Tag: Iraq

18 January 1993

Posted on by Featherproof Books
Piece of a Tomahawk missle that was launched by the U.S. against Iraq

 

Just days before Bill Clinton takes office as president, 46 Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles are used to attack supposed WMD-related buildings around Baghdad after Iraq refuses to cooperate with U.N. inspectors.

One missile reportedly veers off course and hits the Al-Rasheed Hotel, the main hotel used by diplomats and VIP visitors to the country, killing two, according to Iraqi officials. A mosaic depicting President George H.W. Bush is installed at the entrance the lobby, forcing visitors to walk over his face to enter the hotel.

It’s funny that George Bush the son would later come into office with a bad taste in his mouth about the promiscuous use of cruise missiles by Clinton, that such attacks were just “swatting at flies” and “pounding sand,” even though his father was the originator of a tactic that now—with drones and hyper-accurate weapons and perpetual war placing U.S. aircraft globally—seems so obsolete.

By the way, I visited the “Museum of the Aggression” in Baghdad just weeks later, where parts of the Tomahawk missiles used in the attack were on display. The most intriguing was the “brain” of the missile seeker, with Texas Instruments circuitry visible. I “obtained” the piece and later showed it during a talk I gave at the Naval War College. Naval Investigative Service agents then arrived at my office in Washington demanding that I give the part back. I declined to turn it over and told them that they should be glad that I had it and not the Russians. It all seems so long ago.

10 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President-elect George W. Bush is briefed in the famous and highly secure JCS “tank” at the Pentagon—on the national security situation and the immediate threats ahead.

The focus is on the immediate threat from Iraq, the absence of U.N. inspectors, the unravelling of international sanctions, the continued build-up of weapons of mass destruction, the hardening of Iraq’s air defense and communications infrastructure with buried fiber optics, Iraqi relations with terrorists, and Saddam’s Hussein’s human rights record. It is a bracing and single-minded presentation. In other words, Iraq wasn’t just some concoction of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. It was the number one threat as conceived by the Pentagon.

6 January 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

National Security Advisor “Sandy” Berger says President Clinton has expanded the rules of engagement (ROEs) for the no-fly zones over Iraq, allowing preemptive strikes on air defense and command and control targets that had previously exhibited hostile action against American overflights (on earlier flights, thus stretching the concept of “self defense”).

The no-fly zones, which had been imposed in 1991 after the first Gulf War, restricted Iraqi fighter jet (and later, attack helicopter) activity, essentially immobilizing (and deteriorating) the Iraqi air force. The scope of the no-fly zones would be expanded on numerous occasions and would even include “no-drive zones” in southern and northern Iraq that restricted offensive military action with armored vehicles.

The January 1999 expansion, compensating for the absence of on-the-ground UN inspectors and responding to increased Iraqi challenges to U.S. (and allied) overflights, really constitutes the beginning of the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war and the beginning of the end for Iraq. By March 2003, when the second Gulf War began, a clandestine operation called Operation Southern Focus built on the expanded 1999 ROEs and was weeks in the making, bombing Iraq and destroying Iraq’s command, communications, early warning and air defense capabilities while America was debating whether even to go to war. Southern Focus ultimately facilitated the invasion and the rapid defeat.

2 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin
Niger Embassy in Rome

 

The embassy of the Republic of the Niger in Rome is ransacked and thousands of passports and documents are stolen.

Many months later, a set of documents—on Niger government letterhead—would emerge to indicate attempts by Saddam Hussein to obtain uranium yellowcake from the country. The supposed Iraqi pursuit of Nigerien uranium is one of the key pieces of evidence used in “proving” Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of WMD. It is also at the core of the later Valerie Plame affair, where the CIA-dispatched Joseph Wilson (the former ambassador to Niger, and Plame’s husband) to investigate whether Iraq indeed was pursuing nuclear materials.

The documents are later conclusively proven to be forgeries.

22 December 1989

Posted on by William Arkin
South Yemen

 

Osama bin Laden approaches Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, head of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, with a plan to use Arab mujahedin from Afghanistan to overthrow the Marxist government in South Yemen.

Turki rejects his proposal, but bin Laden reportedly organizes fighters anyhow under the al Qaeda flag, and then (working with tribal leaders) makes a series of attacks in South Yemen. The attacks are so damaging and threatening that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh travels to Saudi Arabia to ask King Fahd to get bin Laden under control. The King then himself instructs bin Laden to stay out of Yemeni affairs, and Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz al Saud (then the minister of the interior) demands bin Laden’s passport.

Less than a year later, Iraq invades Kuwait and bin Laden’s views of Saudi Arabia are forever transformed, with King Fahd inviting U.S. military forces to deploy to Saudi soil—a sacrilege to bin Laden that represents a new set of “crusaders” entering the lands of Islam.

17 December 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Al Kut Barracks West - Northwest Iraq

 

U.N. weapons inspectors evacuate Iraq for the last time, removing with them a secret NSA telephone monitoring device that American agents had brought in under United Nations cover.

After weeks of disputes and obstructions by the Iraqis—stopping or interfering with inspections of “presidential sites” and other sensitive installations associated with Saddam Hussein’s protect—UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler decides to withdraw all U.N. staff, setting the stage for American airstrikes.

President Clinton then signs the orders for Operation Desert Fox, and airstrikes against Iraqi targets begin just before 1 AM (2200 GMT on December 16). Desert Fox is aimed officially, according to the White House, against Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that his country had also been left with “no option” but to mount the strikes. Russia and China condemn the actions and Russia recalls its ambassador from Washington. The next day, Russia recalls its ambassador to London.

