Rene — He Lied and Cheated in the Name of Anti-communism
Topic(s): US Analysis | Comments Off on Rene — He Lied and Cheated in the Name of Anti-communismHe Lied and Cheated in the Name of Anti-communism
>>From Iraq, Reagan didn’t look so Freedom-loving
by Jonathan Steele
Friday, June 11, 2004
Guardian / UK
It will be odd for Iraqis to watch TV tonight (power cuts permitting)
and hear the eulogies to freedom-loving Ronald Reagan at his state
funeral. The motives behind US policy towards their country have always
been a mystery, and if Iraqis sometimes explain to westerners that
Saddam Hussein was a CIA agent whose appointed task was to provoke
an American invasion of Iraq, it is largely thanks to Reagan’s legacy.
Although Saddam was still a junior figure, it is a matter of record
that the CIA station in Baghdad aided the coup which first brought the
Ba’athists to power in 1963. But it was Reagan who, two decades later,
turned US-Iraqi relations into a decisive wartime alliance. He sent
a personal letter to Saddam Hussein in December 1983 offering help
against Iran. The letter was hand-carried to Baghdad by Reagan’s
special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld.
Reagan liked several things about Saddam. A firm anti-communist,
he had banned the party and executed or imprisoned thousands of its
members. The Iraqi leader was also a bulwark against the mullahs
in Tehran and a promising point of pressure against Syria and its
Hizbullah clients in Lebanon who had just destroyed the US Marine
compound in Beirut, killing over 200 Americans.
It is not surprising that the current international maneuvering
over Iraq is treated with suspicion grounded in that history. Iraqis
regard their newly appointed government with skepticism. They see the
difficulty France had at the United Nations in trying to persuade
the Americans to allow Iraqis a veto over US offensives in places
like Falluja. They note that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi did not
even ask for a major Iraqi role until the French made it an issue.
Iraqis remember that Allawi and his exile organization, the Iraqi
National Accord, were paid by the CIA.
Not just in Iraq but around the world, the hallmark of Reagan’s
presidency was anti-communist cynicism, masked by phony rhetoric
about freedom. In his first press conference as president he used
quasi-biblical language to claim that Soviet leaders “reserve unto
themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat”. It was
one of the most extraordinary cases of the pot calling the kettle
black. What could Saddam, let alone other Iraqis, have thought when
it became known two years after Rumsfeld’s first visit to Baghdad that
Washington had secretly sold arms to the mullahs Iraq was fighting. Who
had been lying and cheating?
In the name of anti-communism everything was possible. Reagan invaded
Grenada on the false premise that US students who had been there safely
for months were suddenly in danger. Reagan armed thugs to overthrow the
government of Nicaragua, even after it won internationally certified
free elections in 1984. He made the US an outlaw by rejecting the
world court judgments against its blockade of Nicaragua’s coast.
Reagan armed and trained Osama bin Laden and his followers in
their Afghan jihad, and authorized the CIA to help to pay for the
construction of the very tunnels in Tora Bora in which his one-time
ally later successfully hid from US planes. On the grounds that Nelson
Mandela’s African National Congress was pro-communist, Reagan vetoed
US congress bills putting sanctions on the apartheid regime the ANC
was fighting.
His policies towards the Soviet Union were hysterical and
counter-productive. He put detente into deep freeze for several years
with his insulting label “the evil empire”. It led to overblown outrage
over the downing by Soviet aircraft of a South Korean airliner that
intruded into Russian air space. Moscow’s action was inept, but if
Reagan had not put the superpowers in collision, the Kremlin might
have treated the wayward plane more calmly.
Moscow’s policies in the developing world were no less cynical than
Reagan’s. In Iran and Iraq they played both sides, tilting towards
Saddam Hussein, in spite of his execution of communists. They feared
Iran’s Islamic fundamentalism as much as Washington did. But the cold
war was not mainly about ideology, and certainly not freedom. It was a
contest for power. By the time Reagan took office, some independent
analysts and reporters with experience in the Soviet Union were
arguing Moscow’s power had peaked.
The CIA was exaggerating the strength of the Soviet economy and the
amount being spent on defense (shades of the recent fiasco over Iraq’s
WMD). The issue was hotly debated, and it was hard to reach the truth
of events in a closed society. Those like myself who detected Soviet
weakness had to struggle against the Kremlinological establishment,
where traditional views were in a majority.
But the record of Soviet behavior suggested that, behind Brezhnev’s
rhetoric, Moscow had become disillusioned with its international
achievements. Its Warsaw Pact allies were unreliable and had to be
periodically invaded or threatened.
In the Middle East, Moscow had few allies in spite of decades of trying
to win friends through the supply of arms. Egypt had moved west,
Syria saw that Russia had no clout on the central issue of Israel
and Palestine, the Gulf states were suspicious, and only Yemen and
Iraq seemed to offer a little hope.
The Kremlin was losing heart, but its elderly leaders were too ill to
draw the consequences. It took a younger leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,
to start the process of international withdrawal. High oil prices
after 1973 had given Moscow a decade of easy money to finance its
part in the US-Soviet arms race while also developing its industrial
infrastructure.
By the early 1980s the weakness of the consumer goods sector, the
failure to reform agriculture, and the pressure for liberalization
coming from a policy elite which had traveled abroad as diplomats,
engineers and journalists was about to break the surface.
Reagan’s Star Wars project did not bankrupt the Soviet Union into
reform, as his admirers claim. In repeated statements as well as his
budget allocations Gorbachev made it clear Moscow would not bother
to match a dubious weapons system which could not give Washington
“first-strike capability” for at least another 15 years, if ever.
The Soviet Union imploded for internal reasons, not least the erratic
way Gorbachev reacted to the contradictory processes set in motion by
his own reforms. Reagan was merely an uncomprehending bystander. His
acceptance in his second term of detente was a u-turn which millions
of peace activists in Europe had been demanding.
It was detente that made the end of the cold war possible, and
without Reagan’s blind anti-communism it could have come at least
four years earlier.
· Jonathan Steele’ s book ‘The Limits of Soviet Power’ was published
in 1984