But He Was Our Thug!

[a guest-posting from Engineer of Knowledge]

This posting warrants a little history lesson. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter had severed diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and put it on a list of “terrorist nations.” This prohibited the sale to Iraq many U.S. made goods that could strengthen the Iraq militarily. Remarkably, in late 1983, none other than Donald Rumsfeld journeyed to Baghdad to pay court to Saddam Hussein on behalf of President Reagan. The purpose was to re-establish diplomatic relations with Iraq. This happened after it had become widely known that Saddam had used poison gas on Iranian troops. Soon Iraq enjoyed a brisk business with American firms. Some which supplied him with high-tech equipment and other materials of potential dual civilian and military use.

The Washington Times (Oct. 1, 2002) reported, the U.S. Centers of Disease Control even supplied Iraq with strain of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons. Included were anthrax, the bacteria that make s botulinum toxin and the germs that caused gas gangrene. Even after Saddam had used poison gas on his own people in the late 1980’s, the U.S. kindly guaranteed a $4 billion “agricultural” loan extended to Iraq by Italy’s Banco de Lavoro.

Now this brings us to the first Gulf War when the President, George H. W. Bush, encourage the Shia to rise up against Saddam but quickly backed off and dropped support to the uprisings. In 1991 on the ABC program, “This Week” the then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney stated that the administration’s reason for not going into Iraq at that time was, “They preferred the stability in Iraq under Saddam to what was predicted as a Civil War with the U.S. troops caught in a quagmire between the two religious fractions.”

Yes there was a time when Saddam was OUR brutal dictator with large oil reserves. Things were fine with the Status Quo until the event of 9/11. The oil cartel in the White House saw a chance to grab control of all Iraq’s oil reserves under the pretext of crushing the global terrorist threat. Now Dick Cheney is going around the television talk show circuit stating that no one could have ever predicted Iraq would have degraded into a Civil War when our troops went to liberate the Iraqi people and bring them freedom. All of those heart attacks must have given him memory loss from his own statements in 1991. You could also conclude that this means that no one else in the administration was doing their homework resulting in the poor job performance of this administration; or was it just blinding oil ambitions?