glee said:
You do know that Saddam was installed in power by the US, don't you?
Ziggurat said:
Careful there, your tinfoil hat is showing.
The Devil in the Details: The CIA and Saddam Hussein
The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time. Mr. Akins said, "I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them".
"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.
"Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn't bother us".
This happy co-existence lasted right through the 1980s.
One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute "regime change" in Iraq.
http://www.representativepress.org/CIASaddam.html
Source: Alfred Mendes,
Excerpt from Blood for Oil, Spectr@zine.
http://www.spectrezine.org/war/Mendes.htm
The Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organisation. As such, he was soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!
Source: Muslimedia:
August 16-31, 1997
http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/features98/saddam.htm
Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured--a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.
The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest--far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.
The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.
The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them--including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.
glee said:
You do know that Rumsfeld sold him weapons of mass destruction for use in the Iran-Iraq war?
You do know that millions died in that war?
Or don't you care about such things as civilian casualties?
Ziggurat said:
I care quite a bit. I also care enough to actually get my facts correct, which seems to be a bit too much to ask from you. The U.S. never sold Saddam any weapons of mass destruction.
... Leftists like you can rant and rave about the photo of Saddam and Rumsfeld shaking hands all you want (since that's about all they did),
According to an article in Covert Action Quarterly a number of years ago, the U.S. government provided the elements for Saddam’s chemical weapons through the U.S. Agricultural Department.
Not only that, it was at a time when the Reagan administration was faced with the prospect that the American economy was in trouble and so he viewed the wealthy economy of Iraq as an open market for U.S. corporations. It wasn’t so much a covert thing, there were companies in Maryland selling components that were used to make chemical weapons. It wasn’t just the United States. It was German, French, and British companies—all of the major western powers in Europe and the Western hemisphere were bolstering Saddam Hussein’s military capacity.
Western so-called democracies were major supporters of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program. You can also find receipts on the Internet from U.S. companies that sold these chemical components to Iraq.
The whole story of U.S. sales to Iraq was openly talked about under the Reagan administration and at the beginning of Bush, the Elder’s administration. It wasn’t something that Washington was ashamed of. Remember, Saddam Hussein was considered an SOB, but he was considered Washington’s SOB.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2002/021100-iraq01.htm
The history of America's relations with Saddam is one of the sorrier tales in American foreign policy. Time and again, America turned a blind eye to Saddam's predations, saw him as the lesser evil or flinched at the chance to unseat him. No single policymaker or administration deserves blame for creating, or at least tolerating, a monster; many of their decisions seemed reasonable at the time. Even so, there are moments in this clumsy dance with the Devil that make one cringe. It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s, America knowingly permitted the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission to import bacterial cultures that might be used to build biological weapons.
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html
glee said:
Yes, I'm relieved a violent dictator has been deposed.
Ziggurat said:
Well you fooled me.
...
When have people like you ever really thought the US was admirable? Always sometime in the past, but even when that past (whichever one you pick) was present, the far left of that time condemned it. The single unifying apostasy for leftists, despite their myriad beliefs and ideologies, is to find value in the present. But you can content yourself knowing that you'll never commit that sin.
Where in my postings have I ever supported Saddam?
Why do you think I'm a 'leftist'?
What does your phrase 'people like you' mean?
Where in my posts have I shown I don't admire the basic human rights the US has championed for centuries?
You jump to the conclusion that any criticism of Bush and the invasion of Iraq means I'm automatically a Commie who hates the US. This says a lot about you.
