By Joe Renouard

Exactly twenty years ago, US military forces captured the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Although much of the world had opposed the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, few shed tears over the tyrant’s downfall. Figures from across the political spectrum reviled Saddam for his dismal human rights record, his attacks on neighboring countries, and his support to terror groups, while the American political establishment also loathed him for his opposition to a Washington-led regional order. US policymakers sanctioned and marginalized Iraq in the 1990s and ultimately decided that “regime change” was the only acceptable policy outcome.

But of course, before Saddam Hussein was America’s bête noire, he was its partner. Now two decades on from his capture (and exactly 40 years after his infamous handshake with Donald Rumsfeld), it is worth reflecting on that partnership and the documentary record that illuminates it.

Owing to Saddam’s lengthy reign and dramatic downfall, his regime is one of the most thoroughly documented in recent world history. This includes his ties with the United States, a bilateral relationship that ran from cautious (1970s) to cordial (1980s) to adversarial (1990s) to fatal (2000s). While much classified material on Saddam’s international connections is still hidden in government archives around the world,[1] more is available today than ever before. In the US alone, one can consult documents housed in the General Records of the US Department of State, the presidential libraries, the State Department’s FRUS series, the CIA’s FOIA Reading Room, the independent National Security Archive,[2] the “Iraqgate” Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) database, the independent Reagan Files database, the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC),[3] and a handful of book-length publications.[4]

Enterprising investigators gave Anglophone readers a peek behind the Iraqi curtain back in the 1980s,[5] and a few in the 90s documented the massive cache of arms Western states had sold to Saddam.[6] But more recent scholarship in these primary materials has greatly enhanced our understanding of US-Iraq ties, including the inner workings of Saddam’s regime (Joseph Sassoon, Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, Mark E. Stout, and Samuel Helfont),[7] US Iraq policy before 2003 (Peter L. Hahn, Joseph Stieb, David D. Palkki, Frédéric Bozo, and Robert K. Brigham),[8] and the causes and consequences of the US-led invasion of Iraq (Jane K. Cramer, A. Trevor Thrall, John Prados, Richard Immerman, Beth Bailey, Steven Simon, and Melvyn Leffler).[9]

Regarding US-Iraq ties in the 1980s, the documentary record suggests a few themes:

American realists saw Saddam’s Iraq as a useful partner state.

US interests in the Persian Gulf region were pure Realpolitik. Washington sought to maintain the flow of oil, limit Soviet and Iranian influence, contain Arab nationalism, and staunch the spread of Islamism. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Iraq was not only secular and anticommunist, but it was also a potential balancer against both Moscow and Teheran, and its massive oil reserves could help ensure Western energy security.[10] The historian Joseph Sassoon has concluded that these mutual interests made Saddam and the US “natural allies.”[11]

Although the US was officially neutral when the Iran-Iraq War broke out in 1980, a US-Iraq rapprochement developed because both sides feared an Iranian victory.[12] Because Iraq was a bulwark against the spread of the Iranian revolution, a 1983 CIA analysis concluded that “a total Iraqi defeat would be the outcome most damaging to US interests.”[13] The agency later concluded that “the current [Iraqi] regime is likely to pursue policies more favorable to the United States than any successor regime” and that Saddam’s ouster “could usher in an extended period of instability.”[14]

US special envoy Donald Rumsfeld’s cordial visit with Saddam in December 1983, in which he stated that the US was “ready” to elevate the relationship,[15] paved the way for a resumption of diplomatic relations.[16] Washington removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terror, added Iran to the list, loaned Iraq money for grain purchases, granted Ex-Im Bank loans to boost Iraq’s credit rating, and began facilitating third-party delivery of weapons.[17] A national security directive clarified that the US sought “to avert an Iraqi collapse” and would provide Iraq with intelligence while garnering further assistance from regional states.[18] US officials privately repeated this theme for the next few years, arguing in turn that “Iraqi stayability should represent our priority policy concern”[19] and that “an Iranian victory over Iraq would be a strategic disaster. We must keep the Iraqis bucked up.”[20]

The US was fully aware of Saddam’s brutality and use of chemical weapons.

Saddam never made it easy for US officials to forge a partnership, as they knew full well that the man and his party were ruthless. In the words of a 1979 intelligence estimate, “this is a regime led by extremists and chauvinists . . . Iraq’s Ba’athist leaders are determined to perpetuate themselves in power.”[21] Upon Saddam’s assumption of full presidential power, American diplomat Edward Peck sent to Washington a series of remarkably accurate firsthand accounts of the new leader.[22] In 1980, he noted:

the repressive and often brutal manner in which [Saddam] deals with any evidence of internal divisiveness. . . . He can be a vicious and intemperate despot whenever circumstances require. . . . No dissent of any kind is tolerated. The government has amply demonstrated its readiness to apply whatever force is required, without hesitation, to repress any group that it feels offers a threat to stability.

