Democracy,
Deception and the Arms Trade: The US, Iraq and Weapons
of Mass Destruction
Irene
Gendzier
Irene
Gendzier teaches political science at Boston University.
This essay is part of a longer study to be included
in her forthcoming book on US policy in the Middle East.
|
A
US expert of the UNSCOM mission in Iraq inspects
a 500 kg mustard-filled bomb with a sonar resonance
system, 1991. (UN/CORBIS SYGMA) |
The
controversy over Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons
of mass destruction, the prime justification for the
Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, has apparently
been laid to rest. A succession of US-commissioned reports
have failed to confirm the Bush administration’s claims.
According to an editorial in the January 13 New York
Times, however, “die-hard supporters of the invasion”
continue to believe that “something would turn up,”
even as it claimed that that the futile search for such
weapons “may have been one of the greatest non-events
of the early twenty-first century.” As though to soften
its conclusion, the editorial indicated that the fact
that “nothing was found does not absolutely, positively
prove that there wasn’t something there once, something
that was disassembled and trucked over the border to
Syria or buried in yet another Iraqi rose garden.”
Leaving
aside rose gardens, the editor’s suspicions were on
target. There was, of course, something there in the
years before the 1991 Gulf war. As the record shows,
industrialized countries, among them the United States,
sold Iraq weapons prohibited by international conventions.
This part of the record, however, has also become a
“non-event,” one victim of a rampant political amnesia.
The
record—which is unclassified—is found in
hearings held by the House of Representatives and the
Senate in the 1990s. What it reveals is the value of
informed dissent among Congressional activists committed
to the public’s right to know. The record uncovers the
consequences of the Reagan-era decision to “tilt” toward
Baghdad during—and after—the bloody Iran-Iraq
war of 1980–1988, a policy designed to contain
Iran after its 1979 Islamic revolution while opening
Iraq to US interests. The record reveals widespread
deception concerning illicit practices and the violation
of international conventions to which the US is a signatory.
It confirms evidence of the determined pursuit of corporate
gain allied to the objective of US control over Iraqi
and Gulf oil that was and remains at the core of US
policy in Iraq and the Middle East.
The
implications of the Congressional revelations of the
1990s for current US policy in Iraq can hardly be overlooked.
The threatened use by Iraq of biological weapons was
considered a reason for war by the Bush administration.
Yet the same hearings reveal that the US had earlier
exported such weapons to Iraq, in violation of the international
convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production
and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and
Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, that the US
signed and ratified, along with Great Britain and many
other states, in, respectively, 1972 and 1975. Further,
as the same hearings reveal, the US sale of weapons
to Iraq continued until shortly before the 1991 Gulf
war. Reconsidering this past is not an academic exercise.
It is essential to confronting the phony war launched
by the US against Iraq in 2003.
The
Iraqi Market and the US
In
December 2002, Iraq issued an 11,000-page report to
UN weapons inspectors in response to a Security Council
resolution mandating that Iraq destroy its nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons. The report, which confirmed
the brisk international arms trade with Iraq in which
US firms were involved before the 1991 war, was “edited”
by the US before its dissemination. Subsequent leaks
revealed a part of what had been purged.
Far
more accessible, insofar as evidence concerning US complicity
in weapons sales to Iraq, were the Congressional hearings
that had taken place a decade earlier. Two were especially
important: the inquiry of the House Banking, Finance
and Urban Affairs Committee under Rep. Henry Gonzalez
(D-TX) and the investigation of the Senate Banking,
Housing and Urban Affairs Committee under Sen. Donald
W. Riegle, Jr. (D-MI). Though hardly lone voices, Gonzalez
and Riegle were singular in their courage and commitment
to uncovering deception and laying bare the nature of
US policies in Iraq. The limited mandates of the Gonzalez
and Riegle hearings led to investigations of the proliferation
of weapons, the administration’s thwarting of Congressional
inquiry, the scandals associated with various agencies
involved in US trade with Iraq, the Commerce Department’s
export licensing policies and Iraq’s procurement of
weapons.
