Al Haig and a 'Green Light' to Chaos

A "top secret" document authored by Haig in 1981 contained a stunning claim: that Carter, frustrated over his failure to resolve the hostage crisis, gave a "green light" to Iraq's Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in September 1980, starting a war that altered the region's power balance and reverberates to today.

Whether Haig's assessment was correct remains in dispute Carter denied encouraging the attack and Haig, citing the document's classified status, refused to discuss it. Now, Haig has taken that history to the grave. Below is our original article (slightly edited):

In summer 1980, Iraq's wily president Saddam Hussein saw opportunities in the chaos sweeping the Persian Gulf.

Iran's Islamic revolution had terrified the Saudi princes and other Arab royalty who feared uprisings against their own corrupt life styles. Saddam's help was sought, too, by CIA-backed Iranian exiles who wanted a base to challenge the fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And as always, the Western powers were worried about the Middle East oil fields.

At those fateful meetings, amid the luxury of the ornate palaces, the Saudis would encourage Saddam to invade Iran. The Saudis also would claim to pass on a secret message about President Carter's geo-political desires.

During that summer of 1980, President Carter was facing his own crisis. His failure to free 52 American hostages held in Iran was threatening his political survival. As he wrote in his memoir, Keeping Faith, "The election might also be riding on their freedom."

Equally alarming, President Carter had begun receiving reports that the Republicans were making back-channel contacts with Iran about the hostage crisis, as he would state in a letter to a journalist nearly a decade later.

Though it was unclear then, this multi-sided political intrigue would shape the history from 1980 to the present day. Iraq's invasion of Iran in September 1980 would deteriorate into eight years of bloody trench warfare that did little more than kill and maim an estimated one million people.

[The Iran-Iraq War set the stage for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990; the subsequent U.S.-led campaign to drive Iraqi forces out in 1991; the anti-U.S. turn of Saudi Osama bin Laden, who vowed to drive American forces out Islamic lands; President George W. Bush's conquest of Iraq in 2003; and much of today's tensions between the West and Iran.]

The Iran-Iraq War also generated billions of dollars in profits for well-connected arms merchants and spawn a series of national security scandals.

In 1986-87, the Iran-Contra Affair peeled back some of the layers of secrecy, but bipartisan investigations dumped the blame mostly on White House aide Oliver North and a few low-level "men of zeal," sparing Reagan and his Vice President George H.W. Bush from much accountability.

Later inquiries into Iraqgate allegations of secret U.S. military support for Saddam Hussein also ended inconclusively. The missing billions from the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International disappeared into the mist of complex charge and counter-charge, too. So did evidence implicating the CIA and Nicaraguan contra rebels in cocaine trafficking.

A similar fate befell the October Surprise story, President Carter's old suspicion of Republican interference in the 1980 hostage crisis. A special House task force concluded in 1993 that it could find "no credible evidence" to support the October Surprise charges.

Haig's Talking Points

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