Saddam Hussein:
not Bush-Cheney business partner any more

Carter, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and
America's "Frankenstein" foreign policy

Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein in happier times
Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad, December 20, 1983, to sell Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction - America's "Frankenstein foreign policy" at work - create enemies and then destroy them - keeping the military-industrial complex well "oiled" (so to speak)

"As with all sovereign nations, we respect Iraq's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity."
-- Donald Rumsfeld, 1983

"This is a regime that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people."
-- Donald Rumsfeld, March 21, 2003

"We don’t have an opinion on inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait, and we have directed our official spokesman to reiterate this stand, and I have a directive from the President, personally, that I should work to expand and deepen relations with Iraq."
April Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq, transcript of meeting with Iraqi leadership a week before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990

 

The murder of Saddam Hussein

December 30, 2006
Bush crime family murders their former business partner during Muslim feast of sacrifice

Italian cartoon: December 30, 2006

Saddam Hussein was a world class tyrant who killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, Iran and Kuwait. He was backed by the American empire during most of his reign, most notoriously when he was encouraged to attack Iran in September 1980 and then supported during the eight year long Iran-Iraq war. Saddam's worst crimes were committed during that conflict, such as his use of poison gas. The chemicals for that crime were supplied by Western corporations with the tacit approval of the US and its allies.

His 1990 invasion of Kuwait was winked at in advance by US Ambassador April Glaspie, who told him that the US did not have an opinion on Arab-Arab border disputes. A State department spokeperson also told a press conference a few days before the invasion that the US did not have a defense committment to Kuwait, even though Iraqi troops were massed on the border. When Iraq attacked Kuwait, the US Central Command was conducting "Internal Look," a war game exercise that simulated the actual events that unfolded - and may have enabled US forces to get into place (blockading Iraqi ports) before the United Nations Security Council could meet to discuss the situation. The film Hidden Wars of Desert Storm is an excellent resource about this conflict, which resulted in perhaps a quarter million deaths.

While few will grieve the dead dictator, it is worth noting that the US invasion has probably killed more people than Saddam did, and the US empire has killed more people since World War II than the six million Jews killed during the Nazi Holocaust. (Retired CIA agent John Stockwell made that comparison more than a decade ago, and it's even more true today.)

Saddam's murder was carried out by the US puppet regime at the height of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is a sacred duty for all Muslims to do at least once in their life, if they are able to do so. The culmination of the Hajj is marked by the festival of Eid al-Adha, which commemorates the sacrifice by Abraham. The Bush team has a warped sense of humor to kill their former business partner to celebrate this holiday, which seems calculated to be as offensive as possible to Muslims, even the vast majority who couldn't stand Saddam and are glad that he's no longer in power. And as horrible as Saddam was, most Iraqis report that life was more pleasant under the tyrant than under foreign military occupation, at least if you were not publicly dissenting from Saddam's rule. One of the best testimonies about the tragedy that has befalled Iraq is the Riverbend Blog, aka Baghdad Burning, at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com

Saddam may be gone, but the legacy of the US attacks on Iraq will remain for generations to come, especially fallout from depleted uranium weapons, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure, the creation of millions of refugees (Iraq now has the greatest refugee exodus of any country), and the shattering of what was once a prosperous society with one of the best educated population. Iraq has gone from being a relatively gender-equal society (by Middle Eastern standards) to a fearful conflict zone where women are rarely able to be educated or appear in public without the veil. This outcome makes it hard not to suspect that the US plan all along as been to break up Iraq into three fragments to make the oil easier to control.


from a BBC story on Eid al-Adha:
www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/faith/2004/01/eid_al_adha.shtml
February 2004
Eid al-Adha
by Adam Yosef Ali

Eid al-Adha is the Celebration of Sacrifice or Slaughter which is to celebrate the Sacrifice made by the Prophet Abraham when God asked him to sacrifice his own son.
It was with a heavy heart that Abraham agreed to do so but was ready to show his commitment and loyalty to his Lord.
Abraham's son, Ishmael, also recognised the importance of God's commandment and was happy to participate. Abraham drew his knife to slaughter his son but just as the knife drew near, God intervened and Abraham's child was replaced by a sheep.
Abraham was happy and relieved when he saw that his son was safe. God had asked him to sacrifice his son to test his faith and when Abraham proved that he was willing to do it, God did not need him to commit the slaughter of his own son, whom Abraham dearly loved.
The celebration of Eid al-Adha commemorates this event as Muslims all over the world sacrifice an animal during this Eid. This sacrifice is known as Qurbani.