On
October 27, 1992, the Senate committee heard expert
testimony that revealed that “dozens of United States
firms, many holding United States export licenses, contributed
directly to Iraq’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons
program, let alone its chemical weapons.” The same hearings
revealed that the Commerce Department “approved at least
220 export licenses for the Iraqi armed forces, major
weapons complexes and enterprises identified by the
Central Intelligence Agency as diverting technology
to weapons programs.”[1]
US officials could have no doubt as to the end users
of such exports, since they knew their destination.
Assumed
and often articulated in these hearings were the interests
at stake in US policy—the role of oil and the
value of the Iraqi market for US agribusiness and high-tech
defense industries. The pursuit of such interests was
at the root of US courting of the regime of Saddam Hussein,
irrespective of its record of aggression and domestic
repression.
As
Alan Platt, a former official in the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency, reported on behalf of bipartisan
leaders in the House and Senate in late 1992, there
was a clear understanding that US policy in the Gulf
operated within certain guidelines. Thus, “Iraq, Iran
and Syria should not be allowed to obtain sufficient
military power to establish hegemony over the Persian
Gulf.”[2]
Platt added, “Iraq, Iran and Syria should not be allowed
to gain military power such that any one or combination
of the three can threaten to destabilize Turkey to the
north, or any of the sub-regions of the Middle East
as a whole.” Also, “no combination of Middle East nations
hostile to Israel should be allowed to gain military
power such that they pose a direct threat to Israel’s
survival.”
|
Deputy
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger testifying
on Capitol Hill before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee
on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, July 23, 1992.
(Terry Ashe//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images) |
Insofar
as Iraq policy was concerned, as Lawrence Eagleburger,
deputy secretary of state under the first President
George Bush, explained to the House Banking Committee
in the spring of 1992, the administration was fully
aware of the Iraqi regime’s defects, its “human rights
abuses, its chemical weapons program, our suspicion
that Iraq might be developing biological and nuclear
weapons, Iraq’s efforts to build long-range missiles,”
among other considerations.[3] On
the other hand, as Eagleburger pointed out on the same
occasion, “Iraq possessed significant oil reserves,
was a major oil producer and was increasing its supply
of oil to this country.” Added to this was Iraq’s apparent
interest in “expanding commercial ties with the West.”
Eagleburger
was not the only official to defend trade with Iraq
and the support it lent to the Iraqi regime in such
terms. At an earlier Senate hearing in 1990, John Kelly,
the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and
South Asian affairs, maintained that Iraq represented
a major market for US agribusiness, one that reached
an estimated $1 billion in 1989. At the time, Iraq was
“our largest export market for rice, which comprises
23 percent of total US exports, for cattle, eggs, chickens,
lumber, tobacco and a variety of other agricultural
products.”[4]
The undersecretary of international affairs and commodity
programs of the Department of Agriculture, Richard Crowder,
underlined this point in his 1992 testimony before the
House Banking Committee. He claimed that US farmers
and their supporters in Congress backed the administration’s
policy in Iraq in recognition of Iraq’s importance to
the US agricultural economy. Iraq was the “twelfth largest
market for United States agricultural exports and the
single largest market for United States rice.”[5]
The
same principle held in arguments concerning the sale
of arms. According to William Rope of the State Department,
“with a shrinking defense base, our arms exports become
more important to American arms suppliers.” Rope continued:
“We are trying to support defense exporters the way
we would support other American exporters.”[6]
Denial
and Deception
In
spite of such arguments, dealing with Saddam Hussein’s
regime required the management of public opinion—particularly
as evidence of its atrocities in Halabja in 1988 became
public. The stigma of dealing with Iraq explains the
reluctance of the elder Bush’s administration to cooperate
with Congressional committees investigating US policy.
