Not Your Sweetie

Rummy and Saddam Sitting in a Tree - the BBC
Interview


DD: America took it (Iraq) off the list of terror states
20 years ago.

DR: I don't know that. I accept -

DD: When you - when you - sorry. When you visited
Iraq and
negotiated with Saddam Hussein, when America
wanted
Saddam Hussein for its own purposes, America took
Iraq off
the list of terrorist states and, indeed,
supplied it with the
wherewithal to make the chemical weapons they're
now trying
to remove.

DR: I've read that type of thing, but I don't
know where you
get your information, and I don't believe it's
correct. They
may have been taken off. I was a private
businessman. I was
asked for a few months to assist after the 241
Marines were
killed in Beirut, Lebanon. And I did meet with
Saddam Hussein.
I did not give him or sell him or bring him any
chemical
weapons or any biological weapons, as some of the
European
press likes to print. It's just factually not
true.

Now, whether or not the United States at some
point, when I
was not part of the government, decided to take
him off a
terrorist list, you may be right. In fact, I -

DD: Are you saying you don't know, you didn't
know when
you went there whether he was on the list of
terror states or
not? You were trying to reopen -

DR: I believe he was.

DD: - a relationship between the United States
and Iraq.

DR: That's right. And I believe he was on the
list of terrorist
states when I went there.

DD: We're being diverted a bit here, but let's
just go into this,
because it's another of the causes of a lack of
credibility, or a
credibility gap that you particularly have to
fill, that you were
there and met the man.

DR: I was there with the President and Secretary
Shultz to
meet with him and to see it was one of the few
Middle
Eastern countries that had not re-established
relationships
with the United States after the earlier Middle
East war.

DD: But you aren't saying that you weren't aware
that he
was using chemical weapons, because the Secretary
of State
at the time had said they were using them.

DR: I was certainly aware of that. I didn't say I
wasn't aware
of that. I said I was not aware that the United
States gave
him, as you suggested, or I gave him, and that I
had some
burden to bear. That's just utter nonsense.

DD: I'm not suggesting you had a burden to bear.
I was
saying that there was one of the reasons you
lacked -

DR: You said you particularly.

DD: No, you went and talked to the man.

DR: I did.

DD: But what I'm suggesting is that the United
States in the
world outside, over and over again people say,
well, now
they're trying to get rid of the weapons, as
Jesse Jackson put
it when he was at Hyde Park Corner a week ago,
for which
the United States has the receipts. I mean,
that's the
problem, that you created this monster, evil, as
you know -

DR: You who?

DD: You, the United States, not you personally.