[A-List] US/Russia tensions: Iraq

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Saddam takes refuge in Russia pact
Deal could compromise support for an invasion

IAN BRUCE
The Herald, 19 August 2002

IRAQ and Russia are close to signing a £28bn economic co-operation
deal that could put Moscow in direct confrontation with America in any
military attack against Saddam Hussein.

A top Russian official yesterday confirmed the deal was being prepared
despite concerns expressed by the administration of President George W
Bush, who has made ousting Saddam a top priority and is seeking to build
international support for a possible attack on Iraq.

"This document is being prepared," said Oleg Buklemeshev, an adviser to
Mikhail Kasyanov, the Russian prime minister. "We do not know when it
will be signed. When it is ready, it will be signed."

Abbas Khalaf, the Iraqi ambassador to Moscow, said the deal could be
signed as early as next month and would involve Russian technical help
on oil development, agriculture, railroad expansion, transportation, and
electrical supply projects.

Baghdad already owes cash-strapped Russia between £5bn and £6bn for
Soviet-era military and civil equipment and modernisation packages
supplied during the cold war.

Clair Buchan, the White House spokeswoman, said yesterday: "We're
confident Russia understands its obligations under the UN security
council resolutions and that they'll abide by them."

However, the deal is privately being viewed as a potential stumbling
block in US efforts to muster international opinion behind its policy of
achieving "regime change" in Baghdad.

There is also the practical and dangerous prospect of Russian
technicians becoming casualties in any invasion of Iraq by a US-led
force, which would probably include a British armoured force of up to
25,000 troops.

Despite his strong support for America's post-September 11 war on
international terror, Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, has pursued
links with both Iran and North Korea to limit and counter US influence
in regions seen as economically important to Moscow.

Bahrain, a key US ally in the Gulf, yesterday joined Iran in opposing
American military action against Iraq. "Iran and Bahrain declare their
determined opposition to any unilateral military action against Iraq,"
said a joint statement issued at the end of a two-day visit to Tehran by
Bahrain's king, Sheik Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

In the UK, a senior Labour peer warned yesterday that there was not yet
a national consensus for military action.

Lord Ivor Richard, a former leader in the Lords, said Tony Blair must
convince doubters in the cabinet and then build on that consensus, and
he should publish the evidence he claims to have against Saddam.

The prime minister insists the evidence exists, but has said he will
"choose his time" to make it public.

Lord Richard told BBC Radio 4: "You really can't go to war without a
national consensus and at the moment I don't think there is a national
consensus."

He said there were real differences between the prospect of joining a
US-led strike against Iraq and previous conflicts Blair had committed
British troops to.

"The issues over Kosovo, for example, are much clearer than the issues
over Iraq," he said.

Former American officers, meanwhile, have revealed that the US gave
covert military aid to Saddam throughout the 1981-88 Iran-Iraq war, even
when the White House became aware that he was using nerve gas.

A team from the Defence Intelligence Agency supplied satellite
intelligence on Iranian troop movement and front-line deployment to Iraq
to prevent the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Tehran from overrunning
the oil-producing states of the Gulf.

The team also provided tactical planning for Iraqi counter-attacks,
advised on the most lucrative targets for air raids and then carried out
bomb damage assessments for the dictator now branded as being at the
heart of an "axis of evil".

Colonel Walter P Lang, now retired, was a senior DIA officer at the
time. Although he refused yesterday to discuss classified information,
he admitted that both the CIA and its military equivalent, the DIA,
"were desperate to make sure Iraq did not lose to Iran".

He added: "The use of poison gas on the battlefield was not a matter of
deep strategic concern. What President Ronald Reagan's advisers were
determined to do was prevent Iranian forces breaking through to the Fao
peninsula in southern Iraq and spreading the Islamic revolution to
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia."

The Iranians claimed that they suffered "thousands" of casualties from
Iraqi VX nerve gas and from blistering agents such as phosgene, first
used in battle in the trenches of the western front in the first world
war.

A UK military source told The Herald: "Many Iraqi officers were trained
in this country as a matter of routine at that time. One artillery
officer told us chemical shells were mixed with high-explosive rounds as
part of standard bombardments.

"Interestingly, he said the nerve and blistering weapons caused
relatively few losses among the Iranian troops. They tended to run when
they identified the presence of such agents.

"He also told us the wind sometimes blew the agents back over Iraqi
positions, inflicting as many friendly fire losses as enemy.

"Iraqi front-line units were eventually issued with atropine injectors
to offer them some protection against their own gases."

More than a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers died in the eight-year
war, many of them Iranian boys in mass human wave attacks. They were
told they would become instant Islamic martyrs if they fell in battle.