On the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush and Thatcher received distinguished awards, hoping no one noticed they sold the weapons to enable the invasion as well as many other wars! They also armed the Mujahideen, which became the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, Manuel Noriega, Iran and many other future enemies that turned those weapons against us and killed countless innocent civilians, including children!
At the time hardly anyone without inside knowledge of how government knew that he had armed Saddam Hussein, and that it's virtually guaranteed that the Iran/Iraq war would have ended years before it did without support from the United States. I certainly didn't know this, and I paid close attention to the news so I though I was well informed. It wasn't until years later that I realized that Mark Twain had warned us that "If you don't read the newspapers your uninformed. If you read the newspapers your misinformed."
Mark Twain also allegedly said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on," which is essentially true, even if it wasn't attributed properly. As long as I'm using famous quotes, I'll sneak in one more; the reason propaganda is so effective is because the media is controlled by a small fraction of the public; and, "a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth," or at least it seems to, especially if no opposing views are able to reach the majority of the public.
If the traditional media reports on stories like this at all, it's usually in a low profile manner for a brief period of time; then, after the public forgets about it they repeat propaganda about "fighting for freedom" over and over again, giving the public a false impression. Most people don't read good alternative media sources, or good books that do a much better job fact checking the news and reminding the public, assuming they read it, of the things that routinely fall down the memory hole. The best source that I know of to report on how the CIA and the Reagan Bush administration were relentlessly arming Iraq, and even subsidizing the war against Iran with loan guarantees, which taxpayers are stuck with, and even continuing to arm them up until the invasion, was Alan Friedman who wrote the following:
Alan Friedman "Spider's Web" 1993 p.165-6
To Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain, the Statesman Award. To George Bush. president of the United States, the Distinguished Leadership Award. There were among the prime items on the order of business at the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Aspen Institute in Colorado. But by the evening of Thursday, August 2, 1990, when President Bush arrived in Aspen, there was very little to celebrate.
Bush made the trip to Aspen, where an anxious Margaret Thatcher was waiting, even though Saddam Hussein had sent two Republican Guard armored divisions and eight hundred tanks over the border into Kuwait only a few hours before. Both politicians would soon lead the world in condemning Iraq's aggression, but in his initial pronouncement Bush remained circumspect" "We are not ruling any options in, but we are not ruling any options out." The British prime minister was equally careful that weekend when asked for her reaction to the Iraqi invasion. "I have a very good rule," she said. "First find the facts. It has stood me very well in Parliament."
As the world's attention shifted between the unfolding drama in Kuwait and the gathering in Colorado, both Bush and Thatcher worked the telephones, conferring with other world leaders as their advisers scrambled to come up with options to defuse the crisis.
Thatcher might have been surprised had she known that on July 28, just days before, Bush had sent a message to Saddam, thereby exercising an option that had been under consideration for more than two months. The list of policy options on Iraq that the deputies committee had furnished to Brent Scowcroft in May included the option of sending a presidential message to Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader, Scowcroft was informed, "likes the personal touch." In favor of such a move was the argument that "a carefully crafted message from the President could be effective if it hit hard on our key concerns, proliferation and regional tension, but also emphasized a continued desire for improved relations." On the other hand, however, such a message "could be construed here as being soft on Saddam."
Early on the morning of July 28, CIA director William Webster had gone to the White House to brief the president, carrying with him in a thick manila envelope satellite intelligence photographs that showed Iraqi troops transporting ammunition, fuel, and water to the northern border of Kuwait. The infrared photography that Webster put in front of Bush that morning confirmed that this was no routine exercise. Some 35,000 Iraqi troops had massed and were ready to move. Four tank transporters, an ominous sign that they were prepared to travel long distances.
Bush did not want to overreact, no matter how detailed the intelligence information might be. Later that day, he went ahead and sent a cable to Saddam, saying he was concerned about the Iraqi leader's threats to use force. He did not mention Kuwait by name, however pretending instead to reiterate the standard U.S. policy line: "Let me reassure you that my administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq." The president's message, coming after years of equally friendly signals, gave Saddam little reason to be deflected from invading Kuwait. It was, as one State Department hand put it later, "another busted signal." Before Bush sent the cable, senior Defense Department officials had tried to stop it, fearing it was so weakly worded that it would send the wrong message to Saddam. "We were already seeing troops moving. We were getting worried, and we were putting up this piece of pap. It was just very weak. We should have been much more threatening," remembered Henry Rowen, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs at the time. Rowen and others at the Pentagon, concerned that Ambassador April Glaspie had already been spineless in her dealings with Saddam and that a conciliatory message from Bush would be equally ineffectual, had done there best, but the president was not deterred. More excerpts
To Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain, the Statesman Award. To George Bush. president of the United States, the Distinguished Leadership Award. There were among the prime items on the order of business at the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Aspen Institute in Colorado. But by the evening of Thursday, August 2, 1990, when President Bush arrived in Aspen, there was very little to celebrate.
