Building the Beast of Baghdad by William Norman Grigg

Vol. 18, No. 21 October 21, 2002 Table of Contents

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Building the Beast of Baghdad
by William Norman Grigg

Saddam Hussein�s capacity to unleash weapons of mass destruction is doubly horrifying when one considers that past administrations have helped him develop that technology.

A few hours had passed since hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 had plowed into the Pentagon. Emergency operations continued at both the Pentagon and Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Across the nation, Americans were still trying to digest the horrifying spectacle being replayed on their television screens. And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, along with a handful of aides, gathered in the undamaged Pentagon National Command Center to begin planning for war against Iraq.

At 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, according to notes taken from a participant in the meeting, Rumsfeld told his subordinates that he wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether [it�s] good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." As CBS News summarized, Rumsfeld "was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq � even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks."

The history of Rumsfeld�s dealings with Saddam perfectly encapsulates Frederic Bastiat�s maxim that governments grow by creating the poison and the antidote in the same laboratory. As a member of George W. Bush�s cabinet, Rumsfeld insists: "No terrorist state poses a greater and more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq." But nearly 20 years ago, as a presidential emissary on behalf of Ronald Reagan, Rumsfeld helped facilitate the military, technological, and financial aid from Washington that effectively built Saddam into a regional menace.

Courting Baghdad

As reported in these pages more than four years ago (see "Arming Saddam" in our March 30, 1998 issue), Rumsfeld visited Baghdad on December 17, 1983 bearing a handwritten letter for Saddam from President Reagan. "In it Reagan offered to renew diplomatic relations and to expand military and business ties with Baghdad," reported investigator Alan Friedman in his expos� Spider�s Web.

The supposed justification for the U.S. "tilt" toward Baghdad, as summarized in a recently released 1983 diplomatic cable written by Rumsfeld, was that "the U.S. and Iraq shared interests in preventing Iranian and Syrian expansion." Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, beginning a brutal war of attrition that would claim over a million lives by the time it ended in August 1988. During that conflict, the U.S. "gave Iraq vital battle-planning help � by providing detailed information on Iranian military deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments," summarized an August 18th account on MSNBC.com.

In a January 1995 affidavit, former National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher testified:

In June 1982, President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran. President Reagan decided that the United States would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran. President Reagan formalized this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive ("NSDD") to this effect in June 1982.... The NSDD, including even its identifying number, is classified.... Pursuant to the secret NSDD, the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S. military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.

The foreign aid floodgates opened for Iraq shortly after Rumsfeld�s December 1983 visit to Baghdad. In 1984, the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Eximbank) provided a $500 million loan guarantee to Iraq to build the Aqaba oil pipeline, a project that earned the personal attention of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. But even more prodigious amounts of aid flowed from Washington to Baghdad via the Agriculture Department�s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC).

More.

Annals of Government - [How the US Armed Iraq]

In the Loop: Bush's Secret Mission

Murray Waas and Craig Unger

The New Yorker Magazine - Originally published November 2, 1992
Posted to the web November 14, 2002

J4JP Introduction

This article, originally published in New Yorker Magazine, provides a clear picture of the direct involvement of the United States in arming Iraq, providing Saddam Hussein with technology, weapons, intelligence and funding - even in contravention of American law - enabling Iraq to amass the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons that threaten the world. While the US does not openly acknowledge its role in arming Iraq, it now prepares to go to war against a monster of its own creation...

Since this article provides an excellent in-depth analysis of the US's dysfunctional Middle East policy dating back to the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush, it also provides the best perspective from which to view the Pollard case. As long as the US acknowledges no responsibility for its role in arming Iraq, Jonathan Pollard will continue to be buried alive in prison by successive American administrations fearing exposure and embarrassment.

***

In late July, 1986, William J. Casey, then the Director of Central Intelligence, sat down with George Bush, then the Vice-President of the United States, in an out-of-the-way study that Casey maintained on the third floor of the old Executive Office Building, the rococo structure adjoining the White House. Casey had something he wanted Bush to do.

For many years, both Bush and Casey had moved easily in the worlds of foreign policy and Republican politics, and Bush had once held Casey's job. But their relationship was never entirely comfortable. Casey, gruff and perpetually disheveled, was the product of public and parochial schools in Queens and on Long Island - his father was a Tammany Hall pension bureaucrat - and of Fordham. Bush, elaborately friendly in manner, was the offspring of Connecticut gentry. Like his father, an investment banker who served in the Senate, Bush attended Yale and was tapped for Skull and Bones. Casey made millions on his own as a stock speculator; Bush, with family help, grew moderately prosperous in the oil business before his political rise in Houston. Both men held high posts under Richard Nixon, but Nixon himself treated Casey as an equal and Bush condescendingly. It was under Gerald Ford that Bush was appointed to the job Casey now held.

