Iraq–United States relations

Iraq – United States relations

Iraq	United States

United States President Barack Obama with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki

Iraq – United States relations are the diplomatic relations between Iraq and the United States.

Pre-1980s

The Baathist coups

In 1963, the United States allegedly backed a coup against the government of Iraq headed by General Abdul Karim Qassim, who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. The US was concerned about the growing influence of Communist Iraqi government officials under his administration, as well as his threats to invade Kuwait, which almost caused a war between Iraq and England.

While Qassim was actually killed by a firing squad of the Ba'ath party that overthrew him, there had been a separate CIA plan to incapacitate him. In their request, they said the target's death would not be unacceptable to them, but was not the principal objective: "We do not consciously seek subject's permanent removal from the scene; we also do not object should this complication develop."

Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. "Almost certainly a gain for our side", Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to President John F. Kennedy on the day of the takeover. That Komer wrote that memo to Kennedy, without spending any time on additional research, may suggest, but does not confirm, the National Security Council, a covert operations approval committee, or Kennedy knew of planning against Qasim.

Salam Arif, the leader of the new Baathist government, died in 1966 and his brother, Abdul Rahman Arif, not a Ba'athist, assumed the presidency.

Some believe that Robert Anderson, former secretary of the treasury under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, secretly met with the Ba'ath Party and came to a negotiated agreement according to which both the oil field concessions and sulphur mined in the northern part of the country would go to United States companies if the Ba'ath again took over power. In 1968, General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr of the Baath Party was installed as the new president. Former CIA Near East Division Chief James Chritchfield maintains that the CIA played no direct role in the 1963 coup, but that it viewed the Ba'ath Party favorably and offered support after they had taken over. He referred to the subsequent coups that brought Saddam to power as "counter-coups" that enabled the "radical" elements of the Party."We did not identify a radical movement within the Ba'ath," he said. "That was our mistake--that surprised us."

David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, has disputed the notion that the CIA supported the 1968 coup, as has Middle East analyst James Phillips. According to a 2003 report by Common Dreams "many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s," although it is widely acknowledged that the CIA worked to destabilize the Qassem regime in the early part of the decade. Robert Dreyfuss, in his book Devil's Game, maintains that the Johnson administration actually opposed the 1968 coup and used the Shah's Iran as a counterpoint to the Ba'athist regime it established. A 2006 study concluded that the CIA's alleged role in the coup "cannot be considered historical" in the absence of more compelling evidence.

The US broke relations with Iraq in 1967. After al-Bakr seized power in 1968, relations remained severed for 16 years and the US made arms sales to Iraq illegal. In June 1972 all foreign businesses including the Iraq Petroleum Company were seized and Iraq declared oil would be used as "a political weapon in the struggle against imperialism and Zionism".

Saddam assumed power in a counter-coup in 1979.

Even though Iraqi interest in American technical expertise was strong, prior to 1980 the government did not seem to be seriously interested in reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States. The Baath Party viewed the efforts by the United States to achieve "step-by-step" interim agreements between Israel and the Arab countries and the diplomatic process that led to the Camp David Accords as calculated attempts to perpetuate Arab disunity. Consequently, Iraq took a leading role in organizing Arab opposition to the diplomatic initiatives of the United States. After Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Iraq succeeded in getting members of the League of Arab States (Arab League) to vote unanimously for Egypt's expulsion from the organization.

1980s

U.S. support for the Iraq attack on Iran

See also: United States support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war

The U.S. has denied that it gave Iraq a "green light" for its September 22, 1980 invasion of Iran. Five months before Iraq's invasion, on April 14, 1980, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski signaled the U.S.'s willingness to work with Iraq: "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq... we do not feel that American-Iraqi relations need to be frozen in antagonisms." According to Iran's president at the time, Abolhassan Banisadr, Brzezinski met directly with Saddam Hussein in Jordan two months before the Iraqi assault. Bani-Sadr wrote, "Brzezinski had assured Saddam Hussein that the United States would not oppose the separation of Khuzestan [in southwest Iran] from Iran."

Author Kenneth R. Timmerman and former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr separately reported that Brzezinski met with Hussein in July 1980 in Amman, Jordan, to discuss joint efforts to oppose Iran. According to Hussein biographer Said Aburish however, at the Amman meeting Saddam Hussein met with three CIA agents, not Brzezinski personally. Former Carter official Gary Sick denies that Washington directly encouraged Iraq's attack, but instead let "Saddam assume there was a U.S. green light because there was no explicit red light."

U.S. government authorized the sale of dual use chemicals and biological material to Iraq

A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former U.S. policymakers shows that U.S. provided intelligence and logistical support, which played a crucial role in arming Iraq. Under the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, the U.S. authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous dual use items that had both military and civilian applications, including chemicals which can be used in manufacturing of pesticides or chemical weapons and live viruses and bacteria, such as anthrax and bubonic plague used in medicine and the manufacture of vaccines or weaponized for use in biological weapons.

A report of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs concluded that the U.S. under the successive presidential administrations sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992. The chairman of the Senate committee, Don Riegle, said: "The executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think its a devastating record." According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein.

Public diplomacy and covert support

Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's then-special envoy to the Middle East meeting Saddam Hussein on 19–20 December 1983 during a visit to Baghdad. Rumsfeld, who supported Hussein in the 80's, later became the U.S. Secretary of Defense who led the coalition forces later in 2003 against him.

