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Memo To: Chairman Jesse Helms,
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, From: Jude Wanniski, Re: Where did
Saddam Hussein come from?, polyconomics.com, February 18, 1998
Thanks for your nice note of
February 2, in response to my last memo. I know I’m giving you a lot to
mull over, Senator, but there is a lot at stake. We are already spending
dollars into the billions as we prepare for another carpet bombing of
Iraq. Unless you get behind Jack Kemp’s initiative, which is the only way
I can visualize a peaceful and reasonable way out of the swamp we are in,
we will start measuring the cost in bodies, foreign and domestic. In the
Gulf War, we lost 148 lives, a significant percentage by "friendly fire,"
but it still counts that as many as 300,000 Iraqi lives were lost before
we decided to end the slaughter. It also counts that another 1.4 million
Iraqi civilians died since the war ended as a result of the destruction of
water and sanitary facilities, which could not be repaired because we will
not permit Iraq to sell goods or buy what is needed for their repair.
Remember that even before Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, we were
keeping such a tight hold on what he could buy that he complained to April
Glaspie, our ambassador, that they are only permitted to buy wheat, and
pretty soon you will argue that gunpowder can be made out of wheat. We do
tend to bury the past, especially when it becomes inconvenient to our
present and future intentions. Here is a thumbnail account, my own
analysis, of how we have arrived at this pretty pass. Please bear with me,
Jesse.
First of all, Saddam came to full
power as president of Iraq in 1979, a very important year, as I will
explain, in that it was also the year of the Iranian revolution. He had
been vice president since 1974, when he was 37, and essentially ran the
government under a titular leader. The biggest influence on his life was
that of his stepfather, a man who despised Persians and Jews, who became
mayor of Baghdad, and who inspired Saddam to became an Arab nationalist in
the new Ba’ath (or Renaissance) Party. The Ba’ath Party grew out of the
Great Depression, the way the New Deal surfaced in the Democratic party
here. Its three component parts were (Arab) unity, liberation (from
colonialism) and (economic) socialism. Saddam’s various biographers more
or less agree that his central core has been the acquisition of personal
power and the retention of personal power. He has no moral or spiritual
compass, no particular ideology. There is actually no evidence that he
despises Persians or Jews as a class, but assesses them at different times
according to whether they will add or detract from his secure political
position. His biographers agree he is not megalomaniacal or irrational,
but is certainly cold-blooded when it comes to dealing with any direct
threat to his station.
When he came to power in this
pre-Reagan era, capitalism was not held in high regard throughout the
world. It is not surprising that Saddam attempted to manage the Iraqi
economy with socialist schemes mixed in with capitalist markets. He began
his leadership of Iraq in the Jimmy Carter years, which saw the price of
gold rise from $140 to as high as $850, settling to $625 in 1980 going
through election day. These were marvelous days for the oil-producing
states of the Middle East, particularly Iran and Iraq, as the price of oil
rose to as high as $35 a barrel, more than ten times the price before
President Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971. There were great
differences, though, in the way Iran and Iraq managed this new wealth.
In Teheran, the Shah assumed the
dramatic rise in the oil price was due to energy shortages that would
continue indefinitely. He decided to spend not only the cash coming in,
but also borrowed heavily against future receipts, with a dream of
building a modern Iran as his legacy. He did not anticipate the fact that
the general price level would soon be catching up with gold and oil, and
that the Iranian business community would have to catch up with wages and
prices too. When the inflation rate soared as he pumped up the economy on
top of the monetary inflation, the Shah decided to crack down on
profiteers who violated his decrees of price controls. His ignorance of
macroeconomics was not unusual at the time, and he never did make the
connection of why ordinary people began to demonstrate against him in
early 1978. The inflation was not only wrecking the creditor class and
strangling the business community, it also was causing a breakdown in
morality, as the linkages broke between effort and reward. Opposition to
the Shah developed though an amalgam of business and religious leaders.