See, for example, the title of the House Banking Committee
hearings of May 29, 1992, “White House Efforts to Thwart
Congressional Investigations of Pre-War Iraq Policy:
The Case of the Rostow Gang.” Reluctance to assist Congress
in its investigatory capacity was also reflected in
disinformation campaignsabout Iraqi chemical weapons
use undertaken by the Reagan administration and continued
through the first Bush administration. The objective
of these campaigns was to deflect attention from Iraqi
actions and mask the US “tilt” toward Iraq.[7]
When
the Reagan administration took Iraq off its list of
“terrorist nations” after the 1982 Israeli invasion
of Lebanon, doing business with Iraq was no longer officially
taboo. The Gonzalez hearings revealed that Eagleburger,
as undersecretary of state under Reagan, had written
a secret letter urging the Export-Import Bank to open
a line of credit for Iraq as early as 1983—before
Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous handshake with Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad. But it was National Security Directive
26, issued by the elder Bush in 1989, that really promoted
the US rapprochement with Iraq, sanctioning the business
that was, in reality, already underway. Congressional
hearings in the early 1990s recognized but did not investigate
the lobbyists and associated consultants specialized
in trade with Iraq, who included many former officials
with inside knowledge of US policies. They focused instead
on government programs, on loan programs from the Agriculture
Department, notably those of the Commodity Credit Corporation,
the role of foreign banks, such as the Banca Nazionale
del Lavoro (BNL), and the export policies of the Commerce
Department, that together facilitated Iraq’s ability
to obtain arms.
The
government went to great lengths to ensure that loans
were granted, commodities exported, Iraqi interests
recognized—and the American public deceived. The
US penchant for secrecy and deception about its Iraq
policy became readily apparent in the days before and
after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Consider
the effort of the Bush administration to signal its
opposition to weapons exports to Iraq, which led the
secretary of state to recommend to the commerce secretary
that “additional controls be placed on items that could
contribute to Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons
and missile programs.”[8]
This recommendation was issued eight days before Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait. Six days after that event, the president
granted a “conflict-of-interest waiver” to 11 key figures
in his administration. They included National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft and his deputy Robert Gates,
Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, White House Chief
of Staff John Sununu, CIA director William Webster,
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Secretary of Energy
James Watkins, Secretary of State James Baker, Secretary
of Commerce Robert Mosbacher and Treasury Secretary
Nicholas Brady, as well as C. Boyden Gray, White House
counsel.
The
waiver—which was not made public at the time—was
granted “in connection with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.”
Only the Congressional investigations of 1992 forced
disclosure of the document. As the associate counsel
to the president, Gregory Walden, explained under questioning
by Gonzalez, “the types of financial interests for which
a waiver under Section 208b 91 was considered desirable
included interests in oil- and gas-producing properties
and oil and gas companies, foreign and domestic, and
interests in other companies with plants or employees
located in the Middle East arena of conflict.”[9]
Walden added that “the president believed that ‘Cabinet
members and other key foreign policy advisors should
not be needlessly restricted in assisting me in shaping
the United States response to the Iraqi offensive or
be left in doubt about when they can and cannot assist
me.’”[10]
The associate counsel insisted that the waiver “was
intended as a precaution and not as a response to one
or more identified conflicts of interest.” He went on
to argue that the president had granted the waiver upon
the conviction that the financial interests of those
identified “are not so substantial as to be deemed likely
to affect the integrity of the services that the government
may expect from them in the course of current United
States policymaking, discussion, decisions and actions,
in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.” Most likely,
the waiver was kept secret (until the Gonzalez hearings
aired it) to avoid the additional questions about US-Iraqi
business ties that it would have elicited.
The
president’s efforts did not, however, protect his policies
from public scrutiny. The practices in question were
not exactly covert, nor were the intentions of the agents
of the Iraq trade in the US. Moreover, on the US side,
those involved were not a hidden minority. As Rep. Sam
Gejdenson (D-CT), a member of the Banking Committee,
informed his colleagues, “virtually every arm of a modern
government, not just the intelligence agencies, not
just the State and Commerce Departments, but the Agriculture
Department, and the Justice Department [collaborated]
to facilitate a program of aiding and abetting Saddam
Hussein.”[11]
Letters
of Discredit
How
did this program work? Rep. Charlie Rose (D-NC) gave
some clues at a joint session held in August 1, 1991
under the title, “Examine the Link Between an Illegal
Military Procurement Network that Fueled the Iraqi War
Machine and the US Department of Agriculture’s Export
Credit Guarantee Program.” Some years earlier, said
Rose, US tobacco dealers used the BNL to provide credit
guarantees that allowed them to ship their products
to Iraq, secure in the knowledge that they would be
paid. The process was not entirely straightforward.
