British author: Rabin asked King Hussein to arrange secret visit with Saddam

[sabra]

Source: Haaretz


In early summer 1995, a few months before his assassination, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin asked Jordan's King Hussein to approach Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on his behalf and arrange a joint visit by Rabin and Hussein to Baghdad, according to Nigel Ashton, author of "King Hussein: A political Life" (Yale University Press).

Ashton, a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics who is close to the Hashemite royal family, was given rare access to Hussein's private archives. In his Hussein biography, Ashton writes that when handed a secret letter by a Jordanian official, "Saddam did not rule out direct contacts with Rabin," but was reluctant "to work through lower-level intermediaries." No further moves on the Israel-Iraq initiative were recorded before Rabin's murder that November.

Aston calls the Rabin request for Hussein's intervention with Saddam "a bold and remarkable secret initiative." Saddam, a bitter enemy of Israel, had launched some 40 surface-to-surface missiles at it in 1991, partly in retaliation for the 1981 bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor.
Rabin reasoned that opening up relations with Iraq would increase pressure on Syrian leader Hafez Assad, Saddam's enemy, to cut a peace deal with Israel. Perhaps even more importantly, Rabin saw Iran, Iraq's arch-rival, as posing a more dangerous threat to Israel, with Iran bent on a nuclear-weapons program and Iraq under an international-sanctions and monitoring regime after the 1991 war.

...

Saddam was to be first approached by an Israeli prime minster in April 1984, when president Reagan's special Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld tried to get assurances that Israel would not attack an oil pipeline to be built by the Bechtel Corporation and run from Iraq to Jordan's only port, Aqaba.

According to a Pentagon official in Rumsfeld's party, Howard Teicher, Rumsfeld was surprised when Yitzhak Shamir countered by suggesting that instead of the new project, oil would flow again in the old Trans-Arabian Pipeline, Tapline, which was shut down in 1967. Shamir, seeing Iran as the bigger threat to Israel, asked Rumsfeld, due to visit Baghdad, to give this message to Saddam.


Read more: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1067306.html