Bush made the trip to Aspen, where an anxious Margaret Thatcher was waiting, even though Saddam Hussein had sent two Republican Guard armored divisions and eight hundred tanks over the border into Kuwait only a few hours before. Both politicians would soon lead the world in condemning Iraq's aggression, but in his initial pronouncement Bush remained circumspect" "We are not ruling any options in, but we are not ruling any options out." The British prime minister was equally careful that weekend when asked for her reaction to the Iraqi invasion. "I have a very good rule," she said. "First find the facts. It has stood me very well in Parliament."
As the world's attention shifted between the unfolding drama in Kuwait and the gathering in Colorado, both Bush and Thatcher worked the telephones, conferring with other world leaders as their advisers scrambled to come up with options to defuse the crisis.
Thatcher might have been surprised had she known that on July 28, just days before, Bush had sent a message to Saddam, thereby exercising an option that had been under consideration for more than two months. The list of policy options on Iraq that the deputies committee had furnished to Brent Scowcroft in May included the option of sending a presidential message to Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader, Scowcroft was informed, "likes the personal touch." In favor of such a move was the argument that "a carefully crafted message from the President could be effective if it hit hard on our key concerns, proliferation and regional tension, but also emphasized a continued desire for improved relations." On the other hand, however, such a message "could be construed here as being soft on Saddam."
Early on the morning of July 28, CIA director William Webster had gone to the White House to brief the president, carrying with him in a thick manila envelope satellite intelligence photographs that showed Iraqi troops transporting ammunition, fuel, and water to the northern border of Kuwait. The infrared photography that Webster put in front of Bush that morning confirmed that this was no routine exercise. Some 35,000 Iraqi troops had massed and were ready to move. Four tank transporters, an ominous sign that they were prepared to travel long distances.
Bush did not want to overreact, no matter how detailed the intelligence information might be. Later that day, he went ahead and sent a cable to Saddam, saying he was concerned about the Iraqi leader's threats to use force. He did not mention Kuwait by name, however pretending instead to reiterate the standard U.S. policy line: "Let me reassure you that my administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq." The president's message, coming after years of equally friendly signals, gave Saddam little reason to be deflected from invading Kuwait. It was, as one State Department hand put it later, "another busted signal." Before Bush sent the cable, senior Defense Department officials had tried to stop it, fearing it was so weakly worded that it would send the wrong message to Saddam. "We were already seeing troops moving. We were getting worried, and we were putting up this piece of pap. It was just very weak. We should have been much more threatening," remembered Henry Rowen, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs at the time. Rowen and others at the Pentagon, concerned that Ambassador April Glaspie had already been spineless in her dealings with Saddam and that a conciliatory message from Bush would be equally ineffectual, had done there best, but the president was not deterred. More excerpts
This is just the beginning of the story Friedman tells, which is far more comprehensive than most media articles on the subject, especially from traditional media, which ignores the vast majority of the story. They knew that Saddam supported terrorists from the beginning, yet they were so obsessed with standing up to Iran that they took him of the list of terrorists sponsoring nations early in the Reagan years, and tried to create a false image for him to justify selling weapons.
Most people don't remember the history behind our conflict with Iran, since the media also repeats the lies on that while the truth falls down the memory hole. We should keep in mind that contrary to the "defending freedom" our media tells us we're always doing the United States supported the coup in 1953, overthrowing a Democratically elected government that wanted to renegotiate oil deals, so that the Iranian people could have a fair deal, and reinstalled the Shah, who terrorized his own people for decades, so Western oil companies could make a fortune. They sold them weapons that wound up in the hands of the current administration after the 1979 revolution, and continued to sell them weapons as part of the Iran Contra scandal using the funds to arm Contras who were terrorizing the Nicaraguan people, to try to overthrow a popular democratic government and reinstall another tyrannical regime.