 

and from the New York Times coverage of the execution:
December 30, 2006
Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence Is Hanged for Crimes Against Humanity
By MARC SANTORA, JAMES GLANZ and SABRINA TAVERNISE

"According to the law, no execution can be carried out during the holidays" said another official, "After all the hard work we have done, why would we break the law and ruin what we have built?"
The Muslim holiday of Id al-Adha begins Saturday for Sunnis and Sunday for Shiites, who now control the government.
Iraqi law seemed to indicate that executions were forbidden on the holiday.
But Judge Haddad was dismissive of those concerns, injecting some of the sectarian split that is pervading the country. "The official Id in Iraq is Sunday," he said.


Perhaps God, or the Goddess, or Allah, or the Universe, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (depending on your flavor of spirituality) has a sense of humor:

Bush Sheltered During Tornado Alert
Dec 29 9:59 PM US/Eastern
By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press Writer
CRAWFORD, Texas

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush were moved to an armored vehicle on their ranch Friday when a tornado warning was issued in central Texas, the White House said.
The vehicle was driven to a tornado shelter on the ranch at 1:30 p.m. CST, and the president, Mrs. Bush and their two Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley, sat inside until the weather cleared, deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel said. They were never moved into the shelter, he said. The shelter is a few hundred yards away from the president's house on the ranch.
"He was in the vehicle for about 10 minutes and then he went back to the house," Stanzel said, adding that other members of the staff at the ranch were sheltered as well.
About an hour later in Groesbeck, roughly 60 miles west of Crawford, a man was killed when a tornado struck an assisted living facility for veterans, emergency management officials said.
The rush to the tornado shelter interrupted Bush's day at the ranch where he cleared some cedar and was kept abreast of plans to execute Saddam Hussein in Iraq.


http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com

Sunday, December 31, 2006

A Lynching...
It's official. Maliki and his people are psychopaths. This really is a new low. It's outrageous- an execution during Eid. Muslims all over the world (with the exception of Iran) are outraged. Eid is a time of peace, of putting aside quarrels and anger- at least for the duration of Eid.
This does not bode well for the coming year. No one imagined the madmen would actually do it during a religious holiday. It is religiously unacceptable and before, it was constitutionally illegal. We thought we'd at least get a few days of peace and some time to enjoy the Eid holiday, which coincides with the New Year this year. We've spent the first two days of a holy holiday watching bits and pieces of a sordid lynching.
America the savior… After nearly four years and Bush's biggest achievement in Iraq has been a lynching. Bravo Americans.
Maliki has made the mistake of his life. His signature and unhidden glee at the whole execution, especially on the first day of Eid Al Adha (the Eid where millions of Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca), will only do more to damage his already tattered reputation. He's like a vulture in a suit (or a balding weasel). It's almost embarrassing. I kept expecting Muwafaq Al Rubaii to run over and wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth as he signed for the execution. Are these the people who represent the New Iraq? We're in so much more trouble than I ever thought.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

When All Else Fails...
… Execute the dictator. It’s that simple. When American troops are being killed by the dozen, when the country you are occupying is threatening to break up into smaller countries, when you have militias and death squads roaming the streets and you’ve put a group of Mullahs in power- execute the dictator.
Everyone expected this verdict from the very first day of the trial. There was a brief interlude when, with the first judge, it was thought that it might actually be a coherent trial where Iraqis could hear explanations and see what happened. That was soon over with the prosecution’s first false witness. Events that followed were so ridiculous; it’s difficult to believe them even now.

