How the Reagan admin armed Iraq

[menewa]

from counterpunch:

On August 18, 2002, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas". Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war". The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.

While the August 18 NYT article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did Ronald Reagan's Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq's Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of President George Bush II's administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities--which were disregarded at the time by Washington--and those same weapons programs--which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War--to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.

A reader of the NYT article (or the tens of thousands of other articles written after the war drive against Iraq began in earnest soon after September 11, 2001) would have looked in vain for the fact that many of the US politicians and ruling class pundits who demanded war against Hussein--in particular, the one of the most bellicose of the Bush administration's "hawks", defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld--were up to their ears in Washington's efforts to cultivate, promote and excuse Hussein in the past.

rest of article: http://counterpunch.org/dixon06172004.html

 

[NightTrain]

What was provided to Iraq was termed 'perishable intelligence'. It was battlefield information that had a limited life span. While Counterpunch & Moveon would love to try and spin this assistance, it was only that.

The reason the aid was provided to Iraq was because Iraq was losing the war it was fighting with Iran. We did this to balance out the war, and later on we even gave the Iranians information when Iraq began making solid gains.

Saddam found out about this, and was pissed off at the betrayal, and we were on his shitlist from that day on.

Our goal was to preserve the balance of power there, no one wanted either country to double their power & influence in the region, hence our meddling. Both Saddam and Khomeni were proven lunatics & were bad enough as it was.

The plan worked; the Iran / Iraq war ground to a halt without either side making massive gains and the balance of power in the ME was preserved.

 

[menewa]

Originally posted by Sir Evil
NT - Some people just feel better blaming the US for the current state of affairs!

US foreign policy does deserve some blame. Washington looked the other way when Saddam committed atrocities against his own people in the 1980s and then Bush turned around in 2002 and acted like nobody had ever heard of this stuff before. When, in fact, some of the people in his own administration helped facilitate these atrocities in the first place. Talk about denial.

 

[NightTrain]

The world was a very different place back in the 80s. If you recall, we were in the Cold War.

The Soviets were meddling in the ME, and we were counter-meddling. Necessary evil.

Incidently, Arafat and the 'Palestinians' were a Soviet creation. That was a stroke of brilliance, their monster is still around raising hell many years after the fall of the Soviet empire.

 

[menewa]

Originally posted by NightTrain
The world was a very different place back in the 80s. If you recall, we were in the Cold War.

The Soviets were meddling in the ME, and we were counter-meddling. Necessary evil.

Incidently, Arafat and the 'Palestinians' were a Soviet creation. That was a stroke of brilliance, their monster is still around raising hell many years after the fall of the Soviet empire.

Yeah, it's odd that both the US and the Soviets helped out Saddam during his reign of terror. These two teams never helped out the same lackey in other Cold War hot spots.
I don't agree though that lots of the Cold War espionage was necessary though. I think a lot of the Cold War shennanigans are partly responsible for why we are in this indefinite war today.
I didn't know that the Soviets had anything to do with Arafat though. That's interesting. Can you explain further, or provide a link.

 

[NightTrain]

I'd be happy to. This ran in the Wall Street Journal :

The KGB's Man
Moscow turned Arafat into a terrorist.

BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Saturday, September 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington--as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day--believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.





Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called Falastinuna ("Our Palestine"), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him--the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day War, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism" during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism" was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence, Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror operations, while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager," his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel--over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.





In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us. Mr. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."
Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his--all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.

On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.

 

[Annie]

Originally posted by menewa
Yeah, it's odd that both the US and the Soviets helped out Saddam during his reign of terror. These two teams never helped out the same lackey in other Cold War hot spots.
I don't agree though that lots of the Cold War espionage was necessary though. I think a lot of the Cold War shennanigans are partly responsible for why we are in this indefinite war today.
I didn't know that the Soviets had anything to do with Arafat though. That's interesting. Can you explain further, or provide a link.

I'm impressed with the post and query. Nice seeing you Menewa.

 

[menewa]

Originally posted by Kathianne
I'm impressed with the post and query. Nice seeing you Menewa.

