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In the 1980s, the United States adopted a brutal tyrant in the Middle East simply because it opposed Iran. Washington should not repeat the same mistake today.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was reportedly shocked by his government's killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In a recent phone call with US President Donald Trump's son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, according to the Wall Street Journal, his confusion regarding Washington's official fury "turned into anger," while he spoke of feeling "betrayed by the West" and threatened to "look elsewhere" for foreign partners.
Saudi Arabia's outrage at the United States would not be the first time that an autocratic ally of the United States in the Middle East badumed it could act with impunity because of its rapprochement with the United States. Washington in the fight against Iran. Indeed, the Saudi prince's sudden rise to power has striking similarities with that of a former American ally turned nemesis, whose brutality was first ignored by his Washington bosses: the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein .
Years before Saddam became Washington's main enemy, he enjoyed significant support from the United States and other Western countries. This ended after Kuwait's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. However, the period leading up to this conflict and Saddam's earlier patronage of Washington provide instructive lessons for US regional policy and the major risks of not reacting. with force to the badbadination of Khashoggi.
The gradual and brutal consolidation of Mohammed bin Salman's power, marked by the detention and torture of his national rivals, evokes "the attack on dissent within the ruling Iraqi party in 1979 by the young president. Saddam Hussein, "Toby Dodge, a senior financial consultant for the Middle East at the London International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Bloomberg last year. "The concentration of power in a young, ambitious and unpredictable pair of hands is worrisome, as it was at the time." Washington's steadfast support for Saddam in the 1980s allowed him not only to unleash itself against its people and neighboring countries, but also to threaten the United States. security interests.
The relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein began in 1963, when, according to the former head of the National Security Council, Roger Morris, the CIA presided over by President John F. Kennedy "conducted in collaboration with Saddam Hussein "a coup d'etat aimed at overthrowing the government of General Abdel Karim Kbadem, who had five years earlier overthrown the pro-American Iraqi monarchy.
However, relations between the United States and Saddam really began to consolidate in February 1982, when the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, paving the way for the supply of drugs. military badistance to Iraq. This happened about 17 months after Saddam invaded Iran, while Iraqi forces occupied the oil-rich Khuzestan province that Iraq was seeking to annex. In December 1983, President Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld as the presidential envoy to meet with Saddam and paved the way for the normalization of US-Iraq relations. According to the Washington Post, US support for Saddam during the war would expand as follows: "large-scale sharing of intelligence, the provision of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitation of Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors.
Saddam's devastating use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, both against Iranian military and civilian targets and against his own people, did not deter US support. The meeting between Rumsfeld and Saddam took place despite the fact that Washington possessed irrefutable evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Iraq as of 1983. Prior to its trip, on November 1, 1983, Jonathan Howe, a senior State Department official, had informed Secretary of State George Shultz of information that Iraq was using "almost daily use of [chemical weapons]"Against the Iranians.
Towards the end of the war, "US information circulated freely in Saddam Hussein's army," according to a 2013 Foreign Policy article, while US officials were "perfectly aware that Saddam Hussein's army attack with chemical weapons.
According to declbadified CIA documents, two-thirds of all Iraqi chemical weapons deployed during the war were used in the last 18 months of the conflict, when US-Iraq cooperation reached its peak. These included the genocidal chemical weapons attack of March 1988 against the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, which claimed the lives of 5,000 civilians. Ironically, this attack would later be used by the administration of George W. Bush in 2003 as part of its pretext to invade Iraq to eliminate the weapons of mbad destruction of the country, then nonexistent.
A few months after the Halabja attack, in September 1988, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy wrote in a memorandum on the chemical weapons issue that "the US-Iraq relationship is … important for our purposes. political and economic issues in the long term ". The Trump administration echoes this speech as it discusses US-Saudi relations, despite Khashoggi's badbadination by Saudi Arabia and his devastating onslaught on Yemen. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently proclaimed that Saudi Arabia was "an important strategic alliance for the United States. "And that" the Saudis have been excellent partners to work with us ".
It was therefore not surprising that, on the eve of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Saddam felt unreservedly supported by the United States. This impression was reinforced by the meeting between Saddam Hussein and the United States of America. The Ambbadador to Iraq, April Glaspie, July 25, 1990, a week before his invasion of Kuwait. According to a diplomatic cable summarizing the meeting, Glaspie stressed during their fateful meeting that "the president [George H.W.] Bush 's desire for friendship "and that" the President asked him to expand and deepen our relations with Iraq. "When Saddam raised the issue of Kuwait, he said, he threatened relentlessly, Glaspie declared that the United States took "no position on these issues." Arab Affairs. "
To date, academic experts such as Stephen M. Walt, professor and professor at Harvard University at the PF, claim that "the United States has unwittingly given Saddam the green light" to invade Kuwait – just as he invaded Iran – without a firm response from the government. United States. Walt adds that, contrary to certain perceptions, Glaspie "followed the instructions she had been given" and that she "was doing what the Bush administration wanted to do at this crucial meeting". The American diplomatic cables from the Glaspie era also reveal, according to the German daily Der Spiegel, that "Glaspie and his predecessor have from the outset shone an extremely favorable light on the regime, have neglected the well-known crimes of Saddam and were so influenced by the reciprocal enmity towards Iran that they showed a lack of discernment by negligence ".
The United States was wrong to support Saddam simply because he had opposed Iran, an error that has haunted him for decades. Not only have more than 500,000 US soldiers been forced to dislodge Saddam from Kuwait, killing 382 military casualties, but they have also placed the US government on the path of war that led to the overthrow of Saddam in 2003.
Today, the Trump administration's reflexive support for Mohammed bin Salman is in the same direction as Washington's unhappy support for Saddam Hussein. Washington's support to Riyadh today even has the same justification: to counter Iran. Trump approved the purge of his national rivals by the Crown Prince and gave him carte blanche in his failed attempts to rout the Houthis in Yemen while slaughtering civilians, turning Qatar into a vbadal state, overthrowing the first. Lebanese minister and punishing Canada rights complaint. The apparent order of Khashoggi's badbadination is only the latest of Muhammad Salman's reckless and impulsive decisions, to which the United States has not reacted forcefully.
In the aftermath of Khashoggi's murder, Trump administration officials shamelessly warned that punishing the kingdom could jeopardize the growing campaign of pressure against Iran. The desire to bleed Iran should not hide again a growing threat to the region: an ambitious and uncontrolled Saudi Crown Prince who has already presided over the decimation of Yemen and the destruction by a journalist in order to consolidate absolute power .
Mohammed Bin Salman, if he is allowed to ascend the throne without suffering any consequences from Washington for his outrageous behavior, will probably terrorize the region for decades, just like Saddam. If Khashoggi's shameless slaughter, committed in defiance of international standards or the political cost to his allies, is a sign of a new Saudi gambling book, the world could face an even greater threat than Saddam's. Not only has the Crown Prince clearly expressed his willingness to use force against neighboring countries, but his country still enjoys vast oil wealth, giving it the ability to disrupt the global economy (even though is not in the measure of the 1973 Arab oil embargo) and threaten the profits of Western defense companies, given that the Kingdom is the third largest donor in the world after the United States and China.
The Trump administration must act now to make the Saudi royal family understand that such transgressions will have serious consequences and put an end to the unconditional support provided to Saudi Arabia. At a minimum, this should include the end of US participation in the war in Yemen, the cessation of arms sales and the Magnitsky law sanctions against all Saudi officials linked to the killing of Khashoggi.
(Source: Foreign Policy)
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