The timing of all of this is impeccable- two days before congressional elections.


www.thehindu.com/2006/12/31/stories/2006123103600800.htm
The Hindu
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 31, 2006

Outrageous

Saddam Hussein was a leader whose brutal actions and calamitous miscalculations brought unimaginable suffering to the people of Iraq and neighbouring countries. The brutal actions of his regime included the killing of political rivals and large numbers of civilians, above all Shias and Kurds, and the use of chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians. President Hussein's two big miscalculations were the eight-year war of unprovoked aggression against Iran, in which hundreds of thousands of people were annihilated, and the akratic invasion of Kuwait. Following the first Gulf War, a million Iraqis, including hundreds of thousands of children, are estimated to have died because they were deprived of adequate nourishment and medical care on account of the economic sanctions imposed on their country by the victors. Arguably, Mr. Hussein had an opportunity to bring to an end this suffering by being more forthcoming and proving to the satisfaction of the world that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD). His refusal or failure to divulge that he had destroyed all his stockpiles soon after the 1991 war played into the hands of his enemies, above all President George Bush who came to office with the agenda of invading Iraq and destroying the Saddam regime for strategic reasons.
However, it would be mendacious for anyone to claim that justice was served when Mr. Hussein was executed before dawn on December 30, 2006. The judicial process set up to prosecute Mr. Hussein for "crimes against humanity" was designed by a United States-led coalition that had itself committed the supreme war crime of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign nation. The fact that the coalition's illegal invasion and occupation had caused the death of over 600,000 Iraqis evidently made no impact on the collective conscience of its leaders. The present Baghdad regime, which is propped up by the occupation forces, did not just lean on the judiciary; it went so far as to replace judges until a sufficiently partisan presiding officer was found. This judge did the bidding of his political masters and scandalously ensured that the defence was always at a disadvantage. The appeal court that confirmed the sentence of death handed down by the trial judge acted as if the completion of other cases against the accused was of no consequence. That all these legal proceedings were nothing but a sordid farce became clear to the whole world when the Prime Minister of Iraq, who had announced ahead of the appeal court's verdict that the former President would be executed before New Year, even usurped the judiciary's prerogative of setting the date for execution. To go by the manner in which the client Iraqi regime has behaved in all spheres, it was a small mercy that Mr. Hussein was handed over to it by his American jailors just before he was forced to mount the gallows. Various components of this regime run militias that have tortured and butchered hundreds of innocents. Those who engineered this violent and unjust end to the life of a leader who was overthrown by war — in flagrant violation of international law — have much to answer for before the court of humanity.
The Indian Government must take a forthright stand against this outrage. It needs to go beyond its expressions of "disappointment," its indirect criticisms of "victor's justice," and its pious hopes of "reconciliation" and "restoration of peace and normalcy" in Iraq. It must condemn, without equivocation, Mr. Hussein's execution at the hands of the occupation army and its client state, even if the occupying powers maintain the fiction that the trial, sentence, and execution of the former Iraqi President were exclusively the business of the "Government of Iraq." The United States helped sustain Mr. Hussein in power through the 1980s in the full knowledge that his regime had used poison gas against the Kurds of Halabja and against the people of Iran. The Bush administration plumbed new depths of shamelessness when it handed over its captive, its prisoner of war, to a Shia-controlled Iraqi court rather than to an international war crimes tribunal, as many advocates of human rights and justice demanded. At a surface level, Iraqis may be divided, reflecting tragic sectarian divides, in their reactions to the end of Mr. Hussein. However, his hanging is expected to lead to major reprisals from the Sunni resistance to the occupation — and a spike in violence in Iraq. It will also fuel anger and hatred towards the United States among the people of various countries in the Arab world. While condemning this outrageous case of "victor's justice," the world must express its solidarity with the people of Iraq, whose sufferings seem to know no end.


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2124262.ece

Saddam: From monster to martyr?
How Bush and Blair's choices have led to disaster in Iraq, culminating in a chaotic execution that is fuelling civil war
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 04 January 2007

