “as a person.”[63] 

One of the key issues raised by Rumsfeld was the possibility of a pipeline project running from Iraq to Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba, to be built by San Francisco’s Bechtel Corporation. Both Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, and George Shultz, the recently appointed Secretary of State, had previously served as executives at the multinational engineering firm, Shultz having just left the position of Vice President after an eight year stint.  The proposed pipeline was of great convenience to Iraq, as its ability to export oil had been heavily diminished since the invasion of Iran just over three years earlier.  The Iranian Navy had blocked its main route, south from Basra through the Shatt al Arab to the Gulf, and in 1982 Syria had blocked access to its pipeline to the Mediterranean.  This left Iraq’s only oil export route in a single pipeline through Turkey.[64]  In his typical fashion, Rumsfeld believed that a spur could be built off the Aqaba pipeline, taking oil to the Israeli port of Haifa.  Despite being forewarned by a fellow diplomat that King Hussein of Jordan would heavily oppose such an idea, Rumsfeld presented the idea to the King anyways, where it was promptly shot down.

On his follow up trip to Iraq, Rumsfeld had not yet internalized the message that Arab governments would not be seen openly interacting with Israel.  Stopping in Tel Aviv on his way to Baghdad, Rumsfeld picked up a letter from Israeli Foreign Minister Itzak Shamir, offering to sell weapons to Iraq.  When Rumsfeld tried to present this letter to Tariq Aziz, Aziz refused to accept it, claiming “that he would be executed on the spot by Hussein if he did so.”[65] 

*****

What was not dwelled upon at these congenial meetings was Iraq’s use of chemical weapons—illegal since the 1925 Geneva Protocol.  Iran’s official history of the war records Iraq first using poison gas on January 13^th, 1981, which escalated to 11 attacks in 1982 and 31 attacks in 1983.[66]  Over the next five years, when the war became essentially a stalemate along the border regions, Iraq used 100,000 chemical munitions containing chiefly mustard gas, nerve gas and cyanide gas, escalating what started as an extreme tactic to repel Iranian attacks into “a vital element of their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988.”[67]  Saddam even advertised his use of chemicals in a chilling 1984 official communiqué, warning the Iranian forces massing for an offensive “the invaders should know that for every insect there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it…and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.”[68]

Iraq’s flagrant use of chemical weapons was a revival of the long-dormant armaments, the world having not witnessed such extensive use since the trench warfare of World War One.  Nevertheless, despite this gruesome fact, Washington officials offered few terms of condemnation.  This is not to say that they were unaware, as in a State Department cable dated November 1^st, 1983, director of political-military affairs Jonathon Howe wrote: “We have recently received additional information confirming Iraqi use of chemical weapons.  We also know that Iraq has acquired a CW production capability, primarily from Western firms, including possibly a U.S foreign subsidiary.”[69]  This warning prompted Assistant Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to craft carefully worded talking points for presentation to Tariq Aziz, stressing that the issue of chemical weapons was being raised “in a constructive spirit,” and that Washington wished “neither to enter into a confrontational exchange…nor to lend support to the views of others,” meaning Iran.[70]  In March 1984, Washington did manage forceful words against Iraq’s use of its “annihilation insecticide,” but a secret cable from Secretary of State Shultz to Donald Rumsfeld shows how hollow Washington’s official statements rang.  Shultz stressed that despite the recent condemnation “our interests in (1) preventing an Iranian victory and (2) continuing to improve bilateral relations with Iraq, at a pace of Iraq’s choosing, remain undiminished.”[71]

So how to explain Washington turning a blind eye towards Iraq’s use of chemical weapons?  Salt writes that despite Washington’s sporadic expressions of concern:

At no stage did it attempt to compel Iraq to abandon the use of chemical weapons by cutting back on aid or the provisions of war material, for the simple reason, it must be concluded, that without the aid and without the chemical weapons, Iraq was certain to be overran by the Iranians.[72]

This becomes very important when Washington’s role in the conclusion to the Iran-Iraq war is considered.  What becomes apparent is that the use of chemical weapons had diplomatic carte blanche as long as the Iraqis were going to be defeated.  In 1988, after the Iraqis had intensified their war-making capabilities and rebuffed the Iranian waves, making it clear that Iran may be defeated, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons became a taboo in Washington, and one that would be heavily punished.  These details add weight to the notion that from the beginning, the U.S. government hoped that the Iran-Iraq war would continue indefinitely, with neither side coming out the victor.  This is the position taken by Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq for the duration of the war.  “Washington had hoped for a war with no clear victor.  Barring that, it would have been pleased to see the thing drag on, become another ‘hundred years’ war,’ as the diplomats jokingly referred to it.”[73]         

Reflagging the Gulf.

