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According
to the corporate media and the two major political
parties, Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest
presidents in American modern history. They attribute to
the man the myths of ending the Cold War, reviving
America's economy, and uplifting the sense of pride and
nationalism. They also belittle and dismiss as
insignificant some of Reagan's policies that even the
institutional establishment had admitted to their
fallacy and the harm that they had caused, such as
defying and lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra
affairs, supporting reactionary regimes in Latin America
and the Middle East, creating the biggest deficit in
modern US history, assaulting the labor unions and
fighting the working class for the benefits of the
wealthy, shifting the political process in the United
States (including the opposition party) toward the
right, and giving rise to the neoconservatives and their
drive toward Pax Americana and the rise of American
imperialism.
To begin with, we need to clear a few facts and expose
the presiding myths. Reagan did not win the Cold War.
The Soviet Union collapsed from within due to decades
long of struggle to remain alive through artificial
engineering of outmoded state machinery. If the pundits
claim credit for Reagan to end of the Cold War, then
they also need to acknowledge the roles of Soviet
President Mikel Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II.
As for lifting-up America's sense of pride and
nationalism, Reagan lifted the spirit of American
capitalism in rescuing its myth in the world as enemy of
the workers and the oppressed to one that was the engine
of freedom, prosperity, and moral values. Reagan managed
to dress up US capitalism both at home and abroad as a
friend of the little man, finding support for this
exploiting economic and political system even within the
very people that it was exploiting. Perhaps this was
Reagan's biggest achievement.
Yet, the greatest damage that the Reagan's policy caused
and we continue to suffer its consequences was in Iraq
by supporting the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein
despite Saddam's clear violation of human rights and
threats to his neighbors. In fact, it was Reagan that
supplied Saddam with the means to develop his weapons of
mass destruction that Bush Jr. later used as an excuse
in 2003 to launch his war and occupy Iraq.
Concern about the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and
about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a
gradual warming of relations between Iraq and the United
States. American National Security Advisor Zbignew
Brzezinski publicly encouraged Iraq to attack Iran and
take back the Shat-al-Arab waterway. Most American
foreign service officers despised the regime of
Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran for having held diplomats
of the US embassy hostages for 444 days. The "Carter
Doctrine" was established in 1980, stating that America
would intervene militarily in the region to assure its
access to oil. In that same year, Saddam's armies
invaded Iran, instigating a ruinous war that lasted for
eight long years. The invasion was prompted as much by
American urging as it was by Saddam's dislike for
Islamic fundamentalism.
There was a sea change in relations between America and
Iraq when Ronald Reagan became president. Fearing the
rise of Soviet influence in Iran, and fearing an Iranian
takeover of the region, the Reagan administration began
actively arming and supporting Saddam. By 1982, Iraq was
removed from the list of terrorist sponsoring nations.
By 1984, America was actively sharing military
intelligence with Saddam's army. This aid included
arming Iraq with potent weapons, providing satellite
imagery of Iranian troops deployments and tactical
planning for battles, assisting with air strikes, and
assessing damage after bombing campaigns.
Following further high-level policy review, Ronald
Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive
(NSDD-114) on November 26, 1983, concerning U.S. policy
toward the Iran-Iraq war. The directive reflected the
administration's priorities, calling for heightened
regional military cooperation to defend oil facilities,
and measures to improve U.S. military capabilities in
the Persian Gulf.
Soon thereafter, Donald Rumsfeld, the head of the
multinational pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co.
at the time, was dispatched to the Middle East as a
presidential envoy. His December 1983 tour of regional
capitals included Baghdad, where he was to establish
"direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and
President Saddam Hussein." Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and
the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest,
shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and discussed U.S
efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq's
oil. Rumsfeld made no reference to Iraq's chemical
weapons.
The Reagan administration allowed the Iraqis to buy a
wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from
American suppliers. The shopping list included a
computerized database for Saddam's security police,
helicopters to transport Iraqi officials, television
cameras for video surveillance applications,
chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraqi Atomic Energy
Commission (IAEC), and numerous shipments of
"bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the IAEC. The bacteria
cultures were used to make biological weapons, including
anthrax.
