History A Man You Could Do Business With

Even at the edge of the abyss, U.S. policy toward Iraq ran headlong into contradiction with itself. On July 25, 1990, as Iraqi tanks and troops were massing along the border of Kuwait, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad that the U.S. had little to say about Arab border disputes and was eager to improve relations with Iraq. That same day in Washington, anxious State Department officials urged the Pentagon to dispatch the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Independence and its battle group, then in the Indian Ocean, to the mouth of the Persian Gulf -- as a signal to Saddam that the U.S. would not sit idly by if Iraq crossed into Kuwait.

Days passed. The Joint Chiefs of Staff resisted sending the Independence, arguing that such a force, obviously no more than a token, would be no match for Saddam's giant war machine. Just before the invasion, with the Iraqi army now poised for assault, the White House overruled the Pentagon's concerns and ordered the warships toward the gulf. The decision probably came too late to impress Saddam.

The episode was typical of a U.S. policy toward Iraq that was marked by mixed signals, interagency disputes, intelligence failures, errors of judgment and flights of wishful thinking. Behind the specific failures lurked -- and still lurks -- a general policy dilemma the U.S. has yet to resolve: Must America dance with the devil to promote its strategic interests? When is the enemy of your enemy your friend?

While it took months for Desert Shield to be transformed into Desert Storm, U.S. policymakers were scrambling for cover within days of the invasion, trying to defend their actions from the harsh judgments of hindsight. The great "Who lost Kuwait?" debate was on. Revisionism was rampant. But what was clear was that the roots of a failed policy went back more than a decade. The American embrace of Saddam Hussein began on Nov. 4, 1979, when the Islamic revolutionaries who had overthrown the Shah of Iran seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage. That cataclysmic event -- and the growing fear that Islamic fundamentalism would spread throughout the region -- became the driving force behind U.S. policy not only toward Iran but Iraq as well. Three U.S. administrations and both political parties shared responsibility for this view.

1 "A Counterbalance To the Iranians"

Says Graham Fuller, a Middle East specialist with the CIA during the 1980s: "There was a genuine visceral fear of Islam in Washington as a force that was utterly alien to American thinking, and that really scared us. Senior people at the Pentagon and elsewhere were much more concerned about Islam than communism. It was an almost obsessive fear, leading to a mentality on our part that you should use any stick to beat a dog -- to stop the advance of Islamic fundamentalism." That stick was to be Iraq.