Saddam trial stopped short

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How convenient for Saddam Hussein to be convicted two days before the midterm election by a United States-elected and -directed court, providing President Bush with his much-needed November surprise. How irresponsible of the mass media to neglect to point out that the "crimes against humanity" for which Saddam was convicted occurred 15 months before Donald Rumsfeld, then the special envoy to Iraq, met with Saddam in Baghdad to develop an alliance between the administration of Ronald Reagan and that of the murderous Iraqi dictator.

The record of that trip, an enormous stain on our nation's human rights record, is detailed in State Department memoranda readily available on the Internet. Rumsfeld journeyed to Baghdad as President Reagan's special envoy after the bloody crackdown in the town of Dujail. Ironically, Saddam's terrorist campaign was a response to an assassination attempt on his life by Shiite militants belonging to the party now in power in Baghdad, thanks to President Bush's invasion.

Back then, Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration he represented viewed the Iraqi Shiites, who detested Saddam, with suspicion, considering them natural allies of their co-religionists in Iran. Rumsfeld's mission was explicitly intended to align the United States with Saddam's Iraq and offer military support in the ongoing war with the Iranian ayatollahs, regarded as our main enemy in the Mideast.

Rumseld met with Saddam in December 1983 and returned again on March 24, 1984 – the very same day the United Nations released a report that Iraq had committed war crimes by using mustard gas and tabun nerve agent against Iranian troops. "American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with Iraq and the U.S., and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been established in all but name," the New York Times reported five days later.

The official transcripts of Rumsfeld's report on his meetings with then-Iraq Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz and Saddam himself make clear that our defense secretary never even mentioned the brutal suppression of the Dujail Shiites, which has now earned the dictator a death sentence. The diplomatic message was clear: Saddam's brutality, and even his use of chemical weapons, was not an obstacle to warm relations between the United States and Iraq.

"I said I thought we had areas of common interest, particularly the security and stability in the (Persian) Gulf, which had been jeopardized as a result of the Iranian revolution," Rumsfeld wrote in a memo to the U.S. secretary of state, summarizing his meeting with Aziz. "I added that the U.S. had no interest in an Iranian victory. To the contrary, we would not want Iran's influence expanded at the expense of Iraq. As with all nations, we respect Iraq's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity."



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[The Count]

1. I posted then - that wasn't the complete verdict, just a preview

I did read the actual verdict takes days to read. But we didn't have days...(as Kirk would say)