Gassing and Oil

Via This Modern World comes this link to an Institute for Policy Studies report on a very interesting piece of US-Iraqi history. It seems that when Bechtel wanted to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to Jordan in the mid-1980s, the US foreign policy machine revved up to pressure Saddam to agree to the deal. A major player in this effort was none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Reagan's special peace envoy to the Middle East.

Of course, Iraq at the time was busy gassing Iranian soldiers, but a little thing like possession and use of weapons of mass destruction didn't derail the pipeline project. It did result produce a public scolding of Iraq, and a back-channel appeal not to buy any more chemical weapons from US companies lest it embarrass everyone involved, but that was pretty much it.

As the report's author Jim Vallette puts it:

The men who courted Saddam while he gassed Iranians are now waging war against him, ostensibly because he holds these same weapons of mass destruction. To a man, they now deny that oil has anything to do with the conflict. Yet during the Reagan Administration, and in the years leading up to the present conflict, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports. All of this documentation suggests that Reagan Administration officials bent many rules to convince Saddam Hussein to open up a pipeline of central interest to the US, from Iraq to Jordan. … In their own words, we now see that for Administration officials, a dictator is a friend of the United States when he is willing to make an oily deal, and a mortal enemy when he is not.

Of course, this should only come as a suprise to those who thought that we went to war because of Iraq's WMDs, a notion that even the Bush Administration has been busily debunking in recent days.