Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (27 page)

In 1997, Indonesia was hit by the same financial crisis that devastated Thailand. The crisis was bad, but the prescription of the U.S.-led IMF was worse. As a condition for essential emergency loans, the IMF demanded that Indonesia halt food subsidies and raise interest rates in an attempt to keep the currency from devaluing. It also directed the closing of many banks. The remedies were completely at odds with the needs of the Indonesian economy and everyone immediately dumped their rupiahs, sending the currency plummeting despite the sky-high interest rates. More than 20 percent of the population fell into poverty almost overnight. Meanwhile, Washington was becoming uneasy with Suharto, especially because his army continued to terrorize East Timor. Eventullly, Australian and New Zealand troops were called in by the UN to quell the situation created by the Indonesian army. With the acquiescence of Washington demonstrators and leaders of his own party, Suharto was pushed out of office in May 1998, and engineered a shift to a civilian administration that eventually held elections and began creating a democracy.

Bad experiences with the Indonesian army had led the United States to end its training and liaison programs in 1998. But as the new democracy developed, it became apparent that Islamic parties would be powerful and that the Indonesian government was having trouble establishing order. In the wake of September 11, some U.S. officials began to push for resumption of the old training and support relationships with the military. About this time, I was traveling in Indonesia and had dinner one night with the U.S. ambassador and a group of about thirty Indonesian political, academic, and media leaders. I was particularly impressed by their pleas to the U.S. ambassador that military ties not be re-established. ‘What we need,’ they emphasized, ‘is training for mayors, police officers, judges, and teachers, not soldiers.’ They also asked that the United States take the trouble to understand their needs. Several months later, however, some military ties had been renewed, and when I met with a high-ranking Indonesian official in Washington, he noted in despair that the United States was looking at Indonesia only through the prism of terrorism. ‘They want us to stop money-laundering,’ he said. ‘But how can we do that when we can’t even collect taxes?’

A few months later, a terrorist bombing of a nightclub in Bali killed several hundred tourists, making clear that Indonesia needed to address terrorism along with its other needs. Yet Indonesians hesitated to act because many of them believed the bombing had been organized by the CIA as a way of persuading President Megawati Sukarnoputri to crack down on Islamic activisits. Said a member of Parliament from Megawati’s own party, ‘The police will only be able to determine the actors in the field and will not be able to reveal the mastermind behind the attack. But I think the CIA was involved in this case.’
 16 
This view was echoed by other important leaders who said the attack was probably organized by a foreign intelligence agency for the purpose of creating a ‘certain image of Indonesia.’ It sounded crazy to Americans, but in view of the Indonesians’ previous experience with the CIA and American manipulation, who could blame them?

Iran

Mohammed Mossadegh headed an Iranian political movement known as the National Front in 1951. An ardent nationalist, he had played a major role in driving the Soviets out of Northern Iran after World War II. Now, as head of a parliamentary committee on the oil industry, he proposed that Anglo-Iranian Oil Company pay Iran a royalty of 50 percent of its profits. This was identical to the arrangements between the major oil companies and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, but more than the company had been paying. Anglo-Iranian, half owned by the British government and with exclusive marketing arrangements with Exxon and Mobil, refused. They had a monopoly on Middle Eastern supplies and were not about to let the Iranians change the deal. Mossadegh then persuaded Parliament to nationalize the company, a move that was wildly popular with the Iranian people. But the big oil companies boycotted Iran, refusing to buy or market Iranian oil pending some kind of settlement. For two years Mossadegh tried without success to sell his oil. The Iranian economy sank, and the U.S. government, even while pursuing a case against the oil monopoly domestically, put more pressure on Iran by cutting off aid. Unable to sell its oil and with its finances floundering, Iran had begun to turn to the Soviets for help. Given its history, the United States might have been expected to line up with the Iranian nationalists against the British imperialists, but the fear of communist influence in Iran trumped everything else. The CIA arranged a coup and a mob uprising in Tehran and reinstalled Shah Reza Pahlevi on the Peacock Throne. He immediately received an emergency grant of $45 million from Washington to help him get re-established,
 17 
as well as another $850 million over the next six years along with CIA and Mossad assistance in organization and training of the dreaded SAVAK Iranian secret police service.
 18 

