As you know, this is the week when every news and opinion broadcast, podcast, etc., typically does their year in review. There are, of course, economic reasons for this – they basically run clip shows or pre-taped round tables, which can occasionally be worth watching (Chris Hayes usually does pretty well with these) but are mostly pretty dull and awful. So, inasmuch as this is not, repeat, NOT a news blog or, really, an opinion blog in the traditional sense, I am breaking with this obnoxious practice and running with something I think is more useful …. the century in review. Meaning stuff that happened over the last 100 years, selected at random, and by “stuff” I mean historical and political stories that are, in essence, lost to history, particularly in the United States.
One such story is the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). which I have mentioned previously in the blog over the years. This, in my opinion, is one of those seminal conflicts that set the stage for much that followed in this unfortunate region. The United States and U.S. allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf (particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE) played a central role in this horrendous war, a role which has virtually been expunged from pop culture history. One example is the History Channel article on the Iran-Iraq war. which does not mention the U.S. at all. This is remarkable in that the Reagan Administration avidly supported Saddam Hussein’s government from 1982 on, providing them with arms, DIA intelligence on Iranian targets, precursors to chemical weapons, biological agents, and so on.
The Iran Chamber Society provides a useful list of our various efforts to support Hussein’s war against Iran. Here are some highlights:
February, 1982. Despite objections from congress, President Reagan removes Iraq from its list of known terrorist countries.
December, 1982. Hughes Aircraft ships 60 Defender helicopters to Iraq.
1982-1988. Defense Intelligence Agency provides detailed information for Iraq on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb damage assessments.
November, 1983. A National Security Directive states that the U.S would do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq from losing its war with Iran.
November, 1983. Banca Nazionale del Lavoro of Italy and its Branch in Atlanta begin to funnel $5 billion in unreported loans to Iraq. Iraq, with the blessing and official approval of the US government, purchased computer controlled machine tools, computers, scientific instruments, special alloy steel and aluminum, chemicals, and other industrial goods for Iraq’s missile, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
October, 1983. The Reagan Administration begins secretly allowing Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to transfer United States weapons, including Howitzers, Huey helicopters, and bombs to Iraq. These shipments violated the Arms Export Control Act.
May, 1986. The US Department of Commerce licenses 70 biological exports to Iraq between May of 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax.
May, 1986. US Department of Commerce approves shipment of weapons grade botulin poison to Iraq.
(See the full list with references here.)
An excellent account of this war is given by Dilip Hiro in his book The Longest War. And as our president would say, by the way, Happy Christmas
But really the greatest danger is having Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, pick your name out of the hat for Secret Santa. Christmas is his time to offload all of the failed experiments from the past year, and there are usually quite a few of them. You may end up unwrapping a package that contains a beaker of radioactive sludge or something that’s ticking like a bomb. (“Hey, Mack …” you’d say in your 1940s New York accent, “What the heck is this thing? It’s ticking like a bomb!”)
I think it’s worth saying at the outset that I have no idea of what our military’s mission is in Syria. I keep hearing that it’s essentially the same as the one we’re pursuing in Afghanistan – training and equipping a local force to fight the war for us – but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. It is, in fact, a formula for another unending deployment, one that has the support of most of the foreign policy voices in the media. Much of the criticism of Trump’s abrupt decision has been from a right militarist perspective, though one that is broadly shared, much like the criticism of his Korea policy. The only argument that has merit, in my view, is that we will be leaving the Syrian Kurds twisting in the wind – something we have done to the Kurds in past decades as well (ask Kissinger). Maybe that is worth keeping 2,000 plus U.S. troops in Syria, if protecting Kurdish fighters is in fact what they’re doing, but as always, we are pondering policy stacked on top of bad policy decades in the making.