The two men were different in more than background. Casey was part of the rising conservative movement, the historic antagonist of Bush and his ancestors within the Republican Party. In the Cold War, Casey believed not in containment but in what in the late forties and early fifties had been called rollback. He saw every stirring in every corner of the world through an unchanging ideological prism. Bush, by contrast, was a consummate pragmatist. As Casey knew, Bush was capable of rapidly adopting new positions if expediency or advancement seemed to demand it. He had done so on the issue of recognizing China under Nixon, and he had done so on abortion and on economic policy when he became Ronald Reagan's running mate. According to someone who knew both men, Casey had originally distrusted Bush's lack of conviction. Lately, however, he had begun to see Bush's pragmatism in a new light. Whatever vision the Vice-President might lack, he was a man of immense personal discipline, and he understood accommodation as a way to achieve goals. Moreover, during his service as permanent representative to the United Nations, as chief of the United States liaison office in China, and as director of the C.I.A., he had mastered the arts of compartmentalization and secrecy. "Casey knew there was nobody in government who could keep a secret better," a former high-level C.I.A. official who worked with Casey has told us. "He knew that Bush was someone who could keep his confidence and be trusted. Bush had the same capacity as Casey to receive a briefing and give no hint that he was in the know."

Now, in 1986, Casey, seventy-three years old and suffering from prostate cancer, said he needed Bush to run a covert errand. Iran was proving recalcitrant in secret negotiations to exchange arms for hostages who were being held in Beirut by terrorists with links to Iran, so Casey had dreamed up a scheme for forcing Iran's hand. It requires someone of authority to convey a message to Iran's enemy Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, indirectly and without leaving fingerprints. Vice-President Bush was the ideal courier. He was about to visit the capitals of countries in the Middle East in order to "advance the peace process" between Israelis and Arabs, as he told the New York Times. But if he accepted Casey's assignment he would also be there to advance the war process; that is, to heat up the war between Iran and Iraq, with an incendiary message from Washington to Baghdad - escalate the air war and escalate the bombing deep inside Iranian territory.

Casey's reasoning was that if Saddam Hussein could be induced to order his fastidiously cautious Air Force to attack Iran in strength, Iran would be forced to turn anew to the United States for missiles and other weapons of air defense. The United States would then use its enhanced leverage to get better terms from the Iranians for the release of the hostages. (Casey may have been particularly concerned about the plight of one of the hostages, the Lebanon C.I.A. station chief William A. Buckley.) And for Casey there was another enticement as well, according to two Reagan Administration officials whom he frequently confided in; by bringing off this scheme, he would be manipulating two rival policy factions in the Administration. More.

The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine, by Christine Downing

(NY: Crossroad, 1992).

Occasionally I encourage myself (or in this case am encouraged by a friend) to read something outside my interests or specialisms. This book and its subject/s belonged out there, but I have been enriched by it.

It's a book about myths and images and one woman, whose thesis is, 'We need images and myths through which we can see who we are and what we might become' (p.2). In our culture, 'we are fed only male images of the divine... we are starved for images which recognize the sacredness of the feminine' (p.4).

The myths and images Downing employs are those of Greek/Roman goddesses. Gods and goddesses (Nietzsche, Freud) 'never really die, they just go underground' (p.17). Each of these goddesses has a powerful presence in her life - including her dreams, her roles, her relationships. They 'bless' her variously, and she has brilliantly invoked those blessings. Because 'what the gods do, they suffer', such 'blessings' are not always pleasant.

Mythology has to do with origins - primary patterns - and epiphanies. Gods and goddesses are not merely 'back there' but 'here/ in here'. Jung's notion of the 'collective unconscious' is invoked to make the historical, personal.

The oldest artifacts teach us that the female is the primal power. She produces life (blood becomes milk), and food (grass becomes bread). But the fertility goddesses are also goddesses of the underworld, of death. Of course, they are projections of human psychology, but they are more: they are 'transhuman forces' (p.19). And the Greek goddesses are not very attractive: back then there was, too, a deep suspicion of feminine power (which is why the classical literature is explicitly patriarchal).

Downing emphasises her multidimensionality ('I am many; I am one', p.29): when you are done with one goddess, another appears. Each plays a key role in the pantheon of gods and goddesses.

First, there is Persephone in Hades: the maiden who has a mother. Maidenhood and motherhood are two phases in most women's lives. Persephone must be raped, but she does not bear Hades any children. In the underworld (not, in Greek mythology, a terrible place, but somewhere 'beyond life'), she is always present. She enables us to discover the power and beauty of the dark moments in our lives.

