History "A Man You Could Do Business With"

By TED GUP

Even at the edge of the abyss, U.S. policy toward Iraq ran headlong into contradiction with itself. On July 25, 1990, as Iraqi tanks and troops were massing along the border of Kuwait, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad that the U.S. had little to say about Arab border disputes and was eager to improve relations with Iraq. That same day in Washington, anxious State Department officials urged the Pentagon to dispatch the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Independence and its battle group, then in the Indian Ocean, to the mouth of the Persian Gulf -- as a signal to Saddam that the U.S. would not sit idly by if Iraq crossed into Kuwait.

Days passed. The Joint Chiefs of Staff resisted sending the Independence, arguing that such a force, obviously no more than a token, would be no match for Saddam's giant war machine. Just before the invasion, with the Iraqi army now poised for assault, the White House overruled the Pentagon's concerns and ordered the warships toward the gulf. The decision probably came too late to impress Saddam.

The episode was typical of a U.S. policy toward Iraq that was marked by mixed signals, interagency disputes, intelligence failures, errors of judgment and flights of wishful thinking. Behind the specific failures lurked -- and still lurks -- a general policy dilemma the U.S. has yet to resolve: Must America dance with the devil to promote its strategic interests? When is the enemy of your enemy your friend?

While it took months for Desert Shield to be transformed into Desert Storm, U.S. policymakers were scrambling for cover within days of the invasion, trying to defend their actions from the harsh judgments of hindsight. The great "Who lost Kuwait?" debate was on. Revisionism was rampant. But what was clear was that the roots of a failed policy went back more than a decade. The American embrace of Saddam Hussein began on Nov. 4, 1979, when the Islamic revolutionaries who had overthrown the Shah of Iran seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage. That cataclysmic event -- and the growing fear that Islamic fundamentalism would spread throughout the region -- became the driving force behind U.S. policy not only toward Iran but Iraq as well. Three U.S. administrations and both political parties shared responsibility for this view.

1 "A Counterbalance To the Iranians"

Says Graham Fuller, a Middle East specialist with the CIA during the 1980s: "There was a genuine visceral fear of Islam in Washington as a force that was utterly alien to American thinking, and that really scared us. Senior people at the Pentagon and elsewhere were much more concerned about Islam than communism. It was an almost obsessive fear, leading to a mentality on our part that you should use any stick to beat a dog -- to stop the advance of Islamic fundamentalism." That stick was to be Iraq.

Washington had few illusions about Saddam. Says Harold Brown, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Defense: "The intelligence reports all said he was a thug and an assassin." Says Gary Sick, then a Middle East expert on the staff of the National Security Council: "I don't recall reading anything other than that this was a man who was ruthless and dangerous, but who nonetheless, as with the Shah, was a man you could do business with." But if there were grave ( misgivings about Saddam, there was also an early appreciation for the strategic role he could play in the gulf. According to Sick, then National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski "talked quite openly, saying that Iraq provided a counterbalance to the Iranians, and we should cultivate that."

It was not the first time the U.S. had relied on a repugnant regime to advance its interests in the gulf. For years the U.S. had supported the Shah of Iran, whose security apparatus used torture and terror but whose country was seen as a bulwark against Soviet "expansionism" from the north.

By 1979 Iraq was already a formidable military power. Brown recalls that when the Pentagon prepared classified contingency studies matching U.S. forces against a potential Persian Gulf adversary, the standard of measurement and the imagined enemy was always Iraq. To Brown's consternation, Defense Department analysts actually used "Iraq" in their reports. Brown repeatedly asked the Pentagon to delete the country's name for fear the studies might be leaked and America would be seen as preparing for war with Baghdad -- a nondesirable and less than credible scenario at the time.

Howard Teicher, a policy analyst in Brown's office, conducted a six-month study of Iraq for the Defense Department in 1979. "Nobody at a policy level had a good understanding of what was then the nature of the regime and what were its long-term goals," says Teicher. He produced a secret 50-page report that warned nine months before war broke out that Iraq would attack Iran in a bid to become the world's arbiter of oil supplies and pricing.

Teicher's study ended up on Brown's desk. The Secretary rejected the analysis, says Teicher, and insisted that the Iraqi leadership had somewhat moderated its behavior. "They are not the nasty guys you claim they are," was the gist of Brown's comments, Teicher recalls. As personally brutal as Saddam undoubtedly was, Brown says, Iraq had until then not been outwardly aggressive toward its neighbors. Its economic and educational development, as well as its secular approach to nation building, made it more familiar and less threatening to the West than was Iran.