The Shah repaid this kindness by playing a key role in organizing the first OPEC oil price hike at a meeting in Tehran in 1971, which laid the groundwork for the embargo and quadrupling of prices in 1973-1974. With oil now suddenly seen as a strategic commodity and with the British steadily reducing their presence in the Persian Gulf, Washington began to fret about maintaining the region’s stability. Not wanting to deploy a large American contingent, it turned to its old and now oil-wealthy friend the Shah as a possible regional enforcer. The Shah loved the idea and ordered nearly $80 billion (in today’s dollars) of U.S. military hardware.
 19 
It seemed like a great deal. The Shah became America’s agent in the Gulf, and the U.S. got the weapons sales. In addition, said the CIA, ‘A continuing and growing supply of oil from Iran appears as certain as anything can be in an uncertain world.’
 20 

Even as it wrote those comforting words, the CIA should have been aware (but characteristically was not) that an explosion was building in Iran as its devout Muslim people came increasingly to resent the brutality of the Shah and the Americans who backed him. It came in 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini led a powerful uprising that toppled the Shah, threw out the Great Satan Americans, captured their embassy and its staff, and established an Islamic Republic in the name of Allah.

Now the United States had to worry about Iranian Islamic radicalism and its anti-American influence in the newly unstable Persian Gulf as well as, increasingly, the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio. When Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein launched an invasion across the Shatt Al-Arab waterway into Iran’s oil fields in September 1980, the United States welcomed the attack as something like a godsend, as I shall shortly discuss.

Afghanistan

The story of America and Afghanistan began on the night of December 27, 1979, when Soviet tanks, artillery, and trucks carrying some 100,000 troops rumbled into Afghanistan to prop up a faltering communist puppet regime. In the wake of the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs, this invasion was interpreted in Washington not as a disastrous march into quicksand but as a threat to vital U.S. interests. The Soviets had taken a step toward the Persian Gulf and the 30-mile-wide Straits of Hormuz, whose shipping lane is so narrow that a single sunken supertanker would plug the channel through which passes 60 percent of the oil used by the United States, Europe, and Japan. In a nationally televised speech, President Jimmy Carter called the Soviet invasion the gravest crisis since World War II. It is not clear why he said that, since if the Soviets really wanted to stop shipping through the straits they could easily have sent a submarine to sink a tanker. But never mind that, it was time for tense situation room conferences and high-level international consultations.

There was no way the United States was going to engage Soviet troops directly – the potential for escalation made it far too dangerous. Luckily, the problem had an easier solution. Afghanistan, with its wild mountains and wild people, had been the cemetery of armies from the time of Alexander the Great to that of Queen Victoria. The Afghans, who had never been conquered by foreigners, no more welcomed the Soviet troops than they had the others. They began fighting back guerilla style using everything from hoes to nineteenth-century British Enfield rifles. The spirit was more than willing but the arms were weak.

That was a problem Washington could easily fix. It could also help on the spirit side. Motivating the Afghans, in addition to their fierce rejection of foreigners, was their Islamic faith, which the godless communists of the Soviet Union not only denied but denigrated. Washington mounted an effort in conjunction with Pakistan to build up the Islamic Mujahedin resistance to the Soviets. Beginning with small arms shipments in January 1980, the United States eventually spent $5 billion on getting weapons, including shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and antitank guns, to the Afghans.
 21 
It printed thousands of textbooks and training manuals with pictures of militant Islamic students attacking Soviet targets, and set up training bases in Pakistan for Islamic fighters from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who flocked to defend the faith by fighting with the Afghans. Among these was Osama bin Laden. The Saudi government also answered Washington’s call for financial help and saw to it that the Mujahedin fighters were not lacking for funds.

Afghanistan became a huge, bleeding wound for the Soviets. After ten years they had had enough and withdrew in February 1989 as a prelude to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Champagne corks were popped at the White House and at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Even if the war had been unnecessary, it was a great tactical success.

But the celebration was premature. Victory led to the establishment, with Pakistani and at least tacit U.S. backing, of the medievally repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It also gave confidence to the Arab Islamic fighters who attributed to divine intervention their victory over one of the world’s two superpowers. With God on their side, there was nothing they couldn’t do, including taking down the other superpower.

