by David Crist
On June 21, Ayatollah Khomeini publicly proclaimed that the “road to Jerusalem ran through Karbala.” He enunciated a grandiose vision of a Shia crescent stretching across the Middle East. The divided Supreme Defense Council rallied behind the decision. With revolutionary fervor and a sense of divine victory awaiting its army, Iran pressed forward into Iraq, intent on capturing Basra, bringing down the Baath regime, and installing a pro-Iranian Shia Islamic government. “War! War until victory!” became the chant in the streets of Tehran.13
With Iran poised for a major attack on Basra, alarm bells sounded in the White House. “It appears Iran will invade Iraq in the next few days,” National Security Adviser William Clark wrote to President Reagan. “Given the past performance of the Iraqi army,” Clark added, “it seems likely that Iran eventually will succeed in accomplishing its military objectives.” This, Clark warned the president, could succeed in bringing down Saddam Hussein, posing a direct threat to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and grave danger to American interests in the region. “Our principal objective,” Clark wrote, “is to bring an end to the war before Iran can assume hegemony in the region.”
At five p.m. on July 12, 1982, Clark convened a meeting of President Ronald Reagan’s senior foreign policy team in the White House Situation Room. The mood was somber as the men seated themselves around the wooden table in the small, windowless conference room. The first briefing, by an intelligence officer, did little to improve the mood. The Defense Intelligence Agency officer expected the Iranians to attack Basra within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and while the fighting would be heavy, the agency predicted the Iranians would take the city. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Vessey, cringed when the analyst described the incompetent disposition of the Iraqi army. Rather than using natural barriers, such as defending behind rivers, the Iraqi units sat in front of them, with the nearest armor reserves capable of blunting the Iranian attacks more than four days away from the critical front at Basra.
From the outset the Reagan administration took a pro-Iraqi stance. The United States and Iraq had severed diplomatic relations after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and had had a testy relationship for the interceding fifteen years. Now, however, the two countries shared contempt for the new Islamic Republic of Iran, and Washington saw the war as an opportunity to wean Iraq from its chief arms supplier, the Soviet Union. “Closer ties with Iraq would benefit the U.S. and could shift Iraq into opposition against Iran and Syria,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West wrote to Secretary Caspar Weinberger in a memo laying out the pros and cons of closer military ties to Iraq.14 In spring and summer of 1981, a string of senior American diplomats arrived in Iraq for meetings with a close confidant of Saddam Hussein, a powerful Christian Baath Party insider named Tariq Aziz.15 Over occasional glasses of whiskey from Aziz’s well-apportioned walk-in liquor cellar, the two nations gradually moved toward normalization of diplomatic relations.
But the chief catalyst for America’s tilt toward Iraq was the drubbing of the Iraqi army at the hands of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The crisis in the marsh and sand around Basra galvanized the White House that hot Washington July. A crisis mood prevailed as the United States awoke to Iran as the main threat to American hegemony over the Persian Gulf. An air force lieutenant colonel taking notes summed up the opinions after one meeting: “Although there is limited room for maneuver in our policy, it is definitely in U.S. interests to keep the Iraqi government from becoming pro-Iranian.”16 The United States needed to protect moderate Arab states from Iranian aggression and to safeguard Middle East oil. But the challenge, as Washington viewed it, was to support the Iraqis without alienating Iran and pushing it into the Soviet camp.
Nevertheless, that summer a consensus emerged among Reagan’s frequently fractious inner circle to support Iraq. With Jordan and Saudi Arabia lobbying for Baghdad, the United States threw its support behind Saddam Hussein.17 Reagan concurred. He signed a top secret security directive instructing the government to take all measures short of direct military aid to prevent Iraq from losing to Iran.18
Not everyone within the bowels of the U.S. foreign policy establishment agreed with the tilt toward Iraq. William Taft in the Defense Department disagreed with the cooperative arrangement, believing that Iraq was little better than Iran. The State Department’s directorate for Near Eastern affairs, including its director for regional affairs, Philip Wilcox, and his boss, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State James Placke, both were uneasy about siding with Iraq as it might close the door on any chance for normalization with Iran.19 They were joined by a concoction of Cold War hawks, such as Paul Wolfowitz at the State Department and Richard Perle at the Defense Department, who opposed supporting Iraq because they believed that Saddam Hussein posed a greater danger. Perle expressed particular concern about transferring American computer technology to Iraq, fearing it could wind up in the hands of the Soviet Union.