In 1984, Iraq extended its military efforts into the waters of the Persian Gulf, countering Iran’s blockade on Iraq’s shipping lanes.  Attempting to use the same strategy on its enemy, Iraq declared a “zone of exclusion” around Iran’s main oil terminal at Kharg Island, attacking ships of any nationality that transited in or out of the port.  In retaliation, Iran attacked vessels trading with Iraq through the other Arab Gulf states.  Altogether, between April 1984 and May 1987, 227 ships—of which 153 were oil tankers—had been attacked in the Gulf, 137 of them by Iraq and 90 by Iran.[74]       

In the harbor of Bahrain, where the U.S. Navy maintained its Middle East Force fleet, this destruction was easily visible in the “junkyard of mortally wounded vessels,” floating just offshore, as Robert Fisk put it.  “The great tankers that Iran and Iraq had destroyed were towed here in terminal condition, bleeding fuel oil into the warm muddy brown waves in the very center of the Gulf, a series of jagged holes in their scalded superstructure to show how they met their end.”[75] 

Washington’s first response to the maritime destruction was to send 400 Stinger missiles and 200 launchers to Saudi Arabia.  The shoulder-fired weapons were to be wielded by the miniscule Saudi Naval Forces, which planned to lead a GCC flotilla of nearly 100 patrol craft in enforcing a “zone of protection” along the Western Gulf coast from the Strait of Hormuz to the Saudi port of Ras Tanura.[76]  Also discussed at this time was adding two KC-135 tanker aircraft to the fleet of three that the Pentagon already maintained in Saudi Arabia.  The tankers were capable of refueling other aircraft in midair, and thus enabled the E-3 Sentries to maintain 24-hour AWAC surveillance patrols.[77]  For his part, Iranian President Khamenie sarcastically warned “If the Americans are prepared to sink in the depths of the Persian Gulf waters for nothing, then let them come with their faith, motivation and divine power.”[78]

In the fall of 1986, Iran began to frequently attack ships involved in trade with the Arab monarchies across the Gulf.  Leaders in Tehran had become desperate, due to a collapse in oil prices that made prospective shipping even riskier, as well as the exposure of Iran-Contra, which heavily embarrassed the Iranian leadership when it was revealed that they had been dealing with officials of “Great Satan” America.[79]  In December 1986, as a result of the increasing Iranian attacks, the al-Sahab rulers of Kuwait’s asked Washington and Moscow to reflag Kuwaiti merchant ships under their banner, and thus under the protection of their Navies. 

  Moscow agreed immediately to the reflagging, but Washington was more hesitant, for a number of reasons.  Primarily, they did not want to set the precedent of a cooperative relationship with the Soviets in the Gulf, as that would detract from the prospect of hegemonic control.  There was, however, an ideological conundrum as well.  Although Carter had made his proclamation over a half-decade ago, protecting the Persian Gulf was largely still a theoretical concept, with little in the way of practical implementation.  American soldiers had “advised” the monarchies of the Gulf for over fifty years, but they had yet to truly insert themselves into a military conflict.  It was fine to say that a distant waterway was of “vital national interest,” as U.S. leaders had since Roosevelt’s day, but what tangible rules did this set when an incident such as the Kuwaiti request occurred?   What are the rules of battle, and at what cost does should this doctrine be implemented?  The U.S. Navy was now treaty-bound to guard the waterway through which ­­­­­55% of the world’s oil passed, but it was not clear how this was to go about. 

