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CHAPTER 2

Appeasement

At dawn on September 22, 1980, Iraqi jets bombed Iranian airfields and military installations. At the same time, Iraqi soldiers crossed into Iran's Kurdistan Province in the north and its predominantly Arab Khuzistan Province in the south, the latter a strategic prize where Iran's oil industry started in the early twentieth century, and the location of rich reservoirs. By mid-November, Iraq had taken the port city of Khorramshahr and surrounded the oil facilities in Abadan. Saddam Hussein, who had become Iraq's president the year before, had gambled that Iran's revolutionary chaos would enable his country to achieve a quick victory over its much larger neighbor.

The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years. It consumed a million lives, wounded or maimed another two million, and cost more than $1 trillion. With its static fronts, trench warfare, and relentless shelling, the Iran-Iraq War resembled the First World War. Like that conflict, it quickly became a stalemate where neither side could win, nor could they agree to a truce. There was another similarity: beginning in 1983, Iraq made use of increasingly sophisticated chemical weapons to offset Iran's superior numbers. It was the first sustained use of these weapons since they were banned under the 1925 Geneva Protocols, a treaty that resulted from revulsion over the horrors of poison gas in the First World War.

The war was ostensibly fought over the location of a border in a river. Iraq's two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, converge in the south to form the Shatt al Arab, which is Iraq's access to the sea. South of Basra, once Iraq's main port, the Shatt al Arab becomes the border between Iran and Iraq. The Iraqis, backed by the British, long insisted the actual boundary should be on the Iranian shore while the Iranians argued it was the thalweg, or the middle of the river's deepest channel. In 1975, at the margins of an OPEC meeting in Algiers, the Shah of Iran and then Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein agreed that the thalweg would be the border. In return, the Shah agreed to cut off support for a Kurdish rebellion in Iraq that he had initiated for the purpose of extracting this concession from Iraq.

In January 1979, the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became Iran's de facto ruler. Khomeini despised Iraq's Ba'athist regime. Not only was its secular and nationalist character antithetical to the values of the Islamic revolution, it repressed Iraq's Shiites in a land where they were the majority and that contained Shiite Islam's most important religious sites. Khomeini had lived for fourteen years in exile in Najaf, the southern Iraqi city that is the resting place of Ali, the first Imam and the founder of the Shiite sect (the Shiites are, literally, "the party of Ali"). Khomeini had witnessed firsthand the predations of the Ba'athists. He also had a personal grudge. In 1978, at the behest of the Shah, Saddam expelled him from Iraq, a decision that proved the Shah's undoing and nearly Saddam's as well. From his place of exile in the Paris suburbs, Khomeini directed the anti-Shah uprising as he could never have done from a police state like Iraq.

Once in power in Iran, Khomeini appealed directly to Iraq's Shiites to replace a corrupt secular regime with a just -- that is, Islamic -- state. Saddam knew this was fertile ground and he responded harshly. Using the pretext of a failed assassination attempt on Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz by a Shiite radical, Iraqi security forces on April 1, 1980, arrested the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al Sadr, Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric, and his sister Bint al Huda. While the ayatollah was made to watch, the sister was raped and murdered. The torturers then set afire al Sadr's beard before driving nails into his head. A furious Khomeini called for Saddam's overthrow. On September 17, 1980, Saddam abrogated the Algiers Accord and defiantly asserted Iraqi sovereignty over the entire Shatt al Arab. Five days later, he launched war.

Beyond the personal vendetta between Khomeini and Saddam and the territorial dispute that was its proximate cause, the Iran-Iraq War was a clash of ideologies and civilizations. Saddam saw himself as the embodiment of Arab nationalism fighting against the Persians. He even referred to the war as Saddam's Qadisiya, recalling the seventh-century battle in which Arabs defeated the Persians and brought Islam to Iraq. Khomeini saw the war not only as the defense of the nascent Iranian Islamic Republic, but as an opportunity to spread the Islamic revolution to his fellow Shiites in Iraq.

