User:InforManiac/Saddam Hussein – United States relations

Coup against Abd al-Karim Qasim


According to Richard Sale, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan. Qassim's sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959 was an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Hussein, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Abd al-Karim Qasim. Hussein was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qassim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qassim's movements. The move was done with full knowledge of the CIA, and Hussein's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence.

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched; the 22-year-old Hussein lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qassim's driver and only wounding Qassim in the shoulder and arm, Qassim escaped death. Hussein was shot in the leg, but escaped to Tikrit with the help of CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents. Hussein then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, the CIA paid for Hussein's apartment and put him through a brief training course, the agency then helped him get to Cairo, where he made frequent visits to the American embassy. During this time the CIA placed him in an upper-class apartment observed by CIA and Egyptian operatives.

In February 1963 Qassim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Provided with information by the CIA, the Baath Party hunted down suspected communists. They then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned them down. Many suspected communists were killed outright. An exact toll is not known, but accounts indicate that among the victims were hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers, and other professionals. These numbers also include military and political figures. Saddam Hussein himself was said to have participated in the killings. There was an exchange of information between the Ba'ath and the CIA; for the first time, the United States was able to get models of certain Mig fighters and tanks made in the Soviet Union. That was what the Ba'ath had to offer the United States in return for their help in eliminating Qassim.

The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Qassim and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad—for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.

But it wasn't long before there was infighting among Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, it is claimed that the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led by long-time Hussein mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Hussein's rise to leadership took a significant step in November 1969 when he assumed a number of senior posts in the Ba'ath Party and Iraqi government. The British embassy in Baghdad described Hussein as "the recognized heir-apparent" and "young," with an "engaging smile," "a formidable, single-minded and hard-headed member of the Ba'athist hierarchy, but one with whom, if only one could see more of him, it would be possible to do business". In 1979, Hussein formally assumed the presidency when al-Bakr turned over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé.

Said Aburish, journalist and writer, believes that Hussein and the CIA had a common enemy—Qassim. He believes that their alliance was for the duration of getting rid of Qassim, and it was not an alliance of permanent nature.

The CIA, however, claims that the assertion that Saddam once received payments from the CIA was "utterly ridiculous".

David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, has disputed the notion that the CIA supported the 1968 coup, as has Middle East analyst James Phillips. According to a 2003 report by Common Dreams "many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s," although it is widely acknowledged that the CIA worked to destabilize the Qassem regime in the early part of the decade. Robert Dreyfuss, in his book Devil's Game, maintains that the Johnson administration actually opposed the 1968 coup and used the Shah's Iran as a counterpoint to the Ba'athist regime it established. A 2006 study concluded that the CIA's alleged role in the coup "cannot be considered historical" in the absence of more compelling evidence.

Iraq-Iran war


According to Said Aburish, Hussein made a visit to Amman in the year 1979, before the Iran–Iraq War, where he met three senior CIA agents. He discussed with them his plans to invade Iran.

In 1980, Iraq started the war with a blitzkrieg attack. The tide had turned by 1982 in favor of much larger Iran, and the Reagan administration was afraid Iraq might lose. Reagan chose Donald Rumsfeld as his emissary to Hussein, whom he visited in December 1983 and March 1984.

After the visit, the Reagan administration offered Hussein financial credits that eventually made Iraq the third-largest recipient of US assistance. The CIA and DIA relation with Hussein intensified. The CIA regularly sent a team to Hussein to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft, Iraq used this information to target Iranian troops with chemical weapons.

Under President George H.W. Bush, the U.S. doubled its financial credits for Iraq. Dick Cheney, who was secretary of defense and a statutory member of the National Security Council that reviewed Iraq policy, supported the administration's appeasement policy.

Kuwait pre-Invasion
On July 25, 1990 following tensions with Kuwait, Saddam Hussein met with United States Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, in one of the last high-level contacts between the two Governments before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2. Iraqi Government officials published a transcript of the meeting, which also included the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz. A copy was provided to The New York Times by ABC News, which was translated from Arabic. The U.S. State Department has declined to comment on its accuracy.

Glaspie is quoted saying to Hussein:

"I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq. [...] I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60s [during another Iraq-Kuwait border conflict]. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly [...] Frankly, we can see only that you have deployed massive troops in the south. Normally that would not be any of our business. But when this happens in the context of what you said on your national day, then when we read the details in the two letters of the Foreign Minister, then when we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq, then it would be reasonable for me to be concerned. And for this reason, I received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship -- not in the spirit of confrontation -- regarding your intentions."

