TEHRAN (IBNA) -- An
audiobook of the Persian translation of ‘Ominous Alliance’, based on the book ‎‎‎’Shaking Hands with Saddam ‎‎Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984’ (2003), ‎‎edited by Joyce Battle has been released. ‎
This audio version has been produced by Tina Mir-Karimi and narrated by Hamed Abbasi based on a published Persian by Majid Karimi which was already released by Iran’s Center for Documents and Researches of the Sacred Defense Press.
The book shows that the interests of both superpowers of that time the U.S. and the USSR were entangled with Iran-Iraq war (Sacred Defense in Iran) as none of them sided with Iran but supported the Iraqi regime. ‘Ominous Alliance’ has been translated into Persian by Majid Karimi and published by Iran’s Center for Documents and Researches of Sacred Defense Press.
The Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) was one of a series of crises during an era of upheaval in the Middle East: revolution in Iran, occupation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by militant students, the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan, and internecine fighting among Syrians, Israelis, and Palestinians in Lebanon.
The war followed months of rising tension between the Iranian Islamic republic and secular nationalist Iraq. In mid-September 1980 Iraq attacked, in the mistaken belief that Iranian political disarray would guarantee a quick victory.
The U.S. was officially neutral regarding the Iran-Iraq war, and claimed that it armed neither side. Iran depended on U.S.-origin weapons, however, and sought them from various regions. Iraq started the war with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal, but needed additional weaponry as the conflict wore on.
Most of the information in this briefing book, in its broad outlines, has been available for years. Some of it was recorded in contemporaneous news reports; a few investigative reporters uncovered much more - especially after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. A particular debt is owed to the late representative Henry Gonzales (1916-2000), a Democrat of Texas, whose staff extensively investigated U.S. policy toward Iraq during the 1980s and who would not be deterred from making information available to the public.
The U.S. restored formal relations with Iraq in November 1984, but the U.S. had begun, several years earlier, to provide it with intelligence and military support (in secret and contrary to this country’s official neutrality) in accordance with policy directives from President Ronald Reagan. These were prepared pursuant to his March 1982 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 4-82) asking for a review of U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
Almost all of the primary documents included in the book were obtained by the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act and were published in 1995.