Two years later, in the wake of the Gulf war of 1991 (about which more later), there were thirty thousand U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia, many of them stationed at the huge Prince Sultan base south of Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Their seemingly permanent presence on what many Muslims consider sacred soil aroused acute anger among the Islamic fighters. Although he was the scion of a wealthy Saudi family, Osama bin Laden saw Saudi royalty and its government as corrupt obstacles to the cleansing of Islam and the restoration of the culture’s ancient glories. The United States was the Saudi government’s prop and its shield as symbolized by the heretical presence of American troops in the country of Mohammad’s birth. He determined that this second Great Satan of a superpower had to go also, and that with God on his side, it would. Al Qaeda was born and would etch itself into the pages of history on September 11.

Iraq

Even in 1980, Saddam was known as a not very savory character. The State Department had included Iraq on a 1979 list of states that sponsor terrorism, and in late summer 1980, 5,000 Iraqi Kurds were detained and never seen again – killed, the
Independent
of London reported, in gas and chemical weapons experiments.
 22 
This event was consistent with U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents that had been reporting Iraqi acquisition of chemical weapons since the mid-1970
s
.
 23 
But not to worry: it was only Kurds and fanatical Islamic Iranians who were being killed, and besides, the war would surely end quickly because most of the Iranian weapons, acquired from the United States during the time of the Shah, were crippled for lack of spare parts. But the Iranians fought back with human wave attacks and by 1982 had not only pushed the Iraqis out of Iran but were pushing into Iraq. Frightened that the Army of God was now threatening to topple Saddam and take the Iraqi oil fields, President Reagan ordered his Department of Defense and CIA to supply Iraq with military intelligence, including U.S. spy satellite photos, and with sufficient weapons to ensure that it would not lose the war. To clear the way for U.S. military aid, Iraq was removed from the list of states sponsoring terrorism, even as the State Department was reporting unabated Iraqi support of terrorist groups.
 24 
By November 1983, Secretary of State George Shultz knew that Iraqi troops were using chemical weapons almost daily.
 25 

Nevertheless, on December 19, special U.S. envoy Donald Rumsfeld was dispatched to Baghdad to inform Saddam of the administration’s intention to resume diplomatic relations with Iraq. Rumsfeld also relayed a message from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir offering assistance in the war against Iran.
 26 
Over the next several years, the United States reopened its embassy in Baghdad, sent CIA and U.S. military officers to assist Iraq in various aspects of its war effort, and in May 1986 even shipped two batches of anthrax bacillus along with two batches of botulism bacteria to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education.
 27 
At about the same time, U.S. intelligence learned of Iraqi efforts to develop ballistic missiles. This did not deter further U.S. computer exports to the Iraqi research center engaged in the missile development.

Skipping ahead to 1988, we find that in January and February of that year the U.S. Commerce Department licensed the export of equipment to Iraq for its SCUD missile program, while in March, U.S.-supplied Bell helicopters were used to spray deadly chemicals on the Iraqi Kurds of the village of Halabja, causing about five thousand deaths.
 28 
In response to increasing reports of Iraqi use of chemical weapons during the summer, Secretary Shultz said there was no conclusive evidence, and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy wrote that ‘the U.S.-Iraqi relationship is…important to our long-term political and economic objectives. We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis.’
 29 
In September, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988 making Iraq ineligible to receive U.S. loans, military or non-military assistance. It also made importation of Iraqi oil illegal, but the Reagan administration launched a major effort to kill the bill in the House of Representatives and succeeded.
 30 
In March 1989, CIA Director William Webster told Congress that Iraq was the largest producer of chemical weapons in the world,
 31 
but this did not prevent the continued issuance of licenses for export of dual-use equipment to Iraq. As late as July 1990, the first Bush administration okayed nearly $5 million in sales of advanced technology equipment to Iraqi research centers known to be involved in development of chemical and nuclear weapons.
 32 
It was appartently also in July that Saddam decided on war with Kuwait. Before moving, however, he first tried to determine how the U.S. would react. On July 25, he met with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie who assured him that President Bush ‘wanted better and deeper relations, and that we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflict like your border disagreement with Kuwait.’
 33 
This was followed on August 1 by approval of the sale of nearly $700,000 worth of U.S. advanced data transmission devices to Iraq.
 34 
On August 2, Iraqi troops stormed across the border into Kuwait.