The latest instalment of Al Majalla’s groundbreaking series from the Khaddam Cache shows how Syria’s president and Iran’s Supreme Leader wanted George W. Bush to get bogged down next door.
New details have emerged around the American’s pre-war meetings in the region, including with Kurdish leaders and the demands of the US for Iraq after Saddam.
They come from the pen of the late Abdel Halim Khaddam, the former Syrian Vice President, who served Hafez al-Assad for years before leaving for Paris in 2005, several years after his son Bashar assumed the presidency.
The papers he took with him helped build first-hand accounts of key behind-closed-doors meetings in the crucial period leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. More than 20 years later, the region is still dealing with the aftermath.
Those documents—aka the ‘Khaddam Cache’—reveal the private conversations of senior figures from the US (including former Secretary of State Colin Powell), Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Iran amidst the drumbeat of war.
Ironically, although Khaddam was critical of American military action in Iraq, disapproving of Bush’s stubborn determination to remove Saddam regardless, he later advocated for foreign intervention in Syria.
The background
After America was attacked by al-Qaeda in September 2001, with the loss of thousands of lives, US President George W. Bush and his team were always heading back to the Middle East. The unknown factors were when, where, and how.
Two of Iraq’s most important neighbours—Syria and Iran—were (and remain) allies, with Syria having supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War throughout much of the 1980s.
For the first time, Khaddam’s official documents and archives expose the clandestine agreements forged between Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in the run-up to the invasion.
Neither wanted the Americans next door, but both knew that they could not defeat the US Armed Forces militarily, so their pact aimed to disrupt US efforts through "suicide operations" to make Iraq a quagmire akin to the Vietnam War.
Khaddam's papers also reveal the CIA's meetings with Kurdish leaders, as well as the 'surrender demands' that former US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to al-Assad in Damascus after Saddam's fall.
Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), told Syrian leaders (including Khaddam) how the Central Intelligence Agency was trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein a year before the 2003 invasion.
Back then, the current US President, Joe Biden, was a Senator. He met al-Assad in late 2002, warning that "if we do not overthrow Saddam, he will acquire nuclear weapons", evidencing the urgency and seriousness of the Americans.
Khaddam's insights reveal an intricate web of diplomacy, covert operations, and international relations that shaped the prelude to the Iraq invasion.
In short, they offer readers a detailed account of one of recent history's most pivotal moments.
Syria and Iraq
In 1990, just days after Saddam invaded Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council imposed a comprehensive embargo on Iraq. This stifling set of sanctions remained in place throughout the decade, only ending in 2003.
Although Syria had supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-88, an ageing Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, latterly sought to normalise relations with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the late 1990s.
This period saw a flurry of covert communications, the reopening of borders, burgeoning trade relations, and oil exchanges in what became known informally as a "campaign to break the siege" of Iraq.
This helped thaw relations, marking a significant shift from decades of estrangement, accusations, distrust, and plotting that overrode sporadic attempts at rapprochement.
One such attempt was a secret meeting facilitated by the late Jordanian King Hussein in 1987, but it failed to achieve its objectives and find common ground between the ruling Ba'ath Parties of Damascus and Baghdad.