Although Iraq's initial blitzkrieg allowed it to take territory temporarily from its disorganized neighbor, the balance very much favored Iran. Not only was Iran three times more populous, but it had the advantage of strategic depth. Aside from the oil facilities at Abadan and Khorramshahr, Iran's main cities and critical infrastructure are far from the Iraqi border. By contrast, most of Iraq's people live in the eastern part of the country, within easy range of Iranian aircraft. Basra, Iraq's second largest city, is on the Shatt al Arab. The Iranians shelled it heavily during the war. In the war's early days, Iran closed down Iraq's oil exports through the Persian Gulf, damaging its offshore loading facility at Faw.* Iran also had the advantage of a long coastline on the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Bandar-e-Abbas, a major Iranian port and oil export facility, is five hundred miles from Iraq, and was not bombed until the later stages of the war.Ý

Saddam and Khomeini each appealed to the disaffected populations in the other's country. Both were disappointed. Saddam hoped that Khuzistan's Arab majority would welcome Iraq's troops as liberators. They did not, in part because they were Shiites with no desire to trade Persian rule for a Sunni tyrant. The Iraqi Kurds readily accepted Iranian support, and used the war to expand their anti-Iraq military activities. Khomeini had hoped that Iraq's Shiites, who made up the bulk of the Iraqi Army, would come over to the Iranian side. A few did but most fought stubbornly, if not enthusiastically, for Iraq through the eight years of war. In 2003, U.S. analysts looked back on this apparent Shiite loyalty to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War as evidence that Iran would not have undue influence in post-Saddam Iraq. It was a wildly wrong misreading. Shiite soldiers fought for Saddam not out of love for Iraq or the regime, but because they were conscripts who had little choice. As we shall see, the analysts might have done better to examine the words and actions of Iraq's Shiite religious and political leaders.

In 1982, the Iranians counterattacked, expelling the Iraqis from Khuzistan and pushing into Iraqi territory. Khomeini fired up Iranian recruits with religious fervor, promising instant entry into paradise for those who died as martyrs against the infidel Iraqis. Boys as young as twelve volunteered to be human minesweepers, crossing no man's-land chained together and carrying plastic keys to unlock the gates of paradise.* The Iraqis, with a conscript army mostly filled in the lower ranks by sullen Shiites and potentially rebellious Kurds, had no comparable commitment to self-sacrifice.

After the Iranian counterattack, Saddam Hussein proposed a cease-fire, and a return to the prewar boundary. Khomeini refused, insisting that Iran would only stop the war if Saddam were gone. In a direct appeal to Iraq's Shiites, Khomeini told them, "We are related by race, traditions, and religion...No other government or nation in the world has the right to be concerned about Iraq's future." About the same time, SCIRI formed an Iraqi government in exile in Tehran, headed by Muhammed Bakr al Hakim, with the express goal of creating an Iranian-style Islamic republic.*

As Iraq's military situation deteriorated in 1983, Saddam deployed poison gas. From November 1983 to August 1988, Iraq's use of chemical weapons escalated both in quantity and sophistication. The first attacks involved mustard gas, a blistering agent first employed by the Germans in Ypres, Flanders, in 1917. By the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was using sophisticated nerve agents, as well as experimenting with "cocktails" of nerve gas, cyanide, and mustard gas.

The initial U.S. response to the Iran-Iraq War was muted. President Jimmy Carter was in what turned out to be his final months in office when Saddam launched his initial attack. Carter had no reason to be sympathetic to Iran, which was holding fifty-two American diplomats hostage. With U.S. support, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 479 on September 28, 1980. It called for a cease-fire, but without demanding that Iraq give up the territory it had seized. The Iranians were furious with the United Nations' one-sided stance, although they had themselves to blame for the ongoing hostage crisis that resulted in Iran's isolation. The outbreak of war diverted Iranian attention from negotiations aimed at ending the hostage crisis, and destroyed whatever slim chance may have existed for Carter to win reelection.