Thanks KA. It's good to be back on the one and only USMB.l

 

[Gaebolg]

We did a lot of things during the Cold War, many of which have bitten us in the arse since. After the Cold War ended mistakes were made by U.S. presidents that have contributed to the mess we have right now. Laying blame to former presidents (and there would be enough blame to go around to both parties) doesn't solve any of our problems. It does kind of show what kind of sad mentality we have in this country, the "Whose to blame, so we can sue them" mentality. It probably comes from having way to many freaking lawyers.

It's far more productive to solve a problem than to lament the reasons we have it.

 

[dilloduck]

Originally posted by Gaebolg
We did a lot of things during the Cold War, many of which have bitten us in the arse since. After the Cold War ended mistakes were made by U.S. presidents that have contributed to the mess we have right now. Laying blame to former presidents (and there would be enough blame to go around to both parties) doesn't solve any of our problems. It does kind of show what kind of sad mentality we have in this country, the "Whose to blame, so we can sue them" mentality. It probably comes from having way to many freaking lawyers.

It's far more productive to solve a problem than to lament the reasons we have it.

 

[Patriot]

Originally posted by Gaebolg
We did a lot of things during the Cold War, many of which have bitten us in the arse since. After the Cold War ended mistakes were made by U.S. presidents that have contributed to the mess we have right now. Laying blame to former presidents (and there would be enough blame to go around to both parties) doesn't solve any of our problems. It does kind of show what kind of sad mentality we have in this country, the "Whose to blame, so we can sue them" mentality. It probably comes from having way to many freaking lawyers.

It's far more productive to solve a problem than to lament the reasons we have it.

While your post was quite good it will fall on deaf ears with the likes of menewa and other libs who just enjoy pointing fingers but aren't around to do the real task at hand. They would rather watch atrocities happen with bowls of popcorn and soda pop to suck through straws while giving their thumbs up or down in judgement...

I am just waiting for the placement cards that they switch too representing the actual point tally they will render. I wonder what 9/11 would go for? An 8.0 for execution with a 7.6 for total displacement?

 

[menewa]

Originally posted by Patriot
While your post was quite good it will fall on deaf ears with the likes of menewa and other libs who just enjoy pointing fingers but aren't around to do the real task at hand. They would rather watch atrocities happen with bowls of popcorn and soda pop to suck through straws while giving their thumbs up or down in judgement...

I am just waiting for the placement cards that they switch too representing the actual point tally they will render. I wonder what 9/11 would go for? An 8.0 for execution with a 7.6 for total displacement?

You have to know where you come from to know where you're going.

 

[NightTrain]

You have to know where you come from to know where you're going.

?

That's all you have to say about Arafat's history?

Personally, I think that article is a great way to begin to understand where things started. It makes total sense, especially when you consider the 'peace process' and where it ended up.

Arafat is 'against terrorism', and yet he's the Man In Charge. Somehow, even though he is in charge, the idiots keep strapping bombs to themselves.

 

[menewa]

Originally posted by NightTrain
?

That's all you have to say about Arafat's history?

Personally, I think that article is a great way to begin to understand where things started. It makes total sense, especially when you consider the 'peace process' and where it ended up.

Arafat is 'against terrorism', and yet he's the Man In Charge. Somehow, even though he is in charge, the idiots keep strapping bombs to themselves.

Oh no, what you quoted was in response to a previous post that was basically like, it's history, get over it.

That article was very revealing into the character of Arafat. If all was true, it definitely demonstrated some supreme hipocrisy. For one, most Muslims consider athiests as a scourge. It's the same as a bad word to many. In recent attacks against US soldiers in Iraq, several new articles have said that Iraqis would surround the troops during clean up and begin chanting "Athiets! Athiests!" at them. For Arafat to work hand in hand with the Soviets, a communist nation, is treason enough against the people he is supposed to represent. But then to read about the large cash handouts he receives while Palestinians starve and live crammed 50 to a house puts him even more overboard.
Problem is, Palestinians need a new leader. And sadly, Arafat has been the only leader they've ever had. I wish some kind of MLK Jr. type would rise up in the ranks. Arafat is certainly dysfunctional.
But more on the Soviet/Palestine connection. This makes the US's stance to staunchly back Irael no matter how many UN resolutions they break make more sense. It also demonstrates even more how the Cold War is tied into the current war on terror.

