Shorter Vic (as they say on the Internet): We should have taken over Iraq back in '91. Then we could have been 14 years and counting into a guerrilla war by now. But Old Man Bush was a wimp.
But how can you not pause to savor Vic's prime hackery a bit? Like this:
War I was a response to years of appeasement of Iraq, American mixed signals during the Iran-Iraq War, and clumsy diplomacy. All may have given Saddam the message that his invasion of Kuwait was outside the realm of American interest.
Vic has his own little schema for conflicts with Iraq, in which what the rest of the world calls "the Gulf War", Vic calls Iraq War I.
But our entire foreign policy team here at The Blue Voice gasped with astonishment to read of our "mixed signals" to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War. They are always ready to broaden their vocabularies, of course. Some lively discussion also ensued over whether the Iran-Contra deal in which we sold weapons to our supposed arch-(Islamic) enemy Iran while we were actively supporting Iraq in that war could be what Vic meant by "mixed signals".
Wanting to refresh their memories on the topic, our analysts did a little research on what those "mixed signals" were. They recommended the account by Jeffrey Record in Hollow Victory (1993) as a commendable one. He describes the assumptions behind the Reagan administration's "courtship of Iraq" beginning in the early 1980s, which was based on US tensions with revolutionary Shia Iran. Saddam was a Sunni but, more importantly, he was a secular Arab dictator. Which in those days was considered to be a quality American policy should promote in the Muslim world.
Saddam invaded Iran in September of 1980. And the United States began to actively support the secular Iraq against the threatening Islamic Iran. That Iraq attacked Iran wasn't seen as much of an impediment to American support. Our foreign policy staff was generally in agreement with Record's comments on this policy:
Though U.S. policy toward Iraq during the war with Iran was guilty of much shortsightedness, many excesses, and a lot of wishful thinking, its strategic premise was both sound and long-standing: to prevent the Gulf's domination by any single hostile power, be it the Soviet Union (the focus of U.S. policy in the Gulf during the Cold War) or Iran (in the 1980s), or Iraq (in the 1990s). Allegiance to this premise, however, did not dictate what became a virtual wartime alliance with Iraq. Nor did it demand the sharing of sensitive intelligence information and advanced technologies that could later be turned against the West. It certainly mandated neither an apparent failure to recognize that the marriage of U.S. and Iraqi interests during the war was purely one of convenience, nor a postwar official blindness to the emergence of a threatening Iraq as the Persian Gulf's aspiring successor superpower.
Record writes that US policy "amounted by the end of 1987 to virtual U.S. cobelligerency with Iraq against Iran" in that long and bloody war. But that came in stages. In 1983, the Reagan administration helpfully removed Iraq from the list of terrorism-sponsoring states so that we could have less restricted trade with them. Then the administration starting providing Iraq reconnaissance information from satellites and AWACS planes. "Thus began America's long courship of one of the world's most brutal and ambitious dictators, and its slide into cobelligerency against Iran."
What Record describes as "cobelligerency" was the Reagan administation's 1987 decision "to place Kuwait's eleven oil tankers under the U.S. flag and the U.S. Navy's protection." Kuwait was an ally of Iraq at the time. In July, one of those Kuwaiti tankers struck an Iranian mine.
A month later U.S. helicopters attacked and destroyed the Iran Ajr, an Iranian mine-laying vessel, and for the remainder of the war U.S. forces ran into other mines, engaged Iranian oil platforms, and sank Iranian warships. On July 3, 1988, less than three weeks before an Iran exhausted by disastrous defeats on the ground, Iraqi Scud missile attacks on Iranian cities, and the impossibility of dealing with the demands imposed by the American "second front" at sea, announced its willingness to accept a U.N.-sponsored cease-fire, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian commercial airliner.
Record notes, "America's undeclared war on Iran [in alliance with Saddam's Iraq], and its deliveries of foodstuffs, technology, and intelligence information to Iraq, contributed significantly to Baghdad's victory over the country it had so ill-advisedly invaded in 1980." (my emphasis)
And, referring to an event we've heard quite a bit about in recent years, Record writes, "Saddam's poison gas attacks on his own Kurdish citizens at the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War were followed by expanded [American] Commodity Credit Corporation guarantees to Baghdad."
All this, of course, was before George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office, burning with the desire to liberate the Iraqi people from the evil tyrant Saddam. So that we could install a pro-Iranian Shia regime in Baghdad. And have American troops to fight a long counterinsurgency war to keep it in power.
Our foreign policy analysts had a good chuckle over VDH describing conservative god Ronald Reagan's Iraq policy as "appeasement." But they were also unanimous that a de facto alliance and cobelligerency in a war could hardly be described meaningfully as "appeasement". Lots of other words might fit. That one doesn't seem to.
So, I failed this time to do a short one. I'll try again another time. But hackery like this deserves to be enjoyed to the fullest.