  Within months of agreeing to “reflag” the waterway, Washington suffered two setbacks that perfectly encapsulated their tenuous situation in the Gulf.  The first was the accidental bombing of the USS Stark by an Iraqi fighter plane on May 17, resulting in the deaths of 37 seamen aboard.  The official “reflagging,” known as Operation Earnest Will, had not yet even begun, and already the Navy was counting casualties.  In the twisted manner that Washington conducted its Gulf policy, Reagan managed to blame Iran for the attack, telling journalists in Tennessee “the villain in the piece is Iran.  And so they are delighted with what just happened.”[80]  In reality, there was no consensus in Washington on how to react to the attack now that the Gulf was theirs to protect.  Joe Stork, a longtime journalist and founder of the Middle East Research and Information Project, wrote at the time:

The May 17 attack on the USS Stark exposed the confusion and tentativeness of American policy as the administration’s many views attempted to define objectives (bash Iran? Head off the Soviets?  Freedom of navigation? Keep oil prices down? All of the above?)...Twice White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker indicated some grounds for cooperating with the Soviet Union, and twice the White House issued disclaimers.  Assistant Secretary of State Murphy acknowledged on May 21 that the reflagging scheme might lead to war between the U.S. and Iran…On May 26, President Reagan told some journalists that the U.S. was in the Gulf as a non-belligerent party.  “I do not see the danger of war,” he said.  I do not know how it could possibly start.”[81]

The second setback occurred in July, on the very first mission of Operation Ernest Will, when the U.S. Navy attempted to escort the 400,000-ton supertanker Bridgeton to Kuwait.  Washington made a big deal of the journey, hoping to show off its new Gulf policy, and invited the world press to cover the slow journey northward.  However, 200 kilometers out from its Kuwaiti port of call, the Bridgeton struck a mine, tearing a hole in its bow.  Anxious to avoid the fate of the seamen aboard the USS Stark, the Naval escorts fell back into a line behind the behemoth tanker.  Rear Admiral Harold J. Bernsen admitted to the media “it may seem incongruous, but the fact is [that] a large ship, a non-warship such as the Bridgeton, is far less vulnerable to a mine than a warship…if you’ve got a big tanker that is very difficult to hurt with a mine, you get in behind it.  That is the best defense and that is what we did.”[82]

However, not being able to effectively escort merchant-vessels did not stop the Navy from moving full steam ahead to show its presence in the Gulf.  An official Naval history recounts that at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, “MIDEASTFOR was composed of 12 or more ships. That force, along with mine countermeasures teams, special warfare units, and rotating carrier battle groups deployed to the North Arabian Sea, made up America's largest deployed naval force since the Vietnam era. The Navy's Administrative Support Unit contingent in Bahrain grew to over 800 personnel.”[83]  Washington also used the “Reflagging” to expand the AWACS surveillance patrols further over the Gulf, complementing the extensive patrols already flown over the Saudi coast.  At a House Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the reflagging, Defense Secretary Weinberger dryly remarked, “Some of the littoral states of the gulf will be helping with observation.”[84]

Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA Iraqi analyst, concludes “the importance of the reflagging rests in the fact of its having generated a great debate over whether the Gulf was vital to America’s interests.  The issue quite clearly was decided in favor of it being so…in effect Washington had taken on the Gulf as its sphere, replacing London in that capacity.”[85]  Historian Michael Palmer concurs, writing “the 1987-88 tanker war marked the end of a two century old process—the displacement of Great Britain in the Gulf…The United States had accepted not only political, but also military responsibility for the security of the Persian Gulf.”[86]

IV. Why Now?

By early 1988, it was clear that Iraq, backed by the West and the other Arab states, was emerging as the “victor” in its eight-year war against Iran.  The Iraqi army had bested what Tehran claimed was a million-man offensive on the southern Iraqi cities of Karbala and Basra, and then went on the attack itself, retaking the Fao Peninsula in a bloody battle featuring heavy use of chemical weapons.  During this battle, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) provided critical operational support to Iraq, including satellite imagery and strategic air planning, with full knowledge of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons.  Retired Col. Walter Patrick Lang, the top DIA official at the time, characterized Iraq’s chemical assaults as “not a matter of deep strategic concern,” as it was “inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for survival.”[87]  Additionally, during this period the U.S. Navy blew up two Iranian oilrigs, destroyed one Iranian frigate and immobilized another, and sank an Iranian missile boat.[88]

