Let’s begin by recalling why the US Navy shot-down an Iranian airliner in July 1988 and brought 241 innocent men, women and children to their doom. The answer, of course, is that the Navy was conducting patrol operations in the Persian Gulf during the Tanker War in behalf of Iraq and its ally, Kuwait. Yet hardly 30 months later these two putative American “allies” were at each other’s throats militarily.
In the scheme of things, however, neither Iraq nor Kuwait amounted to a tinker’s dam when it came to America’s Homeland security. Still, Washington had leaned heavily on their side during the 1980s Iraq/Iran War because the denizens of Empire on the banks of the Potomac had never gotten over the humiliation resulting from the US Embassy takeover by 400 Iranian religious students, who were largely unarmed, and the prolonged 440 day hostage ordeal that ensued thereafter.
Moreover, assurance of the roughly 5 million barrels per day of oil produced by the two countries didn’t require any help from the US Navy, either. That’s because the greedy Emir of Kuwait needed maximum oil production to support the opulent life-style of himself and the Kuwaiti royalty, while Saddam Hussein needed all the oil loot he could muster in order to pay-off the warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions that comprised Iraq’s religiously fractionated 27 million population and to keep his sprawling governmental dictatorship and military funded.
And yet and yet. While there was surely even less reason for getting in the middle of the Iraqi/Kuwaiti fight than there had been during the former’s invasion of Iran, it did not take the Washington War Party long to reshuffle the deck and choose sides yet again.
As of 1990, therefore, President George H.W. Bush signed up with the Emir of Kuwait; put America’s 1980s stance against Iran temporarily on the back-burner; and, instead, planted the seeds for Sunni terrorism that has plagued the world off and on ever since.
This all happened, of course, owing to the same old, same old cold war “collective security” postulates that had under-girded the Empire. In this case and even as the Soviet Union was visibly passing into the dustbin of history in real time during 1990-1991, Secretary of State James Baker had nevertheless scurried around the world enlisting a “coalition of the willing”, including the Gulf oil kingdoms, to support Washington’s pointless intervention in the wholly intramural war between Kuwait and Saddam Hussein.
And we do mean intramural and utterly pointless from an American homeland security viewpoint. To wit, the war between Iraq and Kuwait in 1990 (known as the First Gulf War) was set off by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Saddam Hussein had ordered a full-scale military assault on his erstwhile ally that quickly overran the country, which Iraq then annexed and declared as its 19th province.
This was the second invasion of a Gulf country by America’s putative ally, Iraq. This time Saddam’s action, in fact, had been triggered by a combination of economic, financial, and territorial grievances after Iraq’s exhausting 1980-1988 war with Iran. Iraq emerged from that conflict with massive debts – including $14 billion owed to Kuwait and other Gulf states—along with a shattered economy and a huge army that Saddam wanted to keep occupied and paid.
Kuwait, however, refused to forgive the loans or grant Iraq better access to Gulf ports and islands. At the same time, Kuwait and the UAE were allegedly “overproducing” oil far beyond OPEC quotas. In turn, this drove down global oil prices and cost Iraq billions in lost revenue each year – something Saddam publicly called “economic warfare.”
Of course, why Washington should not have been nodding approval when so-called OPEC cartel members were cheating on their quotas and thereby enhancing the world’s oil supply remains a mystery understood only by the War Party. Certainly Mr. Market, who should have been in charge of Persian Gulf economics anyway was all for it, causing prices to drop substantially.
In any event, Saddam accused Kuwait of “slant” drilling into Iraq’s side of the massive Rumalia oilfield which straddled the border of the two countries – which claim was asserted to be $2.5 billion and rising.
Still, a second and still more important question recurs: Namely, what in the hell did this scrap have to do with America’s homeland security? After all, neither side had anything remotely resembling long-range naval, bomber or missile capacity to threaten the America’s homeland, to say nothing of possessing a deliverable nuclear arsenal.
Of course, the Bush Administration didn’t say. Instead, it mumbled the usual neocon boilerplate about the rule of law and sanctity of borders (unless Washington determined “regime change” was in order) and then plunged into war on the Arabian desert in February 1991 on the side of the corpulent Emir of Kuwait.
Surely in the annals of modern history no war was ever started for a more squirrely reason. Nevertheless, this new “tilt to Kuwait” and mobilization of Baker’s “coalition of the willing” included the foolish placement of 500,000 American boots on the ground in nearby Saudi Arabia. In turn, that placement turned out to be a thundering insult to the Saudi-based jihadi fighters under Osama bin Laden.