The religious leader who came to
power when the Shah was finally kicked out was the Ayatollah Khomeini, who
had spent a good part of the 1970s watching the economic expansion and
moral degradation of his country from exile, in Baghdad. As in Iran, these
were exciting years for the Iraqi economy, but instead of building an
expensive memorial to himself, Saddam Hussein directed the cascade of oil
wealth into the improvement of the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens. Our
ambassador to Iraq in these years, Edward Peck, tells me there is no
question that as much as ordinary people in Iran came to hate the Shah,
the ordinary people of Iraq came to love Saddam. The wealth went into free
education, K through university, modern hospitals, water and sewer
facilities, and the greatest expansion of living standards in the history
of modern Iraq. His biographers agree he was conscious of the need to
share the benefits of the oil wealth as widely as possible in order to
keep the support of the masses. There had been anti-Israel episodes in the
earlier period, but in this period under Saddam, Israel saw a man who
clearly had no wish to disturb a nation that could cause him trouble. He
recognized the state of Israel and generally showed respect for its
ability to cause him trouble.
Trouble commenced when the Shah of
Iran began to see his regime crumble, and understood the source of his
trouble was sitting in Baghdad. Saddam bowed to the pressure from Teheran
and invited the Ayatollah to take up residence in Kuwait. When Kuwait
turned him down, Saddam assisted him in finding exile quarters in Paris,
but the Ayatollah was not a happy camper. Remember, Iraq is dominated by
Shi’ite Muslims, who account for 60% of the population, Sunni Muslims
counting for 20%. The Ayatollah is also Shi’ite, as are the great majority
of Iranians. When the Ayatollah replaced the Shah, Saddam Hussein
immediately began courting his own Sh’ia population, donning their
traditional religious garb at ceremonies up and down Iraq, and spending
lavishly from state coffers on construction of places of worship. There
was plenty of money. Oil revenues were up forty times their level of the
1960s.
As the Ayatollah began to call for
an uprising of Sh’ia fundamentalists all over the Middle East, including
his old neighbors in Iraq, Saddam also spent lavishly on a military
buildup. The United States, Israel, and the NATO powers were happy to sell
him anything it wanted. When we hear the President remind us that Saddam
invaded Iran, we should remember that he did so "out of fear, not out of
greed," which is how one of his biographers puts it. The historians also
agree that he believed the war would be a quick one, because he was not
interested in gobbling up Iran, a country with three times the population
and land mass of Iraq. His military machine quickly knocked down the
Iranian army in the western province, and instead of advancing toward
Teheran, Saddam stopped when he had incorporated only the segment of the
population that was pro-Iraq, anti-Ayatollah. He later saw the mistake in
not increasing his hold until his forces had run out of steam. The Iranian
forces turned out to be stronger than he had been led to believe by
Israeli intelligence. They struck back, and the war dragged on for eight
years. Each side suffered several hundred thousand dead, with most reports
indicating Iran losing more. The total cost of the war was easily $1
trillion. The war ended when Iraq began to win back territory it had lost
to the Iranian forces and the Iranians finally accepted a UN resolution of
truce.
In that period, his biographers
agree that Iraq used poison gas several times that we can be sure of. From
my readings, I’ve gotten the impression that except in one instance, they
were used as a last resort, when his forces were about to be overwhelmed
by Iranian forces. In those cases where he used poison gas against his own
people, the most egregious example was in 1988, when the city of Halabja
was gas bombed in the Kurdish area. The UN estimates that 5,000 Iraqis
were killed and 10,000 wounded, the bombing occurring after the city had
surrendered to the Iranians. There were other Iraqi villages gassed in the
Kurdish region, but my impression is that they were given warnings of
several weeks to evacuate as Baghdad was relocating some significant
portion of the Iraqi Kurds for reasons not clear to me. Even those
historians clearly hostile to Saddam will point out that the western
powers kept him supplied with the materials needed for chemical weapons
right up to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, including material cleared by
the U.K.
Part II of this thumbnail history
will continue tomorrow, Senator. We’ll begin with an April 1990 meeting in
Baghdad between Saddam and five United States Senators.
In our first part of this thumbnail
history, Senator, I took us through the Iran-Iraq war. One of the
important pieces I omitted, but should bring to your attention in this
second part, is the matter of Iraq’s nuclear power plant, which Israel
blew up in 1981. What reminded me of my omission was The Wall Street
Journal’s lead editorial yesterday, "Waiting for a Pirate." I commented on
this in a client letter I sent out yesterday, the 18th:
Wall Street Journal: The Journal
this morning finally decided to join the bombers, in an editorial,
"Waiting for a Pirate," that dispenses with any serious intellectual
analysis and says it has come down to this: "Who’s in charge here, Iraq or
the United States?" One might ask "Who’s in charge of the editorial page?"