For Iran, the signal that the war was no longer worth fighting came on the morning of July 3^rd, when the USS Vincennes—an Aegis class warship designed to combat the Soviet Navy—fired two heat-seeking missiles at Iran Air Flight 655 as it ascended across the Gulf from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, killing all 290 passengers aboard.  Immediately, Washington tried to cover up the incident, spinning the story to shift blame away from the Navy and onto the Iranians. Later, Newsweek would characterize the official Pentagon report as “a pastiche of omissions, half-truths and outright deception.”[89]  In reality, it seems that blame for the shoot-down fell personally on Captain Will Rogers, the top officer aboard the Vincennes, who had mistaken the civilian aircraft as military.  Rogers, commanding over a massive warship in a waterway crowded with civilian traffic, was eager to use the powerful weapons at his disposal, no matter the nature of the conflict.  Captain David Carlson, who witnessed the attack from the USS Sides, told journalist Robert Fisk that it “marked the horrifying climax to Captain Rogers’ aggressiveness,” following a series of provocations that led the crew of the Sides to deem the Vincennes “Robocruiser.”[90]  However, it makes more sense to blame the institutional nature of the American experiment in reflagging the Gulf.  No matter the personal aggressiveness of Captain Rogers, he was there on battle orders from Washington, where it was thought wise to station an armada of powerful warships in the middle of a contested waterway, moreover declaring the ships to be “neutral” when everyone knew this not to be the case.  This situation, a deadly blend of firepower and confusion, could only lead to atrocities like the downing of flight 665.

          With 290 civilians floating dead in the water at the hands of American missiles and an Iraqi army massed across the border, Tehran concluded that all hope was lost.  On July 18th, Ayatollah Khomeini broadcast a message to the Iranian people, declaring that he had agreed to the UN ceasefire resolution, a decision he claimed was “more deadly than taking poison.”[91]  One month later, after a UN peacekeeping force moved into position, the ceasefire took effect.  After eight years of bloody warfare, an official “peace” now hovered atop the Gulf.  In Washington, the conclusion of the war put the bureaucracy in an uncomfortable position. For eight years, it had been covertly supporting the war, but for the realpolitik purpose of ensuring that neither Iraq nor Iran could become a dominant regional power. Once the ceasefire went into effect, Washington needed to come up with a new policy.

At this point, the obvious dilemma comes to mind.  At what point between the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the start of the 1991 Gulf War did Washington reverse its support for Iraq, and for what reasons? What changed such that in July 1988, Washington could shoot down an Iranian civilian airliner in defense of Iraq, yet in January 1991, would bomb Iraq with 84,200 tons of ordnance in defense of Kuwait.[92]  Sadly, these are questions that have not been fully answered, either for scholars or the people at large, and suffice to say a singular remedy will not follow below.  However, by exploring a number of possibilities, a fuller understanding of the driving force behind American Foreign Policy in the Persian Gulf may come about.

1.) Psychological

There is an argument to be made that the change in policy towards Iraq was brought about by a psychological drive to personally demonize Saddam Hussein.  The evidence for this assessment begins in September 1988, less than two months after the UN ceasefire had been agreed to by Iran.  At that point, Saddam had turned his army against the rebellious Kurdish population in the north of Iraq.  While there is no doubt that the Iraqi army displayed brutality, the Kurds told Western press outlets that Iraq was also using chemical weapons. On August 31^st, the AP ran an interview with one unnamed Kurdish leader based in Cyprus, where he stated that Iraq was using poison gas in the offensive.[93]  In the following week, both the New York Times and the Washington Post repeated these allegations in front page stories, but the State Department refused to confirm whether the Kurds’ claims were accurate or not, stating that they were still gathering evidence.

Then, in early September, hours before Secretary Shultz was scheduled to meet with Sadoun Hammadi, Iraq’s Junior Foreign Minister, State Department spokesman Charles Redman told a press conference that the State Department had confirmed Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in the north, calling the actions “abhorrent and unjustifiable,” a charge repeated by Shultz in his meeting.[94]  The very same day, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Claiborne Pell, introduced legislation sanctioning Iraq.  Described by Pell as “the strongest sanctions proposed by Congress in decades,” the bill halted US credit and sale of sensitive material to Iraq, barred importation of Iraqi oil and required the US to vote against loans to Iraq by international financial institutions.  Waiving normal procedure, the Senate passed the bill within 24 hours of it being brought out of committee.[95]  In a comparison that would be repeated many times over in years to come, Pell stated, “While people are gassed, the world is largely silent…Silence however, is complicity.  A half century ago, the world was also silent as Hitler began a campaign the culminated in the near extermination of Europe’s Jews.  We cannot be silent again.”[96]  Shultz, however, stamped down the sanctions bill, declaring it premature.  Instead, his plan was “to mobilize world opinion to isolate and pressure Iraq, using the United Nations as the primary instrument.”[97]  For what its worth, there is a case to be made that the Iraqi army had not actually used gas during this particular campaign against the Kurds.  All the allegations, including those of Senate staffers, stemmed from Kurds claiming to have witnessed the attacks.  When the incident was investigated by a number of groups—a team of Turkish doctors, the UN High Commission for Refugees, the Red Cross, and the Red Crescent—none of them could confirm that gas had been used, as they could not find any victims.[98]         

