Now that Saddam is dead I am noticing that the blogging left is nearly obsessed with rehashing America’s once cozy relationship with Saddam. I don’t know if you have noticed but I have never focused too much on that history. Yes, we had a role in bringing Saddam to power. And we had absolutely no problem when he decided to attack the Iranians. They had, after all, held our citizens hostage for 444 days, all the while burning American flags and calling us satanic. When you consider that the Shah was our biggest customer for military hardware and a good pal of our energy corporations, then you begin to get the full picture on why we were not superkeen to see Ayatollah Khomeini continue on in power. And, while we brought it on ourselves by helping to oust Mossadegh in 1953, the Iranians have been nothing but trouble ever since the Revolution.
Moreover, as we can see now, Iraq isn’t an easy country to govern, and if the Shi’ites had come to power back in the 1980’s we would have a lot of the same difficulties that we are facing now. Of course, it wouldn’t have been all our fault back then as it is now, but that is hairsplitting.
So, we gave Saddam some assistance. We didn’t give him all that much military equipment (he got most of that from Russia and Europe) but we did give him satellite intelligence and we did give him some of the stuff that he turned into biological and chemical weapons, and that he put to use in his nuclear program. We kind of looked the the other way when he violated the rules of war and gassed the Iranians. We pretended not to notice when the Kurds were gassed.
And we shouldn’t forget that we found it either expedient or financially irresistable to arm the Iranians during the war, too. If we look at it honestly, it appears we got exactly what we wanted. We didn’t want Saddam to win, but we didn’t want him to lose either. So, yeah, we were kind of pals with Saddam. But not really.
When the war was over, Saddam was licking his wounds and we didn’t think he was eager to take on another war. So we encouraged the Kuwaitis to act like real sons of bitches and demand all their loans were repaid at the same time they overpumped gas and kept the price too low for Saddam to recover his economy. It looks like Kuwait may have even taken it so far as to pump oil diagonally from under Iraqi soil.
Saddam complained to everyone but no one gave a shit. Then he called in a representative of the State Department named April Glaspie. Saddam told her that Kuwait was crippling his country and acting like arrogant ungrateful pricks. Here’s how it went.
“We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threats against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship – not confrontation – regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?”
Later the transcript has Glaspie saying: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”
Saddam, strangely, did not take that as a warning that we would strongly object to him dealing harshly with Kuwait. After all, the Kuwait issue was not associated with America. At this point Saddam decided to turn Kuwait into another province of Iraq and settle the issue that way. It was easier than paying back the debt he owed, and Kuwait had pissed him off, and America said ‘go ahead, dude, do your Saddam thing.”
Everything might have been great from that point on. Saddam might have even given us the right to keep our juicy contracts with Kuwait. But, apparently, the Bush Crime Family had other ideas for Sad-dam. It took fifteen years but yesterday we finally got his ass.
I guess the bottom line here is that if we were ever good friends with Saddam we didn’t turn out to be very good friends with him. I mean, nothing ever really worked out well for him. Not on our account. In fact, we turned him into an enemy. He was such an enemy that we feared that he might go off and do something a little bit funny, like build a nuclear weapon and use it against Israel or something. I don’t know why we didn’t think Pakistan might do the same thing when we were looking the other way in the 1980’s while they developed the technology. But I am not the person responsible for our very wise foreign policy.
Not like this guy:
Anyway, I don’t think it is all that interesting that we once thought Saddam was an okay guy. We were never his friend, and if he thought we were his friends, he knows better now.
</snark>
party on, dude!
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Sure Age Fits?
«« click on pic to enlargeperhaps some photoshopping …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
The public prosecutor has called for a 15-year sentence against Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat, who’s now standing trial for being an accessory to genocide. The prosecution claims he supplied Iraq with raw materials which he knew were being used in the production of chemical weapons, and deliberately turned a blind eye to that fact.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yeah.. That is what I was talking about down there VVVV
I know it has got to be in there somewhere.
We certainly were not good friends to him.
But Saddam is getting his post-humous revenge.
Not just a sloppy show trial that would have embarrassed even the Soviets, not just a hanging on one of the most sacred of Muslim holy days, the better to emphasize the irredeemable, infidel, barbarian nature of the invaders.
