Lest we forget: a quic review of America's support of the Butcher of Baghdad

CounterPunch: America's Best Political Newsletter: "In 1959, Saddam, at age 22, came into contact with the CIA, which was backing an effort to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim. (Assassinations are of course illegal, and the CIA's involvement here despicable.) Qasim had led a coup that overthrew the British-imposed monarchy in 1958, and had withdrawn from the anti-Soviet 'Central Treaty Organization' (CENTO) alliance that had linked Iraq with Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, the U.S and Britain from 1954. He had developed cordial ties with Moscow and tolerated the Arab world's most vigorous Communist Party. The CIA and Saddam agreed that Qasim should go. Saddam was set up in an apartment near Qasim's office, but never pulled off the hit. Qasim was toppled by members of the Baath Party in 1963, and a bloodbath of communists followed. Anti-communist Saddam headed the party's intelligence branch, maintaining ties with the CIA, which in fact supplied the new government with lists of Iraqi communists. At present, the U.S. government vilifies the Baath Party, but it once treated the Baathists as a bulwark against communism, and then later, as a counterweight to Islamic militancy.


In 1979, Saddam seized power, becoming President of the Republic of Iraq. In September 1980, he attacked Iran, which had just experienced the revolution that toppled the Shah (placed in power by the CIA in 1954). The U.S. government, implacably hostile to the new regime in Iran, welcomed this attack. ('Here is a man who has attacked his neighbors!' snarls the current U.S. president, whose father served as Vice President under a predecessor who encouraged him to do so.) Iraq had been on the State Department's 'terror' list, and diplomatic relations between Baghdad and Washington had been cut during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. But in early 1982, Iraq was quietly removed from the bad guys' list, and in December 20, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, representing the State Department, visited Baghdad to discuss ways to cooperate against Iran. Then-President Ronald Reagan had just issued a secret National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) stating that the United States would regard 'any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West.'


By 1985, the U.S. provided 1.5 billion in military equipment to Saddam Hussein. For example, CIA director William Casey supplied cluster bombs obtained through an arms company called Cardoen, from Chile, then under the fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which the CIA had helped place in power. Such support continued through the end of the war with Iran in 1988. It was not affected by Saddam's use of chemical weapons; this was never an issue. As late as September 1988, a Maryland company sent 11 strains of germs, four of anthrax, in a Commerce Department-authorized sale to Iraq. This was six months after the Halabja incident that generated outrage around the world.


From Eisenhower to Bush I, the leaders of the imperialist power now disposed to indignantly inveigh against the Great Dictator were once very happily in bed with him. How many Americans know this? However short people's historical attention spans, this record is not immaterial, ancient history. It's material evidence for the prosecutors' utter unsuitability to try the jilted bedmate's case."