Every time a Bush administration official talks about the moral imperative of the war in Iraq, and the need to take down a vicious tyrant who gassed his own people, I think about that famous picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in Baghdad in 1983 and I have trouble accepting the White House’s arguments. Forget “accepting” the arguments; I have trouble not laughing at them.
The truth is the Reagan administration, which never exactly set a high moral example when it came to foreign policy, sent Rumsfeld to meet with Hussein after Hussein used chemical weapons against Iraqis. In fact, after these WMD attacks, the Reagan White House wanted to make it clear to the Iraqi regime that the United States was eager to improve ties Hussein’s government.
As the New York Times reported last week, “the United States secretly provided Iraq with combat planning assistance, even after Mr. Hussein’s use of chemical weapons was widely known.” Citing previously unreleased documents, the Times described “American outreach to the Iraqi government, even as the United States professed to be neutral in the eight-year war, and suggests a private nonchalance toward Mr. Hussein’s use of chemicals in warfare.”
Last year, when the photo of Rumsfeld and Hussein started appearing in the media again, Rumsfeld insisted that he had “cautioned” Hussein about WMDs during his two friendly visits to Iraq. Previously classified notes of their meetings, however, make no reference to any of these warnings.
Yes, we heard plenty of rhetoric over the last year about Saddam and his brutal dictatorship, all of which was true. What we didn’t hear is that some of these same people who were condemning Iraq now were actively, but secretly, courting Saddam’s favor just 20 years ago.
The LA Times’ Robert Scheer noted today that “were the trial of Hussein to be held by an impartial world court, it would prove an embarrassing two-edged sword for the White House, calling into question the motives of U.S. foreign policy. If there were a complete investigation into those who aided and abetted Hussein’s crimes against humanity, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State George Shultz would probably end up as material witnesses.”
Scheer added, “It was Rumsfeld and Shultz who told Hussein and his emissaries that U.S. statements generally condemning the use of chemical weapons would not interfere with relations between secular Iraq and the Reagan administration, which took Iraq off the terrorist-nations list and embraced Hussein as a bulwark against fundamentalist Iran. Ironically, the U.S supported Iraq when it possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and invaded it when it didn’t.”
For all that we’ve heard about moral directives and moral clarity, many of Bush’s top officials, working for Reagan and the first Bush, found it perfectly acceptable to form an alliance with a murdering butcher who gassed people in his own country. As Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, recently said, “Saddam had chemical weapons in the 1980’s, and it didn’t make any difference to U.S. policy.”
Or, as Scheer concluded, “If, as Bush II says, Hussein acted as a ‘Hitler’ while ‘gassing his own people,’ during the 1980s, we were fully aware and implicitly approving, via economic and military aid, of his most nefarious deeds.”