Regardless of whether the claims were true or not, the more important question is why berate Iraq’s use of chemical weapons now, when Washington had turned a blind eye to them for the past eight years?  An unnamed official admitted that for the duration of the war, the Pentagon “wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas,” as “it was just another way of killing people—whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn’t make any difference.”[99]  But now “just another way of killing people” had become “abhorrent and unacceptable.”  One answer is simple; Iraq had emerged victorious with its powerful army intact, and now Baghdad power needed to be tempered.  This was the view expressed by Hammadi, the junior Iraqi minister.  “I do not understand the true motives behind this campaign.  Why at this particular time and on this scale?  There seems to be a desire to punish Iraq because it emerged victorious from the war.”[100]  Another answer, put forward by Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA analyst, is that the State Department was working to preserve its own reputation.  According to Pelletiere, the State Department had thought the prospect of a decisive Iraqi military victory was impossible, and thus “it would have made sense to defame the Iraqis, to promote the idea that they had won a sneak victory, using gas.”[101]  

The demonization of Saddam Hussein followed directly from these accusations.  A swath of editorials immediately emerged in mainstream newspapers personally comparing him to Adolf Hitler and claiming that he was instituting genocide.[102]  This drumbeat grew louder and louder for the next two years, such that six days before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post: “What raises Hussein to the Hitlerian level is not just his unconventional technique—violence—for regulating prices.  Nor is it merely his penchant for domestic brutality…what makes him truly Hitlerian is his way of dealing with neighbors.”[103]  It was as if a whole class of political commentators had been stricken with amnesia, forgetting the past eight years, when Saddam, just as violent, brutal, and fighting a war against a neighbor, had received the lethal largesse of the U.S., Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and their Arab neighbors.

One blatant point as to why this demonization campaign could be the root of the 1991 Gulf War is that it took place at the exact same time that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was breaking up, leaving the national security state with an empty space in the enemy column.  Just as Warsaw was hosting the Roundtable Accords in the spring of 1989, leading to elections where Adam Michnik, Lech Walesa and Solidarity won 99 out of 100 possible seats, the first crack in the shattering of the Cold War, the Washington Post was running op-eds about “thugs like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein” that “must be called to terms” because “how many times must the world relive the lessons of Hitler?”[104]  This did not go unnoticed, as it was brought up by Senator Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who said that the 1990 military budget had a “threat blank,” and that the Pentagon’s “basic assessment of the overall threat to our national security” was “rooted in the past.”[105]  Now, the bureaucracy faced a choice –it could fundamentally reform policy to fit a new world lacking a totalitarian enemy, or it could simply pencil in a new name where USSR used to be.  However, as Richard Barnet explains, this was not really a choice at all:

The most fundamental law of any organization is bureaucratic inertia.  Institutions like to keep doing what they have been doing, always on a grander scale, if possible.  When old enemies disappear, mellow, or turn into allies, as frequently happens in international relations, new enemies must be found and new threats must be discovered.  The failure to replenish the supply of enemies is the supreme threat facing any national security bureaucracy.[106]

But if Barnet does not utilize the readers preferred political views, it is worth moving to the other side of the spectrum and listening to General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time.  In a 1991 interview with the Army Times, Powell admitted, “I’m running out of demons.  I’m running out of villains.”[107]

2.) Institutional Credibility

There is also the case of Institutional Credibility to consider.  Here it is worth returning to Paul Wolfowitz’s words from the Carter-era Limited Contingency Study.  Worried over the “emerging Iraqi threat” that could force “moderate local powers to accommodate themselves to Iraq without being overtly coerced,” Wolfowitz considered that the best solution was to “make manifest our capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq’s power.”[108]   In 1988, Iraq, now free of its war against Iran, was once again an “emerging threat” to the region.  After starting the war with an army of ten divisions, it ended the war with 55 divisions, a tank force of 4,000, and rockets that could reach Tel Aviv and Tehran.[109]  Moreover, the U.S. Navy, in its attempt to “reflag the Gulf,” had ended the war on a disastrous note.  In just over a year, it had seen one ship sunk by an Iraqi fighter jet and another disgraced by the killing of 290 civilians.  Although Carter pledged to prevent “outside forces” from gaining control of the Persian Gulf, it was apparent that the United States had little hope of establishing control over the waterway either.

