Exposing sordid U.S. activities in Mideast

I was struck during a non-working visit to this gorgeous city last week by two articles that appeared on the same day in The International Herald Tribune, a paper owned by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The information disclosed by Raymond Close and Joost R. Hiltermann, who contributed their Op-Ed columns to the Paris-based paper, was flabbergasting.

Raymond Close, a former station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Saudi Arabia and at present an international business consultant, knows the Middle East very well since his father taught at the American University of Beirut back in the fifties.

His article focused on the connection between "the other American regional foreign policy objectives and the U.S. dedication to the Arab-Israeli peace process." In today's case, the threatened American war on Iraq.

Close recalled learning as early as April 1973 from his official Saudi counterparts of a decision by President Anwar Sadat "to begin preparing for a major military assault across the Suez Canal, and that he had informed King Faisal of this decision in a letter (received on April 17, 1973.)"

According to Close, the late Egyptian president had hoped that "by restoring Arab honour and displaying Arab courage on the battlefield could he hope to capture the attention of Washin-gton and persuade (then Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger to support a peace process."

Close recalled that the late Saudi monarch was sending his son and now Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal to Washington "to convey his father's deep concern, made much more urgent by the message from Sadat, that only a vigorous American peace initiative, urgently undertaken, could avert a regional Middle East war that would inevitably include the imposition of an oil embargo."

The former CIA station chief noted that "again, as usual, Washington paid no heed to this admonition from a wise and dignified gentleman, a proven friend of America for many years."

Six months later, the October War started with full Saudi backing for the oil boycott. Thereby, "Washington had again failed, through arrogance and ignorance, to appreciate the significance of the linkage."

Close also disclosed another significant episode that took place a few weeks after the October War. In a personal letter to King Faisal dated December 3, 1973, President Nixon included the following remarkable passages:

"Looking back over recent years, I recall the many times Your Majesty has written to me of your concern and of your conviction that we should do more to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. You have always given me wise counsel, and in retrospect your advice was well taken and should have been heeded.

"The latest war, and the shadow it has cast over our relations with many of our friends in the Middle East, has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the situation which has existed for so long can no longer be permitted to remain unresolved.

"The American people, while they feel a strong commitment to the security and survival of Israel, also harbour friendly feelings toward the Arab world and are well disposed to give responsible Arab views the attention they deserve.

"The American people have even understood how, in the heat of the recent war, the need to demonstrate solidarity with your Arab compatriots led Your Majesty to institute certain measures with respect to the production and supply of oil.

"With Your Majesty's cooperation, I am prepared to devote the full energies of the U.S. to bringing about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East based on the full implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, in the adoption of which my government played a major part. You have my total personal commitment to work toward that goal."

Close noted that "the last sentence was added by Nixon in his personal handwriting, with the word 'total' underlined twice, and the word 'commitment' misspelled."

Hiltermann, who is the director for the Middle East Project at the International Crisis Group and is at present writing a book on U.S. policy toward Iraq, underlined American culpability - certainly Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's - in Iraq's use of chemical weapons.

Declassified State Department documents show that when Rumsfeld had an opportunity, wrote Hiltermann, "to raise the issue of chemical weapons with the Iraqi leadership in 1983, he failed to do so in any meaningful way."

Hiltermann continued: "Worse, he may well have given a signal to the Iraqis that the United States would close its eyes to Iraq's use of chemical weapons during its war with Iran, providing an early boost to Iraq's plans to develop weapons of mass destruction."

Rumsfeld, nowadays descri-bed as one of the leading hawks of the Bush administration who are advocating "regime change" in Iraq, was in December 1983 President Ronald Reagan's special envoy for the Middle East. He was the highest-ranking official to visit Baghdad since Iraq severed ties with the U.S. after the June War in 1967.

He even met with both Saddam Hussain and Tariq Aziz, who was his country's foreign minister at the time, a development that paved the way for the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries in November 1984 after Reagan's re-election for a second term.

At the time of Rumsfeld's visit Iraq was facing threatening Iranian "human wave" assaults and in response Iraq was said to have used chemical weapons on the battlefield. "This was known in Washington at least as early as October 1983," wrote Hiltermann.

Talking points and minutes of the meetings of Rumsfeld's mission to Iraq underlined America's tilt toward Iraq. Additionally, Rumsfeld was also exploring "a proposition to run an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba (a U.S. business interest involving the Bechtel Corporation), and to caution the Iraqis not to escalate the war in the Gulf through air strikes against Iranian oil facilities and tankers (which Washington feared might draw the United States into the war)."

Hiltermann asserted that there was no indication that Rumsfeld raised U.S. concerns about Iraq's use of poison gas with Saddam Hussain (although there apparently was a reference to "certain things" in his later meeting with Tariq Aziz).

"The record of the war," he continued, "suggests, that flush with their new confidence in U.S. backing, the Iraqis may have felt that they were now less restrained."

Hiltermann concluded his article by urging that "the American public should demand a full accounting for the support its leadership provided Iraq in the past, including its green light to chemical weapons use - weapons that Washington is belatedly claiming should be destroyed."

But the fact that both Close and Hiltermann chose to publish their damaging articles in the Tribune, a paper that is primarily circulated in Europe and now in the Middle East, speaks volumes.

If anything it may underline the inability of exposing these sordid American activities in the Middle East to the American public. My attempts to ask the two writers whether they had tried to publish their views in any American publication in the U.S. were not immediately successful.