Rumsfeld's Iraq overture.

ITEM: A headline in the December 19, 2003 Washington Post proclaimed: "Rumsfeld Visited Baghdad in 1984 To Reassure Iraqis, Documents Show." A very telling subtitle added: "Trip Followed Criticism of Chemical Arms' Use." The article began:

   Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Baghdad
   in March 1984 with instructions to
   deliver a private message about
   weapons of mass destruction: that the
   United States' public criticism of Iraq
   for using chemical weapons would
   not derail Washington's attempts to
   forge a better relationship, according
   to newly declassified documents.

ITEM: The New York Times for December 23, 2003 published a similar story, headlined "Rumsfeld Made Iraq Overture in '84 Despite Chemical Raids." The story stated:

   As a special envoy for the Reagan administration
   in 1984, Donald H.
   Rumsfeld, now the defense secretary,
   traveled to Iraq to persuade officials
   there that the United States was eager
   to improve ties with President Saddam
   Hussein despite his use of chemical
   weapons, newly declassified documents
   show.... During [the Iran-Iraq]
   war, the United States secretly provided
   Iraq with combat planning assistance,
   even after Mr. Hussein's use
   of chemical weapons was widely
   known.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Shortly before Christmas 2003, the nation's "prestige press" were all atwitter about supposedly new information concerning Donald Rumsfeld's 1984 trip to Baghdad as a special envoy of Secretary of State George Shultz and President Reagan. More recent subscribers to this magazine are most likely unaware (and veteran readers may have forgotten) that we have covered this issue several times over the years--and have provided considerably more detail and context than the recent stories about the new "revelations."

In a March 30, 1998 article, "Arming Saddam," for instance, senior editor William Norman Grigg reported:

   In fact, secret deals had been struck
   between Iraq and the U.S. foreign
   policy establishment in 1983. Even as
   the Soviets were nurturing Iraq's embryonic
   chemical and biological
   weapons program, the U.S. State Department
   was making its own overtures
   to Saddam. With the help of an
   obscure U.S. Department of Agriculture
   program, an equally obscure Atlanta
   branch of an Italian bank, and
   the involuntary assistance of the U.S.
   taxpayers, the foreign policy establishment
   helped Saddam build his
   war machine, including his weapons
   of mass destruction.

      In 1982, as a prelude to the U.S.
   "tilt" toward Iraq in its war with Iran,
   the State Department dropped Iraq
   from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.
   As Alan Friedman points out
   in his expose Spider's Web, this move
   meant that "Baghdad would now be
   eligible for American government
   loan guarantees" and that covert operatives
   in the U.S. intelligence community
   "now had political cover to go
   ahead with their plans to provide U.S.
   equipment to Iraq, albeit by way of
   unofficial channels."

      On December 17, 1983--shortly
   after the Soviets had agreed to help
   build Saddam's CBW capacity--presidential
   envoy Donald Rumsfeld
   visited Baghdad bearing a handwritten
   letter from President Reagan to
   Saddam. "In it Reagan offered to
   renew diplomatic relations and to expand
   military and business ties with
   Baghdad," reports Friedman. Shortly
   thereafter the U.S. began to extend
   taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to
   Iraq. In 1984, for example, the U.S.
   Export-Import Bank (Eximbank) extended
   a $500 million loan guarantee
   to Iraq to build the Aqaba oil pipeline
   --a project that enjoyed the personal
   attention of then-Vice President
   George Bush.

      But Eximbank subsidies were too
   visible to serve as a means of underwriting
   Iraq's war machine. So the
   foreign policy establishment selected
   an obscure Agriculture Department
   program known as the Commodity
   Credit Corporation (CCC). "As relations
   between the United States and
   Iraq began to thaw in 1983 and 1984,
   the White House sliced Iraq a giant
   piece of the CCC pie," explains Peter
   Mantius in his book Shell Game. "Between
   1983 and early 1990, Iraq received
   $4.98 billion in farm loan
   guarantees from the CCC." Iraq is almost
   entirely dependent upon agricultural
   imports, and its war with Iran
   exacerbated this dependency. As Judith
   Miller and Laurie Mylroie point
   out, "The CCC credits were important
   to an increasingly cash-starved
   [Iraq]. Under the program, Baghdad
   had three years to repay the loans, and
   if Iraq defaulted, the U.S. government
   would be obligated to pay off the debt
   itself"--by extorting the requisite
   sum from the taxpayers, of course.

In an October 21, 2002 article entitled "Building the Beast of Baghdad," Mr. Grigg again reported on Rumsfeld's Baghdad mission. "The foreign aid floodgates opened for Iraq shortly after Rumsfeld's December 1983 visit to Baghdad," he noted. "In 1984, the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Eximbank) provided a $500 million loan guarantee to Iraq to build the Aqaba oil pipeline, a project that earned the personal attention of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. But even more prodigious amounts of aid flowed from Washington to Baghdad via the Agriculture Department's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC)...."