Now that Saddam is dead I am noticing that the blogging left is nearly obsessed with rehashing America’s once cozy relationship with Saddam. I don’t know if you have noticed but I have never focused too much on that history. Yes, we had a role in bringing Saddam to power. And we had absolutely no problem when he decided to attack the Iranians. They had, after all, held our citizens hostage for 444 days, all the while burning American flags and calling us satanic. When you consider that the Shah was our biggest customer for military hardware and a good pal of our energy corporations, then you begin to get the full picture on why we were not superkeen to see Ayatollah Khomeini continue on in power. And, while we brought it on ourselves by helping to oust Mossadegh in 1953, the Iranians have been nothing but trouble ever since the Revolution.
Moreover, as we can see now, Iraq isn’t an easy country to govern, and if the Shi’ites had come to power back in the 1980’s we would have a lot of the same difficulties that we are facing now. Of course, it wouldn’t have been all our fault back then as it is now, but that is hairsplitting.
So, we gave Saddam some assistance. We didn’t give him all that much military equipment (he got most of that from Russia and Europe) but we did give him satellite intelligence and we did give him some of the stuff that he turned into biological and chemical weapons, and that he put to use in his nuclear program. We kind of looked the the other way when he violated the rules of war and gassed the Iranians. We pretended not to notice when the Kurds were gassed.
And we shouldn’t forget that we found it either expedient or financially irresistable to arm the Iranians during the war, too. If we look at it honestly, it appears we got exactly what we wanted. We didn’t want Saddam to win, but we didn’t want him to lose either. So, yeah, we were kind of pals with Saddam. But not really.
When the war was over, Saddam was licking his wounds and we didn’t think he was eager to take on another war. So we encouraged the Kuwaitis to act like real sons of bitches and demand all their loans were repaid at the same time they overpumped gas and kept the price too low for Saddam to recover his economy. It looks like Kuwait may have even taken it so far as to pump oil diagonally from under Iraqi soil.
Saddam complained to everyone but no one gave a shit. Then he called in a representative of the State Department named April Glaspie. Saddam told her that Kuwait was crippling his country and acting like arrogant ungrateful pricks. Here’s how it went.
“We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threats against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship – not confrontation – regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?”
Later the transcript has Glaspie saying: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”
Saddam, strangely, did not take that as a warning that we would strongly object to him dealing harshly with Kuwait. After all, the Kuwait issue was not associated with America. At this point Saddam decided to turn Kuwait into another province of Iraq and settle the issue that way. It was easier than paying back the debt he owed, and Kuwait had pissed him off, and America said ‘go ahead, dude, do your Saddam thing.”
Everything might have been great from that point on. Saddam might have even given us the right to keep our juicy contracts with Kuwait. But, apparently, the Bush Crime Family had other ideas for Sad-dam. It took fifteen years but yesterday we finally got his ass.
I guess the bottom line here is that if we were ever good friends with Saddam we didn’t turn out to be very good friends with him. I mean, nothing ever really worked out well for him. Not on our account. In fact, we turned him into an enemy. He was such an enemy that we feared that he might go off and do something a little bit funny, like build a nuclear weapon and use it against Israel or something. I don’t know why we didn’t think Pakistan might do the same thing when we were looking the other way in the 1980’s while they developed the technology. But I am not the person responsible for our very wise foreign policy.
Not like this guy:
Anyway, I don’t think it is all that interesting that we once thought Saddam was an okay guy. We were never his friend, and if he thought we were his friends, he knows better now.