The Journal’s editor, Robert L. Bartley, obviously gave some junior member
of the staff responsibility for beating the war drums. The author fondly
remembers: "In 1981 Israel bombed and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor
under construction, no doubt delaying Saddam’s expansionist instincts. Oh
yes, critics of the moment said the Begin government had ruined Iraq’s
‘drift toward the West.’" What really happened was that Iraq, a signator
to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, had built a power plant at the
urging of western governments, including the United States, which said the
world was running out of oil. At a cost of several billion dollars, mostly
spent on western engineering and material, the plant was supervised by the
International Arms Control Agency, which signed off on the plant and would
monitor it into the future to make sure it wasn’t producing bomb stuff.
Israel’s spymasters, the Mossad, decided it was too much of a threat
anyway and blew it up. The UN General Assembly condemned the action, but
the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning Israel.
Saddam immediately began secret work on nuclear weapons. Boys will be
boys.
You may dispute me, Jesse, but you
have far greater resources than I to get precise information. At the time
of the Israeli action in 1981, I supported it when told it was justified
by our government. As more information has emerged, I don’t think there
was justification. I wish you would get a serious report from your staff
on the circumstances of the 1981 terrorist act of Mossad. (I hope you
agree that blowing up someone else’s power plant is at the least a
criminal political act.) I said in yesterday’s report that at the end of
the Iran-Iraq war in 1987, Saddam was in serious financial distress. The
cost of the war was enormous, and nobody doubts that Iraq was doing its
best to neutralize the forces of Islamic fundamentalism threatening the
Middle East, and Israel. The figures vary, but he seemed to owe at least
$50 billion in hard currency and had run up debts in Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia, which were happy to have poor Iraqis die on the battlefield to
save the monarchs of the Middle East. Alas, the price of oil was slumping
and of no help to him. The living standards that had climbed in the good
years had fallen back with the war-time austerity programs. Saddam was in
a survival mode, not an expansionist mode. Every $1 to the price of oil
was worth $1 billion to him, and he observed his fellow OPEC members
selling more oil than they had agreed upon, driving down the price to his
oil, in order to keep the sheiks and playboys of the "moderate" states in
the style to which they had become accustomed. He was demanding OPEC agree
to a higher oil price so he could pay his post-war bills, which would mean
Kuwait would have to produce less.
Remember that the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait was on August 2, 1990. "On 12 April 1990 Saddam met with five US
senators: Robert Dole, Alan Simpson, Howard Metzenbaum, James McClure and
Frank Murkowski; the US ambassador [April Glaspie], soon to be famous for
her ‘green light’ to Saddam, was also present. No-one reading the various
transcripts of this meeting can doubt the general placatory tone. The US
senators even criticized the American press in their attempts to
propitiate Saddam, emphasizing that there was a difference between the
attitudes of the US government and those of the journalists."
This account appears in the 1996
edition of "Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam," published in London by the St
Martin’s press. You and your staff should read it, not for further
evidence of Saddam’s readiness to use force himself, but for the evidence
of gross stupidity by our government at various moments in this unfolding
history. In the account cited, author Geoff Simons, a respected British
journalist, noted that during the meeting Howard Metzenbaum, the only
Democrat, spoke up (‘I am a Jew and a staunch supporter of Israel’) who
"then decided to pay Saddam a compliment: "‘...I have been sitting here
and listening to you for about an hour, and I am now aware that you are a
strong intelligent man and that you want peace... If... you were to focus
on the value of peace that we greatly need to achieve peace in the Middle
East then there would not be a leader to compare with you in the Middle
East.’"
In the period between this meeting
and the Kuwait invasion, the record indicates that the Bush administration
bent over backwards to indicate that it was thrilled to pieces with
Saddam, especially as he was using his oil money to buy what we permitted
him to buy to reduce our trade deficit. On May 1, Secretary of State James
Baker III was asked by a Senate committee if Iraq should be put back on
the list of terrorist states, having been removed the year before. Baker
said "It is a bit premature of me to sit here and make that determination.
