The Arming of Saddam Hussein
Smoler, Fredric P.
Adel Darwish is a London-based investigative journalist—a correspondent for the Independent and a regular contributor to the Economist—who has specialized in ferreting out European arms exports...
...The parallels to extraregional cold-war politicking are obvious...
...Exocet AM-39 and MM-40 antiship missiles...
...The only hitch was the looming presence of a fascistic Iraq, armed to the teeth, possessed of an expansionist ideology, encouraged (by us) to think it could get away with irredentist wars and mass murder, and apparently equipped with strategic weapons and modern armies sufficient to allow it to commit aggression with impunity...
...As this is being written the administration is audibly disturbed at the prospect of the destruction of Sunni Arab military dictatorship in Iraq, and Assad, the only regional actor whose biutality rivals Saddam's, bids fair to become Saddam's surrogate just as Saddam replaced the Shah...
...Iranian military power was not merely contained, it was exhausted to the point of endangering the regime, which sought peace rather than risk counterrevolution by an exasperated and immiserated population...
...The potency of this assistance can be gauged by remembering that when we briefly extended such aid to the other side during the Iranamok affair, the Revolutionary Guards are said to have captured the Fao peninsula on the strength of it...
...Both of these processes are still at work in China today...
...Darwish and Alexander give estimates of Iraq's military expenditures over the last decade ranging between $80 and $105 billion on imported armaments (almost all the company names and figures below are from Darwish and Alexander...
...A decision to aid the Iraqi Kurdish insurgency in cooperation with Iran made Soviet assistance genuinely vital to Iraq...
...Why did they extend credit to such an extraordinarily lavish degree...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Some of it was an inability to realize that the petrodollars to service the loans would ever run short...
...Among lesser NATO suppliers, Norwegians provided explosives, and the Dutch sold propellant, artillery shells, night-vision equipment and airborne reconnaissance technology...
...Iran seemed to have disappeared as a power factor in the Gulf, although the militarized Iraq that we had unwittingly conjured up as a byproduct remained, suddenly alarmingly potent...
...The list of companies involved includes virtually the whole of the French arms industry: Dassault, Aerospatiale, Euromissle, GIAT, Panhard, Thompson-Brandt, Matra, Thomson CSF, Luchaire, COFRAS, Raclet, Matra Manurhin Defense, and Lacroix...
...HOT and Milan antitank missiles...
...This was nominally for the purpose of allowing Iran to stare down the Soviet Union...
...At least $15 billion worth have been accumulated since the end of the first Gulf War...
...AMX-10P combat vehicles and AMX-30 tanks...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...If the production run can be suitably lengthened only by producing a quantity exceeding domestic requirements, the armed services become very diligent lobbyists for exports to the Third World...
...At the end of this period Iraq owed France between FFr25 and FFr44 billion (the latter figure being the French estimate, the former the Iraqi), half of which, owed for arms, was guaranteed by the Compagnie Francaise d'Assurance pour le Commerce Exterieur, a state agency...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...It is a fact of political life in the democracies that our political classes do not like to sell arms to odious criminals for the announced purpose of lowering unit costs and making domestic procurement less onerous...
...The R&D costs of modern weapons can be staggering, and a long production run lowering unit costs is sometimes the only way for a Western army to afford the desired quantity of the weapons it has had its domestic suppliers develop, at least at a price its political masters will permit...
...DaimlerBenz made the engines for Brazilian-manufactured light armor, Magirus-Deutz supplied cross-country vehicles, and MesserschmittBolkow-Blohm is said to have supplied Saddam with the plans for an FAE (a fuel-air explosive, a vapor cloud dispersed as an aerosol and then detonated...
...Iraq did not have the habit of paying on the nail, and by the end of the decade the Soviets were perhaps more businesslike than some of their Western competitors...
...communists attacked Baathists with enthusiasm, and Baathist attacks on the CP were particularly brutal...
...The executive branch, however, seems to be infinitely persistent in its enthusiasm for what it enjoys calling, quite hilariously, "realism...
...There was the French taste for expediting the allegedly inevitable (thus helping to make it so...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...In September of that year Iraq's debt was generously renegotiated...
