The United States is going to war against Saddam Hussein once again, this time without the support of the Gulf War coalition or the United Nations. Russia, China and France, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, do not support us. Neither do Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the two most important Arab countries in the Gulf War coalition. Essentially our only ally is Great Britain.
Saddam Hussein is an evil man with a frightening array of weapons of mass destruction. But who funded his war machine? Americans refuse to acknowledge that his military power was largely a creation of American foreign policy during the Reagan-Bush administrations that considered him to be a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism.
On the fourth of November, 1979, a mob of young Iranians, angered by President Carters decision a week earlier to admit the deposed and ailing Shah of Iran into the United States for emergency medical treatment, stormed the American embassy in Teheran. The Iranian militants took fifty-two American hostages, demanding the return of the Shah. Frustrated with his unsuccessful efforts to secure the release of the American hostages in Teheran by diplomacy, Carter launched a daring military rescue attempt. Six large American transport planes departed from a base in southern Egypt to a destination deep inside Iran, where they refueled eight American helicopters flown in from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Oman. The helicopters were to swoop down over the American embassy in Teheran, landing troops who would extricate the hostages. At the last minute, mechanical problems forced the plan to be aborted. As the transports and helicopters evacuated the site, one helicopter collided with a transport on the ground, causing a fire that killed eight men. The survivors fled, abandoning the wreckage and the dead. The American hostages were not released until minutes after Ronald Reagans inauguration on January 21, 1981. Although none of the hostages had been killed, Americans wanted revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini who they blamed for the humiliation of the embassy seizure.
Encouraged by Americas hatred of the Khomeini regime and the American embargo that deprived the Iranian military of replacement parts for the equipment the United States had sold to the Shah over the previous decade, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran on September 22, 1980. The naked act of aggression was condoned by the United States even though we knew that Saddam was a wicked man. Saddam, at least, was godless. Godlessness we understood. Islamic fundamentalism scared the hell out of Americans.
After initial battleground successes by the Iraqis, the Iranians pushed Saddams forces back, relying on human waves of Islamic believers whose indifference to their own survival brought back memories of the Chinese during the Korean War. By 1982 the Iranians had forced the Iraqis back across the border, and the war entered a new phase - the destruction of each others ability to export oil. Both sides attacked oil production facilities and tankers carrying oil through the Persian Gulf. At this point the United States took overt action against Iran, justifying our intervention as an obligation to keep world oil supplies flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. Although we continued to claim that we were neutral in the conflict, our military might was directed solely at Iran despite the fact that Iraq was responsible for most of the tanker sinkings. American hypocrisy was most flagrant after an Iraqi fighter fired an Exocet missile at the USS Stark on May 17, 1987, killing thirty-seven American seamen. Washington immediately blamed Iran for escalating the war. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger responded to the Iraqi attack by threatening Iran, not Iraq - Mark this well, the use of the vital sea-lanes of the Persian Gulf will not be dictated by the Iranians. Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Armitage bluntly confessed, We cant allow Iraq to be defeated.
On July 3, 1988 the USS Vincennes fired a missile that brought down Iran Air 655, an A-300 Airbus flying in broad daylight on a scheduled route in approved commercial airspace over international waters, killing 290 civilians. The American response was shameful. American authorities first claimed that the commercial flight was really an attempt to conceal an Iranian fighter plane with hostile intentions that was flying above airliner. When that excuse was proved to be a lie, they claimed the plane had exhibited puzzling behavior which had led to the mistake, another lie. In 1983 a South Korean airliner had been shot down by a Soviet interceptor after veering three hundred miles off course into Soviet territory above sensitive military installations in the dead of night. The American response to this incident was indignant. The Reagan administration self-righteously proclaimed that there was no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless civilian airliner. The Russians apologized and paid reparations of over $40 million to families of the victims. Five years later, the U.S. government had no apologies for its crime except, While horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident. No reparations were ever made.
The United States continued to support and arm Saddam Hussein until the eve of the invasion of Kuwait. Even as Iraq amassed a hundred thousand troops on Kuwaits border, the Bush administration virtually encouraged Iraqi aggression. On July 25, 1990 the American Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, gave assurances to Saddam that his dispute with Kuwait was an Arab matter, and that the U.S. would not get involved. Saddam interpreted the statement to be a tacit signal from the Bush administration to go ahead with his plans to invade Kuwait. (In later testimony, Glaspie gave the feeble excuse, We never expected they would take all of Kuwait.) A week later, after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, Bush belatedly labeled Saddam the new Hitler. Operation Desert Storm drove Iraqs troops out of Kuwait, but then stopped. Bush had no intention of removing Saddam from power. When a democratic uprising tried to overthrow him after the Gulf War, it was cruelly betrayed by America, leading to the slaughter of thousands more at the hands of Saddams troops.
The truth is America does not want Saddam overthrown by a democratic rebellion. That would risk a takeover by Islamic Shiites, which make up a majority of the Iraqi people, and the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish state. We fear Islamic fundamentalism; our ally, Turkey, fears a Kurdish independent state even more than Saddam does. The bottom line is that we prefer a godless tyrant to the democratic alternative.
Mac Williams
Cosmos Mariner
Destination Unknown
© February 16, 1998