A US Senate inquiry in 1995 accidentally revealed that
during the Iran-Iraq War the United States had sent Iraq
samples of all the strains of germs used by Iraq to make
biological weapons. The strains were sent by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Type
Culture Collection to the same sites in Iraq that UN
weapons inspectors later determined were part of Iraq's
biological weapons program.
The Senate Banking Committee reported in 1994 that the
U.S. Commerce Department had traced shipments of
biological materials identical to those later found and
destroyed by U.N. inspectors. These shipments continued
at least until November 1989. Assisted by Pentagon
expertise, which secretly seconded its Air Force
officers to work with the Iraqis, Iraq began using its
air force more aggressively, hitting Iran's economic and
infrastructure targets and extending its air strikes to
the Iranian oil terminals in the Lower Gulf.
U.S. support for Iraq blossomed further in 1983 when the
United States provided economic aid to Iraq in the form
of Commodities Credit Corporation guarantees to purchase
U.S. agricultural products ($400 million in 1983, $513
million in 1984, and climbing to $652 million in 1987).
This allowed Iraq to use money it otherwise would have
spent on food to buy weapons and other military
supplies. With Iraq off the terrorism list, the U.S.
also provided quasi-military aid.
An example of U.S. sales during this time of germ
warfare and other weapons to Iraq included "deadly
pathogens," with government approval, some from the
army's center for germ research in Fort Detrick. The
British government also conceded after the Scott Inquiry
Report was published that it continued to grant licenses
to British firms to export materials to Iraq usable for
biological weapons at least until December 1996.
So strong was the hold of pro-Iraq lobby on the
Republican administration of President Reagan that it
succeeded in getting the White House frustrate the
Senate's attempt to penalize Baghdad for violating the
Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons, which it had
signed. This led Saddam to believe that Washington was
firmly on his side, a conclusion that paved the way for
his invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf War.
On April 18, 1988, the United States conducted Operation
Praying Mantis. In response to Iran's mining of the
Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy
engaged the Iranian Navy in the Gulf, sunk two of Iran's
biggest surface ships and crippled a third. On July 3,
1988 U.S. forces once again engaged some of the remnants
of the Iranian Navy in the Strait of Hormuz and an
Iranian civilian jet strayed over the battle area. The
USS Vincennes mistook the airliner for an Iranian
fighter and shot it down. Although it was a mistake, in
Tehran it was viewed as a sign that the United States
was now actively allied with Iraq and would take any
action to defeat Tehran. In August 1988, Ayatollah
Khomeini, who had resisted all previous pleas to end the
war, was forced to concede that Iran could not fight
both Iraq and the United States any longer. Tehran
accepted a cease-fire with Iraq that brought the war to
an end.
The most reprehensible of Saddam's actions that the
Reagan administration chose to overlook was his campaign
against Iraq's Kurds known as al-Anfal, a twisted
reference to a verse in the Koran. In March 1987, Saddam
appointed his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, as governor
of northern Iraq. Less than six weeks after his
appointment, Majid employed chemical warfare to wipe out
several towns in the Balisan valley, where one of the
Kurdish opposition group was located. In February 1988,
Majid unleashed the al-Anfal campaign. Iraqi forces
began clearing areas of Kurdish residence with massive
bombardments of chemical weapons and high explosives,
followed by army sweeps that often killed anyone left
alive and razed to the ground anything left standing.
On March 15, 1988, Majid conducted his most famous
attack, swamping the Kurdish town of Halabcha with
several varieties of chemical weapons and killing at
least five thousand Kurdish civilians. When the campaign
finally ended in 1989, some two hundred thousand Kurds
were dead, roughly 1.5 million had been forcibly
resettled, huge swaths of Kurdistan has been scorched by
chemical warfare, and four thousand towns had been
razed. The U.S. Senate passed a bill to impose sanctions
on Iraq, but the Reagan administration prevailed upon
the Congress to drop the matter.
Today, Saddam is held in US custody, awaiting trial for
his crimes. It would be interesting to listen to his
testimonies (granted if he stayed alive for his trial
and did not die of some mysterious cause while in
prison) and reveal the support and aid that he received
from Bush's hero, the great communicator Ronald Reagan,
in waging wars on the oppressed.
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