Forget Dubya’s incessant whimpering about “weapons of mass destruction”, if war is to come to the gulf for a second time, the man at the centre of it all will be Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. The apparent ‘brains’ behind of any attack, Rumsfeld needs no media introduction, his bespectacled visage hovering unsettlingly close to any random military general in a myriad of televised press conferences in recent weeks. Alongside Colin Powell, he seems to be doing the majority of the dirty work for the Bush administration- whilst Powell jets endlessly across the globe to curry favour with a variety of hesitant leaders, he stays put, discussing at great (though often, we are told, one-sided) lengths with General Franks, amongst others, on which strategy to adopt. He has made it clear on numerous occasions that he relies solely on fact as a basis for a possible strike, and public, or international opinion, despite its necessity in the event of the conflict continuing for numerous months, is virtually expendable. Yet deep in his history lies often overlooked documents, the majority of which remain classified, relating to his involvement with the Iraqi dictator some twenty years hence. Rumsfeld is the puppet master, he believes he can cut Saddam’s strings at will should the scissors present itself to him. What he doesn’t want the world to find out is that he had a hand in creating the puppet.

Following the loss of his good friend Gerald Ford in the 1976 general election to Jimmy Carter, Rumsfeld, who in his short time in politics had risen to be the youngest Pentagon chief in history, committed apparent political suicide, by disappearing almost completely from politics for some 23 years. Rising through the ranks of G.D. Searle & Co, a major worldwide pharmaceutical company, he remained merely an external civilian companion to those he knew in the government. However, in late 1983, then President Ronald Reagan grew concerned with Iranian proposals for possible expansion into other ‘friendly’ Middle Eastern nations- ‘friendly’ being a by-word for oil efficient, and therefore also requisite to the US economy. Amongst these nations was Iraq, who had been struck off Reagan’s list of potentially threatening ‘rogue’ nations in 1982. The exact wording of the documented National Security Decision Directive 114, passed on November 26th, 1983, and authorising the protection of such states ‘at any cost’, remains one of the few documents from the Reagan era still to be classified. What we do know however is that a special envoy was sent by the same administration a month later, to discuss the directive further with Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq. That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld.

Quite what doorways Rumsfeld opened in this historic meeting with Hussein still remain a mystery, yet we do know that in the late months of 1983 and early in 1984 the sale to Iraq of helicopters, guns, ammunition and aircraft parts, aswell as several tons of seemingly innocent ‘tubing’- which has become a major talking point of the current crisis- increased considerably, according to a LA Times article of February 13th, 1984. Could chemical weapons have also been shipped out to Iraq from US territory? According to a Senate Banking Report in 1994, which noted the deportation of several strains of anthrax in the mid-80’s from the US commerce department, the answer is a chilling yes. Could Rumsfeld, the head of a multinational pharmaceutical empire, have been the perfect man to discuss chemical precursors et al with a president who up until 1984 was not well researched into the uses of chemical warfare?

It isn’t until March 24th 1984 that a concrete link between Rumsfeld and Iraq’s chemical weapons programme can be made- albeit a highly coincidental one. According to the recent ‘Time’ article, “The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s closet” by Jeremy Scahill, on this crucial date, as Rumsfeld met with senior members of the Iraqi government (including time Tariq Aziz, then Foreign Minister) for the second time, the UPI report for the day’s proceedings contains a far from innocent combat report “Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43 month Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq, a team of U.N. experts has concluded.” Coincidence? Surely a man trained in the pharmaceutical trade, as Rumsfeld was by this stage, would have voiced concern for such wanton use of chemical warfare, being present at the time of such a great atrocity. Not so.

Five days later, Scahill reports, The New York Times printed a statement from US diplomats in Baghdad (including Rumsfeld): “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States, and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name.” Rumsfeld resigned his post a month and a half after this second meeting. Iraq’s gassing of Kurdish civilians, probably using American helicopters, and possibly using American gas; would follow less than four years later.

So can American concerns about Iraq’s potential weapons of mass destruction be solved by simply by a mere comparison of import and export lists between the two nations? The UN, upon completion of the Gulf War, sent several envoys to Iraq to disarm Saddam and halt his WMD programs, the latest of which, which was only undertaken due to American pressure and headed by Hans Blix, gave its report last week, and provoked mixed messages and confused reactions from the international community. However, some 4 years previous, following the last UN inspectors visit in 1998, and in the last years of the Clinton presidency, Newt Gingrich asked Donald Rumsfeld to head a “Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States”, a compendium of nations which could, in future, attack home interests, a list which inevitably included Iraq. A notable exclusion, which upon hindsight might have warranted inclusion, is Afghanistan, particularly if we note the duration of the conflict there and the failure to find Bin Laden. However, due to Rumsfeld’s position as chairman of the commission, the information provided on Iraq in the 1999 report still remains relevant, though slightly different to the current position held by the present government. In it, the commission notes North Korea and Iran as the chief dangers to the United States, both are capable of producing 10,000 km range missiles, which could cause havoc on the western and eastern seaboards of the US, and both with sufficiently unstable governments to warrant caution. Iraq however, whilst having a “large chemical and biological weapons program prior to the war” is listed as having a “plant and equipment less developed than those of North Korea or Iran as a result of actions forced by UN resolutions and monitoring.” Sanctions have continued as such in part right into the Bush administration, sanctions surely lacking from these other two problematic nations. All of this begs a couple of questions, not only, how and when did Saddam get hold of anything new, but to put it another way, how can the puppet master aim to bring life to a set of empty strings?