This is routine in one country after another, but the propaganda gets repeated over and over again by traditional media while alternative researchers do a much better job checking the facts but can only report it in low profile locations.
The support for Saddam Hussein began long before the invasion of Kuwait, but a transcript of a meeting with April Glaspie reported by the New York times shows that they gave mixed messages, expressing some concerns, while also indicating that they have no concern with their disagreements with Kuwait as Stephen M. Walt points out in WikiLeaks, April Glaspie, and Saddam Hussein 01/09/2011 when he says:
In a now famous interview with the Iraqi leader, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, ‘[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.’ The U.S. State Department had earlier told Saddam that Washington had ‘no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.’ The United States may not have intended to give Iraq a green light, but that is effectively what it did.”
Walt's claim that this is "a now famous interview with the Iraqi leader" is only partly correct, though. For a small percentage of the public including Walt and many of his colleagues, it's famous; however, even though many good non-fiction books and alternative media outlets cite this periodically, the mainstream media has stopped reporting on this long ago. They covered this in 1990, then, as usual, let negative stories about the political establishment fall down the memory hole, while repeating patriotic sounding but misleading propaganda over and over again, so the vast majority of the public has forgotten about it.
The same interview also shows how April Glaspie was willing to encourage a public relations campaign to improve Saddam Husseins image just eight days before the invasion of Kuwait as reported in How PR Sold the War in the Persian Gulf 10/28/2004 which says:
On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops led by dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-producing nation of Kuwait. Like Noriega in Panama, Hussein had been a US ally for nearly a decade. From 1980 to 1988, he had killed about 150,000 Iranians, in addition to at least 13,000 of his own citizens. Despite complaints from international human rights group, however, the Reagan and Bush administrations had treated Hussein as a valuable ally in the US confrontation with Iran. As late as July 25 -- a week before the invasion of Kuwait -- US Ambassador April Glaspie commiserated with Hussein over a "cheap and unjust" profile by ABC's Diane Sawyer, and wished for an "appearance in the media, even for five minutes," by Hussein that "would help explain Iraq to the American people."69
Glaspie's ill-chosen comments may have helped convince the dictator that Washington would look the other way if he "annexed" a neighboring kingdom. The invasion of Kuwait, however, crossed a line that the Bush Administration could not tolerate. This time Hussein's crime was far more serious than simply gassing to death another brood of Kurdish refugees. This time, oil was at stake.
Eight days before the invasion they were willing to provide public relations to make Saddam Hussein look better; but, by October 10, Hill & Knowlton, a notorious public relations firm was couching Nayirah, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to commit perjury in a now famous story about Iraqi incubators, at least to those not relying on traditional media. Hill & Knowlton used a front group that sounded like a human rights group, but as the same article points out Hill & Knowlton routinely lies when it suits their purposes and also provides positive public relations for tyrannical governments like Turkey and Indonesia, and for a while, Scientology, but this changed when they realized that the pharmaceutical companies criticized by Scientology had more political clout. To the best of my knowledge, neither Nayirah or any executives from Hill & Knowlton were ever charged with perjury. For these organizations the truth is treated like a commodity that can be sold to the highest bidder, and since they have political connections there's no accountability. There's little doubt that if peace protesters had committed perjury before Congress that they would be charged!
Ironically, if Hill & Knowlton wanted stories about atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein there were no shortage of them, including his use of chemical weapons in 1988 and on other occasions, possibly beginning as early as 1983; however, they would have to carefully avoid the fact that the Reagan and Bush administration was arming them at the time, possibly even with some of the chemical weapons, and they were providing them with espionage information so they would know where to bomb or drop the chemical weapons.
If they really were concerned about children being killed in wars, then of course they wouldn't be selling epidemic amounts of weapons around the world including to many tyrants like Saddam Hussein. There should be no doubt that if our politicians weren't approving weapons sales all around the world to one country after another that they wouldn't be able to fight wars against each other nearly as effective and far fewer civilians would be killed. This includes Saddam Hussein; without weapons from the United States it's virtually guaranteed that the Iran/Iraq war would have ended sooner saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. Furthermore, there's a good chance that neither of the Gulf Wars in 1991 or 2003 would have happened, or if they couldn't be completely avoided they would be far less dangerous, since Saddam wouldn't have the weapons our government helped him buy!