The senior leadership at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, however, tended to see Iraq as the lesser of two evils. Saddam Hussein could provide stability in the region and serve as a bulwark against Iran. Iraq was more independent and perhaps could be wooed away from Moscow. The legacy of the Iranian hostage crisis resonated within the debate. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger despised the Iranian regime and never forgave it for taking over the U.S. embassy. He favored most any plan that would make trouble for the Islamic Republic of Iran.20 “There was no great love for Saddam Hussein,” said Richard Armitage. “Neither side was a good guy. It’s a pity the war could not have lasted forever.”21
The debate was not settled overnight. However, over the course of the next two years, as the war dragged on and Iraqi fortunes on the battlefield ebbed more than flowed, President Reagan consistently sided with those supporting closer relations with Saddam Hussein. Despite Washington’s discomfort with Iraq’s human rights abuses and liberal use of chemical weapons, the United States gradually moved to a position that a senior State Department official labeled a “fig leaf of neutrality” in the Iran-Iraq War.
After the July 12 White House meeting, the United States moved to reassure its Gulf allies. The Gulf Arabs had good reason to worry about the wrath of Iran, and many privately supported the Iraqi invasion. In the brief pan-Sunni euphoria that followed the Iraqi attack, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates allowed nearly one hundred Iraqi aircraft to stage at their air bases for a planned massive strike on Bandar Abbas.22 Alarmed, Washington pressured them to seek withdrawal of the Iraqi planes and to avert starting a much wider, much more dangerous Middle East war. Saudi Arabia, however, secretly allowed Iraqi aircraft to “hot-pit” refuel at its bases as they returned from attacking Iranian oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz.
The United States tried to reassure a skittish Saudi government. Reagan sent a personal letter to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia expressing America’s concerns about an Iranian victory, offering “our readiness to cooperate in the defense of the kingdom.” Under the innocuous name of European Liaison Force One (ELF-One), the United States dispatched to Riyadh four E-3 AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft accompanied by air-to-air refueling tankers.23 This modified Boeing 707 aircraft mounted a large saucer-shaped radar dome capable of detecting Iranian aircraft more than four hundred nautical miles away. They served as the linchpin in an elaborate American-designed Saudi air defense system arrayed against Iran. The Saudis kept aloft American-built F-15 fighters ready to intercept any Iranian jet detected by the AWACS. American technicians manned a communications network throughout the kingdom that linked the American AWACS to the Royal Saudi Air Force. An operations center manned by the U.S. Air Force at the King Abdul Aziz Air Base near Dhahran comprised radar and communications equipment that received the AWACS data.24
The Saudi government worried about the fallout within the Muslim world should it be openly revealed that the keeper of the two holiest sites in Islam allowed a de facto permanent American mil
itary presence within the kingdom. So the Americans tried to keep a low profile. Once a week a U.S. Air Force C-141 cargo jet arrived, off-loading supplies and new airmen dressed in civilian clothes and traveling on temporary duty orders ranging from 21 to 179 days. They were quietly billeted in local hotels. The bulk of Americans in Riyadh stayed at the al-Yamamah Hotel, an unremarkable but well-appointed building most notable for a seventy-pound marble ball in the large center lobby. Each day, Saudi buses transported the Americans from their comfortable barracks to the nearby Saudi air base.25 This routine remained unchanged for the next six years as thousands of American airmen quietly rotated through Saudi Arabia, all under the public radar and all without any formal agreement between the two nations.
