Utter BS. Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq thru Syrian Baathists. Get your facts straight.
More BS. What kind of 'military aid' are you talking about? The Iraqi military was equipped with Soviet weapons. Said K Aburish was Saddam's shopping manager in Europe where none dealt with Iraq in any significant ways.
Who said he was not? Are you that naive to believe that just because we have convenience allies that mean we are also moral allies as well?
You are more ignorant about the history than I thought. Anyway, following is an interview by Mr. James Akins who was an attache at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, 1963-1965, and later became the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I dont expect that this will open up your eyes, but I am posting it for those who are interested in US-Saddam affairs.
Why is Saddam Hussein still sitting in office in Baghdad?
The same way that most dictators stay in power--he has complete control of the security apparatus. He is totally ruthless. He is surrounded by people who have a great interest in the survival of the regime, such as the Republican Guard, and members of the Ba'ath Party. They know that if he's overthrown, they're going to be hanged too. I don't think there's any mystery about why he survives.
It's difficult for those who don't understand that regime to comprehend its ruthlessness. You've seen it develop over the years. How methodical has he been in developing a security apparatus to keep control?
It's extraordinarily effective. He's been working on it for a very long time. Initially, he had people from his own village. He has a lot of members of his own family. They are people that he still trusts, according to all reports. But he's been absolutely ruthless in dealing with opposition, from the Shias in the south, and perhaps even more so for the Kurds in the north. Right after the war, when Saddam was defeated, we made a number of extraordinary mistakes. We didn't demand that Saddam come and sign the capitulation agreement himself. We allowed his lieutenants to do that, so they took the blame for the defeat.
We then allowed them to use helicopters, because the bridges were all destroyed. It seemed like a reasonable request. The only way they could get across the rivers was helicopters. At the end of the war, when the collapse took place, there was a general uprising in both the north and the south. The Kurds occupied Kirkuk, which they basically consider to be their capital. The Shias, rose in the south, and then the Iraqi government started tentatively moving against them with military force. And there was no American reaction. Then they moved more, and there was no American reaction. And then they started the general slaughter in the south, which was horrible, and in the north, which was just as bad.
But Saddam had showed his ruthlessness before that. During the Iraq-Iran war, he decided that the Kurds were giving some support in the north because they bordered on Iran. Kurdistan encompasses Iraq, Iran, Turkey and parts of Syria. So the Kurds have always moved across these borders, which are quite artificial. Saddam moved into Iraqi Kurdistan, and destroyed all the villages in the north that were within a radius of 20 kilometers of the Iranian border. All were ruthlessly destroyed.
About 300,000 people were moved out. The Iraqi story was that they were moved into model villages in the south. I was in Iraq around that time, and I asked to see some of these model villages. I was assured that I would be able to, and of course, I never saw them, for the simple reason that these villages don't exist. Three hundred thousand Kurds were indeed moved out of the north. But they're in graves now.
In the early years, what was your view and that of the U.S. government toward the Ba'ath Party?
The Ba'ath Party was founded in the late 1940s or so. It seemed to me, and to a lot of others in the State Department, that it was the white hope for the Arabs. It was democratic, it was secular, it was socialist. Once they came to power in Iraq after the 1963 revolution, they did not implement the principles of the Party. . . . The Ba'ath Party showed that it wasn't democratic. It betrayed its own principles, and it became a dictatorial party, which it remains today. It controls two states, Syria and Iraq--not that the leaders of the two countries have much good to say about each other.
In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, in the period before the coup, how concerned was the U.S. about Soviet influence?
After the revolution in 1958, it wasn't exactly clear what the new government would be. Would it be Arab nationalist, or would it be leftist, or would it be Iraqi nationalist? Nobody knew very much about Kassem, who became the dictator. The world's assumption was that it was going to be Arab nationalist. . . . Certainly Kassem couldn't be pro-American, because the old regime was too close to be associated with us, and no regime could be pro-American--rather like the regime in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah. It had to be initially anti-American.
