Iraq and the Role of the Big Powers

As the U.S.-British aggression against Iraq moves into a new phase, Modern Communism is featuring a series of background articles on the role played by the imperialist powers, primarily Britain and the U.S., in Iraq during the past century. The following is the third article in the series.

Part 3 1979-1990

Fearing that the1979 Islamic revolution in Iran would spread to neighbouring countries and threaten American interests throughout the Middle East, the overthrow of the Shah and establishment of a fundamentalist regime forced the U.S. to shift its allegiance from Iran to Iraq. While the new Iranian government had inherited the U.S.-supplied military arsenal of the Shah and was overtly anti-American, the Iraqi regime was secular and its leadership had shown itself willing to cooperate with the Americans.

It was in this context that U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski publicly encouraged Iraq to attack Iran. Existing tensions between the two countries combined with Iraqi concern about the spread of Islamic revolution led to frequent cross border incidents. Then in September 1980, bolstered by U.S. encouragement, Iraq invaded Iran beginning a war that would drag on for eight years, severely damage the economies of both countries and kill more than a million people.

By 1982 Iran had recovered from the initial assault and was on the offensive, poised to invade Iraq in what, according to former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, the Aytollah Khomeini was calling a springboard for a larger drive throughout the Middle East. (1) This prompted Washington to increase its support for Iraq. Even though it knew that Iraq had been actively acquiring chemical weapons capabilities since the mid-1970s, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from its list of states sponsoring terrorism. This made Iraq eligible to acquire U.S. dual-use and military technology. (2)

Despite its prohibition under international law, Iraq reportedly began using chemical weapons against Iranian troops in 1982 and 1983, a fact that the U.S. administration was well aware of. Nevertheless, in 1983 it approved the sale of helicopters to Iraq, ostensibly for crop spraying. It is well known that civilian helicopters can easily be weaponized and that such sales are a way of giving military aid under the guise of civilian assistance. (3) Later in the year, the Reagan administration secretly began to allow Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt to transfer U.S. weapons and military equipment to Iraq. (4)

In 1984 the United Nations confirmed Iraq's use of prohibited chemical weapons. The U.S. State Department officially condemned Iraq but took no action against it. Rather, the CIA established a direct Washington-Baghdad intelligence link that began to provide "data from sensitive U.S. reconnaissance photography…to assist Iraqi bombing raids" in Iran. (5) At the same time the Americans were also starting to share intelligence information and sell weapons to Iran. (6) According to Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, this policy of so-called "dual containment …was primarily designed to prevent either Iraq or Iran from emerging as a serious challenger to U.S. interests". (7)

In the same year President Reagan quietly restored full diplomatic relations with Iraq for the first time in nearly two decades. A 1985 effort in the House of Representatives to put Iraq back on state terrorism sponsorship list, because of its documented use of chemical weapons, was quashed by Secretary of State George Schultz who assured Congress that "Iraq has effectively distanced itself from international terrorism". (8)

As the war between Iraq and Iran continued, the American government provided agricultural credits to Iraq to buy food from the United States. That in turn enabled Iraq to spend the money it saved on weapons. Washington also loosened export controls on weapons technology. According to former CIA analyst and Persian Gulf expert Ken Pollack, to do this U.S. officials turned a blind eye to what was really happening on the ground.

Pollack further explained: "We encouraged our allies to basically do the same thing, to look the other way at Iraqi transgressions, to liberalize their own export laws and as a result…a whole range of countries began selling Iraq all kinds of military equipment and technology related to their weapons of mass destruction program. And had it not been for the U.S. and our NATO allies allowing Iraq to buy this technology, none of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs could have gotten nearly as far as they did." (9)

During the war many Kurds living in the north of Iraq had sided and fought with Iran, hoping to bring about the defeat of the Iraqi regime. In 1987, as the war was coming to an end Saddam Hussein unleashed a brutal campaign against the Kurds, which included the notorious 1988 gas attack against the people of Halabja. In response the U.S. Senate passed the Prevention of Genocide Act in September 1988. This would have immediately cut Iraq off from U.S. loans and military and non-military assistance. It would also have stopped American imports of Iraqi oil. However, the President Reagan and his administration opposed the bill and managed to prevent its passage.

A ceasefire was finally implemented between Iraq and Iran in August 1988. The war had been devastating for both countries. In Iraq hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and the country owed billions of dollars in foreign debt. Western arms and construction companies immediately began competing for contracts in Iraq, with the governments of the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and Russia continuing to facilitate arms sales and to provide lines of credit. (10)

Well aware of the Iraqi regime's use of chemical weapons as well as its ballistic missile, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the U.S. administration continued to allow the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq's weapons factories. In October 1989, after all international banks had cut off loans to Iraq, President Bush approved a National Security Council Directive mandating closer links with Iraq and one billion dollars in loan guarantees. This enabled Iraq to get the cash to continue to buy the materials it needed for its weapons programs. These guarantees remained in effect and sales of advanced technology products continued right up until the day Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990.(11)

(1) BBC World radio documentary, "U.S.-Iraq Relations, February 13, 2003. Transcript posted at www.theworld.org/Iraq/part3.html

(2) Nathaniel Hurd, "U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationship with Iraq, 1980 - August 2, 1990". July 15, 2000. Updated December 12, 2001. www.casi.org.uk/info/usdocs/usiraq80s90s.html

(3) Mark Phythian, Arming Iraq: How the U.S. and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997. Cited in "U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationship with Iraq".

(4) Ibid.

(5) Bob Woodward, "CIA Aiding Iraq in Gulf War: Target Data from U.S. Satellites Supplied for Nearly Two Years". Washington Post, December 15, 1986. Cited in "U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationship with Iraq".

(6) Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-1990. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Cited in U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationship with Iraq.

(7) "Iraq History", a chronology prepared by Larry Kerschner for the Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Seattle Community Network. www.scn.org/wwfor/iraqhist.html

(8) Phyllis Bennis, "And They Called It Peace: US Policy on Iraq". Middle East Report, 215, Summer 2000. www.merip.org/mer/mer215//215_bennis.html

(9) BBC World op.cit.

(10) Sarah Graham-Brown and Chris Toensing, "Why Another War? A Backgrounder on the Iraq Crisis". Second Edition. Middle East Research and Information Project, December 2002.

(11) U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationship with Iraq, op. cit.