U.S. Helped Build Iraqi War Machine

Secret U.S. assistance during the final stages of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War played a critical role in the emergence of Iraq as the only major military power in the Persian Gulf and of its leader, Saddam Hussein, as the region’s strongman.

Despite its official policy of neutrality during the war, the Reagan Administration advised Baghdad for more than a year on how to reorganize its elite military units and on strategy to retake the oil-rich Faw Peninsula, according to senior U.S. officials.

The fight over the peninsula turned out to be the turning point of the war.

The U.S. assistance, which was supplemented by aid from Egypt, Jordan and France, included building a replica of the Faw Peninsula for dry runs by the newly reorganized Iraqi army. Iran had taken the swampy but strategic southern oil region in 1986.

The U.S. scheme worked. On April 18, 1988, Iraq recaptured Faw in a lightning attack that lasted less than 36 hours. During a stunning military sweep against Iran, Baghdad then reversed the tide of the war and took more land than at any time since the opening stages of its invasion in 1980. Within three months, Tehran was forced to accept a U.N. cease-fire.

Ironically, the main problem faced by the team of U.S. and other foreign advisers was “convincing” the Iraqis that the plan would work, according to a key source who was involved in masterminding and directing the Iraqis.

Without the U.S. assistance, Baghdad could have faced “months, maybe even years” of continued stagnation in the gulf war, U.S. officials involved in the operation conceded.

Prolonged conflict would have further drained Iraq’s military and, perhapsmore critically, its already deeply indebted economy. By the end of the war, Hussein’s regime had spent its vastprewar foreign exchange reserve surplus and piled up debt estimated at $100 billion, mainly to gulf allies and European countries.

Instead, during the crucial final three months of Iraqi assaults, Baghdad also captured at least 40% of Iran’s most sophisticated arms, including tanks and major artillery pieces, according to Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst and author of two books on the gulf war.

As a result, for the first time in this century, Iran could no longer serve as a counterbalance to Iraq in the Persian Gulf, where the two nations have traditionally been the dominant military and political powers. From the moment the U.N. cease-fire went into effect in August, 1988, Iraq effectively had free rein over the gulf; no regional power was capable of challenging Baghdad.

In earlier stages of the gulf war, the United States provided limited satellite intelligence to Iraq on Iranian troop positions and movements.

But ironically, the Reagan Administration’s major assistance to Iraq was a byproduct of the 1985-86 Iranian arms-for-hostage debacle and its decision to provide sensitive military intelligence to Iran about Iraqi positions and troop strengths.

In late 1986, the critical data was passed to the “second channel”--a nephew of Hashemi Rafsanjani, then Speaker of Parliament and today the Iranian president--in an effort to demonstrate U.S. good faith. Intelligence provided in earlier phases of the secret negotiations had been of marginal importance or use.

Tehran used the intelligence in a series of offensives in early 1987 to close in on Basra, Iraq’s vital port and second-largest city. The siege of Basra led Western analysts to predict for the first time that Iran might actually win the bloody conflict.

With a breakdown in the U.S.-Iran negotiations, the Reagan Administration suddenly had to face the possibility that its nemesis might win--at least in part because of U.S. involvement. In an attempt to undo the damage, the United States began to aid Baghdad.