Was Saddam the head of a representative government after all?

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Kidicious

It sounds familiar. What movie?

"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

The Princess Bride, of course!

-Arrian

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Arrian


"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

The Princess Bride, of course!

-Arrian

Oh. I didn't see. I'll rent it.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
It isn't like there was some sweetness and light, stable, secular, pro-democracy alternative.

By that reasoning Saddam should still be in power.

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Kidicious

Oh. I didn't see. I'll rent it.

You do that, and I will feel the warm fuzzy glow of the knowledge that I've helped enrich your life.



It's one of those movies I feel one simply must see.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Kidicious


By that reasoning Saddam should still be in power.

Pretty much, yeah. Which may yet end up being the result (a new version, of course, not zombie Saddam ).

I just hope the Kurds don't get ****ed over again.

-Arrian

[Patroklos]

The evidence would certainly seem to suggest as much. I didn't really think our CIA presence in Iraq during the 60s and 70s was really a big secret.

We had a "presence" everywhere. What I am saying is that we didn't help Saddam in any quantifiable way until the 80's, where I don't look at it so much as helping Saddam as hurting Iran. In any case as far as helping Saddam in any capacity we have always been one of the minor players. It wasn't M-1s the Iraqs were rolling
around in.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Arrian
I just hope the Kurds don't get ****ed over again.

-Arrian

Why? What's so special about Kurds?

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Patroklos
We had a "presence" everywhere. What I am saying is that we didn't help Saddam in any quantifiable way until the 80's, where I don't look at it so much as helping Saddam as hurting Iran. In any case as far as helping Saddam in any capacity we have always been one of the minor players. It wasn't M-1s the Iraqs were rolling
around in.

Well, I don't think there was ever a case of us helping someone for their own sake. Our interference was always very pragmatic.

Anyways, I probably overstepped by saying we put Saddam in power. But I am pretty sure we helped his party come to power, right?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Lorizael
But I am pretty sure we helped his party come to power, right?

They certainly played the major part.

Another very good example of a CIA-organized regime change was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.

In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go!

In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.

And he was ALWAYS our man. At least until he invaded Kuwait.

Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Kidicious


Why? What's so special about Kurds?

They've been repeatedly beaten on for one thing. For another, the Kurdish region is vaguely functional. It would be a shame if the progress they've made was destroyed.

-Arrian

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Patroklos
We had a "presence" everywhere. What I am saying is that we didn't help Saddam in any quantifiable way until the 80's, where I don't look at it so much as helping Saddam as hurting Iran. In any case as far as helping Saddam in any capacity we have always been one of the minor players. It wasn't M-1s the Iraqs were rolling
around in.

False.

[Patroklos]

I see alot of assumptions and zero fact is there Kid. What does "CIA backed" mean exactly?

[Patroklos]

False.

Prove it with something other than an internet piece with zero source documentation concerning Saddam. The authors and you simple assume any aid to the Bath party was specifically aimed at soley for Saddam himself.

Do you not see how patently ridiculous that claim is?

Obviously we had him pegged for "our man" when he was 26.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Patroklos


Prove it with something other than an internet piece with zero source documentation concerning Saddam. The authors and you simple assume any aid to the Bath party was specifically aimed at soley for Saddam himself.

Do you not see how patently ridiculous that claim is?

Obviously we had him pegged for "our man" when he was 26.

What is your version of the events?

[Arrian]

Interesting article:

A Tyrant Forty Years in the Making
By Roger Morris*
New York Times
March 14, 2003

On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of United States policy on Iraq agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's.

Both sides are mistaken. Washington's policy traces an even longer, more shrouded and fateful history. Forty years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi leader seen as a grave threat in 1963 was Abdel Karim Kassem, a general who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. Washington's role in the coup went unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the C.I.A.

From 1958 to 1960, despite Kassem's harsh repression, the Eisenhower administration abided him as a counter to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt — much as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980's against the common foe of Iran. By 1961, the Kassem regime had grown more assertive. Seeking new arms rivaling Israel's arsenal, threatening Western oil interests, resuming his country's old quarrel with Kuwait, talking openly of challenging the dominance of America in the Middle East — all steps Saddam Hussein was to repeat in some form — Kassem was regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.

In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies — chiefly France and Germany — resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s "Health Alteration Committee," as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim.

Then, on Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but eventually Kassem gave up, and after a swift trial was shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television. Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. "Almost certainly a gain for our side," Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to Kennedy the day of the takeover.

As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political faction influential in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. 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.

According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.

The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad — for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.

But it wasn't long before there was infighting among Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, after yet another coup, the Baathist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized control, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers — including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time — speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.

This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help explain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.

The Kassem episode raises questions about the war at hand. In the last half century, regime change in Iraq has been accompanied by bloody reprisals. How fierce, then, may be the resistance of hundreds of officers, scientists and others identified with Saddam Hussein's long rule? Why should they believe America and its latest Iraqi clients will act more wisely, or less vengefully, now than in the past?

If a new war in Iraq seems fraught with danger and uncertainty, just wait for the peace.

I'm sure we've been over this before, though I can't remember the debate.

I knew for sure we were friendly with him during the Iran-Iraq war. I was fuzzy on our involvement, if any, with his rise to power.

It would seem that there was involvement, Patroklos. I see little reason to doubt it. I do agree, however, that it's unlikely that we in any way singled out Saddam. We aided the Baathists against a guy who was clearly leaning communist during the Cold War.

-Arrian