It takes real genius to create a martyr out of Saddam Hussein. Here is a man dyed deep with the blood of his own people who refused to fight for him during the United States-led invasion three-and-a-half years ago. His tomb in his home village of Awja is already becoming a place of pilgrimage for the five million Sunni Arabs of Iraq who are at the core of the uprising.
During his trial, Saddam himself was clearly trying to position himself to be a martyr in the cause of Iraqi independence and unity and Arab nationalism. His manifest failure to do anything effective for these causes during the quarter of a century he misruled Iraq should have made his task difficult. But an execution which vied in barbarity with a sectarian lynching in the backstreets of Belfast 30 years ago is elevating him to heroic status in the eyes of the Sunni - the community to which most Arabs belong - across the Middle East.
The old nostrum of Winston Churchill that "grass may grow on the battlefield but never under the gallows" is likely to prove as true in Iraq as it has done so frequently in the rest of the world. Nor is the US likely to be successful in claiming that the execution was purely an Iraqi affair.
Many Iraqis recall that the announcement of the verdict on Saddam sentencing him to death was conveniently switched last year to 5 November, the last daily news cycle before the US mid-term elections. The US largely orchestrated the trial from behind the scenes. Yesterday the Iraqi government arrested an official who supervised the execution for making the mobile-phone video that has stirred so much controversy.
The Iraqi Shia and Kurds are overwhelmingly delighted that Saddam is in his grave. But the timing of his death at the start of the Eid al-Adha feast makes his killing appear like a deliberate affront to the Sunni community.


www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1983658,00.html
Cairo Dismayed at "Primitive" Saddam Death
The Guardian UK
Friday 05 January 2007

Saddam Hussein was made into "a martyr" by the manner of his execution, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, warned today, saying he had urged Washington not to hang him during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
In an interview with an Israeli newspaper, Mr Mubarak said that when it became clear the former Iraqi dictator was about to be hanged he sent a message to president George Bush asking to get it postponed. "Don't do it at this time," Mr Mubarak told the US leader, he recounted in an interview with the Yediot Ahronot newspaper.
"Why is it necessary to hang (him) just at the time when people are saying the holiday prayers?"


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1099005.stm
Saturday, 30 December 2006, 05:37 GMT
Obituary: Saddam Hussein

 

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020100082.html

Guantanamo inmates shown Saddam hanging photos: lawyer
By Rob Taylor
Thursday, February 1, 2007; 1:14 AM

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Guantanamo Bay prison inmates were shown photographs of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein hanging from a rope following his execution, lawyers for Australia's only Guantanamo inmate said on Thursday.
In an attempt to intimidate inmates, the lead American lawyer for Australian detainee David Hicks said, pictures of Saddam's trial were also shown to detainees, along with articles about executions carried out by extremists.
"Displaying photos of condemned men to those who may be facing capital charges can only be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate and compel submission under a threat of death and mentally torture an already abused detainee population," Joshua Dratel said in a statement to media in Australia.
A spokesman for Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said he was unaware of whether the accusations were accurate, as they were not raised with an Australian official visiting the prison this week. ....
Dratel said photos of Saddam's 2006 trial were on an exercise yard poster, which also read: "Because Saddam chose not to co-operate and not tell the truth, because he thought by lying he would get released, for that reason he was executed."
Speaking after visiting Hicks at Guantanamo Bay ahead of charges to be laid against the Australian before a late-February deadline demanded by Canberra, Dratel said the photos and articles breached Geneva Conventions protecting prisoners of war.
One of the articles centered on the accidental decapitation of a prisoner while being hanged -- possibly Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim who was executed in Baghdad last month.
"This display is another vivid example of the coercive and dehumanizing environment that exists at (Guantanamo)," Dratel and Hicks's Australian lawyer Michael Griffin said. ...

 

The Capture of Saddam Hussein

Plenty of antiwar activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.
Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the US Army's capture of Saddam Hussein, and therefore in retrospect justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq, is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disemboweling the Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter-century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.
Published on Thursday, January 22, 2004 by The Nation
The New American Century
This article was adapted from Arundhati Roy's January 16 speech to the opening plenary of the World Social Forum in Mumbai.
www.commondreams.org/views04/0122-14.htm


Sunday, December 14, 2003
http://xymphora.blogspot.com
The capture of Saddam Hussein is excellent news for a number of reasons:

  1. The capture took long enough that it proved that the Americans really have no control over Iraq, but happened soon enough that Bush won't be able to use it as an 'October surprise' to win his next election campaign. By the time next summer rolls around, there will be enough dead Americans that everyone will have forgotten about the small victory of the capture of an old man.
  2. The fact that they found a dishreveled old man hiding in a tiny cellar puts the lie to American claims that the resistance was being directed by this mad Baathist villain. The resistance can now clearly be seen for what it is: the spontaneous desire of Iraqis from all sorts of factions to be free of the evils of oppression.
  3. With Saddam gone, the resistance can now redouble its efforts to rid Iraq of the occupying army without the baggage of being identified with the old hated Baathist regime.
  4. Saddams' testimony, if the Americans let him live long enough to present it, will destroy American claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or any relationship with al-Qaeda. He will also be able to shed light on the relationship between Iraq and the United States, including current members of the Bush Administration. All this news should come out just when Bush is trying to get reelected.

