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Originally Posted by powerclown
Yes, you're right. The US is in bed with all sorts of "bad people", but so is everyone else. It's competition for resources, it's maintaining spheres of influence, its negotiating with others for mutual self-interest: it's the price we pay for living together on the same rock. To maintain our values - our interests - our people - our religion. We're stuck in the same room with complete strangers. Did you hear they're going to set up space stations on the moon in the near future?
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powercloen, "denial" is not only the name of a river in Egypt.
You made an "everybody else does it", comparison. France and Germany traded with Saddam's Iraq, so did Russia. How does your comparison stand up with the fall late 2002 early 2003, blitz of "Saddam is a terrorist, he gassed his own people".... "hot air" that emanated from the mouths of Rumsfeld, Rice, and the son of Bush '41, GW, and from Cheney, a man who chaired a corporation that used it's french subsidiary to skirt US restrictions on US corps doing business with Iraq....it is reported that Cheney's Haliburton defied US restrtictions by selling oil field equipment and support to Iraq, in the 1990's while Cheney was chairman, Rice and Rumsfeld worked for Reagan and Bush '41 during a time when they had to know that the US was supporting Iraq...helping Saddam target and kill Iranians with illegal poison gas weapons, the US sold Iraq the helicopters converted to dust the Kurds. The US shipped all of the biological toxins that Saddam obtained, right from the CDC. The US continued to supply military advisors, and allowed the inflow of technology to Iraq, up till the day Saddam invaded Kuwait?
What other country unilaterally invade a former ally and "took out" the "strong man" it created, on the pre-text of such weak and hypocritical excuses, and then handed him over to the Shi'a "mob", it empowered and supported politically and militarily.....
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Jon Wiener: America's Complicity in Saddam's Crimes
Source: Nation (blog) (12-30-06)
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/33536.html
[Mr. Wiener, a columnist for the Nation, teaches history at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (The New Press, 2005).]
Saddam Hussein's execution on Dec. 30 prevents him from being put on trial for his most serious crimes – genocide against the Kurds and the use of poison gas in the Iran-Iraq war. As many as 100,000 Kurds were killed in 1988. Why then was Saddam executed for killing 148 men and boys in the Shiite town of Dujail in 1982?
Human rights activists say the answer is clear: the Bush White House wanted to prevent Saddam from offering evidence of US complicity in his crimes as a defense. It's the same reason the Saddam trial was held under Iraqi auspices rather than in the International Criminal Court: ''It's to protect their own dirty laundry,'' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times in 2004. ''The U.S. wants to keep the trial focused on Saddam's crimes and not their acquiescence.''
Human Rights Watch has done more to document Saddam's genocide of the Kurds than any other organization. Their 1993 report remains the most detailed and meticulous account, based on extensive interviews with eyewitnesses and analysis of Iraqi government internal communications. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam had lost control of Kurdish regions because all his troops had been sent to the battlefields. But as that war came to an end in 1988, he launched his "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds, leveling thousands of their villages and killing 50,000-100,000, mostly by bombing and mass executions.
Saddam's most notorious atrocity was his use of poison gas against Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988, killing at least 5,000. George Bush cited that attack – "gassing his own people" -- as part of his argument for a US war against Iraq. However back in 1988 the US worked to prevent the international community from condemning Iraq's chemical attack against Halabja, instead attempting to place part of the blame on Iran. [See Dilip Hiro, "Iraq and Poison Gas," TheNation.com, Aug. 28, 2002.]
The US had supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, on the grounds that Iran was a greater threat to the US after the rise to power of the Ayatolla Khomeini.
When the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, Saddam's genocide against the Kurds was no secret. The US Senate passed a bill to penalize Baghdad for violating the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons – they did it virtually without opposition, in a single day.
But the Reagan Administration killed the bill. Political scientist Bruce Jentleson of Duke University told the BBC that they did it "for two reasons. One, economic interests. In addition to oil, Iraq at that point had become the second-largest recipient of government agricultural credits to buy American agriculture . . . . And secondly was this continual blinders of the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam used chemical weapons, most obviously in his 1988 campaign to retake the Fao Peninsula. The had been banned since the 1925 Geneva Convention. His trial for that crime has also been prevented by the execution.
Again his defense was likely to have been that the US did not object at the time. Walter Lang, senior defense intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, told the New York Times in 2002 that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides, because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose."
Trials in Baghdad for other Iraqi leaders accused of genocide against the Kurds and violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons may be held. But as Antoine Garapon, director of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies in Paris, told the New York Times, even if others stand trial, "the person deemed most responsible would never face judgment."
Thus Saturday's execution of Saddam Hussein seems less an act of justice for his victims and more an effort to cover up US complicity in his regime.
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Remember, that, under Bolton, Bush, and Cheney, the US backed out of negotiations to extend the 1972 treaty prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons.....
....and watch the video:
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http://deeperpolitics.gnn.tv/blogs/6...Administration
Saddam was “an intelligence asset” of the CIA…he got played like a patsey just like Noreiga.
An excellent Flash tribute to US-Saddam relations over the years… <a href="http://www.ericblumrich.com/thanks.html">Source/video</a>
Below is a little history on Saddam Hussein….and how we linger in
denial of the ‘blood-soaked’ US foreign policies.
In Iraq … “The fall of the dictatorship has meant an end to the torture and execution of political prisoners, replaced by more spasmodic beatings and killings of innocents by coalition soldiers”. by Seumas Milne Thursday June 19, 2003 The Guardian
With a little research we find that the CIA has been sponsoring the likes of Saddam Hussein since 1959. When the US Administration supports dictators_about_the_globe such as this, and then slaughters hundreds of thousands of citizens to “take out” the very scoundrel they helped get in, what does it say about that Administration?.....
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To preserve the integrity of this video material, Juan Cole did find evidence to dispute the 1962=1963 ties between Saddam and the CIA:
The above does not mean that US officials who lnew Saddam was a psychopath and empowered, encouraged and equipped him should be not investigated and held accountable. That won't happen, and Saddam was killed to insure his silence. The hands of US leaders are not clean enough to make invading Iraq and capturing and executing Saddam, a just or a legal set of actions for them to have done. The criminality of "our own", and the hypocrisy are an outrage, they diminish all of us and everything that we stand, fight, and die for....and you refuse to recognize and accept it, powerclown. That spends to those of us IMO, who do recongize it, a "message" regarding your humanity and your motivation and rationale.....your standards and ethics, and your sense of what is right and just. I don't want you deciding who leads our country.