As Rose explained, “commodities were sold to Iraq under
the export guarantee program at markups of over 100
percent. The profits associated with these transactions
in some cases wound up in the Cayman Islands.”[12]
When
he testified again before the House Banking Committee
in the spring of 1992, Rose explained that tobacco dealers
sold a bastardized blend of their product to the Iraqis
and then proceeded to add “extra sales service,” that
provided surplus cash that the Iraqis used for other
purposes. Cables from Iraq disclosed that “the central
buyer for Iraq says we want machine tool parts, we want
trucks, we want military equipment to be sent to us
or we are not going to continue to buy agricultural
products from you.”[13]
The committee learned that the North Carolina tobacco
companies doing business with Iraq were reported to
carry on their letterheads “lists of mortar shells,
ammunition of all descriptions they had made available
to Iraq.”[14]
They also learned of “some frightening examples of intimidation
by large corporations of major network news organizations,
threatening them with billion-dollar lawsuits if they
even mention that they were involved in selling equipment
to Iraq.”
Another
case involved Kennametal, a major US corporation with
an international distribution network that, along with
other American companies, was reported to have been
a source for equipment for the “tungsten-carbide manufacturing
plant that was part of the [Iraqi] al-Atheer complex.”[15]
Marianne Gasior, the former attorney for Kennametal,
testified on the link between “agricultural programs,
American exporters and the Iraqi procurement network
before a joint hearing of the House in August 1991.”[16]
Gasior said that the BNL applied for loans from the
Department of Agriculture under false claims. The loans
were then distributed to Iraqi agents through letters
of credit, which in turn were used to finance the Iraqi
military.
Charlie
Rose’s response to the abuse of agricultural loans,
as expressed at another hearing, was clear: “It
is absolutely illegal to use agricultural loan guarantee
funds for arms. That is not permitted in the law.”[17]
Down
the Memory Hole
In
October 1992, Senate hearings further exposed the thriving
arms trade that, as various scientists and arms experts
confirmed, was critical to Iraq’s military program.
The Senate hearings provided the forum for testimony
on “the broad range of United States built equipment
in Iraqi weapons establishments engaged in nuclear weapons
development,” as well as other evidence of US involvement
in Iraq’s military programs.[18]
David Kay, who would later head the UNSCOM team in Iraq
and the Iraq Survey Group set up by the CIA after the
US invasion, was secretary-general of the Uranium Institute
at the time. He testified that “US-produced equipment
and technology has been found to be part of the Iraqi
nuclear weapons program…. It was an essential part.”[19]
Gary Milhollin, a law professor at the University of
Wisconsin and director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear
Arms Control, added that equipment from the US was essential
“to the Iraqi nuclear program, the missile program and
the chemical program, and I’m afraid I also believe
that we knew that the risk was very high, if not certain,
that it would contribute when it was licensed.”[20]
Kay
and Milhollin testified further on the nature and role
of US exports, their place in Iraq’s military arsenal
and the responsibility of the US administration in issuing
so-called “dual-use” exports to Iraq. Their testimony
was supplemented by Kenneth Timmerman, the Paris-based
journalist considered an expert on the international
arms trade, who reported that between January 1985 and
August 1990 the Commerce Department had issued “770
license applications” that included conventional military
weapons. Timmerman claimed that US sales of weapons
had begun in 1982 under Reagan, who proceeded without
Congressional approval. Milhollin, in his own testimony,
indicated that the Commerce Department failed to inform
the Defense and Energy Departments about their licensing
practices. Timmerman also reported on US-approved exports
for advanced computers and scientific equipment essential
for Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.
