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Donald Rumsfeld made two trips to Baghdad as special Middle East envoy for Ronald Reagan, to meet with Saddam and his foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The much reported trip of 1983. And another trip, in March 1984, to assure Aziz that Washington wanted to strengthen its ties to Baghdad, despite its rhetorical condemnation of Iraq's use of chemical weapons. "Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States' public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington's attempts to forge a better relationship," the Washington Post reports today, about the contents of the declassified documents on the Rumsfeld-Tariq Aziz meeting secured recently by the National Security Archives.
-"The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit National Security Archive, provide new, behind-the-scenes details of U.S. efforts to court Iraq as an ally even as it used chemical weapons in its war with Iran. An earlier trip by Rumsfeld to Baghdad, in December 1983, has been widely reported as having helped persuade Iraq to resume diplomatic ties with the United States. An explicit purpose of Rumsfeld's return trip in March 1984, the once-secret documents reveal for the first time, was to ease the strain created by a U.S. condemnation of chemical weapons.
-"Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy, was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement on chemical weapons, or CW, 'was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating CW, wherever it occurs.'"
Pretty damning stuff. Read the declassified documents here from the NSA archives. Will any of the Democratic candidates -- perhaps the one testifying at the Hague -- pick up the baton on this one?