He
Takes His Secrets To The Grave
By Robert Fisk
07 January, 2007
The
Independent
We've
shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever
of the trapdoor in Baghdad , Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless,
outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain
- gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story
which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember.
And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given
to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since
the Second World War - is dead.
Gone is the man who personally
received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After
Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses
of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the
Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every
home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot.
Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children,
were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu
Ghraib.
There is growing evidence
across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior
American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and
the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse
if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was
instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence
on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from
Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct
contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.
"Mr Fisk... at the very
beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the
Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US
satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything
on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and
behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the
Karun river, the tank revetments - thousands of them - all the way up
the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want
more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air
to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad.
The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"
I was with Saddam's forward
commandos at the time, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi
forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front
with detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran
outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within
a week. The commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me
how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian
armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers
called him "General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam after
that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence
information.
Iran's official history of
the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical
weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad,
Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory
east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked miles and miles
in this fucking desert, just counting," he said. "We got to
700 and got muddled and had to start counting again ... The Iraqis had
used, for the first time, a combination - the nerve gas would paralyse
their bodies ... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs.
That's why they spat blood."
At the time, the Iranians
claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the
US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy
negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain
secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men
at this period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But
a largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological
Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on
the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior
to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments
of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which
produces anthrax, andEscherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report
concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq
with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development
of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including
... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings,
chemical warfare filling equipment."
Nor was the Pentagon unaware
of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical weapons. In 1988, for example,
Saddam gave his personal permission for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence
intelligence officer - one of 60 American officers who were secretly
providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information
on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments
- to visit the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town
from the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had
used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior defence intelligence
officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that the use of gas
on the battlefield by the Iraqis "was not a matter of deep strategic
concern".
I saw the results, however.
On a long military hospital train back to Tehran from the battle front,
I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their
lungs - the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the
windows - and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new
bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully
burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No
wonder that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter
of Shia villagers, not for his war crimes against Iran.
We still don't know - and
with Saddam's execution we will probably never know - the extent of
US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum
of which was spent on the purchase of American weapons from Jordan and
Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987, Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit.
By 1990, just before Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between
Iraq and the US had grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign
minister, Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary
of State, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended
to drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day Iraq - pushed
for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.
In 1989, Britain, which had
been giving its own covert military assistance to Saddam guaranteed
£250m to Iraq shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist
Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an explosion
at a factory at Hilla which was using the very chemical components sent
by the US, was later hanged. Within a month of Bazoft's arrest William
Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, said: "I doubt if there
is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially
so well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly... A few more
Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult."
Even more repulsive were
the remarks of the then Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing
controls on British arms sales to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote,
because "it would look very cynical if, so soon after expressing
outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach
to arms sales".
Saddam knew, too, the secrets
of the attack on the USS Stark when, on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched
a missile attack on the American frigate, killing more than a sixth
of the crew and almost sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam's
excuse that the ship was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and allowed
Saddam to refuse their request to interview the Iraqi pilot.
The whole truth died with
Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington
and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced
for ever.
'The Great War for Civilisation:
The Conquest of the Middle East' by Robert Fisk is now available in
paperback
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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