Tale of Two Cozy Relationships : Iraq and Pakistan: Why all the U.S. help?

Did America’s sharing of its Persian Gulf intelligence with Iraq-- mere weeks before it invaded Kuwait--help Saddam Hussein know where to hide his forces from the U.N. coalition that eventually would oust him from that tiny kingdom?

That is one more uncomfortable question for Congress to add to the list as it prepares to decipher the curious signals Washington was sending Baghdad before it invaded in August, 1990.

The Iraq episode is one of two that Congress should use as case studies of how government makes policy mistakes. The other, involving Pakistan, is still going on, according to recent Times reports by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, who also detailed the dealings with Iraq.

Congress should find out why the Administration has ignored a 1985 policy against shipping arms to Pakistan. Congress imposed the ban to help pressure Pakistan to give up its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

The new question on Iraq arose as the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee prepared for hearings after the recent Times articles on relations between Hussein and the Reagan and Bush administrations in the 1980s and early 1990s. Frantz and Waas reported that time and again George Bush--first as Reagan’s point man, then as President--brushed aside objections that relations with Baghdad were getting too cozy.

Some Administration advisers thought the relations went beyond what was necessary simply to give Hussein a leg up in his war with Iran, where anti-Western Muslims were a threat to disrupt oil supplies. But intelligence-sharing when Hussein was already talking tough about settling his grievances with Kuwait might have led him to think Washington would let him get away with aggression.

The executive branch did not stop sharing intelligence with Baghdad in 1988, as Congress was led to believe. A State Department memorandum says it continued until at least May of 1990, not long before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Even though Iraq’s war with Iran ended in 1988, the memorandum said, Iraq still found American intelligence helpful in monitoring Iran. Sharing the information also kept open American channels to important Iraqis.

But a case can be made that this policy, added to generous U.S. commodity loans that allowed Hussein to use his cash for arms instead of food, and for purchases of American technology, helped encourage his aggression.

The Administration justified the Pakistan shipments by saying the weapons came from commercial companies, not the Pentagon. But there was nothing capricious about the concerns of a formal policy of trying to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. That makes it all the more important to learn why those concerns were ignored.