Not only did he admit ordering the attack against Kurds in the north of the country, but he boasted that the killings were legal and justified.
This is a reference to the al-Anfal campaign of 1987-88, which occurred during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam felt the Kurds (whose territory takes up parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey) were insufficiently loyal to Iraq. So, he gassed them with the chemicals that Donald Rumsfeld (most likely) gave him, and whose use he certainly failed to condemn..
We shouldn’t have been surprised that Saddam didn’t trust the Kurds. After all, Henry Kissinger:
But when the Ayotollah overthrew the Shah, we urged Saddam to wage war on Iran. Yet, simultaneously, Ollie North was selling Iran TOW missiles. This, in spite of the fact that Iran kidnapped our Beirut CIA chief of station, broke every bone in his body, beheaded him, and then sent us a tape of the proceedings.
If you want to know why people hate us, it’s for the same reason that Saddam hated the Kurds. We make lousy allies. Saddam is learning that now.
We facilitated Saddam’s rise to power, gave him WMD, provoked his Kurds to attack him, encouraged him to attack Iran, abandoned the Kurds, armed the Iranians, and then made war on Iraq using his attack on the Kurds (that we provoked) with weapons (we supplied), as the justification.
And that only covers our duplicity in the first Gulf War.
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Although focused on the tragedy and thousands of American lives lost on Gulf Coast, the Iraq War has worsened this week in the region of Basra.
The explosion took place on Wednesday evening outside a restaurant near the city centre which was packed with members of the Iraqi security forces. It was the worst car bombing in Basra since the US-led invasion in 2003.
The attack follows the killing of four US security guards and two British soldiers in separate incidents near Basra earlier this week.
Virginia-based security guards die in attack on convoy. A second bomb explodes on busy street.
BASRA Sept. 8, 2005 — Two bomb blasts shook the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Wednesday, killing at least 17 people, including four American security contractors traveling in a U.S. diplomatic convoy.
The first attack came in the morning, when a makeshift bomb was detonated as the U.S. convoy was traveling in the city, according to a statement by U.S. Embassy spokesman Peter Mitchell in Baghdad.
An armed Westerner and Iraqi policemen and soldiers secure the scene after a convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in the southern Iraq city of Basra. A car bomb shattered the relative peace of the southern Iraqi city of Basra after dark on Wednesday, killing 12 people and wounding 22 in a district packed with restaurants and a market, hospital sources said. A Reuters journalist saw at least five bodies at a local hospital. Atef Hassan/Reuters▼ ▼ ▼
well i’ll be damned, all this time I thought they hated us for our freedom… thanks for the rundown on our ‘clear as mud’ mideast policies.
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By definition a false statement.
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Having taught the Iraqis, by traumatic example, how to leverage the armies of other nations, we should recognize the pattern when it is played on us.
The key is to find a foreign leader who wants to appear more commanding than he is, and give that leader the chance.
He will ban reason and reality and kill without reserve, even kill his own people, to fulfill a flattery-intoxicated dream that he is casting a great shadow in the dawn of a new era.
Sadaams lawyers say he didn’t confess.
He is not getting a fair trial. I think Bush and Sadaam should both have fair trials.
The lies about the war didn’t stop with WMD there are also plenty of lies about Sadaam. He may not have been nice but everything is exaggerated about him.
He is going to stand trial I believe for killing kurds in Anfal, a place where there was an assasination attempt against him. He retaliated. They apprently have proof of this. They will execute him on this alone and not send to trial on other charges which would be embaraasing to the US.
They apparently don’t have proof he buried 400,000 people in mass graves, gassed the Kurds. He also was not captured in a hole according to a US soldier who was there. He said it was staged for the cameras (to make Bush’s vision of smoking them out of their holes come true.
I wish the war had nevr happened, and he had not been touched.
faked rescue of Jessica
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,956255,00.html
Faked capture of Sadaam
http://www.wokr13.tv/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=422B960A-26BA-4891-9E60-21C8818788D4
mass graves
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_07/004333.php
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1983 23 October – 241 US marines and 56 French paratroopers are killed in two bomb explosions in Beirut, responsibility for which is claimed by two militant Shia groups.
Lebanon fucked up by Israel and Sharon with invasion in 1982 called “Operation Peace for Galilee”.
Some reasons why the world hates US ::
In retaliation the US got the Lockerbie Crash.
“The Pan Am 103 plane […] over Lockerbie in December 1988, with 259 victims, was almost surely targeted under Iranian auspices in retaliation for the destruction of the Iran Airbus 655, with 290 civilian victims, by the USS Vincennes in July 1988.”
Timeline
… and France was targeted with two plane bombings over Africa and metro bombings – or did we forget?
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…of Iraq must be always thinking, back of their minds, what if the U.S. cuts us loose again.
Yes! The Bush regime has done more than any other administration to guarantee that no one will trust the US to honor it’s commitments.