Saddam was also “an egoist of massive proportions, thoroughly accustomed to adulation, obedience, unctuous publicity, slavish devotion and servility.”[23] The CIA concurred, noting Saddam’s “continued reliance on repression to rule Iraq.”[24] Saddam had “survived more than a decade at the summit of a country whose politics are often bloody” and had an “unflinching reputation to do away with any suspected opponents.”[25]

American intelligence agencies reiterated this conclusion throughout the entire decade. In 1983, the CIA remarked that Saddam “ruthlessly suppresses those individuals or groups whom he considers a threat to his regime,” including executions, imprisonment, and deportations of Shia, Kurds, and communists.[26] Even in 1985, by which time the US-Iraq partnership was in full swing, the CIA concluded that Iraq’s security services carried out “assassination, kidnapping, and other acts of violence” and that “the people have been intimidated, political opposition groups have been penetrated, and a number of their leaders and relatives have been imprisoned or executed.”[27]

US officials also knew that Saddam was breaking international law by using chemical weapons against the Iranians. This caused genuine concern in Washington because the Reagan administration had taken a public stand against such weapons[28] and had repeatedly called for a total ban (though Reagan would later seek funds to update the US arsenal).[29] Because Saddam’s use of these weapons made it much harder for the US to support Iraq, the administration hoped “to reduce or halt” Iraq’s “almost daily use of CW.”[30] In 1984, after repeated warnings about this “difficult and possibly embarrassing” issue,[31] the US even publicly criticized Iraq for using them.[32] Yet, as long as Saddam was containing Iran, the administration supported Baghdad, even to the point of protecting Iraq in a UN Security Council statement on chemical weapons.[33]

After the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam was no longer so useful to the US.

Once the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, Washington and Baghdad drifted apart. US-Iraq commercial relations were robust (the US was Iraq’s largest supplier of civilian goods), and American contractors were positioned to play a major role in Iraq’s postwar rebuilding. Yet, US officials increasingly believed that Saddam’s volatility and brutality made him unreliable, while Saddam was convinced by the Iran-contra affair (in which the US had sold weapons to Iran) that the Americans were untrustworthy.[34]

Congress took the lead in challenging US-Iraq ties. After years of looking the other way while Saddam murdered and tortured at will, at least some American officials found his infamous 1988 Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds to be too much to ignore. These chemical weapon attacks claimed an estimated 50,000-100,000 lives, with perhaps 5,000 killed in the Halabja massacre alone.[35] The Senate passed a harsh sanctions bill, provocatively titled the “Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988,” which boldly declared, “The Iraqi army has undertaken a campaign to depopulate the Kurdish regions of Iraq by destroying all Kurdish villages in large part of northern Iraq and by killing the civilian populations. Iraq’s campaign against the Kurdish people appears to constitute an act of genocide.”[36]

The act did not pass, both because of lobbying by US businesses and because the outgoing Reagan administration clearly preferred private diplomacy to sanctions. These officials insisted that “this legislation could unravel US/Iraqi relations and jeopardize multi-billion dollar commercial opportunities.”[37] Even a more modest House bill which omitted the word “genocide” did not pass into law.[38] But the episode showed that the Iraqi leader was on thin ice in Washington and that Congress was now far more assertive regarding human rights concerns worldwide.[39]

Saddam likely assumed that he had sufficient cover in Washington as long as the executive branch had his back. But in retrospect, he did not realize that he was no longer so useful to the United States. With the Iran-Iraq War now over, and with the Cold War winding down, a new regional order was emerging. US security analysts increasingly saw Saddam as a loose cannon who was likely to muscle into the Persian Gulf islands of neighboring Kuwait as well as “intensify [his] efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”[40] He was thus caught off guard not only by the tough congressional response to his human rights violations, but also by President George H.W. Bush’s severe reaction to his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That invasion marked Saddam’s true break with the US, and it set in motion his ultimate collision course with virtually the entire American political elite in 2003.

Joe Renouard is the author of Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse.

[1] See David D. Palkki’s comments in Post-Mortem on Iraq: What Assessments of the US Failure in Iraq Tell Us about American Foreign Policy, H-Diplo/Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum (RJISSF) Roundtable, 7 April 2023, https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/RJISSF-Policy-Roundtable-II-1.pdf, 23.