Author Barry M. Lando notes of this meeting, that despite growing concern within the U.S. intelligence community that hostile military forces were planning to annex Kuwait's northern oil field, and whilst General Norman Schwarzkopf had offered the Kuwaitis private assurances they would "come to their rescue" if attacked by Iraq, the Americans made no public declaration nor communicated a single word of warning dissuading Saddam Hussein's government from doing so.

Similarly, author Alan Friedman writes that a poorly worded telegram, from George H. W. Bush to Saddam Hussein, may have had unintended consequences.

Early on the morning of July 28, CIA director William Webster had gone to the White House to brief the president, carrying with him in a thick manila envelope satellite intelligence photographs that showed Iraqi troops transporting ammunition, fuel, and water to the northern boarder of Kuwait... Bush did not want to overreact, no matter how detailed the intelligence information might be. Later that day, he went ahead and sent a cable to Saddam, saying he was concerned about the Iraqi leader's threats to use force. He did not mention Kuwait by name, however, preferring instead to reiterate the standard U.S. policy line: "Let me reassure you that my Administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq." The president's message, coming after years of equally friendly signals, gave Saddam little reason to be deflected from invading Kuwait. It was, as one State Department hand put it later, "another busted signal." Before Bush sent the cable, senior Defense Department officials had tried to stop it, fearing it was so weakly worded that it would send the wrong message to Saddam. "We were already seeing troops moving. We were getting worried, and we were putting up this piece of pap..." remembered Henry Rowen, assistant secretary of defense for security affairs at the time. Rowen and others at the Pentagon, concerned that Ambassador April Glaspie had already been spineless in her dealings with Saddam and that a conciliatory message from Bush would be equally ineffectual, had done their best, but the president was not deterred. p. 166

The expressed position of neutrality coming at a critical point in time, further underscored at James Baker's direction, is viewed by some with suspicion; with others believing it was "deception" or a "green light" to the Iraqi dictatorship, facilitating military intervention.

Tariq Aziz told PBS Frontline in 1996 how the Iraqi leadership was under "no illusion" about America's affairs in the region: "She [Glaspie] didn't tell us anything strange. She didn't tell us in the sense that we concluded that the Americans will not retaliate. That was nonsense you see. It was nonsense to think that the Americans would not attack us." And in a second 2000 interview with the same television program, Aziz said:

"There were no mixed signals. We should not forget that the whole period before August 2 witnessed a negative American policy towards Iraq. So it would be quite foolish to think that, if we go to Kuwait, then America would like that. Because the American tendency . . . was to untie Iraq. So how could we imagine that such a step was going to be appreciated by the Americans? It looks foolish, you see, this is fiction."

Author Donald Schmidt writes that it was a sense of injustice and display of arrogance by the Kuwaiti leadership why Saddam decided to invade his southern neighbor in the end.

End of alliance
The Hussein-U.S. alliance came to an end at 2 a.m. August 2, 1990 when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its most bitter enemy.

Early next year, American, French and British war planes bombed Iraq for weeks. Over twenty different nations had joined forces to defeat Saddam Hussein and soon victory was at hand. When the Gulf War ended in 1991, Hussein was allowed to remain in power, but with severe limitations: U.S. war planes flew non-stop missions over Iraq to deny Hussein the ability to attack fellow Iraqis and thus permit refugees to return home.

Criticizing U.S. policy, weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who was tasked to destroy illegal arms during this period, offered this insight into the mind of Saddam Hussein:

"During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam used 101,000 chemical munitions, which was no secret. The U.S. once in a while would peep and say chemical weapons were bad, but at the same time we were giving Saddam intelligence that laid out where Iranian troops were massing. Then he would gas the living daylights out of them. If you're Saddam, you wonder: How is it that between August 1990 and April 1991 the U.S. became so interested in weapons of mass destruction?"

In 2003, coalition forces, led by the United States, invaded Iraq. The U.S. military developed a set of playing cards to help troops identify the most-wanted men in Iraq, Hussein was the Ace of Spades; most wanted man.

Hussein was captured by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003, and was brought to trial under the Iraqi interim government set up by U.S.-led forces. On November 5, 2006, he was convicted of charges related to the executions of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites suspected of planning an assassination attempt against him, and was sentenced to death by hanging. Hussein was executed on December 30, 2006.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia says: Hussein, having watched the United States gloss over his crimes in the Iran war and at home, concluded he could get away with invading Kuwait.

It was a costly error for him, for his country, and eventually for the United States, which now has the largest part of its military bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire. Meanwhile the architects of the earlier appeasement policy now maintain the illusion that they have a path to victory.