Four Questions for Saddam -- and the U.S.
Pacific News Service, Commentary, Larry Everest, Posted: Dec 17, 2003
Editor's Note:At his trial, captured ex-dictator Saddam Hussein might shed light on several mysteries surrounding his rise, long rule and fall, and his decades-long relationship with the United States.
I have lots of questions for Saddam -- and for the United States.
Given all the historical and journalistic material available to researchers like myself, much is known about the decades-long relationship between Saddam and Washington. But much remains murky. Regardless of what kind of trial Saddam may receive -- or even if the United States has the legal right to try him after what was arguably an illegal war -- any proceeding designed to uncover the truth behind Saddam's rise and fall should start with the following:
1. What role did the CIA and other U.S. agencies play in the Baath Party's rise to power?
Scholars and journalists have widely reported that the CIA helped the right-wing, anti-communist Baath Party come to power in a Feb. 8, 1963 coup, including by providing it with lists of suspected communists, progressives and nationalists via a clandestine radio station in Kuwait. Immediately after the coup, the Baath executed some 3,000 to 5,000 people, many of whom were on the CIA's lists. In those days, Saddam was a low-level but hardcore cadre who attempted to assassinate Gen. Abdul Karim Qasim, the leader of the 1958 revolution that overthrew the pro-Western monarchy.
At the time, France's L'Express stated outright, "The Iraqi coup was inspired by the CIA." London's Guardian reported some years later that declassified British cabinet papers "disclose that the coup had been backed by the British and the CIA."
The new government was an unstable coalition, so in 1967, after a series of military coups, the Johnson administration dispatched former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson to Baghdad to assist the Baath. On July 30, 1968, the Baath faction, led by acting President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, with Saddam a close ally, ousted the non-Baath elements from the government. Iraq's Deputy Chief of Army Intelligence Col. Abdel Razaq Al Nayyef later confirmed in his memoirs, "for the 1968 coup you must look to Washington."
2. What role did the Carter and Reagan administrations play in starting the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, which resulted in a total of 1 million casualties, including over 300,000 dead?
The 1979 fall of the Shah of Iran was a major blow to the U.S. hold on the oil-rich Persian Gulf. There is much evidence that the Carter administration encouraged Iraq to attack Iran in order to weaken the Islamic revolution and protect its oil-sheikh allies. Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski felt that "Iraq was poised to succeed Iran as the principal pillar of stability in the Persian Gulf."
Author Kenneth R. Timmermann and former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr argue separately that Brzezinski met with Hussein in July 1980 in Amman, Jordan, to discuss joint efforts to oppose Iran. Hussein biographer Said Aburish writes that the Amman meeting did take place, but that Hussein met with three CIA agents, not Brzezinski. Former Carter official Gary Sick denies that Washington directly encouraged Iraq's attack, but instead let "Saddam assume there was a U.S. green light because there was no explicit red light."
3. During the Iran-Iraq war, what role did U.S. military and intelligence officials play in Iraq's use of chemical weapons and in prolonging the conflict?
According to an August 2002 New York Times story, "critical battle planning assistance" provided by U.S. intelligence officers continued even after it was clear that Iraqis "had integrated chemical weapons throughout their arsenal and were adding them to strike plans that American advisers either prepared or suggested." In 1986, the Washington Post reported that Iraq used U.S. intelligence to "calibrate attacks with mustard gas on Iranian ground troops." What was Washington's full role here?
In 1987, The New York Times also reported that U.S. intelligence agencies manipulated both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, providing each country with "deliberately distorted or inaccurate intelligence data" in order to "further the Reagan Administration's goals" in the region. One method mentioned was altering satellite photos.
In "Veil," his study of CIA covert operations in the 1980s, Bob Woodward found that some CIA officials were "doling out tactical data to both sides" to engineer a stalemate. What was the full extent of U.S. intelligence manipulation, and what were its consequences?
4. What did the United States really know about Iraq's destruction of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs -- and when did Washington know it?
Most experts now believe that Iraq's WMD were destroyed as far back as 1991. That raises the specter that the United States knowingly continued sanctions -- which UNICEF estimated cost the lives of some 500,000 Iraqi children by 1998 -- not in order to disarm Iraq, but in order to strangle it and conspire against the Hussein regime. Was Iraq actually complying with U.N. resolutions far more than it defied them? This has been the consistent claim of Iraqi officials, including Saddam himself after his capture.
No one would deny Saddam was responsible for the murder of thousands of his own people. But at issue is not simply one man's criminality, but the character of U.S. actions in Iraq for six decades, their devastating consequences for the Iraqi people and the agenda the Bush administration is now pursuing in Iraq and beyond. Many other witnesses will have to be called to get answers to these crucial questions.
PNS contributor Larry Everest is author of the new book "Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda" (Common Courage Press, 2003). He reported from Iraq in 1991.
Page
1 of 1
|