[If we cut Iraq from our credits] in all probability our allies will be
very quick to move in there and pick up our market share." The record is
clear that the Bush administration argued against the imposition of
sanctions, as the Simons book notes, and "it emerged that the US Attorney
General Richard Thornburgh had blocked the Atlanta investigation into
Saddam’s laundering of $3 billion through the Atlanta branch of Italy’s
Lavoro Bank for the acquisition of American weapons, including components
for nuclear devices."
At this point, Saddam Hussein had
his back to the financial wall, he thought of how much treasure he had
expended on a war with Iran that left both sides exactly where they were
eight years earlier, and observed that Kuwait, run by a spoiled little
emir with several hundred wives, was pumping more oil than he was supposed
to be pumping from the fields along the Iraq border. It was even shown
that the western companies were slanting their drilling into Iraq, under
the border, to steal Iraqi oil. The fact that Kuwait was part of Iraq
until the British after WWI decided to simply give it to the playboy
princelings of that Iraqi province was also weighing on his mind. His
people had lost several hundred thousand of their children in a war fought
for the west and the monarchs. Now they were cheating him on his oil
receipts. He began to argue that the monarchs had declared economic war on
Iraq.
On 24 July 1990 two Iraqi armored
divisions moved from their bases to take up positions on the Kuwaiti
border. Later the same day the US State Department spokeswoman, Margaret
Tutwiler, asked whether the US had any military plans to defend Kuwait,
replied: ‘We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are
no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.’ The next day Saddam
Hussein summoned US Ambassador April Glaspie to his office in what was to
be the last official contact between Baghdad and the United States before
the invasion of Kuwait. Even at this late stage, with an obviously
deteriorating situation in the Gulf, Glaspie still made efforts to placate
Saddam Hussein. She emphasized that President Bush had rejected the idea
of trade sanctions against Iraq, to which Saddam replied: ‘There is
nothing left for us to buy from America except wheat. Every time we want
to buy something, they say it is forbidden. I am afraid that one day you
will say, "you are going to make gunpowder out of wheat".’ Glaspie was
quick to reassure the Iraqi leader : ‘I have a direct instruction from the
President to seek better relations with Iraq.’ And she emphasized that a
formal apology had been offered to Iraq for a critical article that had
been published by the American Information Agency: ‘I saw the Diane Sawyer
program on ABC...what happened in that program was cheap and unjust...this
is a real picture of what happens in the American media -- even to
American politicians themselves. These are the methods that the Western
media employ. I am pleased that you add your voice to the diplomats that
stand up to the media....’ Later Glaspie added that "President Bush is an
intelligent man. He is not going to declare an economic war against
Iraq...’; and then the ambassador produced the much-quoted comment that
was perhaps the biggest ‘green light’ of all: "I admire your extraordinary
efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand
that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild
your country. But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your
border disagreement with Kuwait."
On July 31, two days before the
invasion, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly testified before
Chairman Lee Hamilton of House Foreign Affairs. Asked repeatedly if we
would come to the defense of Kuwait if it were attacked, he insisted there
was no obligation on our part to do so. Meanwhile, Iraq prepared for a
meeting the following day with Kuwait to negotiate a deal on the oil
issues. The talks ended badly, with the Kuwaiti emir refusing to attend
and Saddam refusing to attend because the emir would be absent. The Iraqi
demand for $10 billion was clearly made under the threat of force and
constituted blackmail, but Iraq’s arguments were that the payment was
justified for services rendered in the Iran/Iraq war. It was at this point
that Saddam decided to go into Kuwait.
At the time, I was not happy with
the idea of the United States intervening to counter the invasion. This is
because I observed that Kuwait’s neighbors did not seem concerned, even
when Iraq did not stop at the Rumailah oil fields, which Iraq had claimed
as its own since 1922, but went on to Kuwait City. It was in 1922 that a
British diplomat, Percy Cox, drew a line on a map dividing up the Ottoman
Empire as part of the fallout of WWI. There had as yet been no oil
produced in the swatch of desert he gave to the new emirate of Kuwait, but
Kuwait got the swatch apparently because it offered better oil concessions
to the British oil companies. In 1980, a decade before the invasion, Iraq
staged a major propaganda campaign reasserting its rights over the
Rumailah fields. In that last-ditch meeting prior to the August 2
invasion, the Kuwait representative was not permitted to offer Iraq more
than $1 billion to settle the dispute.
