will go [to] the Iranians in one way or another." Regardless of whether the U.S. provided any express green-light to Saddam, Iranians continue to view the failure of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to condemn Iraq's invasion—or to recognize Iraq as the aggressor until after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait nearly a decade later—as a form of tacit complicity in Iraq's aggression against Iran—not just on the part of the U.S., but the entire world. Support By mid-1982, the war's momentum had shifted decisively in favor of Iran, which invaded Iraq to depose Saddam's government. Riedel recounted: "You just had a series of catastrophic Iraqi defeats. They had been driven out of Iran, and the Iraqi army looked like it was falling apart." "The Reagan administration feared that Iran's army might slice through Iraq to the oilfields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia," as described by Judith Yaphe; Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Nicholas A. Veliotes "outlined a nightmare scenario in which the Iranians invade Iraq, they defeat Iraq, and then head straight for Israel, which is distracted and debilitated by its ongoing adventure in Lebanon." As a result, the U.S. gradually abandoned its policy of neutrality. Hiltermann says that the U.S. "began the tilt after Iraq, the aggressor in the war, was expelled from Iranian territory by a resurgent Iran, which then decided to pursue its own, fruitless version of regime change in Baghdad." In February 1982, Iraq was removed from the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism to ease the transfer of dual-use technology to that country. According to investigative journalist Alan Friedman, Haig was "upset at the fact that the decision had been made at the White House, even though the State Department was responsible for the list." "I was not consulted," Haig is said to have complained. In March, President Reagan signed National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 4-82—seeking "a review of U.S. policy toward the Middle East"—and in June Reagan signed a National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) co-written by Teicher, who was now at the NSC, which determined: "The United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran." Pursuant to this Directive, Thomas Twetten arrived in Baghdad on July 27 to share CIA satellite imagery on Iranian troop movements with the Iraqi Mukhabarat. This was "the first U.S. provision of intelligence to Iraq," and