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Envoy
As it was, despite his business conquests,
Rumsfeld missed an even greater prize. He had been on a
short list to become Ronald Reagan's running mate in the 1980 presidential
campaign when the candidate unexpectedly reached for his defeated primary rival
(and Rumsfeld nemesis) George H W Bush. While, over the next 12 years, Bush
went on to the vice presidency and presidency, and Jim Baker - equally detested
by Rumsfeld - went along with his patron to White House staff and cabinet
power, Rumsfeld would build his Searle fortune and bide his time.
The one exception to his involuntary Reagan-era
exile from government would be a stint in 1983-84 as special presidential envoy
to the Middle East.
He
would be sent to arrange US support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its war with
the hated Iranians of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a role little noticed at the
time, which nonetheless produced the notorious photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands
with the Iraqi dictator. The deeper story was far more embarrassing than
any simple handshake.
Most of the relevant records on Rumsfeld's
several-month assignment are still classified, though it is clear that, as at
the Office of Equal Opportunity, he took on his mission with a passion. He
worked to shower on Saddam (in a manner as unnoticed as possible) an infamous
flow of intelligence, financial credits, and sensitive materials and technology
that would come to underpin Iraqi chemical- and bacteriological-warfare
programs, leading to hideous gas attacks on Shi'ite dissidents and Kurds as
well as the Iranian forces. In general, Rumsfeld put his shoulder to the wheel
to shore up the war-worn Ba'athist regime that had attacked Iran in 1980.
In this mid-1980s de facto alliance with Saddam,
as in much else, Rumsfeld was never alone. He was joined in this pro-Iraqi tilt
in the Middle East by president Reagan, vice president Bush, secretary of state
George Shultz, defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, national security advisers
William Clark and Robert McFarlane, and a number of still obscure men like Paul
Wolfowitz at State, Colin Powell, then Weinberger's aide at the Pentagon, and
assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle, not to speak of his zealot
acolyte assistant Douglas Feith (who would return in a pivotal post under
Rumsfeld in 2001) as well as Bill Casey and Robert Gates at the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), among other officials.
Their gambit was, in turn, backed by senators and
congressmen in both parties who were briefed on Rumsfeld's mission and
obligingly shunned oversight of the manifold aspects of the sometimes illegal
collusion with the Iraqis. Their dereliction was assured, in part, by the
general animus toward Iran on a Capitol Hill then in effect controlled by the
Republicans, and increasingly under the bipartisan influence of the growing
Israeli lobby and its Tel Aviv handlers. The lobby quietly, cynically pushed
both for Reagan administration aid to Iraq and for covert arms-dealing with
Iran (later exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal), viewing the ongoing no-winners
carnage of two Islamic states as a boon. All this went on largely unreported,
given the customary US media diffidence or indolence on national-security
issues.
Historically, the moral outrage and far-reaching
political folly of Washington's furtive arming of one tyranny to bleed another,
with untold casualties on each side (including the murderous suppression of
would-be democrats in both countries), would belong at the doorstep of Reagan's
reactionary regime and the Washington foreign-policy establishment as a whole.
Rumsfeld's role was instrumental and in some respects crucial, but only part of
the larger disgrace.
At the same time, in the intelligence briefings he
received as the first ranking US official to go to Iraq since the Baghdad Pact
of the 1950s, he would have been uniquely aware, as no other senior figure in
Washington, of the brutal character of Saddam Hussein's regime and, in
particular, the sectarian, regional, tribal and clan politics that lay behind
it. The Ba'athists were a government, after all, that the CIA itself had helped
to recruit and install in the coup of 1963, reinstalled in 1968 when the
agency's original clients lost control, and then watched closely while Baghdad
had a flirtation (involving an arms-supply relationship) with the feared
Russians (whose influence the bloody 1963 coup was supposed to counter). This
was particularly true in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 with its
peace agreements from which Iraq emerged as a principal remaining challenge to
Israel.
By 1983-84, the volatile, complex currents of
Iraq's political culture, Saddam's essentially family and clan rule, and the
now crude, now subtle layering of Sunni and Shi'ite in the Ba'athist
bureaucracy and plutocracy, as well as the wartime distrust and savage
repression of a suspect, subordinate Shi'ite majority, were well known to
outside intelligence agencies as well as scholars and journalists. The CIA,
Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department Bureaus of Near Eastern
Affairs and Intelligence and Research - and certainly Rumsfeld as presidential
envoy - also had reason to understand much about Saddam's grandiose ambition,
in Iraq's old rivalry with Egypt, to lead a pan-Arab nationalist renaissance to
some kind of future parity with Israel's nuclear-armed military might.
In addition to the usual extensive
intelligence-sharing with Israel's Mossad, less than two years before
Rumsfeld's Iraq mission CIA operatives had literally lit the way for Israeli
F-16 fighter-bombers in their June 1981 surprise attack on Saddam's fledgling
nuclear reactor at Osirak. They planted guidance transmitters along the
low-level flight path under Jordanian and Iraqi radar to the point of painting
the target with lasers. The CIA and Mossad then watched as the Iraqis
dauntlessly, defiantly began to rebuild and expand their nuclear program. From
some 400 scientists and technicians with $400 million in funding, that program
would grow to perhaps 7,000 scientists and technicians with as much as $10
billion at their command, some of which was indirectly made possible by the
bounty Rumsfeld carried to Baghdad in the mid-1980s
For anyone dealing seriously with these issues,
there could have been little doubt that Saddam would use the considerable aid
and trade Rumsfeld was sliding his way under the table to mount a better-armed,
more bloody war on Iran, to further the regime's most ambitious dreams of
weapons development, and to tyrannize all the more savagely potentially
rebellious Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds. As Washington watched, he did all of that
- and no one could have been less surprised than Rumsfeld himself. Long
afterward, as some of the ugly essence of his mission to Baghdad dribbled out
amid the ruins of President George W Bush's Iraqi occupation, Rumsfeld would be
faulted for pandering to, and appeasing, Saddam (whose gassing of the Kurds had
already begun) - in the wake of a single, timorous, hypocritical statement
issued in Washington in March 1984 criticizing his use of chemical weapons. The
actual toll of the policy to which he was integral would prove so much higher
as time passed.
Iraqi chemical-weapons plants bombed in the 1991
Gulf War released agents to which some 100,000 US troops were exposed. The
infamous Gulf War Syndrome might even be traced in some measure to the US
credits, materiel and technology Rumsfeld had knowingly conveyed seven years
before. So, too, of course, could Saddam's brutal 1980s repression of the
Shi'ites, underlying the sectarian animus and resolve for vengeance and
dominance by the US-installed Shi'ite regime after 2003 that shaped Rumsfeld's,
and America's, historic failure in Iraq.
Others colluded at every turn in the long scandal
of policy toward Iraq. Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and Dick Cheney, as secretary of defense during the first Gulf War,
would, for instance, be directly complicit in the syndrome outrage. Yet none of
the participants in the larger disaster after September 11, 2001, was more
directly responsible than Rumsfeld.
While Reagan's special envoy was, with his usual
energy and sharp elbows, dickering with the Iraqis in the mid-1980s,
Condoleezza Rice was an assistant professor of no scholarly distinction at
Stanford; Cheney a third-term congressman from Wyoming squirming up the House
leadership ladder; future viceroy of Baghdad L Paul "Jerry" Bremer moving from
State Department clerk and Alexander Haig protege to lavish-party-giving
ambassador to the Netherlands; and George W Bush, still by his own account
given to "heavy drinking", absorbed in changing the name of his chronically
failed Arbusto Energy oil company to Bush Exploration. |
