U.S. support for Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war
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Western support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war has clearly been established. The Soviet Union, West Germany, France, Britain, and many western companies provided military support and even components of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction program. This article however focuses on the support on all scales and forms that the US provided to the Saddam regime during the war.
U.S. support for Iraq
After the revolution of Iran, with the Ayatollahs in power and levels of enmity between Iran and the U.S. running high, early on during the Iran-Iraq war, realpolitikers in Washington came to the conclusion that Saddām was the lesser of the two evils, and hence efforts to support Iraq gradually became the order of the day, both during the long war with Iran and afterward. This led to what later became known as the Iraq-gate scandals.
Much of what Iraq received from the US, however, were not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology— mainframe computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. It is now known that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and elsewhere, fed Iraq's warring capabilities right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait Russ W. Baker, IRAQGATE: The Big One That (Almost) Got Away, Who Chased it -- and Who Didn't. Columbia Journalism Review March 1993. Link: http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/93/2/iraqgate.asp
The "Iraq-gate" scandal revealed that an Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled US$ 5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. In August 1989, when FBI agents finally raided the Atlanta branch of BNL, the branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq—some of which, according to his indictment, were used to purchase arms and weapons technology.
Beginning in September, 1989, the Financial Times laid out the first charges that BNL, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed loans, was funding Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons work. For the next two and a half years, the Financial Times provided the only continuous newspaper reportage (over 300 articles) on the subject. Among the companies shipping militarily useful technology to Iraq under the eye of the U.S. government, according to the Financial Times, were Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, and Matrix Churchill, through its Ohio branch. Russ W. Baker, IRAQGATE: The Big One That (Almost) Got Away, Who Chased it -- and Who Didn't. Columbia Journalism Review March 1993. Link: http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/93/2/iraqgate.asp
Even before the Persian Gulf War started in 1990, the Intelligencer Journal of Pennsylvania in a string of articles reported: "If U.S. and Iraqi troops engage in combat in the Persian Gulf, weapons technology developed in Lancaster and indirectly sold to Iraq will probably be used against U.S. forces ... And aiding in this ... technology transfer was the Iraqi-owned, British-based precision tooling firm Matrix Churchill, whose U.S. operations in Ohio were recently linked to a sophisticated Iraqi weapons procurement network."Russ W. Baker, IRAQGATE: The Big One That (Almost) Got Away, Who Chased it -- and Who Didn't. Columbia Journalism Review March 1993. Link: http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/93/2/iraqgate.asp
Aside from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and ABC's Ted Koppel, the Iraq-gate story never picked up much steam, even though The U.S. Congress became involved with the scandal. See Federation of American Scientists report: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920519l.htm
In December 2002, Iraq's 1,200 page Weapons Declaration revealed a list of Eastern and Western corporations and countries—as well as individuals—that exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades. By far, the largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were in Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics (now part of EPC Industrie) sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. The Kim Al-Khaleej firm of Singapore supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq. See What Iraq Addmitted About its Chemical Weapons Program. Link: http://www.iraqwatch.org/suppliers/nyt-041303.gif
By contrast, Alcolac International, for example, a Maryland company, transported thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor, to Iraq. Alcolac was small and was successfully prosecuted for its violations of export control law. The firm pleaded guilty in 1989. The al-Haddad trading company in Tennessee delivered 60 tons of DMMP, a chemical used to make sarin, a nerve gas implicated in so-called Persian Gulf War Syndrome. The al-Haddad trading company appears to have been an Iraqi front company. The firm was owned by Sahib Abd al-Amir al-Haddad, an Iraqi-born, naturalized American citizen. Recent stories in The New York Times and The Tennessean reported that al-Haddad was arrested in Bulgaria in November 2002 while trying to arrange an arms sale to Iraq. Al-Haddad, was charged with conspiring in the late 1990s to purchase equipment for the manufacture of a giant Iraqi cannon.
A full list of American companies and their involvements in Iraq was provided by The LA Weekly in May 2003. See:
On 25 May 1994, The U.S. Senate Banking Committee released a report in which it was stated that "pathogenic" (meaning disease producing), "toxigenic" (meaning poisonous) and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce. It added: "These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction."Link: http://www.gulfwarvets.com/arison/banking.htm
The report then detailed 70 shipments (including anthrax bacillus) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding "It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program." See lists:
A report by Berlin's Die Tageszeitung in 2002 reported that Iraq's 11,000-page report to the UN Security Council listed 150 foreign companies that supported Saddam Hussein's WMD program. Twenty-four U.S. firms were involved in exporting arms and materials to Baghdad Link: http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/arming_iraq.php
Donald Riegle, Chairman of the Senate committee that authored the aforementioned Riegle Report, said, "UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licenses issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programs." He added, "the executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control sent Iraq 14 agents "with biological warfare significance," including West Nile virus, according to Riegle's investigators Report by St. Petersburg Times: http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/16/Perspective/How_Iraq_built_its_we.shtml And The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, also released a list of U.S. companies and their exports to Iraq. See page 11 of this report: http://www.sfbg.com/News/32/21/images/b11.gif
More sources and details can be found at the end of this article.
