25.04.2013
Margaret Thatcher: The woman who armed Saddam Hussein
Yassamine Mather digs up some of the recently departed's dirty politcal laundry
One of the forgotten stories in all the obituaries of Margaret Thatcher was the ‘arms to Iraq’ fiasco, which led to a public inquiry, conducted by Sir Richard Scott, into “the export of defence equipment and dual-use goods to Iraq and related prosecutions”. The Economist summed up the inquiry’s findings as follows: “Sir Richard exposed an excessively secretive government machine, riddled with incompetence, slippery with the truth and willing to mislead parliament.”1
However, the Scott report, published in 1996, came before the release of 1981 cabinet papers under the 30-year rule in 2011. Those cabinet papers prove that the Thatcher government was selling arms to Saddam Hussein as early as 1981 and throughout the Iran-Iraq war. According to Sir Stephen Egerton, a former assistant undersecretary in the foreign office, who gave testimony to the Scott inquiry, the Conservative government had misled everyone about the sale of arms to Saddam - British companies were supplying military equipment to Iraq up to 1990.2
On September 22 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, carrying out an air and land assault, and this marked the start of an eight-year war. Western governments imposed an embargo on the sales of arms to both countries, but in practice UK companies were selling arms to both sides. As for the US, its apparent support for Iraq3 was undermined when the Iran-Contra affair (‘Irangate’) was exposed. UK arms manufacturers were caught when the truth about Saddam Hussein’s ‘supergun’ came out after the first Gulf war.
The UK government was a signatory to a UN security council resolution calling on all members to “refrain from any act which may lead to a further escalation and widening of the conflict”. Amongst the documents released under the 30-year rule is a secret letter from Thomas Trenchard, a junior minister in Thatcher’s government, written to the prime minister in March 1981. Trenchard reported that “Contracts worth over £150 million have been concluded [with Iraq] in the last six months, including one for £34 million.”4
This covert arms sale became a source of major embarrassment in 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the United Kingdom, siding with United States, was at war with a country it had supplied with military equipment and the expertise to build a supergun.
On August 6 1990, a few days after the start of the first Gulf war, British customs in Teesport seized steel tubes, a meter in diameter, designed to be part of a supergun. The tubes were falsely labelled “petroleum pipes” destined for Iraq. They were part of Saddam Hussein’s ‘Project Babylon’, involving two UK companies - Space Research Corporation and Advanced Technology. Two weeks later, Gerard Bull, engineering expert, arms dealer and the man behind the supergun, was assassinated in Brussels, allegedly by a Mossad agent.
It was at the trial of directors of companies such as Matrix Churchill and Space Research Corporation that the sordid story of government involvement in arms supply to Iraq came to light.
One of the directors of Matrix Churchill claimed he had been working with the intelligence services and that the ministry of defence had advised the company on ways of bypassing the arms embargo. When government officials were called as witnesses, they used ‘public interest immunity’ and refused to confirm or dismiss Matrix Churchill’s claims. The trial’s collapse came after Tory minister Alan Clark admitted that he had been “economical with the actualité” and the Scott enquiry was later set up under John Major. That inquiry came to the conclusion that the Thatcher government had “relaxed controls of arms export” to Iraq in 1988, but had not informed parliament.
However, the cabinet papers released in 2011 show the story to be even more damning. The Thatcher government sold arms to Iraq from March 1981 and throughout the Iran-Iraq war, during which time more than a million people on both sides died. The policy continued, even as Saddam Hussein was consolidating Iraq’s position as a regional power in the late 1980s.
yassamine.mather@weeklyworker.org.uk
Notes
1. D Butler, ‘Ministerial accountability: lessons of the Scott Report’: www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Research_and_Education/pops/pop29/c01.
2. www.iraqwatch.org/government/UK/Scott%20Report/D3-1.htm.
3. KR Timmerman The death lobby: how the west armed Iraq New York 1991.
4. www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-schwarz/margaret-thatcher-iraq_b_3037423.html.