Why a War With Iraq Is Inevitable

With war looming in Iraq, who is the only senior Bush official to have actually ever laid eyes on Saddam Hussein?

The answer--and the circumstances of the meeting--help explain why our two countries are destined for war, as they certainly are. You can hear it in the rhetoric of the countries’ leaders.

“To assume this regime’s good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble,” President Bush said before the United Nations General Assembly last week.

“The U.S. ... since its foundation was based on killing, usurping others’ rights,” Hussein said in a July meeting of the Iraqi Cabinet.

For all the wistful pleading for a resumption of inspections and diplomacy to avert war, the die has already been cast. There is nothing that the U.N. can do because there is nothing that Iraq will do that is acceptable to the U.S. The two nations don’t just see things differently: It’s as if they aren’t seeing the same things at all.

Which brings us to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In 1983, obsessed with the hostages being held in Lebanon and with the fundamentalist government in Iran, President Reagan appointed Rumsfeld as a special envoy to the Middle East. U.S. intelligence believed Iran was behind the kidnappings (as well as the deaths of 241 Marines in Beirut when their barracks was blown up), and as part of his mission, Rumsfeld went to Baghdad to open high-level contact and seek Iraq’s help in getting intelligence about Iran.

The carrot offered by the U.S.--which did not want Iran to win its war with Iraq--was a promise to begin efforts aimed at reducing the covert supplying of weapons and spare parts to Iran by Israel and others. The overt reward would be a reopening of diplomatic relations, which were severed by Iraq after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Rumsfeld took two trips to Iraq, and on the first one, in December 1983, had a rare visit with the Iraqi president. According to declassified State Department cables obtained by the National Security Archive in Washington, Rumsfeld and Hussein talked about a number of things. But, most intriguing to Iraq, Rumsfeld raised what all thought was a dead idea: building a secure, $1 billion oil pipeline from Iraq through Jordan to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Rumsfeld had every reason to think his trip had been successful. On Jan. 10, 1984, the U.S. interests section in Baghdad sent a cable to Rumsfeld and Washington saying that the Revolutionary Command Council had approved the pipeline project. “Tarik Aziz had gone out of his way to praise Rumsfeld as a person, noting that he was a good listener and had presented the U.S. position in a convincing manner,” the cable reported. A follow-up cable Jan. 31 said that “the Iraqis will want U.S. firms heavily involved in the project,” adding that the Iraqis were “directly in touch with a major U.S. construction company.” (Later that year, the U.S. Export-Import Bank approved a $425-million loan guarantee to Iraq for building the pipeline, and in November, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was reopened.)

But it was soon apparent that the U.S. and Iraq saw the world through very different eyes. Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq not because the U.S. had suddenly decided that its regime was above reproach. In fact, just before his second trip, the State Department had accused Iraq of using proscribed chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war.

In Washington’s view, Rumsfeld sat down with Hussein because it had been decided that the U.S. and Iraq had common interests--however limited. Although Baghdad had invaded Iran on Sept. 22, 1980, an Iranian victory was unacceptable to Washington. This meant the U.S. was willing to engage in covert efforts to get third countries to supply Iraq with weapons. In the year after Rumsfeld’s visit, the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence on Iran. That operation soon blossomed into a larger military exchange, one that continued until 1988 under a succession of code names: “Elephant Grass,” “Druid Leader” and “Surf Fisher.”

If there’s one thing that defines Iraqis--and has proved their downfall in war crimes investigations--it is their compulsive record-keeping. They prepare transcripts of all important meetings, and they obsessively read and reread the transcripts looking for clues to the subtext of foreign interests.

According to State Department cables, the Iraqis, in poring over their transcripts of Rumsfeld’s meetings during his two trips to Iraq, noted one thing above all others: his silence on the issue of chemical weapons, even though his second trip came soon after the U.S. had accused Iraq of using them in the war. In considering the meetings, the Iraqis also noted that while Rumsfeld named Iran, Syria and Libya as supporters of terrorism, he did not name Iraq. These things seemed highly significant to the Iraqis.

They further misread the U.S. position in 1988, when the Iraqis used massive amounts of chemical weapons in March in Halabja, against the Kurds, and then in April on the Fao peninsula, against the Iranian army. Though there was a ferocious internal discussion in the Pentagon about whether the U.S. should continue to provide assistance to a country that used such weapons, the cooperation continued to the end of the war, something the Iraqis read as tacit approval.

The U.S. never considered Iraq more than a partner of convenience--and then only for the limited purpose of tamping down Iran’s power. But from the Iraqi perspective, the Americans’ ongoing provision of intelligence information and willingness to work on a Jordan pipeline deal symbolized true U.S. interest in Iraq--even if that interest, as Iraqis believed, was largely financial.

Is it any wonder that Iraq, which had participated in the web of covert relations with the U.S., also misunderstood the U.S. in 1990 when the invasion of Kuwait was imminent?

And it continues not to understand. At an Iraqi Cabinet meeting on Jan. 28, according to transcripts released by the U.S. government, Hussein complained: “They are bombing Baghdad, Basra and ... then they say that their pilots are acting in self-defense because the Iraqi antiaircraft artillery threatens them? So is the case for the Zionist entity. It is occupying Palestine. [Yet ] when Palestinians defend their home, family, land and the holy sites ... [the Americans] consider this a terrorist act.”

For the Iraqis, everything is equivalence. They firmly believe that Iraq is no different in its actions than the U.S. For the last 20 years, they have repeated the same litany of U.S. “abuses,” from Hiroshima to Panama to Israel. In a meeting with Ministry of Military Industrialization officials just after Sept. 11 last year, Hussein suggested that the U.S. deserved the attacks: “Regardless of the controversial human feelings, America harvests the thorns that its rulers planted in the world,” he said. The U.S. “never left any place in the world without a symbolic memorial for its criminal acts,” he added. “No one crossed the Atlantic Ocean carrying a weapon against them over history, but it was America itself that crossed the Atlantic Ocean carrying death, destruction and offensive exploitation to the whole world.” In another Cabinet meeting earlier this year, he complained about U.S. “greed” and “moral weakness” and pronounced the U.S. a tool of “the Zionist entity.”

Given what seems to be its leaders’ actual--if highly distorted--perception of the U.S., Iraq’s intransigence is not surprising. Nor is Rumsfeld’s disgust that the alliance of convenience he formed in 1983 has come to such an ugly end.

“I have met with Tarik Aziz a number of times, both in Baghdad and Washington and elsewhere,” Rumsfeld said of Iraq’s deputy prime minister earlier this month, dismissing Iraq’s current diplomatic flurry to stave off war. “Clearly, he does the bidding of his master, Saddam Hussein. They have, over a good many years, demonstrated a wonderful talent and skill at manipulating the media and international organizations in other countries.”

And so we move, inevitably, to war. “By breaking every pledge--by his deceptions, and by his cruelties--Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself,” Bush said at the U.N.

The fact is that Hussein has made a damning case against himself. But the history of the U.S.-Iraq story is deeply complicated, and veterans like Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell should have a clearer strategy based upon their experience.

They have abandoned without explanation President Clinton’s strategy of “containment until regime change.” Instead, they have insisted that Hussein might well use weapons of mass destruction to confront the U.S. and that this necessitates a war in which the stated objective is “regime change.” This goal more or less guarantees that Baghdad will employ chemical or biological weapons, if it has them, in pursuit of its national survival.

From Hussein’s point of view, one way or another, it’s beginning to look like he’ll end up a martyr to American lawlessness and morally weak intimidation. Why not go out with a bang?