David
Kay’s testimony confirmed the export of US technology
for Iraq’s uranium enrichment program. Milhollin underscored
the US role in vitally contributing to Iraq’s nuclear
program. Reviewing UN findings, he stated: “The UN found
American equipment at chemical and ballistic missile
sites. The UN early this year sent the US State Department
a confidential list of American equipment that had turned
up in chemical and ballistic missile programs.”[21]
Milhollin’s testimony included a report entitled, “Licensing
Mass Destruction: US Exports to Iraq, 1985–1990,”
that indicated the scope of “sensitive” US exports to
Iraq in this period. According to Milhollin, the Department
of Commerce approved more than $1.5 billion worth of
equipment that qualified as “dual-use”—items with
both a civilian and a military application. But as Milhollin
pointed out, there was no mystery about the destination
of such items, and hence their use was not in question.
Not only did Milhollin identify US exports that he considered
to be in the “dangerous category,” he identified Iraqi
end users that included Iraqi companies working on nuclear,
chemical and missile sites.[22]
The
initial incentive for the inquiries undertaken by Sen.
Riegle was the connection between biological and chemical
weapons and what became known as Gulf War Syndrome,
the complex of illnesses affecting US and allied Gulf
war veterans. In May 1994, Riegle, along with Sen. Alfonse
D’Amato (R-NY), issued a report on “US Chemical and
Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq
and Their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences
of the Gulf War.”[23]
Until 2004, when the New York Times reported
on the findings of a 2002 government-appointed panel
that concluded that “Chemicals Sickened Gulf War Veterans,”
US administrations had been unprepared to consider a
possible link between Iraq’s use of chemical weapons
and the illnesses of American Gulf war veterans, let
alone the connection between US exports and Iraqi attacks.[24]
Research
into that connection led Riegle to conclude that “the
US government actually licensed the export of deadly
micro-organisms to Iraq.”[25]
Their existence and origin was later confirmed in the
UN inspection of Iraq’s biological warfare program.
Riegle stated in the Congressional Record: “We found
that pathogenic, which means disease-producing, items
and toxigenic, meaning poisonous, items, and other hazardous
materials were exported from the United States to Iraq
following a licensing and application procedure actually
set forth by our own United States Department of Commerce.”[26]
As Riegle indicated in the same source, the “exported
biological materials were not weakened” before being
shipped. As he concluded, this meant that “between 1985
and 1989, the US government approved the sales of quantities
of potentially lethal biological agents that could have
been cultured and grown in very large quantities in
an Iraqi biological warfare program.”
The
senator identified some of the agents exported to Iraq
in this report, including anthrax, “a major component
in the Iraqi biological warfare program.”[27]
Along with it were histoplasma capsulatum, brucella
melitensis and clostridium perfringens. Additional agents
were identified in the first chapter of the May 25,
1994 report that dealt with “Iraqi Chemical and Biological
Warfare Capability.” That chapter found that “several
shipments of E. coli and genetic materials, human and
bacterial DNA, were shipped directly to the Iraq Atomic
Energy Commission.” In this and the previous cases,
Riegle provided the dates of export, as given to him
by the Commerce Department. Further evidence indicated
“that the US licensed the export of genetic materials
capable of being used to create these types of genetically
altered biological warfare-related research prior to
the war.”[28]
Such
disclosures were made in October 1992. Less than a month
later, the judge advocate general of the Department
of the Army received a request from government lawyer
John McNeill. Dated November 19, 1992, McNeill’s memorandum
asked for a “Report on Iraqi War Crimes (Desert Shield/Desert
Storm)” that was to be submitted to the State Department.[29]
What of those who sold weapons of death to the same
regime?
In
2003, a campaign was launched in Great Britain that
led to the publication of “Biological and Toxin Weapons
Convention and Iraq: A Report for Parliament on the
British Government’s Response to the US Supply of Biological
Materials to Iraq.[30]
We have yet to witness a comparable campaign in the
US, although as the Congressional hearings of 1992 indicate,
House and Senate leaders strongly objected to the sale
of these and other weapons to Iraq more than a decade
ago, as did many of those who testified before them.
What has become of such evidence? How can we explain
its deletion from public discussion of US policy in
Iraq, when that deletion blunts our ability to confront
the nature of US policy in Iraq and the Middle East?
The question remains to be answered, including by defenders
of US policy.
Endnotes
