The UN, US and Iraq IV

Alarmed by the prospect of Iranian victory [after 1980], The US, The Soviet Union, and France alike all stepped up support for Saddam in the interest of quelling Iranian Fundamentalism. The US provided primarilly anti-Iranian intelligence, while The Soviet Union and France both provided direct military and financial aid.

A. In November 1983, a government memo "indicated that Iraq used chemical weapons against [..] 'Kurdish insurgents'" as well as Iranian forces. [..] In March 1984, "The United States has concluded that the available evidence substantiates Iran's charges that Iraq used chemical weapons".

B. Later in the month, "when asked whether the U.S.'s conclusion that Iraq had used chemical weapons would have 'any effect on U.S. recent initiatives to expand commercial relationships with Iraq [and] open diplomatic relations,' the State Department's spokesperson said 'No. I'm not aware of any change in our position. We're interested in being involved in a closer dialogue with Iraq'."

The same month, the State Department informs a House Committee on Foreign Affairs staff member that the department has not objected to the sale of 2,000 heavy trucks to Iraq, even though the official US policy is not to export military related items to Iraq or Iran; and, when asked if the trucks were intended for military purposes, responds, "we presumed that this was Iraq's intention, and had not asked."

That spring, the U.S. reconsidered policy for the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq's nuclear program, and its "preliminary results favor[ed] expanding such trade to include Iraqi nuclear entities".

A. A State Department background paper dated November 16, 1984 said that Iraq had [..] resumed the use [of chemical weapons] in February 1984.

B. On November 26, 1984, Iraq and the U.S. restored diplomatic relations. Tariq Aziz, in Washington for the formal resumption of ties, said that his country was satisfied that "the U.S. analysis of the war's threat to regional stability is 'in agreement in principle' with Iraq's".

Derived from: George Washington University - National Security Archive

In '88, Saddam massively deployed chemical weaponry against Iranian troops occupying Iraqi territory, [..] He [then] turned his attention to his own Kurds, who had, historically to their detriment been pro-Iranian. Emboldened by lack of strong international response to his internal depredations, he focused on Kuwait. [..]

Timber ... You say we did nothing to further his bad intentions ...

Gel wrote:

Timber ... You say we did nothing to further his bad intentions ...

No I did not say that. I said we were neither alone nor chief in the matter of enabling Saddam, which in no way diminishes the necessity of addressing most condignly him and his ilk.

By early 2003, studies revealed that fear of the United States had reached remarkable heights throughout the world, along with distrust of the political leadership. Dismissal of elementary human rights and needs was matched by a display of contempt for democracy for which no parallel comes easily to mind, accompanied by professions of sincere dedication to human rights and democracy. The unfolding events should be deeply disturbing to those who have concerns about the world they are leaving to their grandchildren.

Blueprint for a Mess
By DAVID RIEFF

On the streets of Baghdad today, Americans do not feel welcome. United States military personnel in the city are hunkered down behind acres of fencing and razor wire inside what was once Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace. When L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, leaves the compound, he is always surrounded by bodyguards, carbines at the ready, and G.I.'s on patrol in the city's streets never let their hands stray far from the triggers of their machine guns or M-16 rifles. The official line from the White House and the Pentagon is that things in Baghdad and throughout Iraq are improving. But an average of 35 attacks are mounted each day on American forces inside Iraq by armed resisters of one kind or another, whom American commanders concede are operating with greater and greater sophistication. In the back streets of Sadr City, the impoverished Baghdad suburb where almost two million Shiites live -- and where Bush administration officials and Iraqi exiles once imagined American troops would be welcomed with sweets and flowers -- the mood, when I visited in September, was angry and resentful. In October, the 24-member American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council warned of a deteriorating security situation.
Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in Iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.

I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war....

...Call it liberation or occupation, a dominating American presence in Iraq was probably destined to be more difficult, and more costly in money and in blood, than administration officials claimed in the months leading up to the war. But it need not have been this difficult. Had the military been as meticulous in planning its strategy and tactics for the postwar as it was in planning its actions on the battlefield, the looting of Baghdad, with all its disastrous material and institutional and psychological consequences, might have been stopped before it got out of control. Had the collective knowledge embedded in the Future of Iraq Project been seized upon, rather than repudiated by, the Pentagon after it gained effective control of the war and postwar planning a few months before the war began, a genuine collaboration between the American authorities and Iraqis, both within the country and from the exiles, might have evolved. And had the lessons of nation-building -- its practice but also its inevitability in the wars of the 21st century -- been embraced by the Bush administration rather than dismissed out of hand, then the opportunities that did exist in postwar Iraq would not have been squandered as, in fact, they were.

The real lesson of the postwar mess is that while occupying and reconstructing Iraq was bound to be difficult, the fact that it may be turning into a quagmire is not a result of fate, but rather (as quagmires usually are) a result of poor planning and wishful thinking. Both have been in evidence to a troubling degree in American policy almost from the moment the decision was made to overthrow Saddam Hussein's bestial dictatorship.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02IRAQ.html?pagewanted=print&position=

The US also provided loan guarantees and direct credits, and certainly did find it convenient to overlook clear and evident WMD and Humanitarian violations