I did alter my position, Senator,
when our former UN Ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and I, attended a
briefing at the Saudi Embassy in Washington by its ambassador, Prince
Bandar. He told us that his government was not worried about the invasion
at first, and that it in fact had good relations with Baghdad. King Fahd
changed his mind when shown photos by U.S. Naval Intelligence that the
Iraqi army had bypassed Kuwait City and had taken up positions on the
Saudi border. President Bush had persuaded the King in several phone calls
that Iraq might very well be bent on swallowing up Saudi Arabia. If Saudi
Arabia was persuaded, I was more open to the idea that it was U.S.
responsibility to counter Saddam with force. When Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak
dropped his opposition to intervention and said his country would join the
coalition, I became a solid supporter of the U.S. intervention. I have to
say I was still suspicious, wondering how Saddam could possibly have
thought he could get away with an invasion of Saudi Arabia or even a
determination to swallow all of Kuwait instead of the Rumailah oil fields.
If he could not defeat Iran in an eight-year war, how could he expect to
engage the allied powers in a grab for Middle East oil?
In the years since, I’ve concluded
that Saddam had no intention of invading Saudi Arabia. I later learned, as
did you, of the "green light" that April Glaspie gave Saddam in their July
24 meeting. I also learned that Ms. Glaspie was subsequently "surprised"
when the Iraqi army did not stop at the oil fields, but went on to Kuwait
City. Of course, if you consider that Kuwait is only 13% the size of your
home state of North Carolina, and Iraq is 10,000 square miles larger than
California, you will see that it did not take much for tanks to overshoot
Kuwait City and appear to be menacing Saudi Arabia. In his invasion of
Iran, remember that Saddam did stop when he got what he wanted, and was
later criticized for not pushing as far as he could so that he would have
a better bargaining position.
Indeed, there is in the historical
record evidence that on August 3, the day after his forces waltzed into
Kuwait City virtually unopposed by the emir’s handful of soldiers, Saddam
announced that he would be prepared to leave Kuwait as soon as it was
determined the security of Iraq or Kuwait was not threatened. This was two
days before President Bush announced Iraqi aggression "will not stand." In
the Simons book, the case is made that Baghdad repeatedly offered to
negotiate its departure from Kuwait prior to the hostilities of Desert
Storm. Perhaps these accounts are in error, but Simons is a respected
journalist and the book is endorsed by British MP Tony Benn, who was the
most active British politician in that period in trying to negotiate a
peace before the U.S. bombing campaign began. It is Simons’ argument that
George Bush put together the coalition against Iraq by fabricating a
crisis that did not exist, by pressuring King Fahd into a request for
military assistance ("all but demanding a Saudi request for American
protection") and then asking Morocco and Egypt to back up the Saudi
request. At first Egypt resisted, but then:
In 1990 Egypt had massive debts,
the largest in the whole of Africa and the Middle East. Almost $50 billion
was owed to the World Bank, and Secretary of State James Baker... proposed
a bribe (or ‘forgiveness’) of some $14 billion. At the same time
Washington pressured other governments, including Canada and Saudi Arabia,
to ‘forgive’ or delay much of the rest of the Egyptian debt. And where the
tactic of bribery worked well with President Mubarak, it could be
exploited to equal advantage with other national leaders.
Indeed, the consensus was built
with money and arms. Turkey, Syria, even Iran joined the coalition with
sudden fountains of credit produced by the World Bank. It does appear in
my readings that there came a point where there had to be a war to justify
all that had been done. In the last weeks before the bombing of Iraq began
on January 16, it is clear with hindsight that there was no interest in
talking to Baghdad because Iraq had to be taught a lesson. Several hundred
thousand Iraqis died as a result of the bombing. The reason we lost only
148 men was that Iraq was attempting a retreat throughout the 100 hours of
battle. If it had put up any resistance, they would have been completely
slaughtered. As it was, Colin Powell called off the "turkey shoot" after
it had accomplished partial slaughter.
Now I am not trying to argue here,
Senator, that what Saddam Hussein did was right and what we did was wrong.
I’m saying this thumbnail history of Saddam Hussein’s intersection with
our national interest demonstrates a different picture than we now are
presenting to the American people. If you want to go ahead with another
massive bombing campaign "to teach the Iraqi people another lesson on who
is boss," perhaps that too will be justified by history. I’m only trying
to make sure you have all the information you need before you throw in
with the President, our commander-in-chief.
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