US-Iraq Relations in 1980s: Mistake or Policy? (Fairly Long)

Great Debates
1

A very interesting article appeared in the Washington Post’s headlines this morning about US-Iraqi relations during the 1980s. I’d like to start with a couple of quotes from the first part of the article:

and this one:

So this is the greater picture - supporting Iraq enough to win the war against Iran will keep Kuwait and the surrounding Gulf states, and the oil they possess, firmly within the sphere of US influence.

Of course, there is plenty of backpedaling from officials within the Reagan and first Bush administration, such as

and

and

But it wasn’t about dealing with Saddam, was it? It was about keeping the rest of the Gulf “safe for democracy”. If it had really been about dealing with Saddam, then Reagan’s Presidental Directive 114, which stated the US would do “whatever was necessary and legal” to aid Iraq in the war (as stated in the article), should not have been issued given the

Nor should the US have sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in order to resume full diplomatic relations, especially since only a month previously

How did the US respond? According to Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official who helped develop Iraqi policy under Reagan,

and that

As a result, in 1991,

But it didn’t stop there. In 1987, Saddam began attacking rebel Kurds with nerve gas, and US intelligence officers found evidence of widespread use of chemical weapons where the last battles of the Iran-Iraq war were fought. And yet the US increased the supply of military intelligence to Iraq and failed to close loopholes in export controls so that Dow Chemical was able to sell $1.5 million worth of pesticides to Iraq, regardless of US concerns that those chemicals could be used against human targets.

The point at which Saddam Hussein became the next grave threat to civilization was in 1990, literally at the moment he invaded Kuwait.

All’s well that ends well - until Saddam did the same thing the US feared Iran would have tried had it won the war. Then, and only then, did he become Public Enemy Number One.

My point, then, is to argue that this article clearly demonstrates that the prime motivating factor in US relations with the Middle East has been concern for keeping oil-rich countries within the sphere of US influence, and that it has pursued that aim through the support of vicious dictators when they appear willing to play ball. US support of Iraq in the 1980s was not a “mistake” or a faulty assessment of Saddam’s character, but a deliberate policy, as demonstrated by two administrations’ continued supply of military intelligence and weaponry to Baghdad despite mountains of proof that all it was doing was making him more vicious and bloodthirsty.

Therefore, I submit that the current administration’s justification for the war drive against Iraq as “standing up to dictators and threats to civilization” is nothing less than an absolute fraud - a cover for the real intent to make sure Iraq stays on a US-made leash, no matter who happens to be running the show from Baghdad. I also submit that the people who have paid the price both for the US’ support of Saddam and the US’ decade-long war against him are the Iraqi people themselves. This next war will mean more of the same for them. And no amount of self-righteous howling about how “Saddam gassed his own people” can ever completely obliterate the fact that the US helped him do it.

2

It’s hardly news that we supported Iraq as a bulwark against Iran, and we certainly like it when humongous oil reserves are in the hands of friendly nations. Is anything in your OP supposed to be new or surprising?

3

Well, I think it’s commonly accepted that you’re right…US foreign policy in regards to Iraq is dominated by a desire to keep oil out of hostile hands. However, if you want to fight a war, it doesn’t sound good to say “Because we want to buy the country’s oil and need someone friendly in there who will sell it to us”. You need some sort of reason that sounds good.

4

Exactly. But is what sounds good the truth? Is this war against Iraq actually justified because Bush & Co. came up with a good soundbite?

I’m not trying to rehash what’s commonly accepted, I’m trying to make a point that this war is an absolute fraud. If the best that the administration can come up with is demonstrably false, then this war drive needs to be opposed, and actively so. Granted, I should have made that explicit in my last post.

5

Correction- it’s a UN war against him and they’re UN imposed sanctions that were put into place due to Iraq violating the terms of the cease fire that they originally agreed to. You wouldn’t be accusing the US of acting unilaterally?

6

Well, not neccesarily. The question of whether or not going to war with Iraq is a good idea or not is independent of whether or not Bush et. al. are telling the truth about our reasons to go to war with Iraq.

