that diplomacy might “defuse the crisis,” and therefore blocked
diplomacy “linkage” at every turn during the build-up to the war.
By refusing diplomacy, the US achieved its major goals in the
Gulf. We were concerned that the incomparable energy resources
of the Middle East remain under our control, and that the enormous
profits they produce help support the economies of the US and its
British client.
T he US also reinforced its dominant position, and taught the
lesson that the world is to be ruled by force. T hose goals having
been acheived, Washington proceeded to maintain “stability,”
barring any threat of democratic change in the Gulf tyrannies and
lending tacit support to Saddam Hussein as he crushed the popular
uprising of the Shi’ites in the South, a few miles from US lines, and
then the Kurds in the North.
But the Bush administration had not yet succeeded in achieving
what its spokesman at the New York Times, chief diplomatic
correspondent T homas Friedman, calls “the best of all worlds: an
iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.” T his, Friedman
writes, would be a return to the happy days when Saddam’s “iron
fist...held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American
allies T urkey and Saudi Arabia,” not to speak of the boss in
Washington. But the current situation in the Gulf reflects the
priorities of the superpower that held all the cards, another truism
that must remain invisible to the guardians of the faith.
The Iran/Contra cover-up
T he major elements of the Iran/Contra story were well known long
before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of
arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal Contra war run out of Ollie
North’s W hite House office were connected.
T he shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985,
when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecuter pick up
the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in
- By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a
large part of the arms for Iran—you could read it on the front page
of the New York Times.