As far back as the Carter administration in 1979, American intelligence and foreign policy officials had identified Iraq’s potential to be a major source of destabilization in the world’s most important energy-producing region. Israel, fearing (correctly, as it happens) that Iraq was attempting to build a nuclear weapon, launched a pre-emptive strike in 1981 on the nuclear breeder reactor in Tuwaitha, Iraq. The International Atomic Energy Agency later determined that Iraqi teams salvaged bomb-grade uranium from the wreckage.
OUR FRIEND SADDAM
Despite all this, for a variety of reasons — some related to oil, some related to the Cold War, others still difficult to fathom — the Reagan administration in 1982 decided that it needed Iraq’s dictatorial regime as an ally. Saddam, while brutal and possibly maniacal in Washington’s calculations, at least had not allied himself with the Soviet Union. More importantly, he was engaged in a bloody slugfest with neighboring Iran, a former American ally whose own dictatorial ruler, the shah, had been overthrown just three years earlier by an Islamic revolution which — like the Bolshevik one earlier in the century — had pledged to spread its ideology through violent upheavals throughout the world. Alarmed, the United States backed Iraq in its war with Iran, providing intelligence help and diplomatic support. Washington even turned the other cheek in 1987 when an Iraqi attack plane targeting Iranian oil tankers instead sent an Exocet missile slamming into an American destroyer, USS Stark, killing 37 American sailors.
At the same time, the Reagan administration, seeking to avoid the kind of oil shocks that rocked the American economy in the 1970s, was cementing its ties to Saudi Arabia, controversially selling the kingdom AWACs early-warning aircraft and F-15 warplanes. These two pillars of new American policy in the Persian Gulf region would soon come crashing down when Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990.