...Particularly important was what might be termed technical assistance: the East German Stasi and the Romanian Securitate helped set up the various Iraqi secret police forces...
...Some of it was simply blind faith admixed with suppressed despair, an illustration of the old adage that "when you owe the bank ten thousand dollars you're in trouble, but when you owe the bank ten million dollars, the bank's in trouble...
...Hungary sold 200 Fug-70 scout cars, and Yugoslavia sold small arms and 122mm artillery rounds...
...The fact has been much occluded by the Soviet Union's status as Saddam's premier arms supplier, but the Baath was (and is) strongly anticommunist, and for many decades the Iraqi Communist party was the strongest in the Middle East...
...amoral (if inept) geopolitical calculation coexisted with a perverse identification of Saddam's fascistic Iraq as a revolutionary nationalist regime, somehow resonant of the Jacobin state during the Great Revolution...
...The generosity of the French arms industry and government—the two are not entirely separable—may be seen more closely by examining the records of Dassault's transactions with Iraq...
...but the French government was perhaps more indulgent than most of Iraq's suppliers when it persistently ignored murder and kidnapping by Iraq's Mukhabarat on French soil, lest any diplomatic unpleasantness disrupt trade...
...Italian firms also provided ten Aspide/Albatross SAM launchers with 224 Aspide missiles, 10 Otomat21 launchers with 60 Otomat-2 antiship missiles, Valsella antitank and antipersonnel mines, light armored vehicles, reconnaissance drones, and various forms of technical assistance and pilot training...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Political pariah South Africa provided great quantities of artillery ammunition, howitzers, and acoustic and magnetic mines...
...Iraq's bounty extended over much of Europe...
...Our European allies are not so hardhearted...
...We in effect condoned Saddam's wanton aggression against Iran (an intriguing parallel has recently occurred with Assad in Lebanon) thereby exacerbating the paranoia and xenophobia of the Iranian regime, while our allies armed him against the ayatollahs...
...Spanish firms sold Saddam Land Rovers mounted with 106mm recoilless rifles, mortar rounds, and iron bombs...
...Adel Darwish is a London-based investigative journalist—a correspondent for the Independent and a regular contributor to the Economist—who has specialized in ferreting out European arms exports to Saddam Hussein...
...Navy into the Gulf War...
...Airpower being by its nature extremely flexible and mobile, the new Saudi air force bid fair to destroy the Israeli qualitative edge, which had previously kept the regional balance of power...
...With the Soviets and the United States as reasonably prudent arms suppliers, the regional balance of power was admirably polyvalent...
...when the Shah was able to extort Iraqi recognition of an adjusted frontier in return for a free hand to repress the Kurds (the Algiers agreement of 1975), we abandoned our temporary proteges to Saddam Hussein...
...Western governments are driven more by the goad of economies of scale...
...This process has produced some striking absurdities: weapons too sophisticated and thus too expensive for the First World armed forces that originally commissioned them...
...Iraqi credit was good, but nowhere near this good, and the suppliers will almost certainly never see this money...
...government managed to stave off any congressional reprisals...
...Indeed, the French are said to have gone so far as to compensate for one of Iraq's military deficiencies—its inability or unwillingness to use weapons efficiently against any armed opposition...
...One recalls the close of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: This is the thing that almost had us mastered do not rejoice in his defeat you men for though the world stood up and stopped the bastard the bitch that bore him is in heat again...
...by Saddam's own reckoning, at least $40 billion worth of his arsenal was bought on SUMMER • 1991 • 349 Arms and Iraq credit...
...After an appalling series of blunders, we seem to have gotten off pretty cheap, although Iraqi conscripts, along with the mounting civilian victims of cholera and typhoid, have paid tragically for our mistakes...
...The men who ordered the very professional Ambassador Glaspie to conciliate the tyrant while he warned us against interfering in the invasion of Kuwait 352 • DISSENT Arms and Iraq have neither been rebuked nor their policies disavowed...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...Iraq was refusing to pay up...
