United States support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War
During the Iran–Iraq War, which began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran on 22 September 1980, the United States adopted a policy of providing support to Iraq in the form of several billion dollars' worth of economic aid, dual-use technology, intelligence sharing, and special operations training. This U.S. support, along with support from most of the Arab world, proved vital in helping Iraq sustain military operations against Iran. The documented sale of dual-use technology, with one notable example being Iraq's acquisition of 45 Bell helicopters in 1985, was effectively a workaround for a ban on direct arms transfers; U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East dictated that Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism because of the Iraqi government's historical ties with groups like the Palestinian Liberation Front and the Abu Nidal Organization, among others. However, this designation was removed in 1982 to facilitate broader support for the Iraqis as the conflict dragged on in Iran's favour. Of particular interest for contemporary Iran–United States relations is a conspiracy theory alleging that the U.S. government actively encouraged Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to invade Iran following the Islamic Revolution. Proponents of this theory, particularly in the Arab world, assert that there is evidence of the U.S. government having greenlit Saddam's intention to launch the campaign, but no direct documentary proof of such a collusion has been found, and several scholars and American officials have denied that such collaboration was in play prior to the conflict.
U.S. support for Iraq was not covert, especially during the Reagan administration, and was frequently the subject of open sessions in the Senate and the House of Representatives. On June 9, 1992, British-American journalist Ted Koppel reported on ABC News Nightline that the "Reagan/Bush administrations permitted—and frequently encouraged—the flow of money, agricultural credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, and weapons to Iraq." The decision by the U.S. and the Western Bloc to openly oppose Iran was made less complicated by the fact that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc had also adopted the same position, with both sides seeking to contain the Iranian policy of exporting the Islamic Revolution; Iran's new government, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, had antagonized the Americans and the Soviets as part of an effort to mobilize Shia Islamism throughout the Muslim world. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, more than 90% of Iraqi arms imports during the Iran–Iraq War came from the Soviet Union, France, and China.
Despite the U.S. government's official position, the view of American officials on the conflict was geared towards simply preventing an Iranian victory rather than being enthusiastically supportive of Iraq's ambitions, as encapsulated in a remark by American diplomat Henry Kissinger that "It's a pity they both can't lose." On 20 August 1988, the Iran–Iraq War came to an end by the belligerents' acceptance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 598, which stipulated their return to the status quo of the 1975 Algiers Agreement. The result of the conflict was ultimately inconclusive, though both sides claimed victory; Iraq's drained human and financial resources, including national debt to other countries, would go on to serve as one of the bases for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. As part of the ensuing Gulf War, the U.S. re-designated the country as a state sponsor of terrorism and led a 42-country United Nations coalition to end the Iraqi occupation by force. International sanctions against Iraq, which were first imposed during the Kuwaiti campaign, continued until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
U.S. reaction to the conflict
U.S. intelligence sharing with post-Revolutionary Iran
Following the Iranian Revolution, the Carter administration continued to see Iran as a bulwark against Iraq and the Soviet Union, and therefore attempted to forge a strategic partnership with the new Interim Government of Iran under Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. Chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in Tehran, Bruce Laingen, realized that Iranian officials were acutely interested in U.S. intelligence on Iraq, and convinced Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Harold H. Saunders to approve an intelligence-sharing liaison with the Iranian government, culminating in an October 15, 1979 meeting between longtime Central Intelligence Agency officer George W. Cave and the Iranian Deputy Prime Minister Abbas Amir-Entezam and Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi. Cave told Mark J. Gasiorowski that he briefed Entezam and Yazdi on Iraqi military preparations and covert operations seemingly designed to facilitate a large-scale invasion of Iran, although no final decision had been made. In particular, echoing a March 1979 warning from Pentagon analyst Howard Teicher regarding Iraqi designs on Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province, Cave pointed out that Iraq had created a front organization that could instigate unrest among Khuzestan's majority–Arab inhabitants—yet Cave emphasized that war could still be avoided if the strength of Iran's armed forces did not continue its post-revolutionary decline. Furthermore, Cave urged his Iranian interlocutors to monitor the movement of Iraqi troops using the CIA-built IBEX systems from the reign of the Shah. Although Teicher and Cave's predictions proved accurate, they were the product of circumstantial evidence disputed internally within the U.S. government, and the significance of Cave's