So Kassem obviously turned to the Soviet Union for support. The communists were given a lot of power. It's an overstatement to say that this was a communist regime--it wasn't. But the communists certainly had a lot of influence in the country. The Soviet Union had a lot of influence. There were a lot of delegations who came from every communist country to Baghdad--artistic, cultural, political, economic, and so on. But we were frightened that Iraq might ultimately move all the way into the Soviet orbit, and I suppose that was a possibility. You can never prove that it would not have happened if Kassem had continued. They started sending students to the Soviet Union for study, which they had never done before. I actually recommended that we subsidize the scholarships to the Soviet Union, because the Iraqis who went to the Soviet Union came back fervently anti-Russian, and particularly anti-communist. It wasn't viewed as serious, and I suppose it wasn't, but it would not have been a bad idea. Frequently, the students who came back from the United States were not terribly pro-American, and a lot of these communists had studied in America. They were dark-skinned. They went to Texas, and they ran into racial problems. People thought that they were black, and therefore they were discriminated against. But those who went to the Soviet Union had the same racial problems, and they did not like the treatment they were given by the Russians. They certainly didn't like the communist system.
So the danger of Iraq going communist probably was somewhat exaggerated, but that wasn't the view in Washington. Don't misunderstand me--it wasn't an irrational view. Iraq clearly was very strongly under the influence of the Soviets, and we decided that something should be done.
After the 1963 coup, how did U.S. policy change?
It didn't change very much. The Ba'ath Party had come to control. We were very happy. They got rid of a lot of communists. A lot of them were executed, or shot. This was a great development. And things opened up in Iraq. We resumed diplomatic relations. Ultimately, we sent out an ambassador. But when did the disillusionment start? Not while I was there. I left in 1965.
Let's talk about the 1970s, when the U.S. began working with the Kurds. What was your sense of the way American handled that?
I consider this one of the more shameful stories in our diplomatic history. The Kurds came to us repeatedly. While I was there, they came to us, and the position that I took was, "You're great people. You're really awfully good, and you really should have your rights inside Iraq, and probably in other countries. But you'll never ever get any support from the United States, because we have great interests in Iran, and in Turkey. Both of them have larger Kurdish populations than you have in Iraq, and any move toward autonomy, or even worse, toward independence in Iraq would certainly upset our allies--the Shah in Iran, and the Turks. So you'll never get support from us. The only hope that you can get from us is that we will urge the governments to treat you fairly. You might aspire to some sort of cultural autonomy, but never, never, any military support."
Things changed after that. We soured on Saddam, and we did give the Kurds military support through Iran. The Turks were not involved at that time. Then, the Shah concluded his agreement with Saddam, and the attitude of Iran changed totally. They stopped hating the Kurds. The border was sealed off, and the Kurds had no outside support whatsoever. Saddam was able to move into Kurdistan and take his vengeance on the Kurds. Kissinger was asked about the morality of a policy that encouraged the people to revolt against their central government in order to obtain a minor political gain for us--and then when we achieved other goals, we would betray the people and allowed them to be slaughtered. And Kissinger replied that covert military activity is not to be confused with missionary work. It's one of the two most immoral statements made by a secretary of state in recent years. The other was by Mrs. Albright, who was asked about the morality of the sanctions program that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. She said that we considered that, and decided it was worthwhile. The second statement has been quoted throughout the entire Muslim world. The first statement really only concerned the Kurds.
Can you tell the story you relayed to me earlier--when you asked Mulla Mustafa about why he had trusted the Americans?
After Mulla Mustafa left Iraq, he came to the United States. He wasn't well. Cancer was diagnosed here, and I saw a lot of him when he was here. I talked to him about what had happened in the past. He knew the position that I would take, and that I had never promised anything. I asked him how he possibly could have believed Henry Kissinger, when Kissinger promised to help, and did give him some help.
And he said, "Yes, yes, we were somewhat skeptical, but we've been urging the United States for 20 years to give us support, and finally the United States was giving us support. How could I not believe the foreign minister of the United States? " He didn't write his memoirs. But there is a young Arab scholar here who went up to interview him. He talked for hours and hours, reminiscing about his experiences in Iran right after the war, and the Soviet Union and why he came back. And he said, no, he wouldn't do that, and these people should forget me. He said, "My life has been a failure. If I had had some success, then that would be different, but everything I have tried to accomplish for my people I have failed. And I don't want anybody to interview me, and I don't want to be remembered."
Do you think he felt betrayed by America?