[2] Joyce Battle, et al. (including John Prados, William Burr, Malcolm Byrne, Christopher Ames, and Jeffrey Richelson) deserve special plaudits for their efforts to publish FOIA materials at the National Security Archive.

[3] The CRRC, which has archived a cache of Iraqi government documents, has been closed to researchers since 2015, but the website still has some original documents and audio recordings alongside English translations and transcripts (https://conflictrecords.wordpress.com/collections/sh/). Some are also viewable at the Wilson Center Digital Archive (https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/topics/saddam-husseins-iraq).

[4] Brian L. Steed, ed., Voices of the Iraq War: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Steed, Iraq War: The Essential Reference Guide (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2023); Thomas R. Mockaitis, The Iraq War: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012); John Ehrenberg, J. Patrice McSherry, José Ramón Sánchez, and Caroleen Marji Sayej, eds., The Iraq Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Tom Lansford, ed., The War in Iraq (Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, 2009).

[5] Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: KPI, 1987); Efraim Karsh, The Iran-Iraq War: Impact and Implications (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Mohammed E. Ahrari, ed., The Gulf and International Security: The 1980s and Beyond (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

[6] Kenneth R. Timmerman, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1991); Alan Friedman, Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq (Bantam Books, 1993); Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); Mark Phythian, Arming Iraq: How the U.S. and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1997).

[7] Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (New York: Cambridge, 2011), 11; Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout, eds., The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978–2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Samuel Helfont, Iraq against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).

[8] Peter L. Hahn, Missions Accomplished? The United States and Iraq since World War I (Oxford University Press, 2012); Joseph Stieb, The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021); David D. Palkki, “Deterring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: Domestic Audience Costs and Credibility Assessments in Theory and Practice,” unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, 2013, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nr3c3tt; Frédéric Bozo, A History of the Iraq Crisis: France, the United States, and Iraq, 1991–2003 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Columbia University Press, 2016); Robert K. Brigham, The United States and Iraq since 1990: A Brief History with Documents (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

[9] A. Trevor Thrall and Jane K. Cramer, eds., American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation since 9/11 (Routledge, 2009); Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? (Routledge, 2012); John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press, 2014); Beth Bailey and Richard H. Immerman, eds, Understanding the US Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: NYU Press, 2015); Steven Simon, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (New York: Penguin Press, 2023); Melvyn P. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).

[10] US regional interests are spelled out in NSDD 99, 12 July 1983, https://www.thereaganfiles.com/nsdd-99.pdf.

[11] Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party, 11.

[12] https://www.thereaganfiles.com/shultz101383memo.pdf.

[13] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84S00927R000200130004-5.pdf.

[14] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB167/04.pdf.

[15] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq32.pdf.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq31.pdf.

[16] Iraq severed official relations with the US in 1967.

[17] Joyce Battle, “Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, 25 February 2003, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/.

[18] 4/5/84, NSDD 139, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nsdds/nsdd139.pdf.

[19] https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/2022-08/40-643-55302807-R01-048-2022.pdf.

[20] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v01/d276.

[21] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v18/d137.

[22] “Telegram From the United States Interests Section in Baghdad to the Department of State,” 17 July 1979, Doc. 138, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereinafter FRUS), Vol. XVIII, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v18/d138.

[23] “Telegram From the United States Interests Section in Baghdad to the Department of State,” 4 February 1980, Doc. 139, FRUS, Vol. XVIII, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v18/d139.

[24] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v18/d141.

[25] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00287R000102360002-0.pdf.

[26] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84S00927R000200040003-6.pdf.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84S00927R000200130004-5.pdf.

[27] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB167/05.pdf.

[28] Administration officials accused the Soviets of providing these weapons to clients in southeast Asia, though never proved it. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R000605240001-7.pdf.

[29] See NSDD 79, 1 February 1983, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nsdds/nsdd79.pdf; and US Initiative to Ban Chemical Weapons, 2 April 1984, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nsdds/nsdd136.pdf.

[30] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq24.pdf.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq25.pdf.

[31] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq54.pdf.

[32] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq48.pdf.

[33] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq51.pdf.

[34] Iraq Survey Group, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD, Vol. I: Regime Strategic Intent (September 2004), 31, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~graceyor/govdocs/pdf/duelfer1_b.pdf.

[35] https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/1988-anfal-campaign-iraqi-kurdistan.html.

[36] S. 2763, Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, 100th Cong., 1988.

[37] https://www.thereaganfiles.com/19880920-iraq.pdf.

the Iraqi side was angry: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB107/iraq11.pdf

[38] H.R. 5337, Sanctions Against Iraqi Chemical Weapons Use Act, 100th Cong., 1988.

[39] Joe Renouard, Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 208-270.

[40] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/wmd02.pdf.