Ariadne is not raped, but is deserted, and is killed as punishment for having turned from the immortal god to a mortal lover. So Ariadne is the bride of death - but in life she is unafraid of her own sensuality, of her capacity for ecstasy. She dies just prior to giving birth: 'so I am pulled back to Ariadne because it is time to give my devotion to her and to the child born in the realm of death, the child born in the realm of the soul' (anima) (p.66).

Hera is the 'representation of wifeness... the only goddess centrally defined by her marital role' (p.70). But, of course, she is Hera as viewed by men: who is, as M.I.Finley puts it, 'the complete female whom the Greeks feared a little and did not like at all' (p.73). She is a goddess who demands total allegiance: the relationship to her husband takes precedence over all other relationships. But her sexuality is repressed. (There is a tale that she blinded the seer who said women experienced nine times more orgasmic satisfaction than men). And she is pathologically jealous, gynephobic. 'The Hera of Olympus does not like women - or being a woman - at all' (p.83). She is, as Zabriskie puts it, 'a restless matriarch in a patriarchal world' (p.91).

Then, Athene, the adolescent girls' idol - 'self-confident and courageous, clear-eyed and strong, intelligent and accomplished, judicious and fair' (p.100). But later, the relationship is ambiguous, paradoxical. She is soul-giver, soul-maker, but animus-ridden, at ease amongst men. She represents 'the repression of the feminine and the undoing of the repression as a soul task'... 'Fully to understand Athene is to enter deeply into the dark mystery of the father-daughter bond... [she helps us comprehend] 'how our creativity is released, distorted, and inhibited by the power of the father' (pp.110-111). We all know, as Hillman says, that 'fathers create daughters; but daughters create fathers too' (p.114).

Gaia, of course, is the primordial earth goddess - the 'great mother', grandmother, mother of the beginning, mother of infancy, the mother who is there before time. Gaia returns us to our source. But she began as an unmothered daughter. She is earth, reminding us that matter is 'rebellious, alive and eruptive' (p.146). Gaia is 'earth made invisible, earth become metaphor, earth as the realm of the soul'. She is 'nature moving toward emergence in personal form' (p.147) - belonging both in ge-ology and psych-ology. She is primal, the Freudian id, sheer raw instinctual energy, ever fertile, ever giving forth, but who cannot be subdued. She is 'for life but for ever-renewing life and so for life that encompasses death' (p.150). It is her nature to generate, bringing forth variety, heterogeneity: she is the mother of gods and human beings.

Artemis is strange, mysterious, remote, the 'mercurial queen of solitude' (p.162), who expresses 'the male fear of mature femininity' (p.163). She has been the youthful virgin forever, and becomes the wise old woman. She is the wilderness, wild and untamed. She is 'connected to a fear of such radical solitude and of unprotected confrontation with self' (p.169). In her realm (as distinct from Aphrodite's) feelings do not issue in creative expression or sexual involvement. She represents the unique areas of the feminine experience - menstruation, conception, parturition, nursing, menopause, death - and therein embodies a profound denial of the world of patriarchy - a passionate, wild woman who loves women.

'And now you, Aphrodite' (whom Christine Downing addresses in the second person): 'the one hardly spoken of' and viewed with suspicion during childhood; who has, through her physical beauty and unfettered sexuality the power to lure one from one's chosen path; creatrix, life force, source of all reproductive energy in the universe; nurturer of erotic relationship, and feelings; who cannot be brought fully into consciousness until all the repressed aspects are acknowledged; the only goddess willing to be seen unclothed; who has a love that begets life, and a creative energy that far transcends human sexuality; an enchantress who generates love, not progeny.

So these goddesses helped Christine Downing come to terms with relationships - Hera to mother and husband, Athene to father, Ariadne to a lover, Artemis and Aphrodite to sister and closest woman friends. The goddesses, as Nietzsche said, justify life by living it themselves, 'the only satisfactory theodicy ever invented. Each goddess implies a different way of viewing our own childhood - each whole, each very different, each true.' (p.233)

A footnote: Christine Downing hardly mentions her father. He does not appear until p.81. Perhaps the clues are [1] she felt 'abandoned' by her father - a 'child's truth which the adult in me has always denied since it was Hitler's "fault", not my father's' (p.222). So (?) [2] she goes through life willing herself to love and be loved - a 'dangerous' (p.191) experience. Her father deserted her, she and her husband divorced, she seems to have had at least three or four special male lovers/friends, but also many close women friends...

Two of the deepest lessons here are * 'We don't outgrow the child within us' (p.237) and * 'Childhood remains within us as the principle of deep life, of life always in harmony with the possibility of new beginnings... When one dreams in depth one is never finished beginning' (p.244).

Rowland Croucher