S. territory. .
1980's.
For most of the Cold War, Iraq was a socialist dictatorship with close relations with the Soviet Union, and America used Saudi Arabia and Iran as its main partners in the Gulf. But, in 1979, this relationship fell when Iranian revolutionaries deposed the American-backed shah and took U.S. hostages. So president Washington had to look elsewhere for different allies in the region. Since then, America has tried several Iraq policies: engagement during the 1980s, armed confrontation during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis, containment through the 1990s, and now "regime change", which makes replacing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein the focus of the U.S. policy.
Concerning one of the policies, the United States decided to engage with Iraq during the 1980s because U.S. officials thought Saddam's secular dictatorship could prove a useful counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in Iran, which bothered the Middle East with its vows to export Islamist fundamentalism and deprived America of one of its key regional partners. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, starting a harsh, eight-year war that claimed a million lives. U.S. officials were very happy to see Iran battered. This war caused Iraq to start selling increasing quantities of oil to the United States, and at a discount.
Even after Iraq received American support, their behavior still did not improve very much. Its human rights record stayed very dreadful, continuing with the Anfal, a murderous campaign against its own Kurdish minority. In 1982, the State Department removed Iraq from its list of countries that sponsor terrorism so that the United States could legally provide arms, agricultural credits, and other support to Iraq in its war with Iran. But Iraq continued to back Palestinian terrorist groups that sought the destruction of Israel, even as it paid service to supporting the idea of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. The Reagan administration also accepted Iraq's insistence that a 1987 Iraqi air strike that killed 37 sailors of the U.