In 1981, the Reagan Administration continued its predecessor's hands-off approach to the war. But after Iran turned the military tide in 1982, the Administration became concerned about the consequences of an Iranian victory. It also saw an opportunity to move Iraq from its alliance with the Soviet Union into a closer relationship with the United States, a relationship that the more optimistic Administration strategists thought might actually replace the lost alliance with the Shah as a means for protecting American interests in the northern Persian Gulf.

Just as Iraq started using poison gas, the Reagan Administration began in earnest its courtship of Saddam Hussein. In staffing his administration, Ronald Reagan had passed over Donald Rumsfeld, President Gerald Ford's chief of staff and defense secretary. In 1983, as something of a consolation prize, Reagan asked Rumsfeld to be his special emissary to Saddam Hussein with the goal of reestablishing diplomatic relations, which Iraq had severed in 1967 in retaliation for U.S. support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli Six Day War. Years later, as he pushed the United States to war in 2002, Rumsfeld claimed that he had protested Iraq's use of chemical weapons, but he did not raise the matter in his two meetings with Saddam Hussein. Meeting with Saddam in December 1983, Rumsfeld discussed America and Iraq's common antipathy for Iran and Syria, U.S. efforts to stop arms going to Iran, and U.S. financing for an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba. Even though the second meeting, in March 1984, took place after the State Department publicly expressed concern about Iraq's use of chemical weapons, Rumsfeld was silent on the matter with the dictator. He did tell Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz that the international community took a dim view of Iraq's use of chemical weapons, but by raising the matter with Aziz and not Saddam, Rumsfeld clearly signaled that Iraq's use of chemical weapons was a secondary issue for the Reagan Administration.

In March 1984, the U.N. secretary-general submitted an experts' report to the Security Council on Iraq's use of chemical weapons. The Dutch and British representatives to the U.N. circulated a resolution condemning the use of chemical weapons (without specifically blaming Iraq) but the United States took no significant actions to support its allies. The State Department did meet with Nizar Hamdoon, Iraq's ambassador to the United States, to discuss how the Security Council might handle the issue in a way that would cause the fewest objections in Baghdad. The Iraqis did not want the Security Council to adopt a resolution on the matter (which could have been legally consequential) and asked instead for U.S. support in limiting any Security Council action to a statement by the council's president. The Reagan Administration obliged and the Iraqis got the outcome they desired. At the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the Reagan Administration went a step further and actively opposed a resolution condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan removed Iraq from the State Department's list of countries supporting terrorism, although there had been no significant change in Iraq's support for radical Palestinian groups that were the principal terrorist concern at the time. The Administration began providing guarantees from the government-controlled Commodity Credit Corporation for Iraqi purchases of U.S. agricultural products in 1983 and extended Export-Import Bank credits to Iraq in 1984. While these credits were intended to finance the purchases of U.S. agricultural and manufactured goods, they aided Iraq's war effort by freeing up other funds that could be used for military purposes. By 1988, U.S. subsidies to Iraq approached $1 billion a year.

In 1983, the Reagan Administration ordered the CIA to share battlefield intelligence with Iraq. Liaison officers provided Iraq with the locations of Iranian units, which enabled Iraq to anticipate and prepare for Iranian attacks. Assisted by American intelligence, Iraq was able to target Iranian troop concentrations with chemical weapons. The Administration certainly knew how its intelligence was being used. Thus, while the State Department publicly criticized Iraq for the use of chemical weapons, the Reagan Administration was working secretly to make them more effective.*

Ronald Reagan had good reasons not to want to see Iraq lose the Iran-Iraq War. If Iran prevailed, it would install in power like-minded Iraqi Shiites -- men such as Bakr al Hakim -- who would give Iran de facto control over the vast oil resources of both countries. Reagan's strategists feared that Iran would emerge as the preeminent power in the Persian Gulf, and be in a position to spread its revolutionary Islamic message to the Gulf's Shiite crescent, which includes Bahrain, Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province, and Kuwait.