The Tanker War and US military involvement
The United States was wary of the Tehran regime since the Iranian Revolution, not least because of the detention of its Tehran embassy staff in the 1979–81 Iran hostage crisis. Starting in 1982 with Iranian success on the battlefield, the U.S. made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying it with intelligence, economic aid, normalizing relations with the government (broken during the 1967 Six-Day War), and also supplying weaponsLink: http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/arming_iraq.phpStarting in 1981, both Iran and Iraq attacked oil tankers and merchant ships, including those of neutral nations, in an effort to deprive the opponent of trade. After repeated Iraqi attacks on Iran's main exporting facility on Khark Island, Iran attacked a Kuwaiti tanker near Bahrain on May 13 1984, and a Saudi tanker in Saudi waters on May 16. Attacks on ships of noncombatant nations in the Persian Gulf sharply increased thereafter, and this phase of the war was dubbed the "Tanker War."
Lloyd's of London, a British insurance market, estimated that the Tanker War damaged 546 commercial vessels and killed about 430 civilian mariners. The largest of attacks were directed by Iran against Kuwaiti vessels, and on November 1 1986, Kuwait formally petitioned foreign powers to protect its shipping. The Soviet Union agreed to charter tankers starting in 1987, and the United States offered to provide protection for tankers flying the U.S. flag on March 7 1987 (Operation Earnest Will and Operation Prime Chance). Under international law, an attack on such ships would be treated as an attack on the U.S., allowing the U.S. to retaliate militarily. This support would protect ships headed to Iraqi ports, effectively guaranteeing Iraq's revenue stream for the duration of the war.
An Iraqi plane accidentally attacked the USS Stark (FFG 31), a Perry class frigate on May 17, killing 37 and injuring 21.[link] But U.S. attention was on isolating Iran; it criticized Iran's mining of international waters, and in October 1987, the U.S. attacked Iranian oil platforms in retaliation for an Iranian attack on the U.S.-flagged tanker Sea Isle City.Link: http://www.navybook.com/nohigherhonor/pic-nimblearcher.shtml
On April 14 1988, the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts was badly damaged by an Iranian mine. U.S. forces responded with Operation Praying Mantis on April 18, the United States Navy's largest engagement of surface warships since World War II. Two Iranian ships were destroyed, and an American helicopter was shot down, killing the two pilots.Link: http://www.navybook.com/nohigherhonor/pic-prayingmantis.shtml
The USS Vincennes incident
In the course of these escorts by the U.S. Navy, the cruiser USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 with the loss of all 290 passengers and crew on July 3 1988. The American government claimed that the airliner had been mistaken for an Iranian F-14 Tomcat, and that the USS Vincennes was operating in international waters at the time and feared that it was under attack. The Iranians, however, maintain that the Vincennes was in fact in Iranian territorial waters, and that the Iranian passenger jet was turning away and increasing altitude after take-off. U.S. Admiral William J. Crowe also admitted on ABC's Nightline that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters when it launched the missiles.Link: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ir655-nightline-19920701.html The U.S. eventually paid compensation for the incident but never apologised.
References
See also
- US-Iran relations
- Anti-Iranianism
- Arms sales to Iraq 1973-1990
- Riegle Report
- British arms to Iraq, also see Scott Report
- Project Babylon, Iraq's Super Cannon project
- Iraqgate
- Iran-Iraq war
External links
- A timeline of U.S. support for Saddām against Iran: http://www.casi.org.uk/info/usdocs/usiraq80s90s.html
- Statement of Henry B. Gonzalez, Chairman, House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs on "Iraq-gate",: see links given on http://www.sfbg.com/News/32/21/Features/iraq.html
- [University of Missouri School of Journalism database]
- [University of Sussex report]
- [A Global Policy Forum Report]
- [Text of the U.S. Senate Riegle Report]
- [NSA Archives]
- [Sydney Morning Herald report]
- [Litigation of involved corporations]
- [Consortium News article]
- Friedman Alan, Spider's Web: The Secret History of how the White House Illegally Armed Iraq. New York, Bantam Books, 1993.
- Jentleson Bruce, With friends like these: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982-1990. New York, W. W. Norton, 1994.
- Phythian Mark, Arming Iraq: How the U.S. and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine. Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1997.
- [STEPHEN R. SHALOM, THE UNITED STATES AND THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR, Z-magazine, Feb. 1993]
- [Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, Edited by Joyce Battle, February 25, 2003]
- [Iraq gate]
- [U.S. Export Policy Toward Iraq: An Agenda for Tomorrow, by Kenneth R. Timmerman]
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