More than that: In going after Saddam and invading Iraq, the American Empire is destroyed. Not that it is all over yet, not nearly over. But the corner has been turned, and all that is left now is the crying and the dying.
There will be plenty of that.
Fisk: He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him – The Independent, UK
Bush had his say, Blair is silent – The Telegraph, UK
several MPs commenting…Here’s the money quote
“Saddam Hussein’s death does not vindicate in any way the ill-conceived and disastrous decision to invade Iraq. His execution does not make an illegal war legal, any more than it will put an end to the violence and destruction.” -Sir Menzies Campbell, the UK Liberal Democrat leader,
the latter group, we can fuck when we want to. E.G supporting Taliban v. the Russians, etc.
I’m trying to think of the enduring US friends. Britain, Israel, Canada (though it’s not difficult to be friends with an historically non-agressive country like Canada). Poland?
Who else? Let’s set the parameters for at least a century.
Turkey? We do, as national policy, honor their wish to to uphold the Iron Carpet over Armenia and “Kurdistan” But they were neither behind us or against us in Iraq II.
Ah well, if “The World is a Wedding” (apologies to Delmore Schwartz), the reception is small and private.
Israel is not our friend. America is Israel’s bitch.
Israel has done a very good job of convincing policymakers and pundits that our interests invariably coincide with Israel’s when they are, in fact, almost diametrically opposed. Given that we are now fighting one of Israel’s wars and constantly threatening to fight Israel’s other two wished-for wars in Syria and Iran, I sometimes have to wonder how many Mossad dollars have flowed into neocon thinktanks over the last quarter-century.
when speaking in international terms, our “friends” don’t object to our moves, nor we, theirs.
I am certainly of the mind that with both Britain and Israel, we are friends, who unfortunately, “let friends drive drunk”
I think we are way more Pakistan’s bitch than Israel’s.
And just for the sake of getting real discussion, and not an I/P bonfire, please articulate, just one instance where our interests and Israel’s are diametrically–which to my mind means 180 degrees– opposed.
Entertain, for instance, “desire for democracy” in the Middle East.
Both Israel and the US decided to void the elected Palestinian support for Hamas by withdrawing funding. (Israel has recently released funds–a good move,imo)
In Iraq, the US first decided to impose “democracy”, but when we didn’t like the results of the elections, we push to remove one PM for another, and keep attempting to tweak the system, so that there can be no governance in Iraq that has any sympathy to Iran.
So both the US and Israel are stumbling over their contradictions when it comes to the “democracy” gambit.
Still, as many women of the world realize, they have little stake in any fundamentalist theocracy, even garnered by an electoral system.
I want everyone to grapple with those nuances.I want people to have to think, learn, and argue their way through the details, rather cast their lot with a “side.”
Finally, I’d like to offer what I think are the questions we should be asking, from a relatively simple perspective: in what ways are we preventing people from succeeding to the point where they have a hopeful stake in the struggle?
If you think that you can have over 50% unemployment rates in both Palestine and Iraq, and hope to engage people in considering what their future might be, you might as well give it up.
What can we do to create the situations where people think their life matters on earth. That they are vital beings and not victims.
And just for the sake of getting real discussion, and not an I/P bonfire, please articulate, just one instance where our interests and Israel’s are diametrically–which to my mind means 180 degrees– opposed.
Israel’s existence in the first place?
Entertain, for instance, “desire for democracy” in the Middle East.
There is no such thing. What Israel and the United States want are friendly governments in the middle east. One certain way not to achieve that is to install democracies among populations that loathe Israel and, partly by association at least until recently, the United States.
It isn’t a matter that we did or didn’t like Saddam. It is a matter that this rub out will resolve nothing, and will bring only temporary joy to the Shi’a majority, and gritty, if not implacable resolve to see us gone amomg the Sunni minority.
Iraq has been a horrible mistake. And hanging ten thousand Saddam’s will not turn this “pile of manure” into a success, no matter how long and hard the Bush apologists clap.
I hope you know I think the world of you. Most of the time I agree with you wholeheartedly. But this time, I think you miss the point.
We’re very responsible for many of the dictators that came to power from the fifties through the seventies, due to covert CIA operations. Saddam was one of those. We did help install him. It isn’t about whether we were ever his “friend” or not. It’s about us putting him in a place where he could do evil, and supporting him in that. Now we punish him for doing what we encouraged him to do. That’s all, I think, people are saying. It’s pretty hypocritical.