That’s to say, it may be in our interest to make sure that Iraqi oil is in friendly hands and accessible to American corporations and consumers, but at the same time, not want to say that’s our primary reason for going to war.

7

Whose interest, though? How is ensuring Iraqi oil flows freely into the hands of US (or other) oil companies actually of benefit to anyone who doesn’t own an oil company?

8

What’s fraudulent about it? I’ll buy “pointless” and “incredibly thick-headed,” but “fraud”? I don’t think so. There’s no inherent contradiction between supporting Iraq’s military efforts 20 years ago and opposing them now. They’re rather different times and circumstances, after all.

As I recall, we pretty much stood behind Israel when they blasted the crap out of Iraq’s nuclear program with that F-16 strike back in the late 80s. And unless you can identify where the U.S. said it was okay for Saddam to drop chemical weapons in Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians, that won’t fly either. Fact is, the equipment used to make chemical weapons is exactly the same sort of equipment used to make any number of perfectly legitimate products. It is illogical in the extreme to blame the U.S. governement for Saddam’s chemical weapons program on the basis that an American company sold legitimate materials to a foreign government that turned out to have illegitimate purposes for them.

Frankly, all I’m seeing out of the OP is a bunch of muddled thinking, typical of today’s anti-everything far left. Oppose the impending war on its merits, not on the basis of perceived inconsistencies in foreign policy.

9

I strongly disagree with this. If the reasons for going to war with Iraq are justifiable beyond a shadow of a doubt, why lie about them then? To me, proving that the justification for war is a lie automatically brings up the question of whether the war is a good idea or not.

10

Less expensive petroleum products benefit consumers of those products. And since demand for petroleum products is comparatively inelastic, oil companies generally prefer it when the price of oil is high, so don’t leap to the conclusion that opening up Saddam’s oil fields is necessarily a great boon to the oil companies.

11

Oil is used for a lot of things, from plastics, to synthetic fabrics, to lubrication, to combustion and power generation. For one really obvious answer that comes directly to mind, ready access to Iraqi oil could help bring down gasoline and heating oil prices.

To see the reverse of this, look at the effect of the OPEC oil embargo on the US economy in the '70s.

12

Well, a few things.

  1. Remember that the policies of one administration do not always carry over to the next. Nixon ended the China boycott that had been in place for several administrations. Carter brought a generally more humanitarian tilt towards the office and put pressure on Pinochet and such to shape up, and ended support for the Shah. So quoting the policies of one Administration (ie, the Reagan and Bush I) is not necessarily indicative of the reasoning of another administration. Of course, since the personnel of the current and the personnel of the past overlap a bit at this time, one could make the case that their reasoning has remained the same.

  2. Your reasoning has a few holes. The reason (according to your cite) that the US opposed Iran was a fear of radical Islam taking control of the oil and harming the US. But it was seen that a secular state like Iraq could be a bulwark. You then posit that during that time, Iraq was firmly in the US camp.
    Why would the US oppose one client from taking over another client if the end result would be the same and the country would still be under the US leash?
    Wouldn’t a Kuwait under Iraq still be in the US sphere?
    And wouldn’t a Saudi Arabia under Iraq be even better since the US could depend on Saddam to crack down heavily on Wahhabi militants and end that threat right there?

Anyway, those are the major holes in your theory. I’m not saying that the current war talk has anything to do with humanitarian issues, as that happens only rarely. And I’m quite sure that oil has been a consideration, but it’s not as much of a concern as you think.

Oil supplies are pretty secure as it is in the oil producing country’s best interest to sell to the US. Only hyper-radicals would cut off the oil supply to the US for ideological reasons, because it causes economic chaos not just in the boycotted country, but in the producing country as well. In fact, if we ended the embargo on Iran right now, they would immediately start selling us oil. Same reason why Venezuela will never use it’s oil supplies as a weapon against the US.

Plus, if another country did make a serious attempt at crippling the economy by withholding oil, the US could easily just go to war with them and take the oil if it needed to.