What was suffering was the credibility of the national security state, long a concern that has haunted Washington.  As a result, it was time to “make manifest our capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq’s power,” as Wolfowitz had written a decade before.  The other option was for the leaders in Washington “to acknowledge that in a world of dynamic social, political, and economic forces, U.S. military strength and foreign policy goals were somehow pathetically irrelevant.”[110]

Coincidently, Paul Wolfowitz had risen to be head of Pentagon Policy Planning in the administration of George HW Bush.  He was now in a position to actually implement the contingency plan he had previously authored.  By 1989, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the newly appointed head of Central Command, was undertaking a full military review of the Middle East, and he came to the same conclusions as Wolfowitz had a decade earlier; Iraq, not the Soviet Union, was the greatest threat to American interests.  Pursuant to this, Colin Powell, signed off on Schwarzkopf developing a blueprint for all out combat against Iraq, known as Op-Plan 1002-90.  By the summer of 1990, Central Command was war-gaming their new blueprint, in Exercise Internal Look 90.  Running from July 9^th to August 4^th, it mimicked an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia.  Two days before the exercise was to conclude, the hypothetical turned into a reality, when Saddam ordered his army over the Kuwaiti border.[111]  In fact, Dennis Ross, who had worked on the Limited Contingency Study with Wolfowitz and was now a top policy advisor to Secretary of State James Baker, was surprised when he witnessed a military briefing on the Iraqi invasion, as the Pentagon was using an updated version of his study.[112]        

These developments illustrate that reasserting the credibility of the American security state was a prime motive behind the 1991 Gulf War, and indeed one that predated any Iraqi aggression against Kuwait.  Or as Margaret Thatcher famously told George HW Bush upon learning that Iraq had invaded Kuwait: “Don’t go wobbly on me now, George.”[113]

 

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[1] Stephen Farrell & Elizabeth Bumiller, “No Shortcuts When Military Moves a War,” New York Times, March 31^st, 2010.

[2] John Abizaid, “Testimony on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror,” Hearing Before the Senate Committee on the Armed Services, August 3^rd, 2006.

[3] Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pg. 159.

[4] “Daniel Ellsberg on U.S Foreign Policy,” Democracy Now!, March 30, 2010.

[5] Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006) pg. 221.

[6] Michael A. Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf: A History of America’s Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf, 1833-1992, (New York: The Free Press, 1992) pg. 95.

[7] Ibid., pgs 90-95.

[8] Thomas L. McNaugher, Arms and Oil: U.S. Military Strategy and the Persian Gulf, (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institutions, 1985), pg.101.

[9] John Pilger, “Paradise Cleansed,” The Guardian, October 2^nd, 2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/oct/02/foreignpolicy.comment

[10] Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, pg. 95.

[11] Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, pg. 221.

[12] Pilger, “Paradise Cleansed.”

[13] Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, pg. 221.

[14] “Richard Harwood, “Wooing Hearts and Minds in Strategic Hamlets,” Washington Post, January 21^st, 1978.

[15] Ibid.

[16] “Arab Nations Expanding Airports,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, December 1^st, 1975; “Oman Air Defense,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 29^th, 1976;  “Arms Exports Increase 60% in Decade,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, July 31^st, 1978.

[17] Thomas, W. Lippman, “Base Report Heightens Oman-S. Yemen Tensions,” Washington Post, January 24^th, 1977.

[18] George C. Wilson, “Three Nations Said Receptive to U.S. Bases,” Washington Post, January 4^th, 1980; “Central Command bases in the Middle East,” MERIP Reports, No. 128, (Nov-Dec, 1984), pg. 25.

[19] David B. Ottaway, “Saudis wary of U.S. Military Role,” Washington Post, December 2^nd, 1981.