Ironically, since they used Jordan as the middle man, to get by laws preventing them from arming Iraq, they wound up in a few awkward situations when Jordan realized that they were selling more sophisticated weapons at a lower price than they were willing to sell to them, as Friedman explained. And, to cut corners and save money they arranged for a weapons manufacturer in Chile to arm Iraq, but he wasn't able to produce the volume they wanted. This would have avoided scrutiny from violating US laws banning sales to Iraq, if he didn't need to buy the equipment to manufacture them and got them from the United States, which violated the law. They got around this by labeling it scrap metal, even though this was obviously false. And they wound up taking advantage of free trade laws to suppress wages for the people manufacturing them, enable higher profits for the owner, and make it cheaper to bomb and kill people, often innocent half way around the world. This also put the workers at risk and led caused twenty-nine deaths after an explosion as the following excerpt shows:
Alan Friedman "Spider's Web" 1993 p.45-6
Half a world away from the Persian Gulf, the remote Chilean harbor town of Iquique was booming in 1986. Iquique, located on the Pacific coast some eleven hundred miles north of Santiago, was benefiting from from the opening of a nearby free-trade zone and a new airport. At least once a month, an empty Iraqi cargo aircraft landed on the runway, taxied to the edge of the field, and safely out of sight of passengers boarding regular flights, picked up shipments produced in an anonymous-looking industrial plant situated nearby. Visitors to Iquique, which was once no more than a collection of shanties at the base of a barren headland, had no idea the town had become the home of a manufacturing facility that was supplying some of the deadliest weapons in Saddam Hussein's arsenal, cluster bombs.
Most of the people of Iquique, including the laborers in the factory, did not know the final destination of the weapons until early 1986, when the community was shattered by an explosion that killed twenty-nine of the seven hundred workers at the cluster bomb plant. The local Roman Catholic bishop was appalled. He condemned the plant as "social sin" and warned that "these are the same bombs that are killing people in Iran and Iraq, and now they have been turned on our own brethren."
Cluster bombs, originally invented in the United States to halt tank columns, dispense a particularly gruesome form of death by very simple means. A cluster bomb is simply a container packed with hundreds of small bomblets. Each bomblet is is no more than twelve inches long and weighs less than two pounds. As the bomb drops, it rotates, a small charge opens the casing, and the spinning bomb distributes the bomblets in an elliptical pattern of spaced clusters that spread devastation over a wide area. Known in the trade as "area denial ordnance," cluster bombs are effectively aerial mincing machines—they shred everything in their path. The U.S. Air Force first used them as antipersonnel weapons in the Vietnam War; when dropped properly, a single bomb has the capacity to kill or maim anyone in the area the size of ten football fields. Some of the bombs that were being made in Chile were timed to explode hours after they had been dropped, causing further casualties among troops and rescuers who had assumed they were now safe. Although technically considered weapons, cluster bombs can wreak almost as much destruction on the battlefield as unconventional arms such as chemical weapons.
Saddam's military planners in Baghdad found cluster bombs highly effective in killing the huge numbers of Iranians who poured into battle in human waves. For Carlos Cardoen, the owner of the plant in Iquique as well as other arms factories scattered around Chile, they had proved to be a very lucrative business. Not only was Iraq eagerly buying as many bombs as he could produce; he paid no taxes or duties in the Iquique free-trade zone, and his own costs were extremely low. His workers received the equivalent of ninety dollars a month, often for a twelve-hour day, and the average output of the factory was one thousand bombs a month. Thanks to all this, Cardoen was able to price his cluster bombs at as little as $7,000 each, or $19,000 less than his competitors in Europe, and still prosper. More excerpts
Half a world away from the Persian Gulf, the remote Chilean harbor town of Iquique was booming in 1986. Iquique, located on the Pacific coast some eleven hundred miles north of Santiago, was benefiting from from the opening of a nearby free-trade zone and a new airport. At least once a month, an empty Iraqi cargo aircraft landed on the runway, taxied to the edge of the field, and safely out of sight of passengers boarding regular flights, picked up shipments produced in an anonymous-looking industrial plant situated nearby. Visitors to Iquique, which was once no more than a collection of shanties at the base of a barren headland, had no idea the town had become the home of a manufacturing facility that was supplying some of the deadliest weapons in Saddam Hussein's arsenal, cluster bombs.