However, Reagan's courtship of Saddam was not just about blocking an Iranian victory in the war. The president and his team saw in Saddam Hussein a potential partner in the Middle East, both politically and economically. By seeing in Saddam what he wanted to see, Reagan overlooked, and then became an apologist for, gross human rights violations, the use of poison gas, and, ultimately, genocide.

In the summer of 1984, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for which I worked as a professional staff member, deployed a five-man staff delegation to look at U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf. After a week of meetings in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, I and staff colleagues Casimir Yost and Graeme Bannerman flew to Baghdad. The Saddam Hussein International Airport was sparkling new -- it had been built to accommodate world leaders slated to come to Baghdad for the 1982 Non-Aligned Summit* -- but was mostly unused thanks to the war.

The Iraqis afforded us extraordinary access, with lengthy meetings with Deputy Prime Minister Aziz and Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan; it was one of the first times Ramadan agreed to see an American delegation. My colleagues, very much caught up in the excitement of a new relationship with a country that some hoped might be the next Egypt,Ý peppered the Iraqis with questions about restoring diplomatic relations and a possible Iraqi role in the Middle East peace process.

I was skeptical. I asked Aziz about his use of poison gas on Iran, which he denied. Ramadan, dressed in green fatigues and with a pistol on the belt, explained that the United States had not yet done enough to justify Iraq resuming full diplomatic relations, as if the United States should jump through hoops to meet the requirements of his despotic regime.

On the surface, Baghdad was a thriving metropolis. We stayed at the brand-new Sheraton on the banks of the Tigris. Every night swank wedding parties passed through its soaring lobby, and affluent Iraqis rode the glass elevators to the rooftop restaurant. In the pool below my room, several young women bathed topless, not a sight I expected in the Arab Middle East.

But there was much about Baghdad that was not normal. There were the ubiquitous portraits of Saddam Hussein -- resplendent in his field marshal's uniform, in a dark suit waving a large cigar, in the turban of a Kurd, on his knees at prayer in a Shiite mosque. These reminded me of the Lenins, Marxes, and Engelses I had seen in every public space in the Soviet Union during a trip I took as a teenager. There was also the pervasive fear. I was warned not to take a picture from my hotel room, since it not only overlooked the Tigris, but also Saddam's Republican Palace. Guests, I was told, had been arrested for ignoring this prohibition, and I wondered how many secret policemen spent their days watching the hotel's windows. I noticed the nervousness of the minions to Iraq's top leaders. They were afraid of their bosses, scared of saying the wrong thing to us, and jumped at any chance to ingratiate themselves with the higher-ups. In his all-white office (white leather sofas, alabaster table, etc.), Ramadan pulled out a cigar and four aides rushed forward with lighters. (None of them worked.)

My unease grew when I visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the vast parade grounds not far from the presidential complex. Newly built to honor the dead of the still raging Iran-Iraq War, it was meant to resemble a sword (in the colors of the Iraqi flag) thrusting upward with a large shield. It is not great architecture. I would drive past it in 2005 with Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, who remarked that it looked like a toilet cover and brush. No one dared describe it that way in 1984. Underneath the shield at the top of the monument was the soldier's metal coffin, with a wreath of pink plastic roses sent by North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. In a museum below the coffin, I counted 144 poster-sized photographs, each of Saddam Hussein.

I wondered about a leader whose idea of a war memorial involved 144 pictures of himself. When I wrote the first draft of our staff report, I described the Stalinist features of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. My colleagues insisted that this be toned down or deleted. We had a battle over my characterization of Aziz's statement that Iraq had not used chemical weapons. I said he had lied. They did not dispute the fact of Iraqi use of chemical weapons, but objected to the inclusion of language that might derail the dream of a strategic partnership with Iraq. In the end, we simply reported Aziz's denial. Some of the objections came from the Reagan Administration, with whom the draft had been shared.

Our report, War in the Gulf, was published in August 1984. Just after Reagan's reelection in November, the United States and Iraq restored full diplomatic relations