Tag: Saddam Hussein

26 January 1998

Posted on by Featherproof Books

 

The Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—founded by, amongst others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Armitage, and Scooter Libby (all future Bush administration principals and officials)— releases its first public letter where it demands that President Clinton undertake the “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime” in Iraq, labeling containment “dangerously inadequate.”

The Project for a New American Century is later labeled “neocon” and influential in setting up a war with Saddam Hussein but the Clinton administration started down this path to a final showdown, both overstating the WMD threat and declaring that regime change was the only path to normalization of relations.

10 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President-elect George W. Bush is briefed in the famous and highly secure JCS “tank” at the Pentagon—on the national security situation and the immediate threats ahead.

The focus is on the immediate threat from Iraq, the absence of U.N. inspectors, the unravelling of international sanctions, the continued build-up of weapons of mass destruction, the hardening of Iraq’s air defense and communications infrastructure with buried fiber optics, Iraqi relations with terrorists, and Saddam’s Hussein’s human rights record. It is a bracing and single-minded presentation. In other words, Iraq wasn’t just some concoction of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. It was the number one threat as conceived by the Pentagon.

2 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin
Niger Embassy in Rome

 

The embassy of the Republic of the Niger in Rome is ransacked and thousands of passports and documents are stolen.

Many months later, a set of documents—on Niger government letterhead—would emerge to indicate attempts by Saddam Hussein to obtain uranium yellowcake from the country. The supposed Iraqi pursuit of Nigerien uranium is one of the key pieces of evidence used in “proving” Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of WMD. It is also at the core of the later Valerie Plame affair, where the CIA-dispatched Joseph Wilson (the former ambassador to Niger, and Plame’s husband) to investigate whether Iraq indeed was pursuing nuclear materials.

The documents are later conclusively proven to be forgeries.

17 December 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Al Kut Barracks West - Northwest Iraq

 

U.N. weapons inspectors evacuate Iraq for the last time, removing with them a secret NSA telephone monitoring device that American agents had brought in under United Nations cover.

After weeks of disputes and obstructions by the Iraqis—stopping or interfering with inspections of “presidential sites” and other sensitive installations associated with Saddam Hussein’s protect—UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler decides to withdraw all U.N. staff, setting the stage for American airstrikes.

President Clinton then signs the orders for Operation Desert Fox, and airstrikes against Iraqi targets begin just before 1 AM (2200 GMT on December 16). Desert Fox is aimed officially, according to the White House, against Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that his country had also been left with “no option” but to mount the strikes. Russia and China condemn the actions and Russia recalls its ambassador from Washington. The next day, Russia recalls its ambassador to London.

Secretary Albright holds a briefing on Desert Fox and was asked how she would respond to those who say that, unlike the 1991 Gulf War, this campaign “looks like mostly an Anglo-American mission.” She answers: “We are now dealing with a threat, I think, that is probably harder for some to understand because it is a threat of the future, rather than a present threat, or a present act such as a border crossing, a border aggression. And here, as the president described in his statement yesterday, we are concerned about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s ability to have, develop, deploy weapons of mass destruction and the threat that that poses to the neighbors, to the stability of the Middle East, and therefore, ultimately to ourselves.”

There are, of course, no real nuclear, chemical and biological weapons left, but then the actual targets of Desert Fox strikes are security-related facilities associated with Saddam’s presidential guards—with the hope that their destruction might provoke a coup or uprising. Inspectors don’t return to Iraq until 2003, in an eleventh hour effort to stave off the second Gulf War.

24 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Martin Indyk

 

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Martin Indyk wraps up meetings with 16 Iraqi opposition groups in London. The meetings, arranged by the British Foreign Office, seeks to unite the expatriate groups as a viable alternative to Saddam Hussein. The groups pledge to work to indict the Iraqi president for war crimes as one means of uniting Iraqi public opinion against him.

“We are not talking here about the opposition groups being involved in activities that are designed to overthrow violently the regime in Baghdad. We are talking about the opposition groups developing political support for a new Iraq, a new open, democratic Iraq,” the Foreign Office junior minister said.

By late 1998, with much of the White House’s (and the CIA’s) attention shifted to al Qaeda, Iraq had fallen off the radar screen, and with an end to U.N. inspections, there was little new reliable intelligence coming from inside the country. But Congress passed a law allowing President Clinton to spend 93 million dollars helping anti-Saddam groups and the beginning of the end was afoot, particularly in providing an outsize role to the Iraqi exiles, who later would manipulate both the Clinton and Bush administrations with fake intelligence and false promises of support inside the country. Indyk would go on to become ambassador to Israel (1999–2001), a position he also filled from 1995–1997.

23 November 1985

Posted on by William Arkin

 

An EgyptAir airliner bound from Athens, Greece to Malta and carrying several U.S. citizens was hijacked by the Abu Nidal Organization, a renegade Palestinian faction backed by Libya. Abu Nidal (Sabri Khalil al-Banna) split from the PLO in 1974 and founded the Abu Nidal group. The November 1985 hijacking is considered their first international terrorist attack.

Egyptian commandos attempted to storm the plane, during which the hijackers threw grenades inside the aircraft and 60 of the 95 passengers and crew died in the resulting explosions and fire. The Abu Nidal Organization would go on to carry out a number of particularly brutal international hijackings and attacks.

Abu Nidal was expelled from Libya in 1999 and he ultimately sought refuge in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He was killed in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002, some say by Iraqi secret police, some say he committed suicide. But the bottom line was that Saddam feared his independence and even possible work with the United States after 9/11, especially as an invasion of Iraq seemed coming.

