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