great article...thanks for posting it ben
-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Braver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 11:24 PM
To: CF-Community
Subject: Liberate Iraq -- Even With Unclean Hands
Liberate Iraq -- Even With Unclean Hands
Jeff Jacoby - The Boston Globe - March 6, 2003
One of the arguments of those who oppose a US-led war to topple Saddam
Hussein is that America long ago forfeited its right to lead a moral crusade
against the Iraqi dictator. If the e-mail I get is typical, the argument
usually goes something like this:
"Where does Washington find the gall to condemn Saddam as evil? Saddam might
not even be alive today if Washington hadn't been his best friend during the
Iran-Iraq War. It's all very well for Bush to thunder about Iraq's stash of
chemical and biological weapons -- but who sold Iraq those germs and poisons
in the first place? We did! It's not the peace movement that is morally
obtuse, it's a foreign policy that never cared about Saddam's crimes as long
as it was convenient to ignore them."
There is some hyperbole there, but on the whole it's true: In the 1980s the
United States supported Saddam's totalitarian regime and showed little
concern for its victims. American exports helped launch Iraq's biological
weapons program. Saddam's horrific violations of international law, such as
his use of poison gas on the battlefield, had minimal effect on US-Iraqi
cooperation. And while the tilt toward Saddam began with Jimmy Carter ("We
see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the US and Iraq" --
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, April 1980), it was the
Reagan and Bush I administrations that brought it to full flower.
All of this has long been a matter of public record. US shipments of deadly
biological agents to Iraq, for example, were detailed in a 1994 Senate
Banking Committee report and a follow-up letter from the Centers for Disease
Control in 1995. They showed that Iraq was allowed to purchase batch after
batch of lethal pathogens -- anthrax, botulism, E. coli, West Nile fever,
gas gangrene, dengue fever. At a time when Washington knew that Iraq was
using chemical weapons to kill thousands of Iranian troops, the CDC was
shipping germ cultures directly to the Iraqi unconventional weapons facility
in al-Muthanna.
Last week, the National Security Archive at George Washington University
published on its Web site a collection of declassified government documents
laying out the American embrace of Saddam in 1980-84. The series is
introduced with a photograph of Saddam firmly shaking hands with Ronald
Reagan's special Middle East envoy, a seasoned Washington veteran named
Donald Rumsfeld. Their meeting took place on Dec. 20, 1983, and according to
the detailed notes that were kept, the two men discussed a wide range of
topics -- the state of US-Iraqi relations, the war with Iran, US concerns
about terrorism, new arrangements for shipping Iraqi oil, and the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
But Rumsfeld said nothing about Saddam's pursuit of nuclear weapons or his
use of chemical weapons. Or about the terrorists he was sheltering in
Baghdad. Or about his monstrous record of torture and murder. Rumsfeld's
instructions were to "establish personal rapport" with the dictator and to
make it clear that the United States firmly supported Iraq in the war it had
started with Iran. American policy in the Gulf under Reagan was one of
unsentimental realpolitik: An Iranian victory was to be prevented at all
costs, and those costs included aiding Iraq militarily and financially and
making as little fuss as possible about its repressive and inhumane
behavior.
The year before Rumsfeld's visit, the State Department had removed Iraq from
its list of terror-sponsoring states; in 1984, it would resume the full
diplomatic relations Iraq had broken off in 1967. The United States became,
in effect, Saddam's silent ally, a policy that was occasionally questioned
but never seriously challenged -- either inside the administration or by
Congress.
That policy even went so far as to censor honest commentary about Iraq. When
the Voice of America aired an editorial that included Iraq in a list of
countries where "secret police are still widely present," Saddam was
furious. To appease him, the State Department ordered VOA to submit all
future editorials about Iraq for pre-broadcast approval. One such editorial,
drafted in July 1990, obliquely warned Iraq not to threaten its neighbors
(though it didn't actually name Iraq or any of those neighboring countries).
State killed it. Kuwait was invaded a week later.
I am a great admirer of Reagan, whose conduct of foreign policy overall left
the world a freer, safer place. But there is no way to prettify his handling
of Iraq. It empowered an evil and brutal tyrant, gave free rein to his
aggressive megalomania, and treated his human rights atrocities as an
unimportant side issue. Had Reagan (and Carter and Bush I) seen Saddam first
and foremost as a dangerous, destabilizing cutthroat rather than a "balance"
to Khomeini's Iran, there is no telling how many lives might have been
saved.
But why is any of that an argument against doing the right thing now?
If America played a role in entrenching Saddam's dictatorship, isn't that
all the more reason for it now to take the lead in toppling that
dictatorship? If US foreign policy for too long disregarded the suffering of
the Iraqi people, is it not good news that US policy now makes that people's
liberation a priority? Are American presidents forever barred from
denouncing a vicious oppressor and leading a war against him because some of
their predecessors neglected to do so?
There is no surer recipe for increasing evil in the world than the doctrine
that evil may be confronted only by those who have never failed to do good.
Our embrace of Saddam in the '80s was shameful. How much greater our shame
will be if we refuse to destroy him now.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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