...in February 1990 Defense Minister Chevenement (one of the founders of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Association) agreed in principle to guarantee Dassault's sale of the Mirage 2000s...
...As it happened, this was no great obstacle...
...This made difficulties for Dassault, desperate to sell Iraq another FFr22 billion worth of Mirage 2000s and Alpha Jets...
...There were extra-European suppliers other than China, notably Egypt, which sold Iraq some $11 billion worth of military goods over the course of the first Gulf War...
...That was "realism...
...It makes for interesting reading...
...These developments encouraged the Nixonian habit of inflating the Shah to serve as an "American surrogate" in the Gulf, and perversely wrought the very opposite of its intended ends...
...foreign meddling in Oman's Dhofar province produced Iranian intervention, and so on...
...Such was the case, for a period, with American Spruance-class destroyers and some British main battle tanks...
...With "Gregory Alexander," a pseudonymous British defense journalist, former army officer, and arms trader, he has just published Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War (London, Victor Gollancz, 1991), the most detailed part of which is a compilation of their research on the Iraqi arms buildup...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...The East Europeans contributed their mite: Poland sold 200 T-55s, East Germany sold 50 more, Romania 150, Czechoslovakia 400 plus 1,000 BMP-1 mechanized infantry fighting vehicles and 200 OT-64 apcs...
...The West German contributions to Saddam Hussein's arsenal are also noteworthy...
...something good must be said about the recipient, preferably on the order of strategic necessity...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Although Saddam had quantities of petrodollars to recycle, the armaments necessary for his remarkable ambitions grossly exceeded his means...
...It was we who helped achieve this remarkable end: it was a triumph of "realism...
...Alouette, Gazelle, Puma, and Super Frelon helicopters...
...Bribed to date with a couple of billions of dollars from the Gulf for standing by the U.N resolutions (apparently at our instructions), Assad has spent this first installment of baksheesh on arms imports...
...Some of it was the recycling of petrodollars following the spike in oil prices of 1973...
...German firms also built the gas and bomb-proof command and control facilities around Baghdad and, by way of a route that stretched from Paraguay through South Africa, were the original source of Saddam's 155mm artillery shells...
...Many of Iraq's allegedly homegrown weapons were in fact French creations...
...The executive branch was successfully fighting off congressional attempts to restrict our agricultural credits to Saddam up to the moment of the invasion of Kuwait...
...Austrians designed missiles and chemical weapons R&D facilities and sold artillery, ammunition, and, with British and Polish firms, an entire munitions plant...
...The Chinese have also taken this line to subtler comic effect, the joke depending on the auditor's realizing that Chinese racism can dwarf the Anglo-Saxon variety...
...for 1988-89 alone, it owed FFr9 billion and was willing to fork over just FFr1 billion...
...Saddam Hussein's ability to molest his neighbors, and even effectively to torment the sturdier elements among his own population, is not homegrown...
...the Iraqi-Soviet friendship treaty was signed after British and American acquiescence in the Shah's seizure of three strategic islands—Lesser and Greater Tunb and Abu Musa—from Ras al-Khaima and Sharjah, which are now part of the United Arab Emirates...
...the Baathists would shortly go back to their long-standing practice of exterminating communists, and Iraq extracted a good price: Soviet abandonment of the Kurds...
...Brazil provided a remarkable number of combat vehicles (500 EE-11 Urutu armored personnel carriers, 300 Jararaca scout cars, 300 Osorios tanks, and 1,026 EE-9 Cascavel armored cars) and a quantity of Avibras Astros II multiple rocket launchers of various calibers and helped upgrade the Scud-Bs...
...Our fantasy of policing the region through an Iranian surrogate, however, did not survive the Iranian revolution, although the policies that fantasy engendered did make such a revolution more likely, and helped ensure the particularly ghastly form the Iranian revolution took...
...The French government managed to smooth over these difficulties...
...in the wake of the Iranian revolution French foreign-policy makers decided that Iraq was going to be the great regional power and decided to butter up Saddam...
...When the Egyptian-modified Scud-Bs suffered such a degradation in accuracy as to miss Teheran by ten miles, the fix is said to have been French expertise in the form of inertial guidance systems developed by Sagem...