Washington extended commodities credit guarantees to purchase American agricultural products to prop up Baghdad’s economy.26 A windfall for American farmers, this totaled $345 million in exports in 1983, increasing to $652 million a couple of years later.27 This also freed up hundreds of millions of dollars for the Iraqis to use to purchase military hardware. Vice President George Bush intervened with a Yale classmate, William Draper, who headed the federal government’s Export-Import Bank, which extends credit to purchase American goods, to overrule his own staff and extend to Baghdad nearly $500 million to finance a new Iraqi oil pipeline to Jordan to be built by the U.S. company Bechtel. As Bush wrote to his friend Draper, “Eximbank could play a critical role in our efforts in the region.”28
In December 1983 Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad. The president had appointed the former defense secretary and Republican stalwart as his special Middle East envoy with a portfolio that included dealing with the myriad problems confronting the United States, from Middle East peace to Iraq’s war with Iran. A tenacious bureaucratic infighter, Rumsfeld was both smart and complex; he could be both charming and acerbic. After several months of diplomatic groundwork, Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad on December 19, 1983, carrying an amicable letter from President Reagan for Saddam Hussein. He had an impromptu meeting with Tariq Aziz in which over the course of two and a half hours they discussed all the fault lines of the region. Aziz, fluent in English, could be equally as glib as Rumsfeld, and the two men largely agreed on a shared view between the two nations, especially in curbing Iran’s power.
“The U.S. has no interest in an Iranian victory,” Rumsfeld told Aziz. “To the contrary. We would not want Iran’s influence expanded at the expense of Iraq.” As Rumsfeld wrote afterward, “I thought we had areas of common interest, particularly the security and stability in the Gulf which had been jeopardized as a result of the Iranian revolution.”29
The next day Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein for ninety minutes. It was the highest-level meeting between the two states in nearly twenty years. Saddam showed up in an army uniform, wearing the epaulets of a field marshal and a pistol on his hip. Iraqi television captured the two men’s prolonged handshake, much to Donald Rumsfeld’s later chagrin when it became a much ballyhooed video on the Internet following the U.S. overthrow of the same Iraqi leader when Rumsfeld was secretary of defense in 2003. Saddam was pleased with the warm tone of Reagan’s letter, telling Rumsfeld that it indicated a deep and serious understanding of the implications and dangers of the war and of an Iranian victory. “Having a whole generation of Iraqis and Americans grow up without understanding each other had negative implications and could lead to mix-ups,” Hussein stated. Rumsfeld agreed, saying that despite differences between the United States and Iraq, the two countries shared a common view, especially regarding stability in the Persian Gulf and curbing Iran. Rumsfeld expressed qualified American support to prevent Iraq’s defeat and pledged to try to curb the arms flow to Iran that perpetuated its military offensives. While the meeting between Rumsfeld and Hussein ended without any grand bargain, it reaffirmed American support for Iraq’s war against Iran and set the two nations on the path to full diplomatic relations, which formally occurred with the exchange of ambassadors in November 1984.30
If the Foreign Service can produce muddy-boots diplomats, Robert Oakley, the lean, drawn former naval intelligence officer, was certainly one of that rare breed. By 1984 Oakley had already had nearly thirty years of foreign policy experience, having served a tour on the NSC and ambassadorial postings to Zaire and Somalia, and he had seen his share of war, including Vietnam. Like most of his colleagues, Oakley viewed Iran as the major menace to American interests. While far from enamored with Saddam Hussein, Oakley believed an Iranian victory would spell catastrophe for the United States and its Arab allies.
Oakley headed an NSC-led interagency group to coordinate support for Iraq. Meeting in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House’s West Wing, representatives from State, Defense, CIA, and the Treasury Department examined the latest intelligence on the battlefront and looked for ways to provide the best assistance to the Iraqi military and to solicit support from other countries for Iraq.
