When Rummy met Saddam
When Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad as President Reagan’s envoy in early 1984, he was instructed to reassure the Iraqi regime that- despite the adminstration’s public codemnation of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran- it was still interested in “continuing to improve bilateral relations with Iraq, at a pace of Iraq’s choosing.”
In other words, Saddam, the mere fact that you’re using what we will later call a weapon of mass destruction won’t stand in the way of better US-Iraqi relations whenever you feel like it.
This revealing, though hardly surprising, bit of realpolitik appeared in a recently-declassified message from then-Secretary of State George Shultz to Rumsfeld.
It came to light thanks to one of the most remarkable sites on the web- the National Security Archive, a database of declassified US foreign-policy and other documents (including reports on the historic Richard Nixon-Elvis Presley meeting). Worth a look around.