Others were less certain. Robert Hunter was on the staff of the National Security Council under Carter. While recognizing the need to sometimes deal with dictators, he cautions from the vantage point of hindsight, "If you're going to sup with the devil, use a long spoon." But keeping one's distance from a tyrant while relying on him to advance U.S. interests would not be easy under any circumstances. Although the Carter Administration remained mostly neutral, the State Department allowed General Electric to sell eight jet engines for four warships being built by Italy for Iraq.

2 "We Created This Monster"

By 1986 the struggle between Iraq and Iran had degenerated into a bloody stalemate. To assist Iraq, the U.S., along with Israel and Egypt, began providing Baghdad with intelligence data on Iranian troop movements. Over the next year the U.S. became more directly involved in protecting shipping in the gulf. Thirty-seven American sailors perished after an Iraqi warplane accidentally attacked the frigate U.S.S. Stark with an Exocet missile.

As Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for International Economic Trade and Security Policy in the Reagan Administration, Stephen Bryen was responsible for protecting American security interests by preventing the transfer of sensitive technology to potential enemies. Most of his attention was directed at exports to the Soviet Union, but he also reviewed export licenses for Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq -- countries that were jokingly referred to in Washington as "the Happy Four" because of their penchant for troublemaking.

In 1986 Bryen learned of an application to export an advanced computer manufactured in New Jersey. Intelligence reports indicated that the computer's final destination was a research facility in Mosul, Iraq, known as Saad 16. There researchers were working to develop a ballistic missile with a longer range than the now familiar Soviet-supplied Scud.

Bryen raised his concerns with the Commerce Department, which insisted nonetheless on going ahead with the sale. Paul Freedenberg, then the Under Secretary for Export Administration, insists that there were simply no grounds for stopping the transaction. "At the time," he says, "the State Department had no particular concerns in this area, so the national policy and the policy of President Reagan was normal trade with Iraq." While the transfer of purely military items was banned, sales of "dual use" technology, with both civilian and military applications, were reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Only infrequently, for example in situations involving extremely advanced computers, were sales not approved.

In this instance, the Commerce Department's technical analysts raised no red flags. "Our analysts said the computer was old and unsophisticated," says Freedenberg. "Just because it was in use at White Sands doesn't mean it was advanced." Today he concedes that the sale was "a mistake" that could have been avoided had the Reagan Administration taken a tougher stance against Iraq.

The issue assumed greater urgency in August 1988 when the Iraqis used poison gas to kill thousands of their own citizens -- Kurdish men, women and children. At a White House meeting sponsored by the NSC, Freedenberg, troubled by the gassings, asked the State Department to impose "foreign policy controls" on exports to Iraq, which would have blocked the sale of militarily useful items like the computer. The Defense Department concurred. Although both the State Department and the White House acknowledged the atrocities of Saddam's regime, they argued that Iraq still played a vital strategic role and that U.S. influence to moderate Baghdad's conduct would be strengthened most by encouragement and trade, not bluster and confrontation. "They said, 'We have no concerns about Iraq; there is no reason to ask for foreign policy controls,' " Freedenberg remembers. "I was overruled by the State Department and the White House."

Since 1986, says Freedenberg, sales of American goods to Iraq have totaled more than $1.5 billion. All the while, other nations, including France, were feverishly selling weapons to Saddam -- without opposition from Washington. Reason: the U.S. was obsessed with making sure Iran would not win the war.

Bryen still ponders the question of the computer, which was sent to Iraq over his protests. "We created this monster," he says. "If you want to know who's to blame for all this, we are, because we let all this stuff go to Iraq."

3 "The Intelligence Was Limited"

Despite deepening American involvement with Iraq, the CIA had trouble predicting what Saddam was up to. Part of the problem was the nature of Iraq's political structure. Saddam ran a ruthless, highly centralized regime. Says Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs in the Reagan Administration: "The intelligence was limited, always has been, and still is today. The access to Iraqi officialdom and private citizens was extraordinarily limited." The U.S. had few intelligence assets within Iraq; as one American official says, analysts were reduced to "dealing with a welter of contradictory, fragmentary and incomplete information, and then trying to make sense out of that mess."

Washington looked to moderate Arab governments for help in understanding Saddam, but their assessments were distorted. Like the U.S., Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan were counting on Iraq to hold the line against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran. Their leaders repeatedly assured the U.S. that Saddam was turning moderate and merited continued American support.

