The enemy of my enemy is my customer: Iraq and the Bush administrations
By Margie Burns, Online Journal, September 5, 2002

Saddam Hussein received tremendous help from Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and from US corporations, and continues to receive passive economic assistance from the current Bush administration. One article could hardly list everything the Reagan and Bush administrations have given Iraq, but even a quick overview suggests the picture.

Reagan official Howard Teicher was a staffer for the National Security Council from 1982 to 1987, where he had regular contact with CIA Director William Casey and traveled with Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq. In a 1995 affidavit for a civil lawsuit, Teicher describes Reagan's Iraq policy as one of consistent, unequivocal support for Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran, when Iran was perceived to be the greater threat (to Saudi Arabia).

"CIA Director Casey personally spearheaded the effort to ensure that Iraq had sufficient military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to avoid losing the Iran-Iraq war . . . the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required. The United States also provide strategic operational advice to the Iraqis to better use their assets in combat. For example, in 1986, President Reagan sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran. This message was delivered by Vice President Bush who communicated it to Egyptian President Mubarak, who in turn passed the message to Saddam Hussein. Similar . . . advice was passed to Saddam Hussein through various meetings with European and Middle Eastern heads of state," Teicher said.

"I personally attended meetings in which CIA Director Casey or CIA Deputy Director Gates noted the need for Iraq to have certain weapons such as cluster bombs and anti-armor penetrators in order to stave off the Iranian attacks. When I joined the NSC staff in early 1982, CIA Director Casey was adamant that cluster bombs were a perfect 'force multiplier' that would allow the Iraqis to defend against the 'human waves' of Iranian attackers. I recorded those comments in the minutes . . . ," Teicher noted.

Teicher's NSC files are in the Ronald Reagan presidential archives in Simi Valley, California. The affidavit can be found online under "Real History Archives."

Moving to direct military aid, in 1982 President Reagan legalized conventional military sales to Iraq. Resulting sales amounted to more than a billion dollars' worth of exports with military ends.

Along with intelligence—if you call it that—and money and arms, the United States also furnished Saddam with biological and chemical capabilities.

The US Department of Commerce licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax, sent by the American Type Culture Collection, then situated in Rockville and now in Virginia. (It shares one building with George Mason University.) Shipments continued beyond Reagan under President Bush, after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988. In other words, Saddam Hussein was still able to purchase biological products for at least four more years after the justification of US/administration worry about Iran was past.

Also between 1985 and 1989, Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission got 17 batches of "various toxins and bacteria." In 1985, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) shipped at least three samples of West Nile Fever virus to Basra University. Other lethal samples included botulins and E. coli.

In 1994, Senator Don Riegle (D-MI, 1976–94) reported a list of lethal bio-products sent to Iraq. Their presence was verified by UN inspectors in Iraq.

Too many US corporations supplied Iraq with chemicals to list here; a class-action lawsuit filed by more than a thousand Gulf War vets in Galveston, Texas, in 1994 (Coleman et al v Alcolac et al) names several, including Alcolac, Phillips Petroleum, Unilever, Allied Signal, and Teledyne. The trial judge is Ben Hardin.

However, the Texas Supreme Court has now dismissed the American Type Culture Collection as a defendant, saying it cannot be sued in a Texas state court because it has no Texas location; the federal district court for south Texas had already dismissed the case for lack of federal jurisdiction. Those GOP judges and your tax dollars at work.

Aside from biological and chemical products, American companies were also licensed by the Commerce Department to supply Saddam with computers, components, electronics, and specialized equipment for future weaponry. Other shipments went to Iraq without benefit of licensing. The late Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Texas) of San Antonio, chairman of the House Banking Committee, entered at least 30 documents into the Congressional Record as part of his heroic investigations into US assistance to Iraq—investigations in which he was thwarted at every juncture, be it noted, by the CIA, the Bush I Department of Justice, and their supporters—mostly GOP—in Congress. (See www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1991 and 1992.)

Again, too many companies provided essential assistance to Iraq to list here. A scant list would include 60 Hughes helicopters in 1982, at least 56 military helicopters from Bell Textron in 1984, and $8 million worth of Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters in the late '80s; equipment for a tungsten-carbide manufacturing plant (later blown up) from Kennametal (Latrobe, Pa.); mainframes and other advanced computer systems from Digital, IBM, and Hewlett Packard; a supercomputer from Silicon Graphics in CA; and military technology including glass fiber and machine tools from Matrix-Churchill (based in Britain and Cleveland, Ohio). Matrix-Churchill also sold equipment to an arms dealer and manufacturer in Chile, Carlos Cardoen, who sent it to Iraq. The lawsuit in which Teicher's affidavit is filed involves Cardoen.

Congressional committees in both the House and the Senate in the early '90s documented extensive provisions to Iraq. A report by Rep. Samuel Gejdenson (D-CT) stated, "From 1985 to 1990, the United States Government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application." Every significant decision approving the numerous pricey deals with Iraq was made at the highest levels of government, and involved federal agencies, including not only the CIA, the DOJ and the DIA but also the Export-Import Bank, the Commerce Department, and the Agriculture Department among others.

It is a mark of the current Bush administration's disregard for accountability that it does not say where the much-touted "weapons of mass destruction" came from (nor that they've been extensively bombed already). But then, the same corporations that profited by dealing with Iraq before—including Vice President Cheney's Halliburton—would also profit from an illegal invasion of Iraq, and from a "rebuilding" afterward. The same companies are well able to purchase both Bush foreign policy and the bloodthirsty commentary that supports it—defying reason, evidence, and common sense—in the corporate media.

There can be little doubt that the whole get-Saddam campaign is bogus on moral grounds. Iraq depends for existence on its oil revenues (as even the CIA World Fact Book shows). It would go under if not for exporting oil. And it exports oil to US allies: Russia, France, Switzerland, Jordan and Turkey. But far from dampening that oil commerce, Bush's saber-rattling has boosted oil prices for Saddam (as well as for Bush campaign donors in the American energy sector).

But then, it would be ethically inconsistent for Bush to pressure US allies to keep them from doing what the administration itself does. As of last May, the American Petroleum Institute listed Iraq number eight on the top 10 list of foreign suppliers of oil to the US.

A year earlier, indeed, the US got more than 90 percent of Iraq's UN-approved oil-for-food deals; now those UN-certified oil sales are dropping—which means that Putin's Russia can become a bigger customer for Iraqi oil, through backdoor deals that release Putin from UN constraints.

Most observers agree by now that the porous administration "sanctions" against Iraq have done more to injure the Iraqi populace than to injure Saddam Hussein. There is only too much reason to believe that, if the administration were (illegally and unconstitutionally) to replace Saddam with a Bush White House puppet, such as the one in Afghanistan, the main beneficiaries would similarly be not the Iraqi people but the largest oil companies, the largest technology companies, and incidentally the demented "think tanks" and other white-collar goon squads they hire in Washington and New York

Margie Burns is a journalist whose articles have been published in Legal Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Salon.com, and the Baltimore Sun, among others, and an adjunct professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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