Saddam may spill the beans

Twenty years ago next Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein held a secret meeting in Baghdad. Mr Rumsfeld was then the special envoy of the then US president Ronald Reagan.

It was at a time when Iraq was at war with Iran. During that meeting, Mr Rumsfeld assured the Iraqi president Washington would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West," according to the National Security Directive that was Mr Rumsfeld's talking points notes.

The meeting led to the resumption of diplomatic relations between America and Iraq, which had been broken off in 1967 as a consequence of the Arab-Israeli war.

Mr Rumsfeld has since maintained that during this meeting with Saddam Hussein, he expressed concern about Iraq's use of chemical and biological weapons in the war against Iran. The release of the minutes of the meeting by the National Security Archive in Washington shows this not to be true.

When Saddam Hussein comes to trial in Iraq or wherever for his "crimes against humanity" he may well spill the beans on those who aided, abetted and armed him in the commission of those crimes. In particular, he may be able to disclose the extent of the assistance he got from the United States by the administration that included George Bush snr as vice-president and indeed the administration led by the same George Bush snr after he became president in 1989.

Saddam Hussein's connections with Washington go back to 1959, when the CIA backed an assassination attempt against the then Iraqi prime minister Gen Abd al-Karim Qasim who had overthrown the American-backed monarchy the year before - Saddam was one of those backed by the CIA in the coup attempt. That failed but another coup succeeded a few years later and Saddam was one of the major beneficiaries.

Following that Rumsfeld-Hussein meeting of 20 years ago, the Americans provided military intelligence and arms to Iraq. This was at a time when the Americans were getting regular reports of the use by Saddam of chemical and biological weapons in the war against Iran. Around $1.5 billion worth of weapons equipment and technology, including items applicable to Iraq's nuclear or biological-weapons programme, such as anthrax strains and pesticides, were provided in the years immediately afterwards. A Chilean arms company, Cardoen, was used by the CIA to provide Iraq with cluster bombs.

The Americans provided Iraq with military intelligence on Iran's military plans and army locations. They removed Iraq from the State Department terrorist list and kept Iraq off that list, knowing that in 1985 Iraq was shielding well-known terrorists, including Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who had masterminded the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an American tourist.

A study undertaken by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, an affiliate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, examined documents relating to the Commerce Department's approval of 771 licences for the export of $1.5 billion worth of goods to Iraq from 1985 to 1990. All of the items were "dual-use" products, those that could have either civilian or military applications.

This assistance continued right through the period in March 1988 when Saddam used poison gas against "his own people", the Kurds, and killed some 5,000 Kurdish non-combatants in Halabja.

Saddam may also like to recall at his trial how the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told him a week before he invaded Kuwait in August 1990 that the US had "no opinion" on Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait, thereby signalling that, as with his use of chemical and biological weapons against the Iranians and the Kurds, the US would turn a blind eye to whatever he did to his other neighbour.

Saddam Hussein should indeed be put on trial for his crimes against humanity, all of them. And along with him on trial should be those that aided and abetted him in those monstrous atrocities.

The most monstrous of those atrocities was that war he instigated by invading Iran in September 1980, just as he had invaded Kuwait 11 years later. It was a war he pursued for eight years, the longest conventional war of the 20th century. In the course of that war, 375,000 Iraqis and as many as one million Iranians were killed or wounded. Nothing else that Saddam Hussein did in the course of his tyranny from 1979 to 2003 comes near the depredations of that period from 1980 to 1988.

Were Iran to be precluded from the prosecution of Saddam Hussein for war crimes, it would be an injustice.

It would also be an injustice if those Americans, other Western leaders and government officials who egged him on and armed him were not held to account.