Ultimate Insiders
By BOB HERBERT, NY Times, April 14, 2003.
Let's go back some 20 years. Ronald Reagan was president. George Shultz was secretary of state. Lebanon was in turmoil. And Iraq and Iran were locked in a vicious war that had sharply curtailed the flow of oil out of Iraq.
In December 1983 Donald Rumsfeld was sent to the Middle East as a special envoy in an effort to jump-start the peace process in Lebanon and advance a presidential initiative for peace between Arabs and Israelis.
One of his stops was Baghdad, where he met with Saddam Hussein. That was unusual. Mr. Rumsfeld was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq since 1967, when Iraq and other Arab nations severed relations with the U.S., which they blamed for Israel's victory in the Six-Day War.
The primary goal of Mr. Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad was to improve relations with Iraq. But another matter was also quietly discussed. The powerful Bechtel Group in San Francisco, of which Secretary Shultz had been president before joining the Reagan administration, wanted to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, near the Red Sea. It was a billion-dollar project and the U.S. government wanted Saddam to sign off on it. READ MORE