...the economic reforms seem to have forced the military to earn some of the hard currency necessary for its modernization, and this may be one of the factors behind some of the peculiarly irresponsible Chinese exports— alleged nuclear technology to Pakistan, Silkworm antiship missiles to Iran during the Tanker War, and ballistic missiles to the Saudis...
...The first radical destabilization of this 350 • DISSENT Arms and Iraq balance occurred when the Shah was armed to the teeth by Kissinger and Nixon...
...The Iranians began to appear particularly threatening to our clients in the Gulf, and the Reaganites discovered Saddam's virtues as a counterweight...
...The Chinese provided more than 1,300 tanks...
...A number of them built Saddam Hussein the heart of an independent arms industry: Ferrostahl of Essen supplied a forging plant, a consortium of German firms under Klockner INA of Duisberg built a foundry, and SMS Hasenclever provided a hydraulic open die forging press...
...and Hai-Ying-2 Silkworm missile launchers...
...It is worth examining the economics of arms exports...
...A balance of power could and frequently did function: when Syrian armor menaced Lebanon, the Israeli air force kept the balance...
...Negotiations were under way at the time of the invasion of Kuwait for the supply of yet more arms...
...720 130mm artillery pieces...
...Argentina developed the Condor-2 missile with Iraq and Egypt and sold Iraq mortars, rifles, ammunition, and tanks...
...The policy of festooning the Shah with weapons had a number of unanticipated consequences...
...Britain also trained Iraqi pilots...
...Until Saddam bought up the more capital-intensive means of repression, he was unable even effectively to terrorize his own Kurds...
...With the aid of these facilities, and another installation built by many of the same firms at Salman Pak, Saddam Hussein had by the summer of 1990 the capacity to produce annually one thousand artillery tubes of 105mm to 203mm...
...Their policies, after all, had "worked...
...The erosion of this advantage greatly exacerbated Israeli insecurities and spurred massive arms imports from the United States...
...Iraq's first export is oil...
...A Destabilizing Arms Race The destabilization of the regional balance of power in the Middle East was produced by a series of arms-export drives...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...But much of this remarkable extension of credit had its roots in the peculiar nature of the arms trade...
...This was an elegant demonstration of Kissingerian diplomacy in action: first the achievement of the opposite of our intentions, then, with the betrayal of the Kurds, a degree of cynicism impressive even by regional standards...
...How did this precariously ensconced despot of a fragile and indeed weak state come to be able forcibly to export Baathism...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...and a vast quantity of other equipment...
...THE EDITORS q SUMMER • 1991 • 353...
...Israel had no petrodollars to recycle and could not pay for these imports, which rather undid the budgetary logic of the original arms exports...
...The list is impressive: Mystere and Mirage fighters...
...Further Iranian aggression, backed by the Nixon administration, accelerated this process...
...It was the French who helped develop—and French workers who maintained and often operated— the Adnan-1, an AWACS produced by marrying a Thomson-CSF "Tiger" radar to an Ilyushin-76...
...So, other than an arms market, what did anyone ever affect to see in Saddam Hussein...
...The Western powers' enthusiasm took various forms...
...Britain is said to have sold Iraq ten thousand NBC suits (nuclear-biological-chemical warfare protective equipment...
...This process played hell with local balances of power, increased the military burdens of the United States, militarized the entire region, and eventually produced Saddam Hussein in his most alarming incarnation: as the paramount regional military power, possessed of a plenitude of the means for expansionist war...
...For grisly comic value, the French crush on Saddam's Iraq as a "revolutionary" regime pales before the assertions by some British cabinet ministers that they were able to discern a taint of racialism—something that had eluded them when surveying their own Tory party's immigration policy—in any noisy worrying about Iraqi nuclear capabilities...
...This was not perfectly unprincipled...
...The Soviet Union was responsible for about ten billion dollars worth of these imports, chiefly tanks (T-62s and T-72s), fixed-wing aircraft (MiG and Sukhoi fighter-bombers, Tupolev bombers, and Ilyushin transports) and helicopters (Mi-24 Hind and Mi-Hip), artillery and rocket launchers, and vast quantities of small arms and ammunition...
