Willravel

Oh boy. The same was said of China after WWII, but they are now the ones loaning America money. I say absolutely not to the starving theory. I'll bet that a lot less people would have died, they would have gone through the movements (same as China), and came out the other end as a unified country under the rule of a semi-communist government.

Not really. Drug production in '89 was on a steep drop because of the efforts of Noriega. Despite the fact that he was facing assassination attempts and coups incited by foreign governments, drug production actually was on the drop. That was right before the deaths of the 4,000 Panamanians at American hands.

Oy. Let's look back, shall we? This story really started way back in 1914, when England helped a small tribe free Kuwait city from the Ottoman Empire, and so under the protection of England the small country of Kuwait was born. During the next 47 years England protected the small kingdom as the Ottoman empire fell apart and became the mess we now know as the middle east. After England released Kuwait from it's protection, Iraq claimed that the territory was traditionally part of Iraq. World powers disagreed and the small kingdom, now very oil wealthy persisted.

Meanwhile, an evil dictator named Saddam Hussein rose to power in Iraq. Under Saddam Iraq became quite wealthy, mostly because in the 70's he continued to sell the USA oil, when the rest of the Arab world had an embargo against the USA. He took this money and brought electricity to the masses. He built schools, and hospitals and opened them to everyone. He also bought a lot of guns and weapons of mass destruction from the USA and from Russia and in the eighties waged war against Iran. In July of 1990 Saddam accused Kuwait of drawing oil from Iranian reserves by placing oil wells too close to their border. The United States and the UN declared this to be an arab problem and chose not to intervene. The evil Saddam decided after checking with his CIA connections who assured him that the US would not intervene*, to once again lay claim to the land known as Kuwait and in a six day nearly bloodless coop took over the small country. (Jan 1991) Six months later a UN coalition attacked the former Kuwait and after a six week battle liberated Kuwait and reestablished the kingdom. 3/3/91 Iraq signed a cease fire and the United States promised ten years protection of Kuwait. A DMZ and no fly zone was established near the southern border. 6/27/91 Claiming to have uncovered a plot to assassinate President Bush, the US resumes bombing of Iraq. 9/2/96 After being caught with his pants down in the oval office President Clinton expands the no fly zones to cover more than half the country and resumes bombing again, on the premise that Iraq is not cooperating with the UN weapon inspections . 11/21/97 Kuwait claims that US interventions are slowing the peace process and are no longer welcome. 12/16/98 US again attacks Iraq, claiming again that they have not and are not cooperating with the UN weapon inspections.


*Qasim, the Iraqi leader preceding Saddam: took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, 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 was assassinated. Qasim was overthrown by the Baath party (with something like 9 tanks, and 850 members at the time). It is quite likely that the US was responsible for the assignation. "We came to power on a CIA train," is a direct quote from Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. (http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg01267.html)

The Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organization. As such, he was soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup. (http://www.spectrezine.org/war/Mendes.htm)

Also check out
http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/f...s98/saddam.htm
http://www.mafhoum.com/press2/cia276...olitics_03.htm
http://www.speakeasy.org/wfp/37/american.html
http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pfvs/.../msg01736.html