13

Well, I said going to war may be beneficial, not neccesarily justifiable under international law or convention.

14

The only difference between then and now is who’s a threat to Kuwait. Saddam’s human rights records didn’t matter a whit to Reagan and GHW Bush when Iran was the threat to Kuwaiti oil.

And is the US calling Israel a threat to civilization now? As I recall, Bush called Sharon “a man of peace” just this year. I don’t see any sort of “sea change” in US-Israeli relations.

For the Kurds, it made very little difference whether the US said “It’s okay” or “We don’t care”. They ended up gassed either way. And the US, as the article asserts, increased military aid to Iraq after the massacer at Halabja. That’s either an “It’s okay” response or a “We don’t care”, certainly not a “We find that entirely unacceptable”.

But the sanctions in place today deny Iraq all sorts of necessary equipment under that same “dual use” clause. That includes things like chlorine, which could be used to purify drinking water, and ambulances. Iraq got what it needed when it was defending against the perceived Iranian threat to Kuwait, now it gets nothing because it became the threat to Kuwait. The change in attitude isn’t because of Saddam’s human rights record, it’s because he invaded Kuwait - the one thing the US was trying to prevent.

I presume you mean “oppose the war on its faults”, no? Well, one major fault of this war is that it’s being justified for things the US didn’t care about twenty years ago. US foreign policy in the region is a major component here.

Iraq isn’t even one of our major suppliers of oil - Kuwait is. And Kuwait’s been liberated from the Iraqi ‘yoke’ for more than a decade now. So how come oil prices haven’t dropped to the levels they were back in the late 80s?

15

I guess I failed in my efforts to get you to deal with the war on its own merits instead of pointlessly complaining about alleged inconsistencies with past policies. You may now go back to your regularly scheduled complaint, impervious to all suggestions that maybe things now aren’t exactly the same as they were 20 years ago.

16

What the heck are you talking about. With the sanctions in place Iraq exports just as much as Kuwait. (Scroll down a bit) If the sanctions were taken off, Iraq would shoot to the top of the list, just behind Saudi Arabia and would massively increase supply, and therefore drop the price. Of course, OPEC would just respond by cutting production and stabilize prices, so the net effect would probably be just a small drop in prices. But still less expensive.

Second, oil prices have dropped to the prices they were back in the late '80s in terms of real dollars. In fact, as of 1998, they were lower!

So please, check your facts and try again.

17

Minty Green,
You are right that in principle it is possible that realpolitik justifies supporting Iraq at one point and attacking it at another (though in practice I don’t think realpolitik justifies an invasion now). However the administration’s case isn’t based on realpolitik alone but moral outrage at Saddam’s atrocities. But that is inconsistent with the prior US stance of looking at the other way when those atrocities were actually taking place. You can’t store up moral outrage and use it only when convenient without being open to charges of insincerity.

18

Beneficial for whom? Certainly not the Iraqi people - they’ve already had twenty years of Saddam and the Gulf War and the sanctions. Their lives are shit right now. Beneficial for us because of the possibility of lower oil and gas prices? Lousy justification at best - “go to war so us consumers can afford it more” - and that’s not even considering the fact that oil companies are more or less free to set prices as they see fit.

The article stated quite plainly that GHW Bush carried on the policies of the Reagan administration towards Iraq. Bush laid down the sanctions against Iraq, which Clinton continued, and GW Bush seems to have done nothing to end. (Yes, yes, the UN ratified the sanctions, but it wasn’t their initiative - the US set the whole thing into motion.)

That’s where close examination of those policies comes in. And it certainly looks to me like the policies of both Bush administrations and the Clinton administration towards Iraq have been identical.

You forget one thing - Saddam Hussein is an Arab nationalist. Successfully seizing Kuwait would have enabled him to sooner or later stage a challenge to US influence in the region - obviously not acceptable to the oil companies and the government back here. Remember, the beginning of the article said that Washington found Khomeini’s fundamentalism and Saddam’s nationalism both distasteful, and were content to remain uninvolved as long as it appeared they could keep each other in check. The US only went in when it appeared Iraq was going to lose, and lose big.