Teicher, a member of the National Security Council staff under Reagan, remembers an April 1982 meeting between Walter Stoessel, then Deputy Secretary of State, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. At the time, Iranian troops had recaptured much of the territory Iraq had seized in the first weeks of the war. At the end of the meeting, Teicher recalls, "Mubarak held my hand and wouldn't let go. He talked to me about the desperate situation Saddam Hussein was in, and the absolute necessity for America to find ways to help him. He wanted me to take his message back to President Reagan."

Such appeals, which continued up to the eve of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, skewed U.S. assessments toward an unrealistically sanguine view of Iraq. The Reagan Administration seemed only too eager to accept the optimistic appraisals, which provided a basis, albeit shaky, for its -- and later the Bush Administration's -- inclination to play down Saddam's human-rights violations and bellicose rhetoric because of Iraq's strategic importance. A senior State Department official reflects on the lesson: "One of the things we've probably learned is to put more stock in our own analysis and less confidence in what other nations are telling us. We listened to them, and we gave it considerable weight. In retrospect, that was an error."

Arab leaders were not alone in suggesting that Saddam could be lured into behaving with more restraint. In the spring of 1984, Teicher accompanied Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan's special Middle East envoy, on a visit to Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told Rumsfeld that Israel considered Iran, not Iraq, to be the greatest threat in the region. According to Teicher, Shamir proposed the construction of an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Israeli port of Haifa as a goodwill gesture. When the U.S. relayed the offer to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, he refused to pass it along to Saddam, saying the President would kill him on the spot.

Five years later, in the fall of 1989, the U.S. began a sweeping reassessment of its policies in the Persian Gulf. According to an official with access to secret intelligence analyses, the CIA, a major contributor to the review, concluded that Iraq's war-weariness and heavy international debt of $65 billion made it likely that Baghdad would concentrate on rebuilding its crippled economy and increasing its oil production rather than embark on foreign adventures. Moreover, the assessment held, Iraq would feel beholden to those countries that had helped finance its fight against Iran, among them Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. There was one cautionary note, sounded almost in passing: Saddam was spending millions of dollars to build up chemical- and biological-weapons capacity.

Intelligence assessments were only part of the review. State Department and other government policymakers made much of Iraq's relaxation of travel restrictions for its citizens, as well as Saddam's plans for drafting a new constitution -- something that never materialized. Bush Administration officials claim that they were not predisposed to arrive at an assessment of Iraq that was rosier than the facts warranted. But if they were, there were familiar, if somewhat amended, strategic arguments to seduce them.

Now Saddam reigned over the region's dominant military power, an emerging political force and a country whose rich oil fields promised to make it an economic giant. Already, 8% of America's petroleum came from Iraqi wells, and American corporations were eager to help rebuild Iraq's shattered infrastructure. The Bush Administration decided to edge still closer to Iraq and to deal with the issue of Saddam's egregious human-rights record by using private pressure and the benefits of trade to gently prod him along a more responsible path.

4 "Your Problems Lie With the Media"

By the spring of 1990 Saddam had become more bellicose. He threatened to incinerate half of Israel if attacked. He moved Scud missiles to the border with Jordan, within striking range of Israel. He railed against the long- established U.S. naval presence in the gulf. He had an Iranian-born British journalist executed as a spy. He attempted to smuggle in triggering devices used in nuclear weapons.

In the midst of these developments, on April 12, six U.S. Senators arrived in Iraq on a regionwide fact-finding mission. The group included Republicans Bob Dole of Kansas, Charles Grassley of Iowa, Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Frank Murkowski of Alaska as well as Democrats Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio and James McClure of Idaho. The group was taken to a hotel along the Tigris River, ushered into a suite and presented to Saddam. They were asked to surrender their tape recorders and cameras.

The meeting drew much attention in the U.S. 10 months later after Baghdad released a partial transcript of the conversation. When Saddam raised the issue of the 1981 Israeli bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor, Dole reminded him, "We condemned the Israeli attack." Simpson, in particular, came off badly: "I believe that your problems lie with the Western media and not with the U.S. government," he advised Saddam.

Simpson does not deny making the remark but says the transcript reflects only 15 minutes of a three-hour meeting and omits the Senators' remonstrations with Saddam about the use of poison gas by Iraq, its efforts to build super- long-range artillery weapons and its threats against Israel. Saddam offered to take the group via helicopter to the Kurdish region. "I will show you that I am beloved by the Kurds," he said. Outside in the hotel parking lot, five helicopters were ready. When the Senators declined, uniformed officers in the room laughed derisively, Simpson says. (Later the Senators spoke among themselves of the hazards of flying in Iraqi helicopters.) Saddam told them that should Israel ever attack, his generals had instructions to launch everything in their arsenal at the Jewish state -- even if he were dead.

