The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq

Preface

With great fanfare, President Bush declared victory against Iraq on February 27, 1991. By all appearances, Operation Desert Storm was an overwhelming success. Saddam Hussein had been forced out of Kuwait, his armies were in a rout, and his dictatorship seemed doomed to certain death. America and its allies had once again shown that it was possible to fight a just war and win.

But the fight against Saddam Hussein had little to do with the liberation of Kuwait, no matter how much President Bush and his advisors tried to focus publicly on that goal. It wasn't about jobs, as James Baker once argued, or even about oil. The United States and its allies had no choice but to combat Saddam Hussein on the battlefield because of the greed of Western businessmen, the misguided analysis of the foreign policy establishment, and the incompetence of regulatory officials. Simply put, the United States went to war to smash the death machine that it and its Western allies had helped Saddam to assemble in the first place.

President Bush had acknowledged as much in his Thanksgiving address to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, before the war against Iraq actually started. With every passing day, Bush warned, Saddam Hussein was "one step closer to realizing his goal of a nuclear weapons arsenal." The threat of an Iraqi nuclear weapon, designed and built with the help of Western companies and Western scientists, gave "a real sense of urgency" to the Allied deployment in the Gulf. Bush didn't tell the troops just how close Saddam had come to the bomb (the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency had informed the President only a few days earlier that Iraq could assemble its first nuclear weapon within three to six months). "But this I know for sure," Bush said: "he's never possessed a weapon he did not use."

Over the fifteen years leading up to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, Western businesses and Western governments helped Iraq to assemble one of the most formidable arsenals ever seen in the Middle East. They sold tanks, supersonic fighters, chemical weapons, and ballistic missiles. They sold Iraq the materials to make an atomic bomb. Together the companies, their bankers, and their supporters in government formed a powerful interest group whose principle bond was the creation of a Middle Eastern Frankenstein. They all contributed in their own way to Saddam's death machine, and lobbied hard to protect their Iraqi connection. The members of this death lobby may have competed fiercely among themselves, but they banded together when it came to defending Iraq.

Saddam Hussein was quick to take advantage of so much solicitude. After the Soviet Union decided to embargo arms deliveries to Iraq fifteen years before the invasion of Kuwait, he set up a master procurement plan with the sole aim of securing Iraq's independence from its foreign suppliers. At the same time he was building up his conventional forces, he dispatched agents around the world to purchase the industrial tools and equipment necessary to manufacture an entire strategic arsenal, so Iraq could weather economic sanctions and arms embargoes and live to fight another day. Throughout this incredible military and industrial build-up, much of which occurred on the open market, never once did a red flag of warning go up in the West. Only four months before the invasion of Kuwait, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told Congress that Saddam Hussein was a "force of moderation" in the region--just as his predecessors had been saying for years. A more forthright statement of the truth could be found in corporate balance sheets: Iraq was a great market for France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Austria, and the U.S.. Saddam Hussein was our creature, our monster. We built him up, and then tried to take him down.

This book is a cautionary tale of what can happen when monumental greed meets monumental ambition. It is the story of the many men, companies, and governments who helped Iraq transform itself from an insignificant oil state into a regional superpower. It shows for the first time how we created Saddam Hussein step by step, piece by piece --through greed, willful blindness and monumental error. And of course, it shows what Saddam intended to do with the enormous arsenal he had assembled. Astonishing as it may seem now, Saddam seldom tried to disguise his true ambitions; yet the policy-makers and the lobbyists always managed not to hear. The confluence of interests fueling the Iraqi arms build-up was too strong.

The Death Lobby aspires to present the big picture of what happened in Iraq, and suggests ways of preventing it from happening again elsewhere. I have tried to respect as scrupulously as possible the actual order of events, so the reader can appreciate what decision-makers knew at any given moment, without the virtue of hindsight. Saddam Hussein did not emerge from obscurity on August 2, 1990 when he invaded Kuwait. The arming of Saddam was a fifteen-year love affair. And it was a world-class enterprise.

Paris, France

June 20 1991