The first Gulf War was caused by a diplomatic fuck-up of massive proportions.
On July 25, 1990, US Ambassador April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz in Bagdhad. There is no autheticated transcript of this meeting, but numerous accounts reported in various media all agree that the key exchange went something like this:
This may well be the most fateful failure to communicate in US history.
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WAHINGTON August 3, 1990 — “The United States might be able to launch a single attack, but that would be the limits of our capability,” said Eugene Carroll, a retired Navy rear admiral who is deputy director of the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
Sending US troops into the conflict also would be risky. They would be fighting a veteran, heavily-armed army.
Bush was informed of the invasion around 9 p.m. Wednesday by Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser. In order to avoid the appearance of a crisis, Bush decided to go ahead with his plans to fly to Aspen, Colo., where he had scheduled a meeting with Thatcher and was to give an address on US defense forces.
But he canceled plans to stay overnight in Colorado and also summoned Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d back to Washington two days early from his trip to the Far East and the Soviet Union.
In Washington, Kuwait’s ambassador issued an emotional plea for assistance during a news conference at the embassy, but Iraq’s ambassador said that the world should not interfere in what he insisted was an internal Kuwaiti matter.
Lady Margaret Thatcher convinced President Bush and his advisors, the US and the world could not isolate itself from the Iraq invasion of Kuwait.
Very similar to Blair convincing GW Bush NOT to attack Iraq in aftermath of 9/11.
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is why Saddam’s trial will be very interesting. Will he be free to testify freely in his own defense? Or will he be prevented from speaking of the American help and encouragement he received.
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Greg Palast Website
BBC Newsnight Thursday, March 17, 2005
Reporting for BBC Newsnight
Why was Paul Wolfowitz pushed out of the Pentagon onto the World Bank? The answer lies in a 323-page document, secret until now, indicating that the allies of Big Oil in the Bush Administration have defeated neo-conservatives and their chief Wolfowitz. Tonight BBC Television Newsnight will tell the true story of the fall of the neo-cons. An investigation conducted by BBC with Harper’s magazine will also reveal that the US State Department made detailed plans for war in Iraq — and for Iraq’s oil — within weeks of Bush’s first inauguration in 2001.
The following report is from BBC OnLine.
Falah Aljibury
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It’s certainly true that the BigOil interests prevailed over the neocons in the matter of privatizing the Iraq oil fields. But, the neocons prevailed over the rationalists in the matter of the perpetual war itself and in the vanquishing of state Dept. power within the Bush regime.
The battle between the James Baker, BigOil, Carlyle Group status quo crowd and the neocon cabal of violent delusional psychopaths is sort of like the turf conflicts here in the US between the Mafia and the Columbian drug gangs. One side is content to maintain the status quo as far as their criminal exploitation of oil is concerned, and the other side is ready to kill anyone and everyone who opposes them in their quest to implement their insane agenda.
The neocons are so infatuated with their own ideology that they’re continuing to work at expanding the war in the MidEast, trying like crazy to find the workable pretext for attacking their preferred target Iran. I think the long-term devastation caused by the hurricane, (especially the damage done to oil infrastructure), is going to make their task much more difficult. But, like cornered rats, these neocons are capable of anything, any atrocity, so we must remain wary of their every move.
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This seems to be an interesting article on the 1st World’s Forgotten Continent.
by Mukoma Ngugi
December 09, 2002
President Bush, as if to settle the debate once and for all over what form a terrorist exactly takes stated, “you are with us or against us”. With that bold statement, he cast the world into one of a binary opposition, on one side evil and on the other good, on one side the West and on the other, the rest of the world.
[…]
The historical relationship of Africa and the United States, marked by Lumumba’s assassination at the behest of the CIA and followed by the US rewarding his killer with military and economic support that anchored the Congolese people to thirty years of terror has been thrown out the window. Those who pay for the relationship between their governments and the West are the African people. They are caught between the twin vices of terrorists who fail to make distinction between the people and their governments on the one hand and western sponsored dictatorial governments that oppress them on the other.
It’s my concern, Al Qaeda is in process of spreading its activities throughtout the Islamic world of Africa and Indonesia. Ideal for terrorist movements, as there is no democracy, peace, social equality and good government.
Britain and the United States are training border guards in the Horn of Africa in the expectation that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, may seek sanctuary there if forced to flee Iraq.
Al Qaeda and Embassy bombings.
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This is the best summation of US govt. treachery in foreign affairs I’ve read.
that the CIA investigation into the incident, at the time, concluded that the chem traces indicated a cyanide based weapon, and were consistent with Iranian, not Iraqi weapons? They concluded that the civilians were probably caught in a cross-fire between the country and were not willfully exterminated. I was reminded of this when, in the run-up to the war, a CIA investigator reiterated all of this in a New York Times article. So, was the CIA covering for Saddam then, or is the news of the confession untrue? Well, history is written by the victors, so I suspect we’ll never know for sure.