While the United States refused to provide direct military support, Washington strongly encouraged other countries to do so. Oakley’s team looked at the military requirements of Saddam Hussein and tried to match up donor countries to meet those needs. In one case, South Korea provided 155-mm artillery shells for long-range artillery pieces provided by South Africa. The U.S. government discreetly approached both the French and the Italians to sell more equipment to Iraq. President Reagan personally supported the initiative, lobbying the Italian prime minister to supply Iraq with arms during an Oval Office meeting. Both countries obliged. For Paris, it was a lucrative business, with 40 percent of all its arms sales going to Iraq during the first half of the 1980s. This included a massive contract for 130 combat aircraft.31 The French sold the Iraqis five advanced Super Étendards to carry the Exocet antiship missile. This provided Iraq the means to effectively hit Iranian oil tankers throughout the Gulf. The aircraft arrived with a team of French advisers who instructed the Iraqis on everything from maintenance to tactics against Iran.
Oakley’s group elicited commitments from both the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments to provide even more assistance; both countries sent military advisers to Iraq.32 Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak sent thousands of “volunteers” to the country, who joined a brigade from North Yemen fighting in the trenches alongside the Iraqis. Jordan agreed to serve as an intermediary for American-made radars capable of detecting incoming Iranian missiles. Washington provided the radars to Jordan, which then sent them on to Baghdad. The United States and Egypt reached a secret agreement whereby Cairo would sell off its older, surplus Soviet-built equipment and, in return, Washington would backfill Mubarak’s military with more advanced, American-made weapons. Over the course of the war, Egypt sold over a billion dollars’ worth of military equipment to Iraq.33
Oakley took a liberal view of providing nonmilitary assistance to Iraq. The United States sold communications equipment, sixty Hughes helicopters (the same make as those used by U.S. Army Special Forces), as well as two thousand heavy trucks themselves worth $234 million. Iraq impressed all of this matériel into its army. To help justify the truck sale, the State Department used twisted logic, stating that, as Iraq was on the defense in the war, it “is now unlikely to use the trucks to contribute significantly to the destabilization of the region.”34
To complement the arms for Iraq, the United States worked to cut off a similar flow to Iran. To feed its military needs, Iran purchased $2 billion worth of weapons, munitions, and spare parts every year. It was a lucrative trade; any country who could fulfill that need stood to make huge profits. Overt and illicit weapons flowed into Iran from all over the globe in an underground arms trade. Iranian agents met in Frankfurt and Lisbon with shady arms dealers intent on profiting by providing American spare parts to Tehran. Israel and countries in Europe and Asia all clandestinely sold compatible apparatus for Iran’s American-made hardware. Between 1983 and 1985, Spain alone sold $280 million worth of spare artillery tubes, ammunition, and small arms. In the sam
e period, 28 percent of Portugal’s entire arms exports went to Iran, including the illegal transfer of as many as four thousand U.S.-made TOW missiles. Belgium and other NATO allies refurbished Iranian F-4 aircraft engines.35
In order to curtail weapons flowing to Iran, in the spring of 1983 the United States initiated Operation Staunch, spearheaded by Richard Fairbanks. Having succeeded in taking Iraq off the terrorism watch list, the State Department now declared Iran to be a state supporter of terrorism. This permitted the U.S. government to impose export sanctions against Iran, which prohibited the export of any American-made weapons to Tehran. Fairbanks knew it would be impossible to halt all arms sales to Iran, but he concentrated on stopping the sale of sophisticated equipment, such as radars and aircraft parts.36 He issued two or three démarches every month to European and Asian nations to pressure them to halt these exports. Ambassadors in Europe and Asia were instructed to “preach” the virtues of Operation Staunch: the dangers of providing armaments to Iran that perpetuated the war.
The U.S. military supported Fairbanks’s diplomatic campaign too. Senior officers at CENTCOM traveled across the Middle East with instructions to convince their counterparts to agree with the arms embargo and to forge a united effort to curtail selling any equipment that could aid the Iranian military.37