🚀 go-pugleaf

Uncle Samuel wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 20:18:51 GMT, MiKe <gamma@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> >And the Neo-Cons try to wave all the bungling, mismanagement,
> >irresponsibility, and DEATH by saying "Aren't we better off without
> >Saddam in power?"
> 
> Ask the people he butchered.

Ask the guy who armed him....

RUMMSEY & SADDAM!!! BEST BUDDIES!!!!

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2002/US/09/30/sproject.irq.regime.change/rumsfeld.80s.jpg

http://www.kargar.org/images/saddam_rumsfeld.jpg

http://content.miw.com.sg/LifeStyle/Military/Images/fall_of_saddam.jpg

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

New York Post,
Sunday, February 16, 2003
nypost.com

Why don't my fellow hawks ever discuss
America's history with Saddam Hussein?

I don't mean the 1990's, when Bill Clinton
tried to ignore the Iraqi dictator hawks
(especially Republican ones) discuss that
all the time.

I mean the 1980's when Ronald Reagan
and George H.W. Bush armed him.

The history is appalling, and it
involves key officials shaping
Iraq policy today.

Saddam first used chemical weapons,
in particular mustard gas, in 1983,
in his war against Iran.

By October of that year, according
to recently declassified documents,
the United States knew he was using
them "almost daily."

But the Reagan administration wasn't bothered.

To the contrary, that December it sent
Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld to
Baghdad.

According to the book
"Spider's Web: The Secret History of
How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq,:
by Financial Times reporter Alan Friedman,
Rumsfeld presented a letter from Reagan
that propsed restoring diplomatic relations
and offered U.S. military and economic assistance.

When Iran launched a new offensive in February 1984,
Saddam added tabun, a lethal nerve gas, to his chemical
repertoire.

In the spring of 1984, Rumsfeld returned for another visit.

By November, the United States and Iraq had
restored diplomatic relations.

It gets worse.

Records from the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and a 1994 Senate Banking
Committe investigation show that during Reagan's
presidency, America sold Iraq anthrax, bubonic plague
and botulinum toxin, all supposedly for medical research.

Over congressional opposition, the Reagan adminstration
sold Iraq twin engine Bell "Huey" helicopters, which
appear to have been used in Saddam's chemical attacks
on the Kurds.

All this was jusitified at the time, of course,
by the need to stop fundamentalist Iran.

But, by August 1988, the war between
Baghdad and Tehran was over.

Yet Saddam continued his genocidal
"Anfal" campaign against the Kurds,
which by late 1988 had resulted in close
to 100,000 deaths, most of them civilian.

So, in September 1988, then
Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.)
introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act,
which would have ended all U.S. aid to
Baghdad.

The bill passed the Senate, but
the Reagan Adminstration helped
scuttle it in the House.

When George H.W. Bush became president
the following year, he doubled U.S. agricultural
loans to Iraq, money that, it would later
be revealed, Saddam was partly diverting
to the military.

As Samantha Power pints out in
"A Problem from Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide,"
the Bush adminstration in 1989 refused
to join 12 other democracies calling for a
special U.N. Investigation of human rights in
Iraq.

Only left wingers discuss this history.

And for them the lesson is obvious:

The Bush adminstration's current outrage
at Saddam crimes is bogus.

If people like Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and
Colin Powell, who held top government positions
in the 1980's, really cared about the Iraqi people,
they wouldn't have helped Saddam brutalize
them in the 1980's.

And since the United States doesn't care about the
Iraqi people, our real motivation for a war must
lay elsewhere, in a thirst for world domination, or
oil or both.

I think the left is wrong.

First, France and the Soviet Union sold Saddam
even more military equipment in the '80s than
Washington did.

So, they should be just as cynical about
France's and Russia's motives for opposing
war (i.e. they'd be perfectly happy to go back
to doing business with Saddam).

Second, it is precisely because the United
States abetted Saddam's repression in the
'80s that we should atone for our sins and
depose him today.

Certainly the left never argued that because
for decades Americsa coddled apartheid
South Africa, it should not have switched course
and imposed sanctions.

But, if the antiwar movement misuses America's
shameful history with Saddam, hawks ignore
it altogether.

Hawsk seem to assume that because they support
war now, people like Rumsfeld have learned from
their past.

But it's not that simple.

Just because the United States is going to war with
Saddam doesn't mean we're liberating the Iraqi people.

It's far from clear whether the Bush administration will
help build a democracy in post Saddam Baghdad rather
than simply install another strongman.

Afghanistan doesn't offer much reason for optimism:

The Bush adminstration's reluctance to expand the
peacekeeping force beyond Kabul has condemned
much of the country to instability and violence.

It would be nice, then, if prommient Bush officials
acknowledged their past moral culpability and vowed
not to betray the Iraqi people againl.

Rumsfeld should have trouble sleeping at
night given his role in abetting Saddam's crimes.

Instead, he told the Senate Armed Service
Committe last September,

"It would be a shame to leave this committee
and the people listening with the impression that
the United States assisted Iraq with chemical or
biological weapons in the 1980's.

I just do not believe that is the case."

But, according to recently declassifed
State Department documents reviewed
by Newsweek, The Washington Post,
and the Associated Press, it is the case.

It is a testament to Rumsfeld's immense arrogance
and lack of moral reflection that neither on CNN nor
before the Armed Services Committee did he betray
the slightest hint that he or the adminstration he served
did anything wrong in the '80s regarding Saddam Hussein.

That's not a reason to oppose this war.

But it sure makes me wish a better man were running it.

Peter Beinart is the editor of
The New Republic.
>From The Feb 24 issue.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Worthless killed 7,000 civilians. I won't laugh. Its not funny.

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/bodycount.htm

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0522/p01s02-woiq.html

http://www.positiveuniverse.org/BackgroundBriefs/CiviliancasualtiesinIraq.html

http://www.comw.org/pda/0305iraqcasualtydata.html

http://electroniciraq.net/news/590.shtml

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

And the American Body Count Rises!

http://www.antiwar.com/ewens/casualties.html

GAWD BLEST 'MERICKA!!!!


-- 


"We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would 
instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab 
world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-
day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless 
hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning 
them to fight in what would be an unwinable urban guerilla 
war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever 
greater instability."
-George H. W. Bush in his 1998 book  "A World Transformed"

"There should be limits to freedom."--George W. Bush

"I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation
building."--George W. Bush, 10/11/2000


http://minime.de/bush/
http://www.911pi.com/
http://www.warprofiteers.com/
http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
http://www.mindprod.com/bush911.html