Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group and author of "Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja" clarifies the decades-long history of the US relationships with Iraq and Iran and why Iran has so many good reasons to distrust the US.
He was interviewed by NPR and that interview is available at The Scribe. Here's an excerpt:
JH: [During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's] the Iranians would send these young, so-called volunteers across minefields where many were blown up, of course – and many of these were teenagers – towards the Iraqis, and the Iraqis would be sitting there with the machine guns, firing, firing, firing, killing a lot of these guys. But there would be more coming. The machine guns would heat up and jam. So the Iraqis were really afraid of being overwhelmed by these human wave assaults. The only weapon they could think of that could effectively counter them was gas.
NPR: Did Iraq feel that it could literally get away with murder?
JH: Well, I think so! Because each time it used a new chemical agent and it was starting to gas civilians as well, nothing happened. There was silence. And so it knew it could go ahead. And of course this of course benefited it tremendously, especially toward the end of the war, when it was going for advantage.
NPR: Getting on towards near the end of the war, how did the Iran-Contra affair encourage Saddam Hussein?
JH: The Iran-Contra affair was a huge slap in the face of the Iraqis. They had already suspected but now they had the evidence that the US was in fact arming its arch enemy and was giving it very critical weapons systems. So when this was uncovered and became a big public scandal, the State Department and the US government more broadly went out of their way to increase the tilt toward Iraq. The credit guarantees went up. The intelligence-sharing went up. The US presence, through the US defense attaché and military intelligence in Iraq, was ramped up. And so we get a very close, fairly intimate relationship, especially on the intelligence level, between the US and Iraq.
NPR: Did the American intelligence agencies actually share satellite photos or data about where Iranian positions were in northern Iraq or along the border?
JH: Along the southern front in particular they did. And so this helped the Iraqis hugely especially in terms of directing chemical fire – they knew now where the Iranian troops were…
NPR: But certainly American officials at that point knew there was no question that Iraq was using this on the Iranians?
JH: Oh, US intelligence documents make it abundantly clear that there was full knowledge of this from at least the summer of 1983 on.
That neither the US nor the UN intervened when Saddam used chemical weapons still matters very much to the Iranians -- not to mention the Kurds -- a couple of decades later. One can understand why they would be so resentful. It also explains why they're so eager to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
NPR: ...You write that [Iran's] memory of the weapons that Saddam used in both Iraqi Kurdistan and Iran is very much alive. There was fear at one point that Teheran itself might be gassed. Iranians see the US as being complicit, of course, in the chemical campaign. And you suggest this figures into their drive for nuclear weapons.
JH: Well, I think it’s directly related because the Iranians, of course, had a nuclear program under the Shah. Khomeini stopped that. But then later this was resumed because of the direct experience Iran had in the war with Iraq. To be totally vulnerable to chemical weapons attacks with no similar response capability, and realizing that the Iraqis were also starting to develop biological and nuclear weapons, and so they started to develop their own programs. Plus, they learned that you could not rely on the international community to abide by its own international treaties like the 1925 Geneva Protocol against the use of chemical weapons! The Iranians kept saying to the United Nations, “This is your international convention. Why do you not observe it? Why is Iraq allowed to use chemical weapons against us?” So now they sign all these treaties themselves but they know that it’s just ink on paper.