briefing has been debated. For example, according to Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyst Wayne White, who was not aware of the intelligence that informed Cave's briefing: "The Iraqi army was doing little more than continuing its well-known annual schedule of primarily battalion and brigade-level training exercises ... Very little of the Iraqi military was anywhere near the Iraqi-Iranian frontier." Similarly, the head of the Iran desk at the State Department, Henry Precht, stated: "I had no impression at the time that anyone believed Iraq was planning a major attack although we thought that Saddam might be stirring up the Kurds. At the time I did not think he would take on his larger and still probably more potent neighbor." On the other hand, Gasiorowski contended that "If Iran's leaders had acted on the information provided in Cave's briefings ... the brutal eight–year might never have occurred."Pre-war relations between Iraq and Iran
The Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 was preceded by a long period of tension between the two countries throughout 1979 and 1980, including frequent border skirmishes, calls by Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini for the Shia Muslims in Iraq to revolt against the ruling Sunni Ba'ath Party, and allegations of Iraqi support for ethnic separatists in Iran. On June 18, 1979, U.S. chargé d'affaires Charlie Naas asked Yazdi about the deterioration in relations; Yazdi stated he "does not know what might be bothering Iraq ... certainly we have done nothing to bother them." Khomeini had recently condemned Iraq's arrest of Shi'ite leader Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, but Yazdi claimed this had nothing to do with any effort to export the Islamic Revolution to Iraq: Iran was merely concerned with protecting the sacred Shi'ite sites in Najaf and Karbala. Nevertheless, in a subsequent conversation between Naas and Entezam, it emerged that the latter was unaware of National Iranian Radio and Television's broadcasts denouncing Iraq. Continuing to seek good relations with Iranian authorities, U.S. officials uncovered considerable evidence of Iraqi support for Kurdish rebels in Iran under the leadership of Jalal Talabani. While these rebels were not considered capable of overthrowing the Iranian government militarily, they were undermining Iranian moderates, prompting Precht to broach the possibility of meeting with Iraqi officials to persuade them that Iraq's support for the Kurds was not in its best interest. Throughout this time, Chris Emery states that Iraq's intentions toward Iran were not entirely clear, as Saddam invited an Iranian delegation to the country following his assumption of the presidency in July, while the CIA concluded in November that Iraq sought a diplomatic settlement with Iran. Saddam was willing to work with Iranian moderates such as Yazdi, whom he met in Havana in October, but the collapse of Bazargan's government following the November 4th seizure of the U.S. embassy and initiation of the Iran hostage crisis—and the resulting consolidation of power under Khomeini—"would profoundly change Saddam's decision-making calculus," according to Emery. While the Iraqi archives suggest that Saddam contemplated invading Iran as early as February 1979, he was deterred from doing so until July 1980, at which point post-revolutionary purges had rendered Iran grossly unprepared for the attack. A key July 1980 report by Iraqi military intelligence concluded: "It is clear that, at present, Iran has no power to launch wide offensive operations against Iraq, or to defend on a large scale."Claims of U.S. involvement and "greenlight" accusations
Iranian leaders, including Khomeini and his successor Ali Khamenei, have long espoused a belief that the U.S. gave Saddam Hussein a "green-light" to launch the invasion of Iran. U.S. officials have strongly denied this charge. Joost Hiltermann observes that a U.S. green-light is also "the conventional wisdom in the Arab world." In fact, Iranian suspicions that the U.S. would use Iraq to retaliate for the hostage-taking predated the invasion, as Carter noted in his diary on April 10, 1980: "The Iranian terrorists are making all kinds of crazy threats to kill the American hostages if they are invaded by Iraq—whom they identify as an American puppet." There are several reasons for this perception, including some circumstantial evidence.First, although the Carter administration had been interested in engagement with Iraq since 1977, the longstanding U.S.-Iran alliance effectively rendered this impossible. After the dramatic break in Iran–United States relations, however, both American and Iraqi officials made a number of positive gestures towards one another; notably, Saddam publicly condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and on April 10, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David D. Newsom, offered "to resume diplomatic relations with Iraq at any time." Saddam later stated that Iraq had accepted Newsom's offer shortly before the outbreak of the war, but "when the war started, and to avoid misinterpretation, we postponed the establishment of relations." In another widely publicized remark, Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told a television interviewer on April 14 that "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq ... we do not feel that American–Iraq relations need to be frozen in antagonism." Moreover, the CIA—desperate for intelligence on Iran—maintained contacts with Iranian opposition figures including Shapour Bakhtiar and Gholam Ali Oveissi, who were themselves in touch with Iraqi officials and had encouraged Saddam to invade. Although there is no evidence that either Bakhtiar or Oveissi were acting at the behest of the U.S., Iranian awareness of such contacts through documents seized in the U.S. embassy fueled suspicion.