He was betrayed by America.
During this time in the mid-1970s, what was the driving force behind U.S. policy towards Iraq? How was it evolving?
At the end of the decade, the Iranian revolution had colored our relations with Iraq. Before the Iranian revolution, we had reasonably good relations with Iraq. I used to go to Iraq regularly every January, and my wife would come with me. We had served in Iraq. We like Iraq. We have a lot of Iraqi friends. And I would stay three or four days in Baghdad. . . . My wife came back from the trip in 1990, back to Baghdad where she was staying with the ambassador. The ambassador gave a dinner for the assistant secretary for Middle Eastern affairs, who was in Baghdad at the time. There were a lot of Iraqis, and my wife knew most of them. The assistant secretary sang the praises of Saddam, "What a wonderful person he is. This is a person we can really work with. We have a fantastic relationship. We could make lots of commercial sales, agricultural material," and so on.
And when he left, the Iraqis said to my wife, "What's wrong with this man? Doesn't he have any understanding of who this man [Saddam] is? The man's a monster. How can he be coming and praising this man in such forceful terms to a bunch of Iraqis who know exactly what the man is?"
Why do you think he was doing that?
I presume he thought that Saddam was great. This man had no Middle East experience, and he thought that Saddam was great. He can make lots of sales. He could be very advantageous to us commercially. And then, we had the famous visit of the three senators which came three months later--only three months or four months before the invasion of Kuwait. And I'm sure that you've interviewed some of these senators, and if you haven't, you've had the full report of what they said to Saddam. It was a love feast.
When it came to the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam concluded that the Americans would go along with it. There were a number of other factors. Saddam knew that the Kuwaitis were disliked by everybody else in the peninsula, and the Saudis won't mind if we move into Kuwait. After all, Kuwait was originally Iraqi, and I'm just resuming sovereignty over the lost Iraqi province. Nobody's really going to worry about that. There were a lot of Iraqis who knew the fallacy of this thinking, no doubt about it. I know some of them myself. But they couldn't say anything to Saddam, because he had demonstrated vividly what happens to people who disagree with him on things that he wants to do. So all these people who knew that this was a disaster, who knew the United States could not tolerate having Kuwait's enormous oil well being attached to Iraq's enormous oil well. Iraq is only second to Saudi Arabia for oil reserves in the entire world. Add Kuwait's to that, and you have a colossus.
Furthermore, if you got away with this, the countries of the peninsula would make their accommodation with this new henchman, so it couldn't stand. But if there were Iraqis who knew that--clearly there were--they wouldn't dare say that to Saddam. They had to tell him it was a brilliant idea--"It was what Kuwait itself wanted in the old days before oil." But things have changed. And Kuwait was no longer a terribly desperately poor province. It was an enormously wealthy one. The Kuwaitis opposed it, almost to a man. The Saudis were terrified with it, and we are able to use this as the pretext to send troops into Saudi Arabia, and ultimately to destroy Iraq.
Go back to the 1970s. How did U.S. policy towards Iraq change during the Carter administration, and was there some sort of opening that was tested under Brzezinski?
I'd been in Iraq at that time. At the time of the Carter election, it seemed to me that this was the time to resume diplomatic relations. I talked to people in the White House, and I talked to Brzezinski about this. They agreed that this would be the time explore this. And so, Philip Habibe was sent to Baghdad to explore the possibility. But he was not a good choice of candidate, because the main line that he took with the Iraqis was that what you really have to do is to open talks with Israel, and the Iraqis were rather surprised at that. They thought that we'd be talking about bilateral issues, not about their relations with Israel. That set things back for quite some time, and it was quite some time before diplomatic relations were then resumed.
Do you have any sense of how the revolution in Iran changed American policy toward Iraq?
Everything changed once the Shah fell. The Shah was invulnerable. The Shah was going to last forever. You have on record all of the reports and the CIA statements that, after the revolution was well underway, that Iran without the Shah was unimaginable, and Iran is not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation. The first cable that came from the embassy saying that the Shah was in trouble was dated in October. 1978, when anybody who would open his eyes would see that the Shah was on his last legs. There isn't any rational explanation for our stupidity in Iran. The only explanation I can come up with that's at all satisfying is psychological. The restoration of the Shah in 1953 was one of the great victories of the CIA. They didn't have very many they could talk about, but that was one of them--getting rid of the "communists" restoring the monarchy to Iran, and restoring our close relations with the Shah. The Shah was an extraordinary, seductive person and he in a sense seduced all American presidents, and most American secretaries of state. We could not imagine that he could be in trouble, that this great victory should be crumbling. Therefore we were in a period of denial until shortly before he left he country, and even after he left the country. There were people talking about the restoration of the monarchy.