Last I checked, the ruling Saudi family were also Wahhabi. And again, an Arab nationalist seizing the two richest sources of US oil imports is not something the US wants to see happen.

OK, so what is the war talk all about? Terrorism? That goes right back to the 1980s. The US helped Saddam rain chemical terror on the Iranians and Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war, and have no place to claim the moral high ground on the issue.

To whom, though? Take a look at the last two graphs in that article you cited. The Persian Gulf is the lowest (by percentage) source of oil imports for the United States, and the US is the smallest net importer of Persian Gulf oil. So yeah, Iraq is one of the five top producers of oil in the Gulf, but the majority of it ain’t going to the US. And that chart shows the price of crude oil - something the average American consumer doesn’t generally use. What about the prices of gasoline and refined oil? If you’re going to justify the war on the possibility of the decline in price of consumer goods, then show charts reflecting the price of consumer goods.

You’re a person of strong character; I’m sure you’ll be able to get past this. Would you mind telling me what the “merits” of this war are in the meantime?

19

Iraq is not the only country W has pursued in the current campaign, if you’ll recall. Iraq has simply been deemed the most current threat, as the Administration believes they are the closest to developing nuclear weapons. I’m sure you remember Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, which, as much as you may have hated it, did not go “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq”. Iran is not currently an important threat to Kuwait, and NK isn’t even a player in the region – and doesn’t even have any oil! In any case, that’s not the “only difference between then and now”. There is a different administration in power, which especially since September 11 has attempted to push a campaign of forceful intervention for the sake of democracy, particularly when non-democratic countries have obtained or are in the process of obtaining WMDs.
**

I don’t see how this relates to our policy on Iraq. Unless of course you’re trying to say that Sharon is a megalomaniacal dictator bent on regional domination who has used chemical weapons in the past and is likely to use them in the future.**/quote]

True. And that was wrong. But I’m not going to sit here and defend Reagan’s idiotic policy, when you have not proven that it has any bearing on today’s policy. Your logic has been “They’re connected by oil, and I know today’s policy is about oil because it’s connected to Reagan’s policy by oil.”

For believers in international law such as yourself, I’m sure you recognize the moral difference between invading a country and not invading a country? I’ll acknowledge that the change in US policy has not been as a result of Saddam’s human rights violations, but the frank truth is that it was unacceptable that Saddam invaded Kuwait, a US ally, and was known to be developing WMDs. That is why there were sanctions. To say it was about oil is foolish, given the amount foreign oil prices have gone up as a result of US refusal to negotiate with Saddam. If the US had quietly dropped the sanctions and not pressed for inspectors in, say, 1992, US oil companies probably could have been doing business in Iraq, increasing their profit margins, and benefitting the oil companies far more, and in a far more stable manner, than sanctions or war.
**

This is some variation on the genetic fallacy. W is not responsible to be consistent in his policy with Reagan.
**

Because Saddam’s oil is not generally available on the world market, as it was in the late 80s. Supply has been limited, so the price goes up. Kuwait is only a larger supplier of oil because we don’t trade with Iraq, which IIRC has the second-largest reserves in the world.

20

You really don’t have any understanding of economics, do you?

It doesn’t matter who Iraq exports the oil to, just it’s presence affects the price of oil. See, oil is priced at the world level and doesn’t vary much from country to country. A barrel of crude costs the roughly the same for the US as it does for Japan (minus shipping and handling).

Now then, as the facts have beat you in terms of oil, let’s go on to gasoline. This article explains that the price of gasoline has been on a consistent slide, except for a few periods of spikes. In fact, the article explicitly states that in 1999, gasoline prices were at the lowest they have been since they have kept track of gas prices. It also says that there has been a recent spike that has led to the highest prices of gasoline since the Gulf War. But remember that gas prices fluctuate. This chart shows that as of 2001, gasoline prices are roughly equivalent to what they were in the 1980s.

Are you satisfied?