This isn’t about any warm fuzzies – we’re talking strict political alliances. We put him in place to serve our purposes. We aided and trained him, and Bush senior even armed him (see the EXCELLENT book “Spider’s Web” on that point).
Robert Parry did an excellent series at the time re April Gallespie given Saddam the green light to invade. I know a guy who claimed he was hired to put an assassination team together concurrent with Desert Storm to take out Saddam. But when this guy found out the whole thing was a setup, he refused. He felt sorry for Saddam, notwithstanding his other actions. I certainly don’t feel sorry for Saddam. But I feel his crimes are co-crimes, and that our role is not fully acknowledged yet in the press, the blogosphere, or anywhere else. So that’s why I, and presumably others, think it’s worth mention our role in helping make Saddam what he became: a dictator. He wasn’t our first, and sadly, probably won’t be our last. Pinochet, Suharto, Saddam, the Shah – we have a pretty horrible record.
And btw – when’s the last time we helped install a GOOD leader anywhere?
We share some of the guilt. We need to acknowledge that. Too bad we’re not in a position to prosecute that. Or maybe we are, if we speak up loudly enough.
So it’s not about whether we liked him or not – we USED him, and then dumped him most unceremoniously. We should acknowledge that, not try to make light of that.
sigh.
Lisa, this post in tongue-in-cheek.
While it’s true that I really don’t think we have to be friends with life with people that we helped for reasons of convenience, my critique is that the problem is a WHOLE LOT BIGGER than whether we were pals with Saddam. We were. Sort of. Not really. But, whatever. It’s fifty years of stomping our hiking boots all over the globe and fucking most of it up.
is tongue-in-cheek, and for life.
Sorry! I think alcohol interferes with my ability to process satire!
I completely agree that the problem is that Americans still buy into the Disney version of who we are, instead of the reality. People tell me “politics is boring” or “I can’t handle that” or “I don’t want to think about that.”
What do you do with the people in your life who don’t see that their inaction condones these horrors?
Actually, let me give this a more fleshed out response.
Saddam is not alone. Noreiga is another example. Both men appear to have been CIA contract agents at different points in their career. Both men had their countries invaded, were detained, put on trial, and placed in jail.
Now, I am not going to defend the decision that we took that might have aided their rise to power, but I also do not think that a later President is obligated to respect those arrangements.
Just because we were once friendly with them doesn’t mean we have to remain friendly with them until the end of time.
Take the Shah for example. If you go back and read Kermit Roosevelt’s take on the coup, they thought they were installing a scared little crown prince and were worried he wasn’t tough enough. Well, with our help building up SAVAK he turned into a real son of a bitch that was actually quite embarrassing as an ally. Were we allowed at some point to reconsider his character and decide maybe we shouldn’t be his best pals?
You bet we were and we should have figured that out before it got to the point where the mullahs took things into their own hands.
This is not a defense of our history of going around installing dictators, rigging elections, and plotting and aiding assassinations. But I have always thought that by 2003 it was irrelevant that we had buddied up to Saddam in the 1980’s. Iraq was a country that we were containing and it was a problem. The issue was what to do about it.
We made the wrong decisions, but not because we once liked Saddam.
I’m guessing the (awful) reason we stay friends with those who become monsters is that if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to prop up the next guy. If we bite the hand that feeds, how many hands will feed us in the future?
But I agree, Booman. I think we need to reevaluate such relationships frequently and often.
I fear, however, that we set these people up knowing full well how horrible they will be, and thinking it’s the best choice for a variety of reasons, many of which we are not privvy to, but should be. I suspect we’d STILL think it’s a bad idea, even if we knew all the secrets.
April GLASPIE. Yikes! I shouldn’t type when I’ve got two beers in me..! 😉
I keep trying to remember the Maryland area (in Baltimore maybe?) company that provided ingredients for the chemical weapons that Saddam used (while trying to gas Iraninans) on the Kurds?
I know that George W. Bush owned part of the company, and Hillary Clinton owned shares and was on the board of that company as well.
Dagnabit… I hate being semi-senile! lol
Are we going to believe Saddam is dead because the MSM are reporting that? Not that it makes any difference as long as BushBoy can use it in his state of the Union Address. Is Osama dead yet?