The U.S. provided critical battle planning assistance at a time when U.S. intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program. The U.S. carried out this covert program at a time when Secretary of State George P. Shultz, United States Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci and National Security Adviser General Colin L. Powell were publicly condemning Iraq for its use of poison gas, especially after Iraq attacked Kurdish villagers in Halabja in March 1988. U.S. officials publicly condemned Iraq's employment of mustard gas, sarin, VX and other poisonous agents, but sixty Defense Intelligence Agency officers were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq. It has long been known that the U.S. provided intelligence assistance, such as satellite photography, to Saddam's regime. Carlucci said: "My understanding is that what was provided" to Iraq "was general order of battle information, not operational intelligence." "I certainly have no knowledge of U.S. participation in preparing battle and strike packages," he said, "and doubt strongly that that occurred." "I did agree that Iraq should not lose the war, but I certainly had no foreknowledge of their use of chemical weapons." Secretary of State Powell, through a spokesman, said the officers' description of the program was "dead wrong," but declined to discuss it. His deputy, Richard L. Armitage, a senior defense official at the time, used an expletive relayed through a spokesman to indicate his denial that the United States acquiesced in the use of chemical weapons.

Concern about the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted Iraq to reexamine seriously the nature of its relationship with the United States. This process led to a gradual warming of relations between the two countries. In 1981 Iraq and the United States engaged in low level, official talks on matters of mutual interest such as trade and regional security. In 1982, the United States extended credits to Iraq for the purchase of American agricultural commodities, the first time this had been done since 1967. More significant, in 1983 the Baathist government hosted a United States special Middle East envoy, the highest-ranking American official to visit Baghdad in more than sixteen years. In 1984, when the United States inaugurated "Operation Staunch" to halt shipment of arms to Iran by third countries, no similar embargo was attempted against Iraq because Saddam Hussein's government had expressed its desire to negotiate an end to the war. All of these initiatives prepared the ground for Iraq and the United States to reestablish diplomatic relations in November 1984.

In early 1988, Iraq's relations with the United States were generally cordial. The relationship had been strained at the end of 1986 when it was revealed that the United States had secretly sold arms to Iran during 1985 and 1986, and a crisis occurred in May 1987 when an Iraqi pilot bombed an American naval ship in the Persian Gulf, a ship he mistakenly thought to be involved in Iran-related commerce. Nevertheless, the two countries had weathered these problems by mid-1987. Although lingering suspicions about the United States remained, Iraq welcomed greater, even if indirect, American diplomatic and military pressure in trying to end the war with Iran. For the most part, the government of Saddam Hussein believed the United States supported its position that the war was being prolonged only because of Iranian intransigence.

1990s

The Gulf War terminated on April 11, 1991 with a cease-fire negotiated between the U.S. and its war allies and Iraq.^{[citation needed]}

The U.S. engaged in a secret campaign to overthrow the government of Iraq. According to former U.S. intelligence officials interviewed by the New York Times, the CIA orchestrated a bomb and sabotage campaign between 1992 and 1995 in Iraq via one of the insurgent organizations, the Iraqi National Accord, led by Iyad Allawi. The campaign had no apparent effect in toppling Saddam Hussein's rule.

According to former CIA officer Robert Baer and according to the Iraqi government, the bombing campaign against Baghdad included both civilian and government targets. The civilian targets included a movie theater and a bombing of a schoolbus and schoolchildren, in which children were killed. The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. In 1996, Amneh al-Khadami, who described himself as the chief bomb maker for the Iraqi National Accord, recorded a videotape in which he talked of the bombing campaign and complained that he was being shortchanged money and supplies. Two former intelligence officers confirmed the existence of the videotape, as reported in 1997 by the British newspaper The Independent, which had obtained a copy of the videotape. The campaign was directed by CIA asset Dr. Iyad Allawi, who was later installed as interim prime minister by the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003.

In October 1998, regime change became official U.S. policy with enactment of the "Iraq Liberation Act."

2000s

See also: Iraq War

Embassy of Iraq in Washington, D.C.

Because of the primary roles taken by the United States and Britain in deposing Saddam Hussein and establishing interim governments to replace his regime, Iraq’s relationships with those countries, particularly the United States, are expected to remain paramount for the foreseeable future. Government and nongovernmental aid from the United States will continue as a crucial support in reconstruction. In 2006 formulation of more precise foreign policy priorities awaits the firm establishment of the permanent government. In the short term, Iraq’s relations with Western and Far Eastern economic powers are determined by debt forgiveness and reconstruction assistance, which have come from many quarters. Relations with the United States were strained in mid-2006 when Iraq criticized Israeli attacks on Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

See also

• Saddam Hussein - United States relations
• Embassy of the United States in Baghdad
• Sanctions against Iraq
• Iraqi Americans
  • List of Iraqi Americans
• United States Ambassador to Iraq
• Iraq–Israel relations
• Cruise missile strikes on Iraq (June 1993)
• Bombing of Iraq (December 1998)
• Operation Desert Scorpion (Iraq 1998)

References

This article is based on the public domain Library of Congress country study and country profile.

External links

• History of Iraq - U.S. relations

• Embassy of Iraq - Washington, DC
• Embassy of U.S.A - Baghdad