The July 9 Nojeh coup plot, a failed military coup d'état against Khomeini funded by Iraqi intelligence through Bakhtiar, solidified the Iranian view that the U.S. and Iraq were conspiring to reverse the Iranian Revolution. Bakhtiar falsely told the plotters that their efforts had the "blessing" of America, but there was no U.S. involvement. After a peak earlier in 1980, Saddam reduced bilateral tensions with Iran leading up to the coup attempt, perhaps seeing a successful coup as an alternative to war. In August, Saddam made a trip to Saudi Arabia in which King Khalid is reported to have pledged Saudi support for an invasion of Iran, which Bryan R. Gibson commented was "a very significant gesture, especially in light of the closeness of American–Saudi relations." United States Secretary of State Alexander Haig told Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, that it was during this visit that "President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd," but at a 2008 conference several academics and former U.S. officials questioned the veracity of this assertion as well as the motives of both Haig and Fahd in promulgating it. As described by Malcolm Byrne: "The American veterans were unanimous that no 'green light' was ever given, and that the Haig document, while intriguing on its face, leaves far too much room for interpretation to be definitive. ... the Saudi comments did not address the various policy arguments that militated against an invasion—chiefly, the potential danger posed to the American hostages in Tehran". In the view of Hal Brands: "Haig had not been in government in September 1980 ... The Haig memo therefore provides hard evidence only of the fact that one of the secretary's sources believed the green light thesis to be true." On the other hand, senior U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman told journalist Andrew Cockburn that "he remembers coming across a 'memcon' summarising a meeting in late June 1980—three months before the war began—between Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and a senior Iraqi diplomat. In the meeting Brzezinski clearly stated that America would be content with an Iraqi attack on Iran—a green light if ever there was one."
Additionally, sources linked to the Iranian government have accused Brzezinski of personally meeting with Saddam in Amman, Jordan in July 1980. King Hussein of Jordan is said to have acted as an interlocutor, but two of the king's biographers—Avi Shlaim and Nigel J. Ashton—found nothing to corroborate that such a meeting occurred. Gary Sick, a close aide who accompanied Brzezinski during a 1980 trip to the Middle East, told Brands that the meeting as described was impossible: "I was with him at least 14 hours a day, including a brief visit to Jordan, and I can attest absolutely that Iraq was not on the agenda, and he could not physically have made such a visit—even if he stayed up all night and got a secret flight to Baghdad," the latter being a variation on the original claim. Nevertheless, Sick states that "a year before the war," Saddam did in fact meet with King Hussein and CIA officials in Amman; per Sick, having received no "red light" from the U.S., this amounted to a "green light" to Saddam, although "this hardly constituted a US-backed war against Iran."
French historian Pierre Razoux wrote, "a meticulous analysis of the events, context, and statements by contemporary authorities, combined with more recent sources and interviews granted by certain key participants, has left no doubt that the American government did not push Saddam Hussein to criminal behavior".