 


 

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=475931

Rumsfeld backed Saddam even after chemical attacks
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
24 December 2003
Fresh controversy about Donald Rumsfeld's personal dealings with Saddam Hussein was provoked yesterday by new documents that reveal he went to Iraq to show America's support for the regime despite its use of chemical weapons.
The formerly secret documents reveal the Defence Secretary travelled to Baghdad 20 years ago to assure Iraq that America's condemnation of its use of chemical weapons was made "strictly" in principle.
The criticism in no way changed Washington's wish to support Iraq in its war against Iran and "to improve bi-lateral relations ... at a pace of Iraq's choosing".
Earlier this year, Mr Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration regularly cited Saddam's willingness to use chemical weapons against his own people as evidence of the threat presented to the rest of the world.
Senior officials presented the attacks against the Kurds - particularly the notorious attack in Halabja in 1988 - as a justification for the invasion and the ousting of Saddam.
But the newly declassified documents reveal that 20 years ago America's position was different and that the administration of President Ronald Reagan was concerned about maintaining good relations with Iraq despite evidence of Saddam's "almost daily" use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Kurdish rebels.
In March 1984, under international pressure, America condemned Iraq's use of such chemical weapons. But realising that Baghdad had been upset, Secretary of State George Schultz asked Mr Rumsfeld to travel to Iraq as a special envoy to meet Saddam's Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, and smooth matters over.
In a briefing memo to Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Shultz wrote that he had met Iraqi officials in Washington to stress that America's interests remained "in (1) preventing an Iranian victory and (2) continuing to improve bilateral relations with Iraq".
The memo adds: "This message bears reinforcing during your discussions."
Exactly what Mr Rumsfeld, who at the time did not hold government office, told Mr Aziz on 26 March 1984, remains unclear and minutes from the meeting remain classified. No one from Mr Rumsfeld's office was available to comment yesterday.
It was not Mr Rumsfeld's first visit to Iraq. Four months earlier, in December 1983, he had visited Saddam and was photographed shaking hands with the dictator. When news of this visit was revealed last year, Mr Rumsfeld claimed he had "cautioned" Saddam to stop using chemical weapons.
When documents about the meeting disclosed he had said no such thing, a spokesman for Mr Rumsfeld said he had raised the issue with Mr Aziz.
America's relationship with Iraq at a time when Saddam was using chemical weapons is well-documented but rarely reported.
During the war with Iran, America provided combat assistance to Iraq that included intelligence on Iranian deployments and bomb-damage assessments. In 1987-88 American warships destroyed Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf and broke the blockade of Iraqi shipping lanes.
Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that obtained the documents, told The New York Times: "Saddam had chemical weapons in the 1980s and it didn't make any difference to US policy. The embrace of Saddam and what it emboldened him to do should caution us as Americans that we have to look closely at all our murky alliances."
Last night, Danny Muller, a spokesman for the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, said the documents revealed America's "blatant hypocrisy". He added: "This is not an isolated event. Continuing administrations have said 'we will do business'. I am surprised that Donald Rumsfeld does not resign right now."

 

McDermott in Hot Water for Saddam Quip

By MATTHEW DALY
Associated Press Writer
December 15, 2003, 9:07 PM EST
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who earned headlines across the globe last year for criticizing President Bush while in Baghdad, is enmeshed in a new controversy over remarks he made about the capture of Saddam Hussein.
In an interview Monday with a Seattle radio station, McDermott said the U.S. military could have found the former Iraqi dictator "a long time ago if they wanted."
Asked if he thought the weekend capture was timed to help Bush, McDermott chuckled and said, "Yeah. Oh, yeah."
McDermott went on to say, "There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing."
When interviewer Dave Ross asked again if he meant to imply the Bush administration timed the capture for political reasons, McDermott said: "I don't know that it was definitely planned on this weekend, but I know they've been in contact with people all along who knew basically where he was. It was just a matter of time till they'd find him.
"It's funny," McDermott added, "when they're having all this trouble, suddenly they have to roll out something."

"Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
-- Henry Kissinger, commenting on the US sellout of the Kurds in Iraq in 1975

"...hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a "murderous dictator" is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy? When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oilfield supply firm Halliburton, the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam, the evildoer "prepared to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists. So if Saddam is "the world's worst leader," how come Cheney sold him the equipment to get his dilapidated oil fields up and running so he could afford to build weapons of mass destruction?"
-- syndicated columnist Molly Ivins

www.counterpunch.org/lindorff04092003.html
April 9, 2003
CounterPunch Special Report
Secret Bechtel Documents Reveal:
Yes, It Is About Oil
By DAVID LINDORFF
.... One particularly revealing 1983 memo, declassified for the first time in February by the National Archives, concerns a trip by Rumsfeld to Iraq. Acting as a special White House "peace envoy" allegedly to discuss with Hussein and then foreign minister Tarik Aziz the bloody war between Iran and Iraq, Rumsfeld turns out according to this memo to have been talking not about that war, but about Bechtel's proposed Aqaba pipeline.
In his memo to Secretary of State George Schultz reporting on the meeting with Hussein, Rumsfeld talks at length about the pipeline discussion, but makes no mention of having discussed either the war or charges that Hussein's army was using chemical weapons against the Iranians.
The intense focus of Rumsfeld, Schultz (a former president of Bechtel), Cheney and other Reagan officials, in concert with Bechtel, on the pipeline, reads like an abbreviated, or mini "Pentagon Papers," laying the groundwork for a collapse in relations between the U.S. and Iraq, and eventually to
war. The documents also cast Bechtel's current position as one of two top candidates for the lucrative contract to "rebuild Iraq" in a troubling light.

www.iraqometer.com
"While we hoped that popular revolt would topple Saddam, we did not wish to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. Extending the war into Iraq would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
-- From Why We Didn't Remove Saddam by George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft, Time Magazine, 1998.

"To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero . . . assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an un-winnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."
George Bush Sr., in A WORLD TRANSFORMED, 1998


The people of the Middle East contend that this is a war for empire, for conquest and domination in a region that possesses two-thirds of the world’s oil supply. The way I look at things, the haste to go to war and not let the inspectors finish their task, the unwillingness to depend on a UN decision, the present disinterest in even searching for WMD’s, the reluctance now to accept the idea of a UN major role in the nation building process, all of this suggests other motivation and somehow confirms the Middle Eastern view.
- Letter to Laura Bush by Margarita Papandreou, April 9, 2003
(Ms. Papandreou is honorary president of the Center for Research and Action on Peace, located in Athens, Greece)

Background on US Frankenstein Foreign Policy in Iraq

www.commondreams.org/views02/0802-01.htm
the saddam in rumsfeld's closet

www.sfbg.com/reality/04.html  
Cheney's oil deals w/ Iraq

Good history of US - Iraq relations from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/022703a.html

US sent Iraq germs in 1980s
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20020923/1048504.asp

US shipments of pathogens to Iraq
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/politics/4186725.htm

Did the US help Iraq get biological weapons?
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html

Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein - the US "tilt" toward Iraq 1980 - 1984
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

IRAQGATE
The Big One That (Almost) Got Away Who Chased it -- and Who Didn't
Columbia Journalism Review - March/April 1993 http://www.cjr.org/year/93/2/iraqgate.asp
ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear," said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."

 

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2849.htm
Exclusive: Saddam Was key in early CIA plot
04/11/03
UPI: Richard Sale
See Also: IRAQ-GATE. How The United States Illegally Armed Saddam Hussein

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.
United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.
While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

 

article on the exodus of Jews from Iraq a half century ago
http://jewsagainstzionism.com/articles/iraqijews.htm

 

Bush Senior: Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons by Kurt Nimmo
www.counterpunch.org/nimmo0919.html