Most of the people of Iquique, including the laborers in the factory, did not know the final destination of the weapons until early 1986, when the community was shattered by an explosion that killed twenty-nine of the seven hundred workers at the cluster bomb plant. The local Roman Catholic bishop was appalled. He condemned the plant as "social sin" and warned that "these are the same bombs that are killing people in Iran and Iraq, and now they have been turned on our own brethren."
Cluster bombs, originally invented in the United States to halt tank columns, dispense a particularly gruesome form of death by very simple means. A cluster bomb is simply a container packed with hundreds of small bomblets. Each bomblet is is no more than twelve inches long and weighs less than two pounds. As the bomb drops, it rotates, a small charge opens the casing, and the spinning bomb distributes the bomblets in an elliptical pattern of spaced clusters that spread devastation over a wide area. Known in the trade as "area denial ordnance," cluster bombs are effectively aerial mincing machines—they shred everything in their path. The U.S. Air Force first used them as antipersonnel weapons in the Vietnam War; when dropped properly, a single bomb has the capacity to kill or maim anyone in the area the size of ten football fields. Some of the bombs that were being made in Chile were timed to explode hours after they had been dropped, causing further casualties among troops and rescuers who had assumed they were now safe. Although technically considered weapons, cluster bombs can wreak almost as much destruction on the battlefield as unconventional arms such as chemical weapons.
Saddam's military planners in Baghdad found cluster bombs highly effective in killing the huge numbers of Iranians who poured into battle in human waves. For Carlos Cardoen, the owner of the plant in Iquique as well as other arms factories scattered around Chile, they had proved to be a very lucrative business. Not only was Iraq eagerly buying as many bombs as he could produce; he paid no taxes or duties in the Iquique free-trade zone, and his own costs were extremely low. His workers received the equivalent of ninety dollars a month, often for a twelve-hour day, and the average output of the factory was one thousand bombs a month. Thanks to all this, Cardoen was able to price his cluster bombs at as little as $7,000 each, or $19,000 less than his competitors in Europe, and still prosper. More excerpts
This wasn't the only time that third world countries cut corners leading to explosions killing people at the beginning of Full Text: Indefensible: Seven Myths that Sustain the Global Arms Trade 2016 they describe a similar incident which killed twenty-six people, including at least a couple children and a pregnant woman. This was also a result of a contract that was indirectly supported by the United States to provide weapons for the Afghan army, which went to a contractor that violated numerous laws leading to the disaster. It's virtually guaranteed that there are more incidents like it, and Indefensible goes on to explain more of them in their book, although the details will, of course, vary.
Unfortunately these stories are rarely reported in a high profile manner, while the propaganda is often repeated over and over again, sometimes even rewriting history to downplay the fact that we armed and supported Saddam Hussein for years, which didn't end, until after the invasion. On Bob Dole's web page, Bob Dole and Saddam Hussein shake hands 1990-04-12 it says "Notes: Dole with Senate Delegation whose mission was to dissuade Iraqis from invading Kuwait." This statement is highly unlikely and certainly not the way Friedman describes it. At that time there was little or no official knowledge about plan to invade three and a half months later. Friedman indicates they were trying to improve their relations, despite other problems, which they did know about as indicated in the following excerpt:
Alan Friedman "Spider's Web" 1993 p.159-60
While Saddam's threats to use chemical weapons against Israel were producing politically violent reactions on Capital Hill, both George Bush and James Baker were sending private messages that sought to reassure Saddam. The President's first message was carried by Senator Robert Dole, the dour Republican minority leader from Kansas who led a Senate delegation to Iraq in a two-hour meeting with Saddam on Thursday, April 12. Dole did express U.S. concern at Saddam's publicly acknowledged development of unconventional weapons, but he also lent a sympathetic ear to the Iraq's complaints that he was the victim of a smear campaign.
"He indicated that he feels very strongly that there's an American-British-Israeli campaign to tarnish the image of his government and his country," said Dole, upon emerging from the meeting in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, which happened to be the site of several Iraqi missile projects. Senator Alan K. Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, embraced Saddam's views, telling him, "I believe that your problems lie with the western media, and not with the U.S. government. As long as you are isolated from the media, the press—and it is a haughty and pampered press—they all consider themselves political geniuses." Saddam also gave the senators the implausible promise that he was prepared to destroy all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There was only one catch—Israel would have to do the same.
