American capillary vision and inventions of democracy - Part II

Once a proud, rapidly developing nation of educated, decent people, Iraq is now on its knees, begging for a chance to survive

Caught up in the consequence of this “short sighted” U.S. policy of political prostitution are the innocent men, women and children of Iraq and U.S. This senseless war based on deception, has not only stripped Iraqis off their dignity, pride, elementary human rights and freedom, it also has scarred the sense of pride, decency and sanity of the American Soldiers, dehumanising some of them to a the lowest level. It has distressed and angered the decent American population. Scars of both nations will take many years to heal.

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Once a proud, rapidly developing nation of educated, decent men, women and children, ascending from the cradle of the first civilisation, Iraq is now on her knees, begging for a chance to survive.

No sensible person will absolve Saddam from the heinous crimes he is being charged for. Other than his criminal past, which the U.S. and France have played a role in, Saddam has also played a vital role in turning Iraq into one of the best educated, moderate countries in the Middle East, which did not promote Islam fundamentalism. Iraq once had the best health system in the Middle East.

Instead of providing encouragement for Iraq to achieve further developments in these directions, for covert geopolitical and energy-economic justifications successive U.S. administrations channeled millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers money to arm Saddam Hussein and to provide him with U.S. intelligence, bacteriological chemical ingredients and know how, which he used to enforce his power base in the region. He soon started to use the same language of power and aggression that the White House mentors used to teach him, knowing that as far as he danced to their tune he could get away with anything. Danced to the White House tune, he did, very successfully at that.

The irony is the remnants of the same old mentors, such as Donald Rumsfeld, wants the world to believe that the Tyrant of Iraq appeared from nowhere. The truth is, he was created by the vested interest of the West, mainly White House. The Bush clan, the father, the son and his holy ghosts such as Rumsfeld, cannot waive off their responsibilities by inventing deception after deception, justification after justification, semantics and more semantics. The records of the past Presidents George Hubert Bush, Ronald Wilson Reagan and John Fitzgerald Kennedy cannot be ignored either.

The blatant facts of the past and present U.S. involvements in the crimes against the people of Iraq and in the making of the Tyrant need to be put on public record. For quite a long time in the past Saddam Hussein was not an enemy or stranger to U.S. and he saw successive U.S. Presidents come and go. To say that the White House had no knowledge of Saddam's aggressive ambitions in the region is a blatant lie. His oil reserves was more important to U.S. They still are. U.S. also blatantly lying when they say Saddam, 9/11 and Bin Laden were closely linked. One lie contradicts the other. What is not a lie, is that it was U.S., who provided the fangs and the venom to turn Saddam to the venomous snake that he became.

So let us look at the blatant facts:

Fact 1

In the book called “The Threatening Storm” published in 2002, Kenneth M. Pollack, Olin Senior Fellow and the Director of national Security Studies for the Council of Foreign relations, states:

"The first signal of what would become a U.S. 'tilt' in favor of Iraq came in February 1982, when the Reagan administration removed Iraq from its list of terrorism-supporting states (where it had been a charter member)...... Nevertheless, taking Iraq off the terrorism list - no matter how cynical the reasoning - removed a number of hurdles that would have hindered U.S. support for Iraq. Soon thereafter, Washington began passing high-value military intelligence to Iraq to help it fight the war, including information from U.S. satellites that helped Iraq fix key flaws in the fortifications protecting al-Basrah that proved important in Iran's defeat the next month."

"U.S. support for Iraq blossomed throughout the war. Starting in 1983, the United States provided economic aid to Iraq in the form of Commodities Credit Corporation guarantees to purchase U.S. agricultural products - $400 million in 1983, $513 million in1984, and climbing to $652 million in 1987. This allowed Iraq to use the money it otherwise would have spent on food to buy weapons and other military supplies."

"Saddam saw his suspicions confirmed with the 1986 revelation that the Reagan administration had secretly been selling weapons to Iran in what later came to be known as the Iran-contra scandal. The United States had sold Iran weapons via Israel, including thousands of sophisticated tube-launched optical-tracking wire-guided (TOW) antitank missiles and Homing-All-The-Way-Killer (HAWK) surface-to-air missiles, in a bid to get Iran to release American hostages held by Iran's Lebanese ally, Hezbollah."

Fact 2

Confirmation of U.S. military support to Iraq in this period, comes also from Howard Teicher, former staffmember of Ronal Reagan's National Security Council. In his affidavit of 31st January 1995 which was previously sealed but later released on NBC news. Howard Teicher's wrote:

"CIA Director [William] Casey personally spearheaded the effort to ensure that Iraq had sufficient military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to avoid losing the Iran-Iraq war."

"Pursuant to a secret National Security Decisions Directive, the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S. military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required. The United States also provided strategic operational advice to the Iraqis to better use their assets in combat."