 

[st8_o_mind]

Originally posted by Sir Evil
Talk about denial eh? seems you did not read the reply to well from Night Train.

Denial is the right word. You seem to assume that the post from Nightrain is correct. In fact, it is not. The extent of us assistance to Iraq was not limited to perishable intel, although providing satalite intel to a goverment using it to taget Iran with WMD is inexcusable. US assistance went well beyond that. During the negotiations of the chemical weaposns convention Rummy was dispatched to Iraq to reassure Saddam that the CWC would not imjpact Iraq, this was, of course, after US intel had confirmed that Iraq was using WMD against the Kurds and Iran. In addition to political support, precursor chemicals for Iraq's WMD was provided covertly by the US. Moreover, Iraq was diverting other US assistance, particularly grain credits, to its military right until the beginning of Gulf War I. This was known to the Bush I administration who turned a blind eye even though ignoring the diversion is a violation of US law. A little known report was filed at State by then Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs, Paul J. Hare.

As was posted by others, the US had a significant hand in training and equiping many of the monsters that we are trying to cope with now, including Osama and Saddam and Iran (Iran/Congra). Rather the the expedient of simply blaming the cold war as a blanket justification for short-sighted policy, it might be more productive to look at who we are arming, training and providing political cover for now. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

[NightTrain]

Interesting.

Do you have reports from reputable sources?

 

[Avatar4321]

Originally posted by menewa
US foreign policy does deserve some blame. Washington looked the other way when Saddam committed atrocities against his own people in the 1980s and then Bush turned around in 2002 and acted like nobody had ever heard of this stuff before. When, in fact, some of the people in his own administration helped facilitate these atrocities in the first place. Talk about denial.

What exactly did you expect Washington to do? We were still trying to win the cold war. If we had interceded directly in this conflict to stop the atrocities we wouldnt have had a cold war we would have had a hot war, possibly nuclear hot. Do you honestly think the Soviets wouldnt have jumped in as well if we did?

While i agree the atrocities were horendous, we are living in different times. Now that we are the lone superpower we can intervene to stop these atrocities. before it just wouldnt have been feasible. Reagan was right to focus on the Soviets. they were the priority then. Times have changed.

 

[Avatar4321]

Originally posted by NightTrain
I'd be happy to. This ran in the Wall Street Journal :

The KGB's Man
Moscow turned Arafat into a terrorist.

BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Saturday, September 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

Looks like terrorism is tied to the left more than i realized.

 

[Avatar4321]

Originally posted by Patriot
While your post was quite good it will fall on deaf ears with the likes of menewa and other libs who just enjoy pointing fingers but aren't around to do the real task at hand. They would rather watch atrocities happen with bowls of popcorn and soda pop to suck through straws while giving their thumbs up or down in judgement...

I am just waiting for the placement cards that they switch too representing the actual point tally they will render. I wonder what 9/11 would go for? An 8.0 for execution with a 7.6 for total displacement?

mmmmm popcorn....

 

[st8_o_mind]

Originally posted by NightTrain
Interesting.

Do you have reports from reputable sources?

The report from Hare who was with the State Department was obtained by a member of congress and read on the floor of the House about ten years ago. I think it was rep. Gonzalez (it was about ten years ago so don't hold me to that).

The arguement made at the time including in the State Dept. report made public was that Iraq was our best check against Iranian fundamentalist expansion. Don't forget, at the time, the Islamic Revolution in Iran which deposed the US back Shaw of Iran was considered the biggest threat to U.S. interests in the region at the time. So we backed Saddam to check the Ayatollah (spelling?). Now we are supporting a number of different SOB's in the region to check Saddam.

Saddam was so confident in US support, that before his forces invaded Quwait, he informed the State Department of his intentions. The State Department official in Bagdad at the time (I forget her name but its all on the public record) told Saddam something to the effect that the United States would not feel compelled to respond to such an event (as the proposed invasion). That is diplospeak for, "go ahead dude, we've got your back."

In my opinion, these facts point less to some grand conspiracy to control Iraqi oil, but rather incompetence and an ideologically driven foreign policy that subordinates American values such as democracy, human rights and self-determination for short-term expediency.

Sorta like the problems we have in the region now.