Dole told Saddam that if there were any smear campaign, it certainly didn't come from President Bush, who only twelve hours before had "assured me that he wanted better relations, and that the U.S. government wants better relations with Iraq." The senator, who represented a state that had exported large quantities of wheat to Iraq on the back of CCC credits added his personal assurance that President Bush would oppose sanctions in Congress. More excerpts
While Saddam's threats to use chemical weapons against Israel were producing politically violent reactions on Capital Hill, both George Bush and James Baker were sending private messages that sought to reassure Saddam. The President's first message was carried by Senator Robert Dole, the dour Republican minority leader from Kansas who led a Senate delegation to Iraq in a two-hour meeting with Saddam on Thursday, April 12. Dole did express U.S. concern at Saddam's publicly acknowledged development of unconventional weapons, but he also lent a sympathetic ear to the Iraq's complaints that he was the victim of a smear campaign.
"He indicated that he feels very strongly that there's an American-British-Israeli campaign to tarnish the image of his government and his country," said Dole, upon emerging from the meeting in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, which happened to be the site of several Iraqi missile projects. Senator Alan K. Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, embraced Saddam's views, telling him, "I believe that your problems lie with the western media, and not with the U.S. government. As long as you are isolated from the media, the press—and it is a haughty and pampered press—they all consider themselves political geniuses." Saddam also gave the senators the implausible promise that he was prepared to destroy all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There was only one catch—Israel would have to do the same.
Dole told Saddam that if there were any smear campaign, it certainly didn't come from President Bush, who only twelve hours before had "assured me that he wanted better relations, and that the U.S. government wants better relations with Iraq." The senator, who represented a state that had exported large quantities of wheat to Iraq on the back of CCC credits added his personal assurance that President Bush would oppose sanctions in Congress. More excerpts
Both Bob Dole and the Bush administration were well aware that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988 and the Iranians on numerous occasions during the Iran/Iraq war, and they even helped with the financing of his weapons, if not directly selling him the chemicals; yet they were still trying to improve relations while he was threatening to use them against Israel, and April Glaspie also wanted to improve relations, when they had far more knowledge of a possible invasion of Kuwait in July after the build up of troops was well underway. Both Bob Dole and Alan Simpson also seemed t think that Saddam Hussein could benefit from good public relations, or at least agreed that the press was treating him unfairly. I'm no fan of the press, but in this case the Republicans were even worse; and after consolidation in the nineties, the press also got even worse. Even after the invasion, George H.W. Bush's first reaction was to hedge, implying he might consider a compromise even at that time.
Bob Dole wasn't the first high profile politician to personally visit Saddam Hussein to try to improve relations; Donald Rumsfeld was sent there to do that as well, in 1983, as Friedman writes in the following excerpt:
Thus, on December 17, 1983, President Reagan's special Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, flew into Baghdad bearing a handwritten letter to Saddam. In it Reagan offered to renew diplomatic relations and to expand military and business ties with Baghdad. Teicher, who traveled to Baghdad with Rumsfeld, said that it was this letter that paved the way for the U.S. tilt to Iraq: "Here was the U.S. government coming hat-in-hand to Saddam Hussein and saying, 'We respect you, we respect you. How can we help you? Let us help you.'" Saddam listened politely and then told Rumsfeld that America should try to stop the flow of weapons to Iran. The United States did even more: It began offering government-backed loan guarantees to Iraq. (Friedman p.28-9)
A more recent article, Rumsfeld 'helped Iraq get chemical weapons' 12/31/2002 indicates that Donald Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration knew at the time that Saddam Hussein was already using chemical weapons and they still gave him loan guarantees and provided traditional weapons, and "dozens of biological agents were shipped to Iraq under licence from the Commerce Department. They included anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program." Other sources have speculated that Donald Rumsfeld and the company he worked for at the time, G.D. Searle, might have provided some of these chemicals, although this article adamantly denies that.
