Barry Rubin: Do Iraqi Documents Give Some Hints About the Iranian Regime’s Nuclear Strategy?

Do Iraqi Documents Give Some Hints About the Iranian Regime’s Nuclear Strategy?

by Barry Rubin

Using captured Iraqi documents, Hal Brands and David Palkki, have published an interesting short paper for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), “Why did Saddam Want the Bomb? The Israel Factor and the Iraqi Nuclear Program.”

They begin:

“On March 27, 1979, Saddam Hussein…laid out his vision for a long, grinding war against Israel in a private meeting of high-level Baathist officials. Iraq, he explained, would seek to obtain a nuclear weapon from ‘our Soviet friends,’ use the resulting deterrent power to counteract Israeli threats of nuclear retaliation, and thereby enable a “patient war”—a war of attrition—that would reclaim Arab lands lost in the Six Day War of 1967. As Saddam put it, nuclear weapons would allow Iraq to “guarantee the long war that is destructive to our enemy, and take at our leisure each meter of land and drown the enemy with rivers of blood.”

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

Technorati Tag: Iraq and Iran.