Abu Nidal was probably the last of the individual charismatic terrorists—à la “Carlos the Jackal”—who could flourish in rogue states and evade international capture. And his organization’s many hijackings also ultimately lead to more and more efforts to secure air travel, a process that obviously didn’t happen until after 9/11.

14 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Saddam Hussein revokes his August 5 decision to cease cooperation with the United Nations inspectors (UNSCOM). Iraq states in a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan that it is willing to resume inspections. But the U.S. and U.K. argue that the country imposes a number of unacceptable conditions with its offer, particularly restrictions on visiting presidential sites and including American inspectors. Capitulating, Iraq then informs the U.N. Security Council that it was the “clear and unconditional decision of the Iraqi government to resume cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA.”

As Iraq deliberates on resumption of inspections, an air and cruise missile operation (Desert Viper) is being prepared and even implemented: aircraft moving into place, armed, with targets selected. When Iraq notifies the Security Council, President Clinton aborts Desert Viper just minutes before the designated H-hour (11:00 AM EST).

In a televised address, President Clinton later says that Iraq has “backed down” and pledged full cooperation with UNSCOM. The president also makes clear that U.S. policy includes the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a prerequisite for resumption of normal relations. The UNSC accepts Iraq’s decision and issues a statement in which it stresses that Iraq’s commitment “needs to be established by unconditional and sustained cooperation with the Special Commission and the IAEA in exercising the full range of their activities provided for in their mandates.”

The U.S. and U.K. then threaten that without full cooperation, they will strike Iraq without warning. According to the Iraq Survey Group, the events of 1998 “had so poisoned the atmosphere with UNSCOM that the relationship could not be repaired.” It was the end of inspections and the beginning of the road to certain war, but also not the last time that a president stopped an underway bombing operation, President Trump doing so vis-à-vis Iran.

7 November 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Saddam Hussein

 

Saudi Arabia opens a border-crossing point with Iraq to facilitate Saudi exports to Iraq under the U.N. “oil for food” program. The land border had been closed between the two countries since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Since at least 1998 (when U.N. inspectors were ejected from the country), sanctions against Iraq had been crumbling, prominent countries like France and Russia increasingly contracting with Baghdad, commercial air travel restored, and illicit trade increasing.

There’s no evidence now that much weapons-of-mass-destruction materials flowed into the country between 1998 and 9/11, but the general crumbling of sanctions worried Washington that indeed Saddam would escape from “the box” he’d been put in.

Colin Powell in particular as Secretary of State in the new administration would seek to reinvigorate sanctions with his proposed “smart sanctions” regime. But the program never got off the ground before 9/11 and then certain war with Iraq loomed.

15 October 1997

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Max van der Stoel, Special U.N. Rapporteur of Iraqi Human Rights, reports widespread continuing violations of human rights in Iraq, torture and execution, and displacement and retention of political dissidents and ethnic minorities. (U.N., A/52/476, 15 October 1997)

Saddam Hussein was hardly the only one in the Middle East at the time, but a combination of under-the-surface changes highlighted and gave unsettling detail to his rule and the internal situation. Though the human rights community—some in that community—focused on American blame (in the bombing inside Iraq during Desert Storm or the effects of the use depleted uranium), the repression inside the country came as no surprise. But for a U.S. national security system that had ignored Iraq’s domestic situation, all of a sudden there was the “intelligence” that comes in with an intense and intimate presence to support assistance to the Kurds, enforcing the no-fly zones, support for U.N. inspectors and then abundant covert actions. A good part of the U.S. military and intelligence communities were focused on Iraq, with the flow of information to follow.

Finally, as U.S. intelligence used the U.N. presence to increase clandestine spying—particularly eavesdropping from inside Baghdad—the details of Saddam’s absolute rule and nepotism, cruelty and corruption increased. The dynamic was inscrutable: was the intelligence needed to support U.S. policy or did the intelligence drive it? When the Clinton administration finally said that there could be no normalization of relations—even if Iraq eliminated its WMD and satisfied the U.N. inspectors—there was no end game but war.

Van der Stoel shouldn’t be criticized for his report—and nor should the human rights community—but they, too, became agents for inevitable war. And what does it have to do with 9/11? Only that Iraq became dominant and overwhelming as a problem, diverting attention from terrorism, while those drawn to al Qaeda saw the plight of Iraq—they’ve killed one million Iraqi children, Osama bin Laden said many time—as further “proof” of American perfidy and the West’s campaign to destroy the Middle East.

5 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Candidates Dick Cheney and Joseph Lieberman discuss Iraq during a vice presidential debate.

There isn’t really much debate. Both the former secretary of defense and the Connecticut senator support more aggressive action to achieve regime change in Iraq—and both are generally critical of Clinton administration policy.

Cheney defends his record in stopping the 1991 Gulf War short of overthrowing the Iraqi leader and marching on Baghdad by saying that Saddam’s military was “decimated” and that Iraq was “back in the box” after being ejected from Kuwait.

Cheney blames the Clinton administration for allowing sanctions to fray. If it were discovered that Iraq is rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, Cheney says the U.S. might have to consider military action. On a question regarding “taking out” Saddam Hussein, Cheney says: “We might have no other choice.”

But for all of the later criticism of the Bush administration’s supposed conspiracy to depose Saddam and go to war in Iraq, the debate proved a hawk-fest, Lieberman just as hostile towards any kind of normalization of relations, almost competing with Cheney as to who would guarantee military action.