The detention of Saddam Hussein in Tikrit draws to a close a long relationship between the Iraqi dictator and the USA. Saddam Hussein was a leader of the Baathist party, whose 1963 coup in Iraq was directly supported by the US State Department and the CIA as 'a useful counterweight to the spread of communism ... and the pressure from Nasserism in Egypt' (John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, Saddam's War, 1991, 54-5). Saddam's first regime was short-lived but he rose to power again, with the support of the Iraqi Communist Party - only to turn on them at the end of the 1970s. In 1980 Saddam started a war against the radical Islamic Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, at the direct request of US President Jimmy Carter's Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski (Bulloch and Morris 75-6). In the course of that war, Saddam attacked Kurds at Halabja, using chemical weapons supplied by the West, and, as journalist John Pilger recently uncovered, with US military advisors in the field. Once again Saddam was the loyal ally of the west, crushing popular opposition - so how did he make the transition to all-purpose hate figure in the first America-Iraq war of 1990-91?
Bulloch and Morris have the insight that 'in the final analysis, the strength of the international response to Saddam's challenge was not about Kuwait or the future security of Israel or even about oil; it was about the status of the existing powers - particularly of the United States - in the New World Order'. (17)
Allied commander General Norman Schwarzkopf explains how the New World Order put Iraq in America's firing line in his autobiography 'It Doesn't take a Hero' (with Peter Petre, Bantam Press, 1991).
The book documents how, in the lead up to the Gulf War itself, Schwarzkopf's professional militarism coincided with the American military establishment's needs of the moment. Schwarzkopf joined Central Command, which covers parts of the Middle East, in July 1988. By July 1989, running short of the enemies a general needs to justify his job, he was pointing the finger at Iraq:
'I was confident of the Middle East's strategic importance and, therefore, of Central Command's reason for existence. Nobody except a few stubborn hardliners believed that we'd go to war against the Soviets in the Middle East....So I asked myself, what was most likely? Another confrontation like the tanker war, one that had the United States intervening in a regional conflict that had gotten out of control and was threatening the flow of oil to the rest of the world. What was the worst case? Iraq as the aggressor....' (p286)
Schwarzkopf worked overtime to throw out the old 'Zagros Mountains plan', which assumed a Soviet invasion and replaced it with 'Internal Look'. The new plan assumed an Iraqi invasion to seize Saudi oil fields.
The telling thing here is that Schwarzkopf, in line with his own career outlook assumes that there must be an enemy, and then goes looking for one. The wish is father to the thought. What is generally true for generals happens to be particularly true for a militaristic society like the USA - first they needed an enemy, then they found one.
Looking back at this episode, it is not hard to see why perceptive commentators believed the Iraqi regime had been set up to invade Kuwait in August 1990. On the eve of the invasion April Glaspie, the US ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein that the USA had 'no opinion on the Iraq-Kuwaiti dispute' - at the same time that the US military command for the region was actually preparing for a war with Iraq. The transcripts of the Glaspie-Saddam encounter are reproduced in Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent's 'Secret Dossier - The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf War', Paladin, 1991. The transcripts show that Saddam was convinced that he had American backing for the Kuwaiti invasion, just as he had for his previous military actions, and was incredulous when he was challenged by the US. In late July 1990, Schwarzkopf staged a mock-up of 'Internal Look' just two weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As he says himself 'the movements of Iraq's real-world ground and air forces eerily paralleled the imaginary scenario in our game' (Schwarzkopf, p292).
After the Gulf War, there was no possibility that the Iraq could be allowed back into the pro-Western club. By surviving the US-led invasion, Saddam stood - rather against his own inclinations - as a permanent challenge to American status. Martin Woollacott, a liberal Guardian journalist, summed up the prevailing consensus:
'The issue of whether or not Baghdad still has, hidden away somewhere, a serious nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, or ballistic capacity, on which it can now begin to build again, important though it is, is less important than the fact that Saddam has successfully defied Washington and New York. The weapons question is a red herring.' (Guardian, 29 July 1992)
-- James Heartfield