Those who appreciate irony will mark a jaundiced anniversary at the weekend. Twenty years ago Saturday, Dec. 20, 1983, Donald H. Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad at the beginning of what has been described as a cordial 90-minute meeting. He who was once great guns is now good riddance. (Saddam, not Rumsfeld, at least in this instance.)

[...]

In 1983, Rumsfeld -- who although then a private citizen already had a heady governmental resum\ufffd including his first stint as defense secretary -- was in the Iraqi capital as a special envoy for President Reagan. The Republican administration in Washington was determined to exploit Saddam's increasingly defensive position in the zero-sum war he had begun in 1980 with Iran. Rumsfeld was to suck up to the ruthless autocrat, despite a lack of formal U.S.-Iraq diplomatic arrangements since the 1967 Middle East War.

In a determined exercise of the old Middle Eastern theorem ("The enemy of my enemy is my friend"), the Reagan administration was seeking to help Saddam -- with the aim of keeping the Iran-Iraq conflict preferably unstable or at least short of an Iranian victory. According to talking points drafted for Rumsfeld's 1983 visit to Baghdad, the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West," according to a Washington Post report.

[...]

The United States was already aware of, but in geopolitical terms of the times, unconcerned about, Saddam's chemical weapons program (including the mustard gas with nerve agents that had been used against Iranian troops at least since earlier in 1983 and the similar toxic spray that Saddam would use against Iraqi Kurds in 1988). We now know that U.S. firms (as well as some in France) had been sources of ingredients required to develop Iraq's biological weapons program.

[...]

Rumsfeld, once again defense secretary, has seemed a little skittish of late when questioned about his meeting with Saddam. "Where did you get this video?" Rumsfeld asked when footage of the Baghdad handshake was shown during a September 2002 interview on CNN. "From Iraqi television?" Rumsfeld asked. Yes, exactly, the CNN reporter said.

"When did they give it to you, recently or back then?" Rumsfeld asked, worried about any uptick in Iraqi propaganda. He was told it came from the CNN library. "I see. Isn't that interesting. There I am."

We have learned somewhat less, at least accurately, about the meeting from Rumsfeld. In a September 2002 interview on CNN, Rumsfeld insisted that he had "cautioned" Saddam against using chemical weapons. A Defense Department official subsequently told the Washington Post that Rumsfeld had raised the issue not with Saddam but with his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz.

A State Department document indicates that even in the Aziz meeting, Rumsfeld mentioned chemical weapons only as one of several impediments to a fuller U.S.-Iraq relationship. Interesting how the weapons came to assume a larger role in Rumsfeld's mind -- and that of his president -- in more recent times. Funny, diplomacy can be like that.