Again, to recall the relevant history, the latter had earlier answered the call to join the Mujaheddin or holy warriors during the 1980s struggle against the atheistic Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, and had been trained, supported and financed by the CIA. But once the Soviets retreated from “graveyard of empires” and the cold war ended in 1991, the Washington-based Empire had no further use for them.
Needless to say, once mobilized jihadists apparently do not loose their taste for struggle and battle against the forces of evil. So it did not take Osama bin Laden long to declare that one million (i.e. two legs per US soldier) modern-day “crusader” boots on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia was a blasphemy beyond all others; and that the new mission of al-Qaeda was to smite the “head of the snake” in America.
The rest is history, of course, incepting with the 3,000 American lives lost in the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. But here’s the thing: Every single episode of “terrorism” on American soil both before and after 9/11 was committed by Sunni jihadists, not operatives or proxies of the Iranian regime.
Actually, the latter even made efforts in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to aid the US side because Sunni jihadists were viewed as a dangerous threat in Tehran, as well. So for crying out loud. Even the much exaggerated “terrorist threat” of the last three decades was never, ever rooted in the Iranian regime.
Still, the real time focusing of the so-called War on Terror after 1990 on the Sunni side of the Islamic ledger did not stop War Party operatives on the Potomac in their effort to demonize Iran and its Shiite allies. Again, this underlying drumbeat against the Iranian regime was led by the neocons in the George H.W. Bush administration, who on the way out the door in January 1993 issued a new “defense strategy” document that labeled Iran as a surrogate “enemy” to replace the now evaporated Soviet Union.
Written by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his principle neocon strategist, Paul Wolfowitz, the document argued for maintenance of cold war era defense spending levels. This was alleged to be necessary in order to handle two near-simultaneous major regional conflicts—implicitly involving states like those in the Middle East.
A core objective according to Cheney/Wolfowitz doctrine was to “preclude hostile domination of regions critical to our interests” (e.g., the Middle East/Persian Gulf), thereby preventing any nondemocratic power from controlling resources that could fuel global challenges. Again, this reflected the misbegotten neoconservative view that the U.S. must act as the sole guarantor of international order, with military intervention as a “constant fixture” if allies faltered.
In this context, Iran was grouped with Iraq and North Korea as “unpredictable states” likely to be uncooperative with Washington. Accordingly, the 1993 report warned:
“In addition, a number of countries – including unpredictable states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea – are working to develop nuclear or other unconventional weapons.”
This portrayal framed Iran as a nuclear proliferation risk that could destabilize the region, albeit there was virtually no evidence to support that charge at the time. But lack of evidence made no never-mind to the neocons. They simply asserted that Iran was a threat to Washington’s so-called allies in the region – mainly Israel – even though, again, America’s Homeland security did not require middle eastern allies in any way, shape or form.
In short, the 1993 defense strategy document marked a clear anti-Iranian escalation from the 1980s U.S. tilt toward Iraq. Moreover, with Iraq purportedly “contained” in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the Washington War Party doubled-down on its efforts to portray Iran as a “rogue” actor based in the slogan that its alliances with Shiite allies like Hezbollah made it a “state sponsor of terrorism”.
Of course, what this really meant is that Washington reserved the right to determine Iran’s foreign policy and to approve the states with which it wished to maintain relationships. Those which did not meet the approval of Washington and also Israel, in turn, were ipso facto terrorist states and Iran thereby became a leading state sponsor of terrorism. Presto.
In the cold light of facts that was utter nonsense. If the truth had been told, forces within Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states in the Gulf had done far more by 2001 to support and fund actual terrorist attacks than had Iran, and by more than a country mile, too.
Still, the neocons were desperate to maintain the Cold War Empire in the post-Soviet world where it was not needed—if it had ever been. Yet in order to justify a muscular foreign policy and $600 billion plus defense budget (in 2025 $) amid post-Soviet “peace dividend” pressures, a fearsome “enemy” was needed. And the Iranian regime got the nomination in no small part owing to the efforts of the Netanyahu wing of the neocon establishment, as we will amplify in Part 6.
But here’s the spoiler alert. To wit, the attack on the World Trade towers on 9/11 clearly should have shifted the spotlight away from Tehran because the latter had had absolutely nothing to do with the most devastating assault on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
Yet no sooner had Sunni jihadists leveled the World Trade Center on 9/11 than the neocon-dominated War Party ginned up the very opposite in President George Dubya Bush’ 2002 Axis of Evil speech to the US Congress claiming that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were all part of the same kettle of fish:
“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
This was utter nonsense – the whole kit and caboodle of it. Saddam was no threat to America and never had anything close to a nuke or WMD. And neither did Iran. The whole story was made from whole cloth by Netanyahu and his agents in the Washington Swamp, as we will amplify in Part 6.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