[20] James Carroll, House of War: the Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006) pg. 373.

[21] Jimmy Carter, “Inaugural Address,” January 20^th, 1977; quoted in Carroll, House of War

[22] Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, pg. 101.

[23] Ibid., 101.

[24] “Carter and Reagan-Arms transfers and Trades,” American Foreign Relations Encyclopedia, (http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/A-D/Arms-Transfers-and-Trade-Carter-and-reagan.html)

[25] Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, pg. 103.

[26] Ibid., pg. 103.

[27] Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pg. 273.

[28] “Limited Contingency Study,” Quoted in James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), pg. 81.

[29] Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War: The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy, (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), pg. 121.

[30] Carroll, House of War, pg. 374.

[31] Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), pg. 43-47.

[32] Thomas W. Lippman, Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 2004) pg. 287.

[33] Thomas W. Lippman, "Arab Weapons Consortium Believed Nearing Production,” Washington Post, September 9^th, 1978.

[34] George C. Wilson, “Reclaiming Petrodollars; U.S. Army Helps Oil Lands Build,” Washington Post, May 11, 1978.

[35] Scott Armstrong, “Saudis’ AWACS Just the Beginning of New Strategy,” Washington Post, November 1^st, 1981.

[36] Joe Stork and Martha Wegner, “The US in the Persian Gulf: From Rapid Deployment to Massive Deployment,” Middle East Report, No. 168 (Jan.-Feb. 1991), pg. 36.

[37] Nicholas Latham, Selling AWACS to Saudi Arabia: the Reagan Administration and the Balancing of America’s Competing Interests in the Middle East, (Westport Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002), Pg. 3-4.

[38] Klare, Blood and Oil, pg. 47.

[39] Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008) pg. 40.

[40] Ibid., pg. 45.

[41] Patrick Cockburn & Andrew Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, (London: Verson, 2002), pg. 82.

i[42] Stephen Pelletiere, Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf, (Washington D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 2004),, note 79, pg. 190.

[43] Juan de Onis, “Ambivalent U.S.-Iraq Relationship improving Despite Diplomatic Rift,” New York Times, September 28^th, 1980.

[44] “Technical Assistance Export Sales Grow,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 2^nd, 1975.

[45] “U.S. Forbids Sale of Jetliners to Iraq,” New York Times, August 30^th, 1980.

[46] Robert Parry, “October Surprise X-Files Part 5: Saddam’s “Green Light”,” Consortium News, 1996. (http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile5.html)

[47] Joyce Battle ed., “Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts towards Iraq, 1980-1984,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, (George Washington University: National Security Archive, February 25, 2003), Document No. 4.

[48] Joyce Battle, “Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein,” Document No. 10,

[49] David B. Ottaway, “Arab Loans Helping Iraq Stay at War,” Washington Post, April 23^rd, 1981.

[50] Cockburn & Cockburn, Saddam Hussein, 82.

[51] Nathaniel Harrison, “Iraq gets arms for Iran war,” Christian Science Monitor, April 1^st, 1981; Howard Teicher, “Signed Affidavit before the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida,” January 31^st, 1995; reproduced as “The Teicher Affidavit: Iraq-Gate,” Information Clearing House

[52] Battle, “Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein,” Document No. 13; Jeremy Salt, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pg. 286.

[53] Jeffery Richelson, “Saddam’s Iron Grip: Intelligence Report on Saddam Hussein’s Reign,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 167, (George Washington University: National Security Archive, October 18^th, 2005), Document No. 3.

[54] Teicher Affidavit

[55] “National Security Act of 1947,” Section 104A, (http://intelligence.senate.gov/nsaact1947.pdf).

[56] Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes:The History of the CIA, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pg. 176

[57] Teicher Affidavit.

[58] Teicher Affidavit.

[59] Teicher Affidavit.

[60] Salt, The Unmaking of the Middle East, pg. 288-291.

[61] Ibid., pg. 288-291.

[62] Ibid, pg. 290.

[63] Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and, Catastrophic Legacy, (New York: Scribner, 2007), pg. 75-76; Battle, “Shaking Hands With Saddam,” Document 37.

[64] Pelletiere, Iraq and the International Oil System, pg. 175.

[65] Teicher Affidaivt.

[66] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pg. 209-210.

