Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 551Communist, and had won a power struggle against another, but more moder-
ate, Communist group. Weirdly enough, the Russians feared that Amin would
abandon their side altogether and form an alliance with... the Americans. So
the Soviets had intervened to overthrow an extremist Communist regime and
put in power a more moderate Communist group, which they did–one led by
Babrak Karmal. As noted earlier, President Jimmy Carter, prodded by his
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, had already begun to support
anti-government rebels in Afghanistan who were fundamentalist Muslims
[ironically, the enemy in Iran] in “Operation Cyclone.” The U.S. hoped the
Russians would make a large commitment to Afghanistan and get dragged
into an ugly war there like the U.S. had done in Vietnam. So Carter and his
successor, Ronald Reagan, began to send billions of dollars in weapons to the
anti-Soviet fighters, who were training in Pakistan, along with military advi-
sors to help them prepare to fight. In a classic case of “blowback,” many of
these fighters would become members of the Taliban or al Qaeda, both of
which would become violent enemies of the U.S., and one of those who
received American support would become the most wanted man in the world
in September 2001, Osama bin Laden.
At the same time that Carter and then Reagan were trying to hurt the
Soviet Union by supporting radical Muslims, long-time tensions between Iran
and Iraq blew up. Both had Muslim majorities but Iran had a majority of
Shiite Muslims, while Iraq was led by Sunni who feared that the Shiite in their
country might rise up against the Saddam Hussein government (and Iraq was
essentially a secular state anyway). More importantly, there were also border
disputes between the two countries and a growing dispute over control of and
access to the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, which ran along the Iran-Iraq border
into the Persian Gulf. The situation was becoming more complex, and confus-
ing, by the day. The U.S., which had backed Saddam and the Ba’athists for
years, ramped up its aid to support Iraq against the Khomenei regime. In 1983,
a representative sent by Reagan and the secretary of defense during the wars
of the early 2000s, Donald Rumsfeld, met with Saddam in Baghdad to assure
him of U.S. aid. The Americans sent helicopters, chemical and biological
weapons [including anthrax and botulins], machine tools, computers, special
alloys and chemicals with military uses, and other equipment to Iraq.
It also used third-country banks to provide billions of dollars in loans, and
allowed, in violation of export agreements, other Arab states to send howit-