It’s the fall of 1983. Michael Jackson is riding high with Thriller; Ronald Reagan is obsessed with a red menace in the jungles of Central America; humiliated U.S. troops have just retreated from Beirut; and America’s newest nemesis, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, is locked in a vicious conflict with America’s soon-to-be ally, the secular “socialist” dictator Saddam Hussein.
In November, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz receives an intelligence report describing how Hussein’s troops are resorting to “almost daily use of CW [chemical weapons]“ against the Iranians. Undeterred, Reagan signs a secret order instructing his charges to do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq from losing the war. A month later, the president dispatches a special envoy to Baghdad on a secret mission. The identity of the envoy is intriguing. He’s not a diplomat or a member of Reagan’s cabinet – he’s a private citizen, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
On December 20, the envoy meets with Saddam Hussein. He is not there to lecture the dictator about his use of weapons of mass destruction or the fine print of the Geneva Conventions. He is there to talk business.
The envoy informs the Iraqi leader that Washington is ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a recently declassified State Dept. report of the conversation, and that Washington would regard “any major reversal of Iraq’s fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West.” Iraqi leaders later describe themselves as “extremely pleased” with the visit.
The envoy was Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the CEO of pharmaceutical giant Searle. The meeting is widely considered to be the trigger that ushered in a new era of U.S.-Iraq relations, one that opened the door to shipments of dual-use munitions, chemical, biological agents and other dubious technology transfers. But for years what exactly was discussed in that now infamous meeting has been shrouded in secrecy.
Until last week.
A new investigative report from the Institute for Policy Studies entitled Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured U.S. Government Focus On Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein was released last week, in which researchers Jim Vallette, Steve Kretzmann, and Daphne Wysham discovered the real reason Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Baghdad: Rumsfeld, under direct instructions from the White House, was there to convince Saddam Hussein to approve a highly lucrative, and highly secret, oil pipeline project from Iraq to Jordan.
Examining recently released government and corporate sources, the researchers document how a close-knit group of high-ranking U.S. officials (including Rumsfled, Shultz, a former CIA director and Attorney General Edwin Meese) worked in secrecy for two years attempting to secure the billion dollar pipeline scheme for the Bechtel corporation. The Bush/Cheney administration now eyes Bechtel as a primary contractor for the rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure.
Bechtel’s pipeline would have carried a million barrels of Iraqi crude oil a day through Jordan to the Red Sea port of Aqaba.
“The men who courted Saddam while he gassed Iranians are now waging war against him, ostensibly because he holds these same weapons of mass destruction” said Jim Vallette, lead author of the report. “To a man, they now deny that oil has anything to do with the conflict. Yet during the Reagan Administration, and in the years leading up to the present conflict, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports. All of this documentation suggests that Reagan Administration officials bent many rules to convince Saddam Hussein to open up a pipeline of central interest to the U.S., from Iraq to Jordan.”
What happened to the Jordan deal? What trade-offs were made? Who were the players? How did Israel fit into the scheme? What impact did it have on current U.S. policy?
For answers to these questions, and links to the original memos and declassified cables, read GNN‘s Cointel interview with the report’s lead author Jim Vallette here.