...Under Qassem's regime the communists were indeed the most virulent foes of the Baath...
...local powers were generally unable to attempt the conquest of weak neighbors without producing coalitions to defend the status quo...
...The Iranian revolution had produced a vacancy in SUMMER • 1991 • 351 Arms and Iraq the role of regional American surrogate, Saddam became Our Man in the Middle East (the role Assad seems to be auditioning for now), and the administration deemed it acceptable for our allies to arm him to the extent necessary in order to stand off an Iran three times his size, and, as the victim of unprovoked aggression, hopping mad...
...No startling changes in Iraqi behavior were at any time required (a fact Assad seems to have taken particular notice of...
...Switzerland sold Iraq 50 Roland armored personnel carriers and 120 trainer aircraft, 48 AS-202 Bravos, 52 PC-7s, and 20 PC-9s...
...Portugal sold mortar rounds and explosives, Italy's Fincantieri a small navy: two frigates, six corvettes, a supply ship, and a floating dock, with a total value of almost $3 billion (but the Iraqi habit of refusing to pay for weapons ordered in this case prevented delivery...
...German contributors to Saddam's biological warfare programs included WET of 348 • DISSENT Arms and Iraq Hamburg and Oxoid GmbH, since renamed Unipath GmbH...
...Chile delivered a munitions plant...
...France has been arming Iraq since 1967, and by 1990 was Saddam's second-largest supplier...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...Messerschmitt-BolkowBlohm also owns half of Euromissile, which sold Saddam his HOT antitank missiles...
...The neutrals also did their bit...
...These were the aircraft that allowed Iraq to wage the tanker war, belatedly provoked Iranian reprisals, and eventually brought the U.S...
...its second is dates...
...Assad is also a Baathist, with ideological roots in 1930s European fascism, a minority confessional/familial regime with no margin for democratization, and little inclination for the relaxation of state terror...
...B-6 bombers...
...there is no evidence that Saddam's military budgets are the product of grudging necessity...
...within the region it is generally forgotten that Qaddafi, too, was once something of an American darling for precisely the same reasons...
...This massive foreign assistance was obviously necessary if Saddam was to realize his ambitions, the Iraqi economy and industrial base being insufficient to sustain an autarkic policy of aggression...
...Although the United States left the visible support to the Europeans, the Egyptians, and others, we ourselves tendered Saddam invaluable military assistance, notably in the form of satellite and electronic intelligence...
...For a long period after the Second World War Soviet military technology was quite competitive with the West's, and occasional Western prudery—the period immediately after Suez, for example—could even make the East bloc monopoly suppliers...
...In a particularly vicious circle, the arms exports to Iran eventually meant that the Israelis rapidly depleted American stocks by getting first call on the weapons that had originally been sold to Iran in part to defray their costs to the point that our armed forces could acquire them in the quantities desired...
...the technique produces a remarkable over-pressure over a confined area) by way of Egypt (alleged by Der Spiegel) and sold Iraq twenty-three BO-105 helicopters in a package deal assembled by the Spanish firm CASA...
...German firms contributing to these plants included Walter Thosti Boswau and Heberger-Bau, MesserschmittBolkow-Blohm, Karl Kolb, Sigma Chemie, Anton Irle, Quast, Preussag, and Rhema...
...as Saddam possessed the only such weapons in the region, this equipment simply allowed his troops to deliver their chemical munitions onto Kurds and Iranians without undue danger to themselves), mortar-location radar, military vehicles, and potassium cyanide...
...This fueled Iraqi arms purchases and drove the communist-exterminating Saddam into the arms of the Soviet Union...
...once one regional power acquired modern weapons in any quantity it was in a position to dictate terms to its quondam equals until they had caught up...
...Since development costs tend to be greatest for high-technology weapons, there is a tendency to export what are at least intended to be the most capable (and hence the most terribly destabilizing) weapons...
