A Short History Of How Saddam Came To Power

[Jcrowley]

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

From Richard Sanders, 24 October 2002

<snip>

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.

<snip>

In 1963, Saddam Hussein worked with the CIA to carry out the coup by the Baath party, which eventually brought him to power in Iraq. The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite by Said K. Aburish, which was reviewed recently in Counterpunch (The CIA: Lest We Forget, CounterPunch. Sept.16-30 1997, p.2), describes how the CIA, Saddam and other members of the Baath party collaborated to bring about the coup, murdering perhaps 5,000 people in the process. The United States went on to help Saddam win the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. According to Noam Chomsky, There were no passionate calls for a military strike after Saddam's gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March, 1988; on the contrary, the US and U.K. extended their strong support for the mass murderer, then, also 'our kind of guy' (Iraq and the UN Sanctions, The Economist, Nov.19 1994, p.47)

<snip>

In early 1963, Saddam had more important things to worry about than his outstanding bill at the Andiana Cafe. On February 8, a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. We really had the toes crossed on what was happening, James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. We regarded it as a great victory. Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. We came to power on a CIA train, admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers.

<snip>

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/217.html

[formercia]

1. 'our kind of guy'

yep, to the very end.

The stories he could tell...

[Brundle_Fly]

5. notice the trial was delayed 20 mins....

and edited by the US military.

[formercia]

7. Didn't want anything 'classified' to slip out

can't have the old boy doing a deathbed confession as to who he was really working for.....

[liberal N proud]

2. America, the only nation on earth who creates, trains, arms their enemies

[leftchick]

3. but he was a bad bad man!

OUR bad bad man. :puke:

[UTUSN]

4. Shrub-CHEENEE-Rums need a Nuremberg trial at Gitmo n/t

[Octafish]

6. In the 80s, Bush and Reagan ARMED Saddam.

Bidness.

Saddam Hussein: Made in the USA

by Mike Burke
[e-mail], February 14, 2003

"The Bush administration sent U.S. technology to the Iraqi military and to many Iraqi military factories, despite over-whelming evidence showing that Iraq intended to use the technology in its clandestine nuclear, chemical, biological, and long-range missile programs."

No this quotation is not pulled from a conspiracy-minded website, but from the Congressional Record from July 27, 1992. They are the words of the late Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas.

For months in the early 1990s Gonzalez released hundreds of documents that outlined how the highest levels of the U.S. government - including Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - had secretly and illegally helped arm Saddam Hussein. The scandal was known as Iraqgate.

SNIP...

Among the information deleted was a list of U.S. corporations, government agencies and laboratories that aided Iraq. The companies included Honeywell, Kodak, Bechtel, Dupont and Hewlett-Packard. Among the government agencies were the Departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce and Agriculture. And then there were government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia, which all offered training to Iraqi scientists. This information emerged only after a German news reporter obtained unedited portions of the Iraq documents.

U.S.-Iraqi relations extend back to June 1982 when President Reagan issued a National Security Decision Directive in the midst of the Iraq-Iran war. According to an affidavit by former National Security Council official Howard Teicher, from 1982 on the White House "supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the 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." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld twice, in 1983 and 1984, visited Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. Teicher, who traveled to Baghdad with Rumsfeld, described the mission: "Here was the U.S. government coming hat-in-hands to Saddam Hussein and saying, 'We respect you, we respect you. How can we help you? Let us help you.' "

Rumsfeld's trips came at a time when the U.S. knew Iraq had already begun gassing Iranians. In 1985, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control sent samples of an Israeli strain of West Nile virus to a microbiologist at Basra University in Iraq. The U.S. would also send over "various toxins and bacteria," including botulins and E. coli.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/Saddam_MadeInUSA.html

After the trials, may we all watch their incarceration on 24/7 webcams.