Saddam : His Rise and Fall by Con Coughlin

Author:Con Coughlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0060505435
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2002-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Officially the United States and Britain maintained a policy of neutrality toward the combatants, but there were clear indications that both London and Washington were more favorably inclined toward Baghdad than Teheran. President Carter, in particular, was desperate to find an ally to help him extricate himself from the political situation caused by the American embassy hostage crisis in Teheran, which seriously threatened his prospects of his being elected for a second term in the autumn of 1980. Even though Washington still had Iraq on its list of countries that sponsored terrorism and had not enjoyed full diplomatic relations since the 1967 Israeli-Arab Six Day War, from mid-1980 onward there was a distinct shift in the Carter administration, which began to regard Saddam as a potential counterweight both against the ayatollahs and as an ally that might provide a bulwark against Soviet expansionism in the Gulf. According to President Bani-Sadr and the New York Times, Carter’s desire to explore the possibility of a clandestine alliance with Saddam resulted in a top-secret meeting taking place in Amman, Jordan, during the first week of July 1980 between Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, and Saddam Hussein. According to the Times, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss ways that the United States and Iraq could coordinate their activities “to oppose Iran’s reckless policies.”22 Brzezinski and his former aides have always denied that there was a face-to-face meeting, although Brzezinski did meet with King Hussein of Jordan, whose own survival instinct had already persuaded him to befriend his dictatorial namesake and neighbor. It is possible that a high-level Iraqi emissary was also present. As with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait ten years later, various former Carter administration officials, including Gary Sick, the former national security adviser, have claimed that the Americans led Saddam to assume that they had given Iraq a green light to invade Iran in the summer of 1980. Certainly from that moment on there was a distinct thaw in U.S. relations with Baghdad. While the U.S. Senate continued to block any attempt to export military equipment to Baghdad, in July Carter approved the sale of five Boeing airliners for Iraq’s national airline, America’s first significant commercial contract with Iraq since the Baathists came to power.

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