Fact 3

When it came to saving Saddam's regime in the Iran-Iraq war the U.S. President Ronald Reagan had no reservations. In his National Security Decision Directive 139 issued on 5th April 1984 he was straight do the point:

"In light of recent developments in the Iran-Iraq War and the threat which an escalation of that conflict or a terrorist campaign could pose for the vital interests of the U.S. and its Allies, measures must be taken now to improve our immediate ability to deter an expansion of the conflict in the Persian Gulf and, if necessary, defend U.S. interests." "The Secretary of State, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, will prepare a plan of action designed to avert an Iraqi collapse."

Fact 4

The Bush senior, then Vice President of the U.S. played even more impressive role of a reliable mentor to his Iraqi protйgй. The 13th December 2002 issue of the Newsday magazine reported about this flourishing relationship as follows:

"The U.S.-Iraqi relationship flourished from February 1986, when then Vice President George Bush met with Iraq's ambassador to Washington, Nizar Hamdoon, and assured him that Baghdad would be permitted to receive more sophisticated U.S. technology."

"U.S. military and financial assistance to Iraq continued until Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August, 1990." "Over [the] four-year period [1986-1990], the Reagan and Bush administrations approved licenses for the export of more than $600 million worth of advanced U.S. technology to Iraq, according to congressional reports."

Fact 5

The relationship between the U.S. administration and Saddam's regime became so trustworthy that CIA almost had their experts working for Saddam at U.S. taxpayers' expense. Richard Sale, a journalist, in his article "Exclusive: Saddam Key in early CIA Plot," published by United Press International (UPI) on 4th April 2003 reveals details of another impressive understanding and intelligence sharing arrangement between the CIA and Saddam Hussein:

"The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACs surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency group."

"According to [Middle East expert and author] Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days."

Fact 6

Elaborating on the close relationshipbetween U.S. and Saddam Hussein, on PBS' Frontline broadcast on 11th September 1990, former United States Senator Alfonse D'Amato said:

"It was a totally uneven policy. There was not a tilt towards Iraq, there was a wholesale rush to Iraq. Ignore everything. Ignore the state-sponsored terrorism. Take any little piece of propaganda that Saddam Hussein would put out, and it would become a wonderful thing. And right down to the last minute - right down to his last crossing over - we had State Department people - in other words, from '81 right on through - coming out and mouthing his [Saddam Hussein] lines."

Fact 7

In an article published in the New York Times of 14th March 2003 titled “A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,”  Roger Morris, a journalist wrote:

"Forty years ago the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein.

As its instrument the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Ba'ath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political faction influential in the Iraqi army. According to the former Ba'athist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the CIA in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958."

Fact 8

The United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld in an interview with CBS Radio on 14th November 2002 revealed the importance U.S. administration gave to their relationship with Saddam's government and facilitating his win over Iran.

"Our friends in the Gulf region were concerned about the possibility that Iran could win, and were deeply concerned that it could upset, and create instability in the entire region. So I was asked to go over there and I met with Tariq Aziz and with Saddam Hussein, and talked to him about our interests."

"And the fact that - it was one of the few countries from the Middle East war that we had not re-established relationships with. So I was, I guess, the first senior American to go in there in some time. And we had a good discussion. He [Saddam] recognized his situation, and was interested in getting some assistance, so that he had better information."

"And it's my understanding that subsequent to my visit, the United States government did, in fact, provide some intelligence assistance to him, so that he - the war ended up kind of at a standstill, or a stalemate, rather than either country being defeated."

Fact 9

The extent of U.S. support for Saddam Hussein was considerable and stretched over number of years since the very first days of his power in Iraq. Peter Camejo, a financial investment advisor, in an interview broadcasted on Fox News on 17th February 2004, confirmed this fact as follows:

"The United States and the CIA supported Saddam Hussein, right from the day he came to power, when the Ba'athists first came to power, they even gave lists of the names of people for the Ba'athists to murder, which they did."

"The CIA worked very closely with them and United States supported Saddam Hussein at every level - gave him arms, gave him money, gave him political backing, the military helped him; none of this is really fully understood by the American people. And then the decision when he wouldn't follow orders from Washington, to go to war against Iraq, is an additional crime against the Iraqi people."

"Because first we put Saddam Hussein against them, a murderer and torturer, as George Bush says, without ever explaining of course, that politically we supported Saddam Hussein. His father in 1990 even sent a message to Iraq saying what a good job Saddam Hussein was doing. This is after he used poison gas on his people."

So the same old Iraqi protйgй of the White House, who used to get frequent pats on his back from the very President of the U.S. , and also got mentioned often as 'our kind of guy,' “suddenly” started to get labeled by the same old White House as “the most hated, most dangerous of all the enemies of the U.S.”

To be continued

Gamini Mithra
Sydney

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