[67] Dilip Hiro, “Iraq and Poison Gas,” The Nation, August 28^th, 2002.

[68] Battle, “Shaking Hands with Saddam,” Document 41.

[69] Battle, “Shaking Hands with Saddam,” Document 24.

[70] Battle, Shaking Hands with Saddam,” Document 25.

[71] Malcolm Byrne, “Saddam Hussein: More Secret History,” (George Washington University: National Security Archive, October 18^th, 2005), Document No. 7. Note: In “Shaking hands with Saddam,” this cable is document 48, but with one page missing.  Byren’s archive contains the missing page, containing this quote.

[72] Salt, The Unmaking of the Middle East, pg. 292.

[73] Pelletiere, Iraq and the International Oil System, pg. 200.

[74] Fisk, Great War for Civilization, pg. 222.

[75] Ibid., pg. 224.

[76] Richard Halloran, “400 Missiles Sent to Saudi Arabia,” New York Times, May 29^th, 1984.

[77] Ibid.

[78] Fisk, Great War for Civilization, pg. 227.

[79] Pelletiere, Iraq and the International Oil System, pg. 183.

[80] Fisk. Great War for Civilization, pg. 220.

[81] Joe Stork, “Reagan Re-Flags the Gulf,” MERIP Middle East Report, No. 148, (Sep.-Oct. 1987) pg. 4.

[82] Fisk, Great War for Civilization, pg. 248.

[83] http://www.history.navy.mil/Wars/dstorm/ds1.htm

[84] John H. Cushman Jr., “U.S. Aims to widen AWACS Patrol over Gulf before starting escorts,” New York Times, June 11^th, 1987.

[85] Pelletiere, Iraq and the International Oil System, pg. 185.

[86] Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, pg. 150.

[87] Patrick E. Tyler, “Officers say U.S. aided Iraq in war despite use of gas,” New York Times, August 18^th, 2002.

[88] Dilip Hiro, Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm, (New York: Nation Books, 2002) pg. 31.

[89] Roger Charles, “Sea of Lies,” Newsweek, July 13^th, 1992.

[90] Fisk, Great War for Civilization, pg. 264.

[91] “A peace worse than poison,” The Economist, July 23^rd 1988.

[92] Salt, The Unmaking of the Middle East, pg. 300.

[93] Ed Blanche, “Iraq attacking Kurdish Guerillas with troops and poison gas, Kurds say,” AP, August 31^st, 1988.

[94] Don Oberdorfer, “U.S. Charges Iraq Used Poison Gas on Kurds,” Washington Post, September 9^th, 1988.

[95] Helen Dewar & Don Oberdorfer, “Senate Votes Sanctions Against Iraq,” Washington Post, September 10^th 1988.

[96] Mark Tran & Michael Simmons, “US moves to punish Iraq,” Guardian, September 10^th 1988.

[97] David B. Ottaway, “A Sharp Divergence over sanctions for Iraq,” Washington Post, September 15^th, 1988.

[98] Pelletiere Iraq and the International Oil System, pg. 204.

[99] Tyler, “Officers say U.S. aided Iraq in war despite use of gas.”

[100] Donald Neff, “The U.S., Iraq, Israel, and Iran: Backdrop to War,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4, (Summer 1991), pg. 33.

[101] Pelletiere, Iraq and the International Oil System, pg. 208.

[102] William Safire, “Stop the Iraqi Murder of the Kurds,” New York Times, September 5^th, 1988; Richard Cohen, “And Iraq Keeps Spreading its Poison Gas,” Washington Post, September 7^th, 1988.

[103] Charles Krauthammer, “Nightmare from the Thirties,” in Micah L. Sifry ed., The Gulf War Reader (New York: Times Books, 1991), pg. 135.

[104] Richard Cohen, “Getting Away with Genocide,” Washington Post, March 14^th, 1989.

[105] David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harpers, October, 2002.

[106] Barnet, Roots of War, pg. 97.

[107] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pg. 203.

[108] Ibid., pg. 81.

[109] Cockburn and Cockburn, Saddam Hussein, pg. 82.

[110] Kolko, Confronting the Third World, pg. 87-88.

[111] Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000) pg. 61-62; Global Security: (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/internal-look.htm).

[112] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pg. 82.

[113] Tina Brown, “You’ve come a long way ladies,” Washington Post, October 13^th, 2005.