Christmas came 11 days early for Donald Rumsfeld two years ago when
the news broke that American forces had pulled Saddam Hussein from a
spidery hole. During interviews about the capture, on CBS and ABC,
the Pentagon’s top man was upbeat. And he didn’t have to deal with a
question that Lesley Stahl or Peter Jennings could have logically
chosen to ask: “Secretary Rumsfeld, you met with Saddam almost
exactly 20 years ago and shook his hand. What kind of guy was he?”
Now, Saddam Hussein has gone on trial, but such questions remain
unasked by mainstream U.S. journalists. Rumsfeld met with Hussein in
Baghdad on behalf of the Reagan administration, opening up strong
diplomatic and military ties that lasted through six more years of
Saddam’s murderous brutality.
As it happens, the initial trial of Saddam and co-defendants is
focusing on grisly crimes that occurred the year before Rumsfeld
gripped his hand. “The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38,
riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he witnessed after
his arrest in 1982, including a meat grinder with human hair and
blood under it,” the New York Times reported on Dec. 6. And: “At one
point, Mr. Muhammad briefly broke down in tears as he recalled how
his brother was tortured with electrical shocks in front of their
77-year-old father.”
The victims were Shiites -- 143 men and adolescent boys, according to
the charges -- tortured and killed in the Iraqi town of Dujail after
an assassination attempt against Saddam in early July of 1982. Donald
Rumsfeld became the Reagan administration’s Middle East special envoy
15 months later.
On Dec. 20, 1983, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld “visited
Iraq in what U.S. officials said was an attempt to bolster the
already improving U.S. relations with that country.” A couple of days
later, the New York Times cited a “senior American official” who
“said that the United States remained ready to establish full
diplomatic relations with Iraq and that it was up to the Iraqis.”
On March 29, 1984, the Times reported: “American diplomats pronounce
themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United
States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in
all but name.” Washington had some goodies for Saddam’s regime, the
Times account noted, including “agricultural-commodity credits
totaling $840 million.” And while “no results of the talks have been
announced” after the Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad three months earlier,
“Western European diplomats assume that the United States now
exchanges some intelligence on Iran with Iraq.”
A few months later, on July 17, 1984, a Times article with a Baghdad
dateline sketchily filled in a bit more information, saying that the
U.S. government “granted Iraq about $2 billion in commodity credits
to buy food over the last two years.” The story recalled that “Donald
Rumsfeld, the former Middle East special envoy, held two private
meetings with the Iraqi president here,” and the dispatch mentioned
in passing that “State Department human rights reports have been
uniformly critical of the Iraqi President, contending that he ran a
police state.”
Full diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad were
restored 11 months after Rumsfeld’s December 1983 visit with Saddam.
He went on to use poison gas later in the decade, actions which
scarcely harmed relations with the Reagan administration.
As the most senior U.S. official to visit Iraq in six years, Rumsfeld
had served as Reagan’s point man for warming relations with Saddam.
In 1984, the administration engineered the sale to Baghdad of 45
ostensibly civilian-use Bell 214ST helicopters. Saddam’s military
found them quite useful for attacking Kurdish civilians with poison
gas in 1988, according to U.S. intelligence sources. “In response to
the gassing,” journalist Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, “sweeping
sanctions were unanimously passed by the U.S. Senate that would have
denied Iraq access to most U.S. technology. The measure was killed by
the White House.”
The USA’s big media institutions did little to illuminate how
Washington and business interests combined to strengthen and arm
Saddam Hussein during many of his worst crimes. “In the 1980s and
afterward, the United States underwrote 24 American corporations so
they could sell to Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction, which
he used against Iran, at that time the prime Middle Eastern enemy of
the United States,” writes Ben Bagdikian, a former assistant managing
editor of the Washington Post, in his book The New Media Monopoly.
“Hussein used U.S.-supplied poison gas” against Iranians and Kurds
“while the United States looked the other way.”
Of course the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were not just in
the future when Rumsfeld came bearing gifts in 1983. Saddam’s
large-scale atrocities had been going on for a long time. Among them
were the methodical torture and murders in Dujail that have been
front-paged this week in coverage of the former dictator’s trial;
they occurred 17 months before Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad.
Today, inside the corporate media frame, history can be supremely
relevant when it focuses on Hussein’s torture and genocide. But the
historic assistance of the U.S. government and American firms is
largely off the subject and beside the point.
A photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand on Dec. 20, 1983, is
easily available. (It takes a few seconds to find via Google.) But
the picture has been notably absent from the array of historic images
that U.S. media outlets are providing to viewers and readers in
coverage of the Saddam Hussein trial. And journalistic mention of
Rumsfeld’s key role in aiding the Iraqi tyrant has been similarly
absent. Apparently, in the world according to U.S. mass media, some
history matters profoundly and some doesn’t matter at all.
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Norman Solomon is the author of the new book “War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com