I vaguely recall Dan Rather once saying something like, "We know Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons because we have the receipts," but the traditional media rarely ever reminds the public of this. On exception, which wasn't very high profile was another article, Did the United States Supply Saddam with Biological Weapons in the 1980s? 2003 quoting Senator Robert Byrd saying the following:
A letter from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, which I shall submit for the Record, shows very clearly that the United States is, in fact, preparing to reap what it has sewn. A letter written in 1995 by former CDC Director David Satcher to former Senator Donald W. Riegle, Jr., points out that the U.S. Government provided nearly two dozen viral and bacterial samples to Iraqi scientists in 1985--samples that included the plague, botulism, and anthrax, among other deadly diseases. According to the letter from Dr. Satcher to former Senator Donald Riegle, many of the materials were hand carried by an Iraqi scientist to Iraq after he had spent 3 months training in the CDC laboratory.
Why?
What could they have been thinking?
Could they have been selling them to him so they could study the reaction to chemical weapons in the field in a manner that no ethical researcher would even consider? This would be outrageous of course; and I would hope not; but the CIA has done similar things, so I wouldn't completely rule it out.
The arming of Iraq may have been one of the most outrageous things our government has done but it's far from an exception. In his book Killing Hope U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II 2004 William Blum lists dozens of interventions in dozens of countries where the United states intervened to try to overthrow other governments, often succeeding, including many democratically elected leaders that wouldn't support the United States ideology, blaming most of it on a fanatical version of anti-communism to hide efforts to rig the global economy in favor of the wealthy. He opens his book by saying:
It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was "to be as rich and as wise as an American". What happened?"
During World War II Vietnam and several other countries that the United states intervened in since then, were our allies, and they expected them to keep their promise of fighting to make the world safe for Democracy. Vietnam signed their own Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2 1945, based partly on our declaration of Independence and the one by France. Hardly anyone in the United States knows about this, but they started their own democracy which had far more popular support than the corrupt regimes the United States installed by force, often with the help of obviously rigged elections.
The United States has also admitted to overthrowing other democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and several other countries, but usually only after years, if not decades of denial. Further these admissions are typically only made in a low profile manner and traditional media only gives them a minimal amount of coverage before they go back the their false rhetoric about "fighting for freedom." They're still in the denial stage for several other coups including Honduras and Bolivia, but the evidence in alternative news outlets is overwhelming and it's a matter of time before they admit it, although that may mean years if not decades, once again, despite the fact that Elon Musk admitted to the coup in Bolivia in a tweet which was later deleted recently.
If you want the real history of our country and updated news you have to read authors like Alan Friedman and William Blum that hardly get any attention from traditional media and alternative media outlets that do cover good authors like this.
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Killing Hope U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I William Blum 2004 Truman, after all, was the man who, the day after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, said: "If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious in any circumstances."12 ....... This is how it looks to the simple folk of America. .....
Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): Iraqgate: Saddam Hussein, U.S. Policy and the Prelude to the Persian Gulf War, 1980–1994
Source Watch: Iraqgate Scandal
Iraqgate 1980-1994
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In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA 03/27/2016
Everyone Is Denouncing the Syrian Rebels Now Slaughtering Kurds. But Didn’t the U.S. Once Support Some of Them? 10/26/2019
“I Could Live With That”: How the CIA Made Afghanistan Safe for the Opium Trade 07/10/2020 Then, in 1953, Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s nationalist equivalent of China’s Sun Yat-sen, won elections and immediately moved to suppress the opium trade. Within a few weeks, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was calling Mossadegh a madman, and Dulles’s brother Allen, head of the CIA, dispatched Kermit Roosevelt to organize a coup against him. In August 1953 Mossadegh was overthrown, the Shah was installed by the CIA, and the oil and opium fields of Iran were once again in friendly hands.
"Our country does not launch bombs against other people." Fidel Castro speaks passionately about how Cuba sends doctors around the world, and not bombs. 08/16/2020
Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran 08/26/2013
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II by William Blum 1995
CONFRONTATION IN THE GULF; Excerpts From Iraqi Document on Meeting With U.S. Envoy 09/23/1990 The decision to establish relations with the U.S. were taken in 1980 during the two months prior to the war between us and Iran. ....... GLASPIE: I saw the Diane Sawyer program on ABC. And what happened in that program was cheap and unjust. And this is a real picture of what happens in the American media - even to American politicians themselves. These are the methods the Western media employs. I am pleased that you add your voice to the diplomats who stand up to the media. Because your appearance in the media, even for five minutes, would help us to make the American people understand Iraq. This would increase mutual understanding. If the American President had control of the media, his job would be much easier. ........ GLASPIE: I think I understand this. I have lived here for years. I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.
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