The United States was very concerned about the overthrow of the Shah. This was a great blow to the United States. The power structure of the Middle East changed dramatically with the most important country in the Gulf becoming, not one of the pillars of American policy in the area, but one of the strongest opponents of America, and the entire world, because of our close association with the Shah. . . .
When disintegration started, and a report was prepared on this--the economic and political and military disintegration of the country--the army had been totally purged, and the people who were taking over were young and incompetent. The implication was that the government would not last too much longer. A copy of such a report was given to the Saudis, and the Saudis were quite impressed by it, because they were deathly afraid of the government of Iran's mullahs. What the Saudis did with this report is where this narrative breaks down somewhat.
There are a lot of people who believe that the Saudis gave a copy of this to Saddam. But no Saudis ever told me that it was given, and no Iraqi has ever told me that they got a copy of this report from the Saudis, although they could have. Whether they did or not, Saddam also reached the same conclusion on his own. There's no doubt about that. If he got confirmation of his conclusion from an American report, that would have made him even more determined to move against Iran. Saddam thought that if they are really close to disintegration, attack from me will bring about the total collapse of the country. I will be able to absorb what the Arabs have always called Irabustan into the greater Arab homeland, and Irabustan happens to be the Iranian province that has almost all of its oil. There were Iraqis at the time who saw that this would be a fatal policy for Iraq, most notably Adnan Hamdani. He was then minister of planning, and a close personal friend of mine and coincidentally, of Saddam, as well.
Adnan said at a cabinet meeting, "Well, they may be close to disintegration now, but we know what happens when a country is attacked from outside. The Soviet Union was very unpopular inside Russia, but when it was attacked by Hitler, the people rallied, not around communism, and not around the Soviet Union but around Holy Mother Russia. If Iran is attacked, people who don't like the mullahs are going to rally around the government because there's a foreign attack. If the attacker plans, as it certainly does, to dislodge the oil-producing province of the country, everybody in the country is going to fight against Iraq forever. And Iran, I point out, is three times as big as Iraq. It's a war that we can lose. It will be a disaster for Iraq."
Whereupon Saddam killed him, Adnan, by himself. Not that he had him killed-- Saddam killed Adnan himself.
By all accounts, he went to the funeral and cried at the loss of his dear friend. His wife still gets the pension of a widow of a cabinet officer. And here's another case of somebody suggesting, and not agreeing, with something that Saddam has suggested. It was during the war, when Iraq was not winning and probably was losing. The losses were terrible for Iraq. The Iranians were organized, and they were sending wave after wave of people in to the battle, who were being slaughtered. The Iranians didn't care about the losses, and the Iraqis cared more. They were much smaller. At the cabinet meeting, Saddam apparently said, according to all accounts, "Perhaps I should withdraw. Khomeini has made this a personal attack on me. He said he has no battle with Iraq, he has a battle with me, and maybe I should just withdraw. Then peace can be made with Iran."
The health minister at that point said, "We don't want you to go, of course, and if you withdraw [from power] it should be temporary. Just go to your farm and wait there, and then when things are normal, then you can come back, but that maybe should be done."
That wasn't the sequence that Saddam wanted to hear. He wanted people to say, "You can't possibly do this. You are Iraq, you cannot withdraw, and you must stay." The health minister was not killed by Saddam, but he was executed, probably after torture. God knows. In any case, his remains were delivered to his family in a bag in small pieces, and no funeral was allowed.
Now these things make an impression on cabinet people, and people who are around Saddam. When it came to talking about the invasion of Kuwait, if there were Iraqis who foresaw the consequences of such an action, and I have no doubt whatsoever that there were many, not one would dare point this out to the leader, because he would remember the minister of planning first, and then the minister of health. He doesn't want to be the third in this sequence.