Dole spoke last. He put forward his withered right arm, injured in 1945 by German mortar and machine-gun fire, and looked Saddam in the eye. "I have a daily reminder of the futility of war," Dole said. Recalls Simpson: "Saddam didn't respond to that. He was taken aback."

5 "Take a Tyrant At his Word"

U.S. officials with access to classified intelligence reports for the month preceding the invasion of Kuwait say they provided precise details of Iraqi troop movements, logistics and air activity. But for most of that crucial period the reports remained vague on a fundamental question: Was Saddam bluffing the Kuwaitis, planning a short cross-border raid, or about to swallow the country whole? One explanation: intelligence assessments tend to be cautious and shy away from firm predictions. But there were other reasons why the Administration was so slow to come to terms with threats from Saddam. Policymakers who had spent years offering sanguine assessments of his regime were reluctant to accept the fact that the policies they had promoted had so dismally failed.

Saddam can be accused of many things, but masking his intentions is not one of them. In May 1990 he told a gathering of Arab leaders in Baghdad that he considered oil production above the limits set for each producer nation by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to be an act of war. Kuwait was exceeding its OPEC limits at the time. But a senior State Department official dismissed the statement as "typical exaggerated rhetoric." Says the same official today: "I guess there is a lesson here: Take a tyrant at his word."

If the U.S. was slow to discern Saddam's intentions, Saddam was worse at understanding the U.S. He knew little of America and drew many a false conclusion. U.S. Ambassador Glaspie told State Department colleagues how Saddam had marveled at some earthworks constructed in Iraq by Vietnamese workers. Saddam had been amazed that a Third World people could defeat a superpower and may have been emboldened by the thought. He seemed to repeatedly conclude from America's experience in the Vietnam War that the U.S. lacked will. "He thought he knew more about us than we knew about ourselves, and that was ultimately his most severe miscalculation," observes a senior State Department official.

But given the mixed signals the U.S. was sending Saddam, no wonder he misread Washington's intentions. On July 25, a week before the invasion, Glaspie was summoned to a hasty meeting with Saddam even as his troops threatened the border with Kuwait. She told him, "We don't have much to say about Arab-Arab differences, like your border difference with Kuwait." After the invasion Glaspie was severely criticized for her remarks, which were seen by many foreign policy analysts as having given Saddam a virtual green light for invasion. The criticism was misplaced. "She was an ambassador operating on the basis of instructions," says Representative Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East.

The mistake was compounded on July 31, two days before the invasion, when Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs John Kelly told a congressional subcommittee, "We have no defense-treaty relationships with any of the ((gulf)) countries. We have historically avoided taking a position on border disputes or on internal OPEC deliberations, but we have certainly, as have all administrations, resoundingly called for the peaceful settlement of disputes and differences in the region." Says Hamilton: "The Administration still believed Saddam was a guy they could work with. They were still taking that position right up to the day of the invasion." Like Saddam, Hamilton and other Congressmen had concluded that the U.S would not fight on behalf of Kuwait.

By then, cautious intelligence estimates had been replaced by loud alarms. In mid-July, Iraqi supply buildups were considered large enough for a military operation in northern Kuwait, possibly to take disputed border oil fields or Bubiyan Island. A week before the invasion, at the very time Glaspie was meeting with Saddam, senior officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department were advised in intelligence briefings that Saddam was not bluffing. His patience with Kuwait was growing thin. Intelligence summaries cited Iraqi air exercises indicating preparation for a massive ground assault.

At 3 p.m. on Aug. 1, Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed al-Mashat sat across from Kelly and other U.S. officials in Kelly's sixth-floor office at the State Department. The conversation was tense. Kelly warned Mashat that the U.S. was deeply concerned about the military buildup, that the massing of forces had created anxiety throughout the area. Mashat blamed U.S. rhetoric for increased fears. Preposterous, answered Kelly, noting that 100,000 Iraqi troops were deployed along the Kuwait border. Iraq, said Mashat, had the right to move its troops within Iraqi territory as it pleased; he also assured Kelly that press accounts of negotiations with Kuwait were unduly pessimistic. "You don't need to worry," the ambassador declared. "We are not going to move against anybody."

Two hours later, at 5 p.m., senior State Department officials, joined by representatives from the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House and the CIA, met behind closed doors in Secretary of Defense James Baker's conference room. There, CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr made an ominous prediction: Iraq would invade within six to 12 hours. At 8:30 that evening, Kerr's prediction came true.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Steve Hart

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