...Because no amount of conventional arms could conceivably achieve this end in the military conditions of the mid-seventies, the Shah found something else to do with his new arsenal: he unilaterally renounced the treaty fixing his frontier with Iraq...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...From 1976 through 1989 Dassault had sold Iraq thirty-two Mirage F1EQ, thirteen F 1BQ, twenty-eight F 1EQ-4, twenty F1EQ-5 , and eighteen F1EQ-6 aircraft...
...The rumored cooperation of the CIA with the Baathists (in making possible house-to-house searches for communists) after the Baathist coups is part of Iraqi political folklore...
...Squabbling with the newly aggressive Shah in the early seventies, the Baathists invited the Iraqi communists into a contentless Progressive National Front in a cheap attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Soviets, the only counterbalance to Westernbacked Iran...
...he also was seen as a barrier to Moscow...
...When Saddam began to use nerve gas as a weapon of war, and subsequently as an instrument of domestic policy, the U.S...
...According to Kurdish guerrillas, the Bravos were used against Kurdish mountain villages to deliver chemical weapons...
...Between 1982 and 1990, say Darwish and Alexander, some sixty-eight West German companies contributed to Iraq's armaments industry...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...The French government seems to have encouraged French banks to spur these exports with extraordinarily generous loans and credit arrangements, a pattern visible in other Western states...
...To counterbalance the new Soviet relationship with Iraq, the Shah was armed to the teeth—in an unprecedented arms-export policy, he was allowed to buy any nonnuclear American armaments he desired...
...Strange Bedfellows Saddam's reincarnation as a friend of the West occurred in the wake of his classic blunder in attacking a revolution, thus restoring Iranian military power in a much more menacing form: as revolutionary power...
...Saddam's viciousness was less ghastly in its consequences when physical incapacity moderated his reach, which at the beginning of his reign did not extend even over the whole of Iraq...
...The rapidity of the change in cast required alternate certification and decertification (and shouting down the congressional clamor for the recertification) of the Iraqi regime as a notorious sponsor of terrorism...
...in 1987 they seem to have been disinclined to provide MiG-27s on yet further credit...
...By a great feat of arms and a considerable feat of diplomacy, both of them happy surprises, Iraq has been stripped of the (borrowed) power to conquer its neighbors, at least for the moment...
...the alleged Iraqi testing of nerve gases on political prisoners and captured Kurdish insurgents is said to have occurred at the Abu Gharib prison near Baghdad...
...The gesture was meaningless...
...Italy's Agusta also provided helicopters, by Darwish and Alexander's accounting two A-109, six S61A-4, thirty Model 500C, fifty-four Model 500D, five ASW variants of the AB-212, twelve AB-412 Griffons and six AB-412 aircraft...
...Several months later it was successfully fighting off congressional attempts to punish the German companies that had helped Saddam develop his chemical weapons...
...For the old East bloc states, arms were one of the rare competitive goods their economies could produce, and the armaments industry was one of the very few industrial sectors capable of earning the hard currency needed to pay for imports from outside the bloc...
...The first effect, the Iraqi arms drive, made the Saudis even more than usually insecure, which boosted their arms imports by 2,300 percent...
...when Iraq invaded a weakened Iran, Syria and Israel kept the balance...
...650 armored personnel carriers...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...Between 1983 and 1985 the French government lent Iraq not only five Super-Etendarde aircraft but thirty SUMMER • 1991 • 347 Arms and Iraq military personnel, including seven pilots, who are alleged to have not only maintained the aircraft but flown combat missions...
...German contributions famously include the nerve gas plants at Samarra, Akashat, and Al Fallujah, which have been dubbed "Auschwitz in the sands," although with imperfect accuracy...
...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...Because nothing could make the Saudi ground forces a match for the armies deployed by their more populous neighbors, these expenditures necessarily focused on the Saudi air force...
...Egypt also provided vital technical support, and more: Egyptian commandos are said to have made the critical first attacks in the recapture of Fao...
...The Chinese market weapons through Norinco and its various subsidiaries, but this, too, is a fairly businesslike operation, and the Chinese are not known for generous credits...
...F-6, F-7, and F-8 fighters...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
