Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cover-Up? Bush critics dub the most controversial parts of prewar Iraq policy "Iraqgate": claims, still unproved, that the Administration has tried to hide the full extent of its tilt toward Iraq by interfering with the prosecution of the Atlanta branch of Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which extended more than $4 billion in illegal loans that helped finance Baghdad's purchase of equipment with potential military applications. Officials at the Departments of State, Commerce, Defense and Energy who monitored "dual use" & sales, which amounted to $500 million between 1985 and 1990, knew they were helping Saddam's military...
Administration officials say there was little they would have done differently. The U.S. was giving Iraq agricultural export credits that helped American farmers. Saddam's Arab neighbors and many European countries were advising Washington to be nice to Iraq and would have resisted, out of fear or Arab solidarity, any drive toward containment. The U.S. did not sell arms directly to Iraq. The dual-use equipment sold by the U.S. was not cutting-edge technology but rather more generic items and processes that could have been bought in 10 other countries...
...kind of "constructive engagement" policy with a man like Saddam had to assume his behavior could be affected by U.S. sticks and carrots. It is understandable that Bush would want to bring Iraq into the community of nations, but some government experts now think Saddam never had any interest in Washington's blandishments. U.S. policy was based on the belief that he wanted to reconstruct his country after the exhausting war with Iran and would need access to the West to do so. Instead Saddam resumed an interrupted march toward domination of the Arab world and figured raiding the Kuwaiti...
Bush's basic error was to leave his prewar Iraq policy on autopilot. The Administration had a big investment in its belief that Saddam -- whom Bush called "worse than Hitler" after the invasion -- could be cajoled into better behavior. So the U.S. pulled its diplomatic punches in a way that not only seems like appeasement in retrospect but also struck some as such at the time. If the U.S. had few tools to influence Saddam's prewar behavior, as Bush aides now acknowledge, then perhaps little would have been lost had they just written Iraq off, but Bush...
...will be a strange irony if the sociopath Saddam outlasts Bush, who attempted to sketch the outlines of a new world order in defeating him. That new world will present future Presidents with more dilemmas like prewar Iraq -- Syria and China are current examples -- where the moral costs of engaging with a thuggish regime must be weighed against the practical chances of coaxing it into the concert of nations -- and making a buck in the meantime. Bush's Iraq policy is not a perfect model for future action, but neither is it a perfect example of what to avoid...