Secretary Albright holds a briefing on Desert Fox and was asked how she would respond to those who say that, unlike the 1991 Gulf War, this campaign “looks like mostly an Anglo-American mission.” She answers: “We are now dealing with a threat, I think, that is probably harder for some to understand because it is a threat of the future, rather than a present threat, or a present act such as a border crossing, a border aggression. And here, as the president described in his statement yesterday, we are concerned about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s ability to have, develop, deploy weapons of mass destruction and the threat that that poses to the neighbors, to the stability of the Middle East, and therefore, ultimately to ourselves.”

There are, of course, no real nuclear, chemical and biological weapons left, but then the actual targets of Desert Fox strikes are security-related facilities associated with Saddam’s presidential guards—with the hope that their destruction might provoke a coup or uprising. Inspectors don’t return to Iraq until 2003, in an eleventh hour effort to stave off the second Gulf War.

24 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Martin Indyk

 

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Martin Indyk wraps up meetings with 16 Iraqi opposition groups in London. The meetings, arranged by the British Foreign Office, seeks to unite the expatriate groups as a viable alternative to Saddam Hussein. The groups pledge to work to indict the Iraqi president for war crimes as one means of uniting Iraqi public opinion against him.

“We are not talking here about the opposition groups being involved in activities that are designed to overthrow violently the regime in Baghdad. We are talking about the opposition groups developing political support for a new Iraq, a new open, democratic Iraq,” the Foreign Office junior minister said.

By late 1998, with much of the White House’s (and the CIA’s) attention shifted to al Qaeda, Iraq had fallen off the radar screen, and with an end to U.N. inspections, there was little new reliable intelligence coming from inside the country. But Congress passed a law allowing President Clinton to spend 93 million dollars helping anti-Saddam groups and the beginning of the end was afoot, particularly in providing an outsize role to the Iraqi exiles, who later would manipulate both the Clinton and Bush administrations with fake intelligence and false promises of support inside the country. Indyk would go on to become ambassador to Israel (1999–2001), a position he also filled from 1995–1997.

23 November 1985

Posted on by William Arkin

 

An EgyptAir airliner bound from Athens, Greece to Malta and carrying several U.S. citizens was hijacked by the Abu Nidal Organization, a renegade Palestinian faction backed by Libya. Abu Nidal (Sabri Khalil al-Banna) split from the PLO in 1974 and founded the Abu Nidal group. The November 1985 hijacking is considered their first international terrorist attack.

Egyptian commandos attempted to storm the plane, during which the hijackers threw grenades inside the aircraft and 60 of the 95 passengers and crew died in the resulting explosions and fire. The Abu Nidal Organization would go on to carry out a number of particularly brutal international hijackings and attacks.

Abu Nidal was expelled from Libya in 1999 and he ultimately sought refuge in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He was killed in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002, some say by Iraqi secret police, some say he committed suicide. But the bottom line was that Saddam feared his independence and even possible work with the United States after 9/11, especially as an invasion of Iraq seemed coming.

Abu Nidal was probably the last of the individual charismatic terrorists—à la “Carlos the Jackal”—who could flourish in rogue states and evade international capture. And his organization’s many hijackings also ultimately lead to more and more efforts to secure air travel, a process that obviously didn’t happen until after 9/11.

15 November 1997

Posted on by William Arkin

 

In a speech in Sacramento, California, President Bill Clinton portrays a bleak future if nations do not cooperate against “organized forces of destruction,” telling the audience that only a small amount of “nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did.” Stopping the spread of nuclear materials and not letting weapons “fall into the wrong hands” is “fundamentally what is stake in the stand-off we’re having in Iraq today,” he says.

Clinton asked Americans not to view the current crisis as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, “think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”

It is a good reminder that the WMD phantom—with Iraq, North Korea, Iran, etc.—is perpetual and also, short of destroying Iraq and war, we are so unable to peacefully resolve the bigger question of proliferation in the most difficult cases.

14 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Saddam Hussein revokes his August 5 decision to cease cooperation with the United Nations inspectors (UNSCOM). Iraq states in a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan that it is willing to resume inspections. But the U.S. and U.K. argue that the country imposes a number of unacceptable conditions with its offer, particularly restrictions on visiting presidential sites and including American inspectors. Capitulating, Iraq then informs the U.N. Security Council that it was the “clear and unconditional decision of the Iraqi government to resume cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA.”

As Iraq deliberates on resumption of inspections, an air and cruise missile operation (Desert Viper) is being prepared and even implemented: aircraft moving into place, armed, with targets selected. When Iraq notifies the Security Council, President Clinton aborts Desert Viper just minutes before the designated H-hour (11:00 AM EST).

In a televised address, President Clinton later says that Iraq has “backed down” and pledged full cooperation with UNSCOM. The president also makes clear that U.S. policy includes the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a prerequisite for resumption of normal relations. The UNSC accepts Iraq’s decision and issues a statement in which it stresses that Iraq’s commitment “needs to be established by unconditional and sustained cooperation with the Special Commission and the IAEA in exercising the full range of their activities provided for in their mandates.”

The U.S. and U.K. then threaten that without full cooperation, they will strike Iraq without warning. According to the Iraq Survey Group, the events of 1998 “had so poisoned the atmosphere with UNSCOM that the relationship could not be repaired.” It was the end of inspections and the beginning of the road to certain war, but also not the last time that a president stopped an underway bombing operation, President Trump doing so vis-à-vis Iran.